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The day after Au Contraire! a group of us went to the Weta Cave. It was very cool, and it was great to see the actual weapons and armour used in the various movies that Weta has worked on. We were also privileged enough to get to chat with the guy who designed and made Dr. Grordborts Infallible Aether Oscillators. You can check out a few photos of our trip here.

I have spent the last few days at Au Contraire!, the 2010 New Zealand National SF Convention. I had a fantastic time. You can read my reports here, and see my gallery of images here.

Ripley Patton is setting up a club called SpecFicNZ, for people interesting in writing speculative fiction (an umbrella term incorporating Science Fiction, Fantasy, and similar genres). This promises to be a very cool organization, and I’m looking forward to seeing it develop.

Ripley and Helen organized a second informal meeting of SpecFicNZ members (the first being held after Elizabeth Knox’s talk) at Cafe NG today. Nine of us were there, and it was a good fun couple of hours with good coffee and good food, and lots of writerly conversation. We’ve decided to make it a regular thing.

I went to Armageddon over the weekend. You can read my report here.

While perusing the SF&F section at UBS today I noticed two examples of a new (to me anyway) development: novels based on computer games. These were Assassin’s Creed: Renaissance, based on Assassin’s Creed 2, and Eve: The Empyrean Age, based on Eve Online. I have not read either book, nor have I played either game. I’d be very interested to know, though, a) how well these books capture the feel and backstory of their respective games; and b) how well these books read as SF&F books, independent of their origins. It would seem that neither author has written anything else, which doesn’t augur well, and media tie-ins are traditionally sub-par in terms of writing quality, but you never know…

So I went into Borders last night, and wound up buying Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross. While I was there I noticed that they are about to reduce the size of the Science Fiction section once more. They aren’t bothering to restock the shelves, leaving lots of unsightly gaps, and the Crime section has wrapped itself around the corner and taken over the first bookcase in the Science Fiction section like convolvulus. Furthermore, there was a stack of about a hundred unsold copies of The Gathering Storm gathering dust against one wall. Sigh…

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Since I am as bad as anyone else at buying books mostly from authors I already know, rather than giving the new guys a go, I try on occasion to look for books by people I’ve never heard of. I pulled one such book off the shelf – a mighty red tome, an omnibus edition of a Fantasy trilogy I’d never heard of by some guy I’ve never heard of. I judge new Fantasy books by the quality of the map at the front, so I took a quick squiz: three maps! Oh my! I had already decided to buy the Stross, so I resolved to remember the name of the author and series and check them out some time.

This morning I realised that I had completely forgotten everything about the book, except that it was big and red and had three maps in the front. How hard could it be tracking it down based on that?

Then I happened to read an article on tor.com, in which people were asked to nominate undeservedly little-known writers. And there it was, in comment eight: Chris Wooding, author of The Braided Path trilogy.

Robert Jordan wrote a series of eleven massive Fantasy novels called collectively The Wheel of Time. He had intended to bring the series to a conclusion with a twelfth volume, although he clearly knew that this would be quite a task – he remarked at one stage that the twelfth book would be so large that the hardback edition would have to come with a shoulder-strap to enable you to lug it around.

Jordan very sadly died before he could complete the twelfth book. Fortunately he left behind a huge number of notes and rough drafts and audio recordings of what was to happen in the final book.

Brandon Sanderson was shoulder-tapped to finish book twelve. After working on the project for a year or so, he announced that there was still about 800,000 thousand words left in the story, and that he couldn’t possibly fit it into one book. (By way of comparison, 800,000 words is about two Lord of the Rings worth.) And so “book twelve” promptly became books twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. Book twelve has been released, and (after a few adventures in on-line ordering) my copy arrived today.

It really cracks me up that the twelfth book in a series of fourteen massive tomes would have a title with such a prelude-y feeling as “The Gathering Storm”.

The latest version of Whitcoulls Top 100 List is up. It makes for interesting reading as usual. It has the usual mix of classics and first-timers, some of which will go on to become classics and others which will vanish without trace, based on forces beyond the ken of mortals. Fifteen of the titles have been on the list for ten years, twenty titles are appearing for the first time.

Lord of the Rings is at number one. Again. I don’t get this. SF&F is something of a minority interest, accounting for about 10% of fiction sales. So why does our Mother Ship come in at #1 every time? Is it because the self-selected voters are disproportionately drawn from the ranks of the genre readers? Or are there large armies of readers who would never want to get any of that icky Fantasy stuff on them, but who have a soft spot for LotR for some reason? Interesting stuff.

I count eighteen SF&F books among the 100, modulo the usual problems of what counts as SF&F.

Dear old Cross-Stitch is still there, at #4. Must read it some time. The Da Vinci Code is still there, although it’s dropped to #7. I had hoped that this would be a flash in the pan, but it’s been on the list for some time now, and seems to be heading for classic status. The Bible makes it to #15. It’s kind of embarrassing to see The Secret there (#80). I think the one to watch is Twilight (#44) – will it vanish without trace, or is it heading for classic status?

There is one cookbook (if you’re a Kiwi, you don’t need to be told which one), and I think two non-fiction books (A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Penguin History of New Zealand).

Sixty-nine authors are present once only, with eleven authors having more than one book on the list as follows:

Borders has just announced that it is running a Top 100 vote as well. It’ll be very interesting to see how closely their list matches Whitcoulls’s.

Check out these interviews with the guests at ConScription, conducted by Cheryl Morgan:

• Julie and Roger Czerneda
• Helen Lowe
• Nalini Singh
• Russell Kirkpatrick

I spent the weekend in Auckland having a great time at the ConScription SF&F convention. You can read my report here, and/or see my gallery of images here.