Head over to Tor.com and you can read an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Stealing Worlds, which hits the shelves on June 18. In this clip, Sura is dusting off old skills--breaking into the former family home...

Early Reviews

“Lesser writers use technology as a metaphor; Schroeder is a master of rigor in technological speculation. Part prophet, part critic, Schroeder is a hell of a storyteller.”―Cory Doctorow

“Karl Schroeder seizes cyberpunk traditions and larps them into the onrushing era of blockchains, sentient contracts and rapid-paced convulsions of reality!”―David Brin, author of The Postman and Existence.

There's a new interview with me over at Plural. I was asked about digital governance and how humanity can address our growing climate crisis, among other things.  My answers are actually hints at nearly everything that's coming in Stealing Worlds--the ideas, the world and its issues, and--just possibly--hints at a solution.  Check it out!

If you're thinking about wealth in terms of money, you're just not thinking big enough.  This was one of the principles I decided to run with when I set out to write The Million.  I mean, this is a story about the literal inheritors of the Earth--the culmination of human civilization, distilled down to a population small enough to prevent the extinction of the species, and large enough to permit diversity, creativity and ambition to flourish.  One million people, who have inherited all human history, all human art, all our accomplishments, our homelands, cities, technology and, yes, money.

Think of The Million as Downton Abbey without the servants.  In the future, after all, we assume robots and AI that serve us hand and foot.  You want an suborbital spaceplane?  How about a whole air force of them that can do aerobatics around you while you fly yours?  You want a yacht?  Why not a migratory island?

No amount of thinking big is big enough for understanding the ordinary lives of the Million. Just one teaser:  while you're drowsing in bed, not yet fully awake, an army of bots has fanned out across the land, looking for individual stands of ripened wild wheat.  By the time you're blinking at the cathedral ceiling of your bed-chamber, they've picked thousands of wheat seeds, judged them and selected the best, and have ground them into flour.  When you finally stagger downstairs, thinking about the temporary city your cousin built for last night's party, with its crowds of fake humans revelers, the smell of fresh baked bread entices you to the kitchen where you see the newly cut loaf... and decide to have something else instead.

The one thing you won't be doing, as a citizen of the Million, is going online.  Or watching television.  Why watch a recorded program--so gauche!--when you can summon a set of robot players to perform the thing on sets built just-in-time by your other army of carpenters?  Why play a first-person shooter on a console when you can have a city neighborhood built to play out a raid for real?  Or, when it comes to romance--well, the possibilities are endless.

So:  forget money.  Forget the whole concept of wealth, it no longer applies. 

What does still apply, even in this world, though, are jealousy, envy, pride, ambition, and deceit.

What's all the wealth in the world worth, after all, if you can't conspire against your neighbours...?

John Joseph Adams' glorious climate-change anthology Loosed Upon the World will be coming out this September from Saga Press.  The book has stories by Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Robert Silverberg, Greg Benford and lots of other.  I have two stories in the anthology:  "Kheldyu," my most recent and most pessimistic Gennady Malianov piece, and "Mitigation," the open-Arctic-ocean romp that Tobias Buckell and I wrote together.

Climate change isn't your ordinary apocalypse, since it's actually already upon us.  It's a slow, nearly imperceptible alteration of all our affairs--"boiling the frog" but not necessarily all negative.  It's not a destroyed world that results, but a reconfigured one.  Loosed Upon the World explores this ambiguity with panache and energy--and a book like this is long overdue.  

Here ya go. Risingshadow.net has let the cat out of the bag and posted the cover art for my next novel, Lockstep. Not to be outdone, I'll present it too. Here is McGrath's excellent rendering of Toby and Corva on the planet Wallop:

The novel will be serialized first in Analog, this fall, then hit the stores in hardcover form March 25, 2014. I know that seems like a long time to wait, but there's the serialization--and there will also be a lot of other stuff from me during the summer/fall, including new installments of the Sun of Suns graphic novel, audiobook work, and a major secret project I can't yet reveal.

Meanwhile, am I leaving behind adult hard SF? Is Lockstep truly YA? No, and I dunno. I wrote it in the style I felt the story needed. Tor says it has a sufficiently YA-ish feel to it that it can be marketed that way; the hero is 17 years old, but so was Rue Cassels in Permanence. (By the way, Lockstep is not another Halo Worlds novel.) I don't think my older readers are going to be disappointed by this story, and I've always written with younger readers in mind. (You think the steampunk air-pirates of Virga are just for grownups? Ha!) Anyway, you can judge. Here's the marketing bumpf/synopsis of Lockstep:

A grand innovation in hard SF space opera — a slower-than-light civilization of planets without stars

When seventeen-year-old Toby McGonigal finds himself lost in space, separated from his family, he expects his next drift into cold sleep to be his last. After all, the planet he’s orbiting is frozen and sunless, and the cities are dead. But when Toby wakes again, he’s surprised to discover a thriving planet, a strange and prosperous galaxy, and something stranger still — that he’s been asleep for 14,000 years.

Welcome to the Lockstep Empire, where civilization is kept alive by careful hibernation. Here cold sleeps can last decades and waking moments mere weeks. Its citizens survive for millenia, traveling asleep on long voyages between worlds. Not only is Lockstep the new center of the galaxy, but Toby is shocked to learn that the Empire is still ruled by its founding family: his own.

Toby’s brother Peter has become a terrible tyrant. Suspicious of the return of his long-lost brother,  whose rightful inheritance also controls the lockstep hibernation cycles, Peter sees Toby as a threat to his regime. Now, with the help of a lockstep girl named Corva, Toby must survive the forces of this new Empire, outwit his siblings, and save human civilization.

Lockstep's one of those books I wrote purely for the fun of it, without bothering to think about market. I hope the fun shows through, and I hope you like it.

Starting this week I'll be doing several talks and speed-forecasting exercises around the city of Toronto, to help Toronto Public Library celebrate Keep Toronto Reading 2013. Everybody's invited to come out and to participate. These are going to be short, focused sessions--an hour on average--so we won't have time for long debates or in-depth analyses. However, one thing I'll be hoping to do is an exercise I call 'speed forecasting.'

Scenario-based forecasting is a foresight methodology that goes back to the RAND Corporation and Hermann Kahn, the man who inspired the character of Dr. Strangelove. Generally, scenario design is a meticulous process that takes months and involves a research phase, consultations and often several rounds of workshops convened for experts in the field being analyzed.

We're going to do the whole thing in a half an hour.

While we'll be leaving the smoking wreckage of a decades-old methodology in our wake, I guarantee you we'll have fun and it'll be an interesting glimpse into the future. So, come on out on one of the following dates and places, and join in!

April 18, 2013: Spadina Road Branch

When: 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Where: 10 Spadina Road, Toronto

April 22: Pape Branch

When: 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.

Where: 701 Pape Avenue, Toronto

April 30: St. Lawrence Branch

When: 7:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Where: 171 Front Street East, Toronto