Questions, please

The Brighton Digital Festival is in full swing, Reasons To Be Creative is underway, and Brighton is chock-a-block with all manner of smart geeks enjoying the seaside sunshine. It’s pretty damn great.

Not long now ‘till Brighton SF on Thursday evening with Brian Aldiss, Lauren Beukes, and Jeff Noon. I’ll be the host for the evening so I should make sure that I’ve got lots of incisive questions for the three authors…

What the hell am I thinking‽ I have no idea what I’m doing. Damn it, Jim, I’m a sci-fi fan, not an interviewer!

I could do with your help. If you have anything—anything at all—that you’d like to ask one or all of these luminaries, please share it with me. We’ll be taking questions from the floor on the night too, but I’d feel a lot better if I had a nice stack of good questions to get the ball rolling.

So please, leave a comment and let me know what I should be asking these three masters of sci-fi.

Have you published a response to this? :

Responses

Ricky Onsman

Well, one idea would be to ask Brian Aldiss to reflect on the recently late Harry Harrison, a personal favourite of mine and - I believe - an industry stalwart.

# Posted by Ricky Onsman on Wednesday, September 5th, 2012 at 3:48pm

marsha grasett

Lauren Beukes— In Zoo City you wrote: In pagan/wiccan/shamanic circles the world over, it is agreed that you don’t choose your power animal, or familiar. The animal chooses you.

Do you believe this and if so what is your power animal? And is there a story behind this?

# Posted by marsha grasett on Wednesday, September 5th, 2012 at 3:59pm

marsha grasett

Lauren Beukes—-Zoo City: Correction in my above post. You didn’t write that. But there are power animals in your novel.

# Posted by marsha grasett on Wednesday, September 5th, 2012 at 4:04pm

Ben Sauer

What is your favourite truth about humanity’s past to consider when writing about it’s future?

# Posted by Ben Sauer on Wednesday, September 5th, 2012 at 6:42pm

James Burt

Jeff Noon didn’t have a novel published between 2002 and 2012 yet before that gap he was producing some fascinating work. Was he still writing novels when he wasn’t publishing? And, if so, what did that feel like.

Also, please could ask him where I can find a cheap copy of Cobralingus.

# Posted by James Burt on Thursday, September 6th, 2012 at 9:26am

Previously on this day

16 years ago I wrote pre-dConstruct

Almost there…

18 years ago I wrote d.Construct events

A pre-conference booze-up, a mapping workshop, and a microformats picnic.

20 years ago I wrote Crisis? What crisis?

Hurricane Frances is taking its own sweet time. For a while today it stopped completely off the coast of Florida.

22 years ago I wrote Coudal Partners

Here’s a nice documentary from Coudal looking at the work of designer Andy Mueller.