Columbus

Chicago

Billy Bean gave the keynote address at the Midwest Venture Summit, and afterwards signed my copy of Moneyball. Highlights included referring to his ex-wife as “the previous administration”, after she objected to the nickname “my Mulligan”. Displaying his career statistics, describing them as “the baseball equivalent of a Chapter 11”. Showing this quote:

The road to truth is long, and lined all the way with annoying bastards. -Alexander Jablokov

And explaining why he gave Michael Lewis so much access (didn’t realize the story was that big—first a short profile, then an article in the New York Times Magazine, “oh, it’s going to be a cover story”, “forget the article, I think there’s a book in this”—after which, they tried to get him not to print some of the more colorful items. Also, Lewis was a Wall Street trader, so they tried to pick his brains about pricing/trading strategies. Also, he’s married to Tabitha Soren.) Then, a short trip through the statistics of baseball. Big, consistent finding: outs cost more than can be gained by moving forward in bases, so don’t trade outs to get bases. Other big finding: some players/skills are mispriced. As with any asset, if you can find these mispricings, you can arbitrage and make a profit, either by getting a bargain, or by selling an overpriced asset.

After the conference, off to a networking event for Private Equity Lab, where all of the host VC firms are to show up. Not very many did, as far as I could see; at least the cocktails were good. Tiny, tiny appetizers, delivered by hand in tiny, tiny quantities on large platters.

Out to Oak Park to see Bruce Sterling do a book signing for Zenith Angle. I follow Chicago Ave all the way out, which is a mistake, as it cuts through some rather dodgy neighborhoods on the way. Fortunately, I made almost all green lights heading out. Along one stretch, they’ve installed weird surveillance cameras all along the street with flashing blue lights on top and big Chicago Police seals on the side. They look like cruisers that have been compacted and hung up on telephone poles. I don’t know how you attact one’s attention, though, if you need it, or what happens when you do…maybe a Predator drone comes along and dive bombs your location. Maybe they just take your picture for tomorrow’s Tribune. Anyway, the neighbors are all in a tizzy about the things.

Then, suddenly, while I’m thinking I’ve gone too far, I cross a road, and suddenly, I’m in suburbia. Barbara’s Books is a funky little bookstore that looks like, well, a funky little bookstore. About fifteen people in the crowd. Five of whom are on the Viridian mailing list, and another few who follow Bruce’s weblog. The guys from worldchanging.com were there, and got a mention during the talk. Some older folks, some younger folks, a really mixed bag. At least half the people there were blogging the event, some with images. Bruce is clearly a really cool, happening dude with a couple of atavistic king geek characteristics deep in his DNA that make him who he is: profound, ongoing obsessions (with mass evacuations, industrial design, life extension), and a surprising, non-standard issue laugh that pops out at odd moments of the conversation. He also seems to know everyone, everywhere.

He’s also really, deeply committed to the lineage and tradition of science fiction. Rightly so. Key recommendations: Kelly Link, “the leading light” of the GenX New Fabulists, Cory Doctorow (another guy who knows everyone) and Charles Stross (“the Overclockers”), the South American Macando Group “magic realism without all the damn magic”.

Complemented him on having the same jacket I do. I call this coat “the jacket that goes everywhere”. It’s this black J. Crew thing I bought back in college, and have worn to everything from a wedding to a cockfight without looking at all out of place. I told him this, and he signed my copy of his book with that noted.

I asked him the wrong question, which is “do you ever feel tempted to go back and write more of the same book,” which sounds like I’m asking for a sequel to Schismatrix. I’m not. (Although, I do confess to sometimes wishing for a postcard from Maya set after the end of Holy Fire, or maybe Martin Warshaw about fifty years before it. And I’d really love it if Wired did some more of the cyberpunk travelogues they used to have.) Even though I’m a guy who likes to see lots of character s from other books in walk on parts, just to check up on them, what I was really trying to get at was the question of whether he in particular feels like he’s cutting several books from the same background cloth, whether Zeta Starlitz’s vision of refugees feeds into the mass evacuations and problems of Heavy Weather, which are maybe the same plagues mentioned in Holy Fire, whose nascent immortals become Shapers and Mechanists. Feeding into this is a timeline somewhere in Schismatrix Plus, which seems to indicate that a lot of these books could be happening one after another. On the other hand, I get the impression that Sterling is a little allergic to this interpretation, at least with regards to relations among his books. Some of the short stories clearly happen in/are sketches for various novels (Fast Eddy and the Chattanooga series feed closely into Holy Fire, for instance. Leggy Starlitz has been featured in some shorts.) I wonder if the shorts don’t “count”, or if they’re always just preparatory sketches for the big books.

Anyway, lots of fun. Sleep now.

So, Wayan Vota sends me an email saying basically, why don't I update his link, already, and I give him some line of bull about not having access to Dreamweaver or some other high-end web design tool, to which he replies, grab a pair and use a text editor. What are you, some Johnny-come-lately, nuveau-blogger? No, you're an HTML coding badass from the early prehistory of these things. Come on, if you've really got the chops, you'd do it all in binary or something.

Well, actually, he didn't say it in those specific words, because he's actually polite, and in training for a triathlon as well, but that's what I said to myself after his email arrived.