Walton says, among other things, she always snaps up extra copies of Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi and all of John M. Ford's books, because she's always giving them away. Other commenters mention Catherynne M. Valente, Pamela Dean... and Walton herself. (As for me, it's not science fiction, but I was just complaining the other day that I can't keep a copy of Small World by David Lodge on my shelf because peopel always borrow it and don't give it back, and the person I was talking to had the exact same problem with Small World. I've also loaned out/given away multiple Kushiel's Darts and keep a box of d.g.k. goldberg's Queen Of The Country Where They Sleep Till Noon to give away.)

How about you? What books do you hang onto, in order to get rid of? [Tor.com]

In the "cosy catastrophe" genre, the end of civilization happens more gently, or is passed over altogether, and there's often some hope for the rebuilding of the world. The Guardian explains:

The phrase is attributed to the British author Brian Aldiss, who mentions it in his fascinating history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, while talking about the author of Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham. While Triffids, with its blinded populace and sinister, stalking plants, could hardly be described as "cosy", it is an example of a largely non-violent, non-destructive doom. Wyndham also wrote The Kraken Wakes, in which an alien invasion gradually destroys civilisation by way of melting the ice caps rather than with death rays and war machines. The book chronicles the rebuilding of a massively de-populated world once the aliens have been despatched.

John Christopher is another British author who embraced the idea of a cosy catastrophe. While his novel, The Death of Grass – which so worried Sam Jordison when he was younger – does feature an ecological disaster that causes often violent social breakdown, Christopher (real name Sam Youd) also wrote The World in Winter, a very much more British version of Emmerich's movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which increasingly harsh winters drive the population of western Europe towards the suddenly more temperate African regions. And then there's JG Ballard, who employed ecological apocalypse in his debut novel The Wind from Nowhere, as well as in his more famous works The Drowned World, The Burning World, and many of his short stories.

Of course, there may be a bit of wish-fulfillment on the part of these authors, as the Guardian quotes author Jo Walton suggesting. The survivors of these catastrophes are often very middle class, and they get to wander around a suddenly depopulated world, with the working class wiped out in a guilt-free way. And then they get to rebuild the world along more civilised lines.

But leaving aside the classist undertones of the genre, who's to say that a collapse of civilization wouldn't be slow and relatively non-violent? And that we wouldn't pull together to rebuild afterwards?

Cover of Day Of The Triffids by Mark Salwowski. [Guardian]

Notes Walton:

Even C.J. Cherryh in the Chanur books does this. They drink gfi. Gfi! To make it worse, they also drink tea, because tea is somehow a value-neutral word. There's a scene where the hani and the stsho exchange crates of tea as part of a bargain, but then they go back to the ship and drink gfi. I wonder what that is!

As she points out, people in the future aren't likely to give up coffee — not without a fight anyway. And coffee's been around since at least the 17th century, and was enough of a fixture that you get delightful things like this:

But Europeans didn't have it in the Middle Ages, although the Ethiopians did. So "if you're going to have coffee, perhaps your fantasy world ought to be more manic and caffeinated than the real middle ages." Which sounds like an alternate history fantasy I'd love to read! Top image from Shannon Wheeler's Too Much Coffee Man Opera: The Refill [Tor.Com]

We went to a Worldcon panel called "The Singularity: Are We Getting Any Closer?" featuring Farthing author Jo Walton and Julian Comstock/Spin author Robert Charles Wilson. They talked a lot about the pitfalls and plausibility of the Singularity, the idea that a drastic change in technology will result in a world we can barely visualize, full of sentient machines and vastly improved longevity, among other things.

Many people seem to think the Singularity is inevitable, noted Walton, but the panel was aimed at questioning whether we're any closer to it now than when Vernor Vinge pioneered it in his 1986 novel Marooned In Realtime.

For her part, Walton argues the Singularity is an interesting concept for science-fiction storytelling, but "it isn't going to happen. It's a completely mistaken concept [and] we've made no real progress towards it." The idea is based on a false extrapolation, similar to saying that since we could go 30 MPH 100 years ago, and 400 MPH 50 years ago, now we should be traveling at the speed of light.

And because people believe the Singularity is inevitable, some argue that you can't write about the future at all — since we can't imagine life after the Singularity, it's almost impossible to write about. Walton worries that this idea is the "turd in the punchbowl" of future-set science fiction.

Adds Walton: "To be fair, Vinge has written some excellent fiction within that constraint [of assuming the Singularity happens in 20 years], in the same way people write sonnets — but a sonnet is not the only poem you would want to write."

Wilson pointed out that if the Singularity really is coming, then it's inevitable — so there's no need for people to be cheerleaders for it. He compared it to "telepathy or dianetics," science-fictional ideas which some people adopted "with religious fervor." A core question in science fiction is "where is our technology going, and what can we do with it," noted Wilson. "The Singularity is just one answer."

Panelist Christopher Carson pointed out that the science fiction section in bookstores lately consists of nothing but "transhuman science fiction or urban fantasy." People tend to see the Singularity coming partly because devices are becoming more complicated — but that's often an example of "feature creep," like the fact that your cellphone now has a host of functions you don't understand and didn't ask for. That's not really a sign of progress, because those extra functions were designed by some marketing person somewhere, he pointed out.

The Singularity is notoriously hard to define, but people often say that you could bring Socrates forward in time and take him to Worldcon, and he would understand what it was about, more or less. But you couldn't take a goldfish to Worldcon and have it understand what was going on. A present-day human, visiting a post-Singularity world, would be more like that goldfish than Socrates.

But Walton says this is a loaded example, because Socrates is an extraordinary example. A "random Greek person" from Socrates' era might have a much harder time understanding Worldcon.

"The question I sometimes ask myself is, How would the Singularity work in Darfur?" says Wilson.

And there was lots of talk about the potential downsides of getting the Internet in your head, complete with phishing, spam, malware and bad memes. Says Walton, the first 100,000 people who get the Internet in their heads, without any terrible, life-ending mishaps, will have a really hard time upgrading later on. "Imagine an outdated computer in your head."

Walton published Tooth And Claw several years ago – long before the current craze for monsters in drawing rooms. She won the World Fantasy Award for it, and you can see why. She manages to lampoon the novel of manners while also telling a surprisingly engaging story about the domestic lives of dragons in a world of steam trains, fashionable hats, and legal squabbles over inheritance.

The kicker is that Walton makes all the psychological tics of the Victorians into biological facts for dragons. The Victorians fought – often very politely – over inheritance money because they needed it to survive. In dragon society, you cannot grow bigger without eating the dead bodies of other dragons. Part of your inheritance is a sizable portion of your parent. And wealthy landowners can choose to eat the bodies of their dead servants if they want. Servants, of course, don't get to eat very many dead dragons at all. So they remain small, while the wealthy grow large and dangerous.

And female dragons wear their chastity literally on their sleeves. If a male dragon gives them romantic attention, or presses his body against them, their golden maiden scales blush a bright pink. So everyone knows who the fallen women are, based on their coloration. It doesn't help that men can force women to blush just by "crowding" them.

Influenced by Victorian writer Anthony Trollope, Tooth And Claw is about the fate of two sisters whose father dies before they are married off. They cannot inherit his caverns, and he's left them almost no money. One goes to live with their married sister, whose husband is a cruel land owner who eats the children of his servants. The other goes to live with their brother, a pastor and new husband who lives in the caves of a very wealthy woman whose son takes a shine to her.

Walton manages to translate Victorian details into dragon life, commenting on what is fashionable in cave decoration and describing the dangerous machinations of dragon bureaucrats. There's even a Middlemarch-esque subplot where one of the sisters gets involved with a movement to better the lives of the poor. And of course it's a romance – even dragons get a happy ending.

The best part about Tooth And Claw is that it isn't just a simple parody. Certainly it is very witty, but it is also a fascinating thought experiment in which the most savage creatures of our imagination turn out to be the very best society that 19th century civilization has to offer.

Tooth And Claw via Amazon

Rucker's ideas include "magic doors," gateways to alternate dimensions, that swarm around people and provide portals they can jump through any time they want to escape this particular space-time continuum. He also suggests that writers could do a lot more with "dreams and memories" and how they can become real. My favorite idea is that memories could actually be a form of time travel, and some people might learn how to jump through them into the past — or pull people from the past into the present. (This reminds me a little bit of Scarlett Thomas' frustrating but brilliant novel The End of Mr. Y.)

He also suggests tackling "the afterworld," but from a scientific perspective. Or you could write about "quantum computational viruses . . . something like a computer virus might infect matter, perhaps changing the laws of physics to make our world more congenial to some other kinds of beings." Along those lines, he instructs people to write about "the subdimensions," and "the holographic universe."

After lobbying for people to write about humans developing "new senses," unlike the boring old telepathy or sensitivity to radio waves, Rucker suggests an idea he's explored himself: a flat Earth. Except what he wants to see that's different is "an infinite flat Earth," where you can keep going and going and the flatness doesn't end. He says it would be the perfect setting for a road trip, kind of like On the Road for aliens.

Check out more of Rucker's ideas on his blog, and invent some of your own while you're at it. Photograph by Rudy Rucker.

On her blog, Walton says that doing all the research to make her science unimpeachable slows down her writing process to a crawl, to the point where she loses interest in the story. And her friends who know science end up suggesting alternatives that screw up what she wanted to do in the first place. She explains:

So I have this thing about aliens with four genders. It takes place in the universe where the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that FTL drives make your star explode after 20 uses. So these aliens are stuck in their solar system (with a couple of other aliens who showed up and can't go home) and they know about other aliens. (Earth may or may not exist in this universe. It doesn't matter. This is a story about some aliens.) My aliens have a mother planet and a terraformed marslike, and a moon where they live in domes. My character comes from the terraformed planet. He's leaving a spaceship on the mother planet, he smells the mother planet air, and he thinks "Ah, the sweet smell of /INSERT ATMOSPHERE COMPONENT GAS HERE/, which we don't have in the air of my terraformed home, which smells so atavistically good because this is where my ancestors evolved, but which nevertheless reminds me of the three years I spent here in the prison camp." And I stop, and I trot off to ask what atmospheric component gas it could be (and already you notice I have stopped writing and started checking, and also, note how much I had to explain to get to this point, which in the actual story would all not be explained) and after a long discussion I find out that there's nothing, unless I totally change everything I want, or give them noses that can smell argon or something (which is an unnecessary complication when they already have turtle shells and four eyes and the interesting thing is the four genders) and I have to scrap that sentence which was doing set up and incluing and background and was about to set up the next sentence about how he met his best friend in the prison camp and was going to lead on into some actual story.

If I didn't know any science at all, I'd just merrily put traces of chlorine in an oxygen atmosphere and it would all be as dumb as heck but at least it would actually get written and the characters would get out of my head and get to have their adventure.

And this is just one line, and it's all like that.

So anyway, that's why I don't write SF, even though it's what I like to read.

I wonder how many would-be science fiction authors get turned off by these sorts of concerns. And how many of them would have written thought-provoking classics of the genre. (And how many people who do write tons of science fiction novels bother to know their science half as well as Walton already does.) The comment thread over at Walton's post is also well worth reading. [Paper Sky]