Powers Publishes "Genie"

Just out--a new novella / long short story by Powers. Available as a download via Byliner.com. Description from the iTunes store:

"In "Genie," a short story of epic proportions, Powers goes sci-fi: he turns a failing relationship between a randy scientist and a staid statistician into a quest—not only for love and connection but for a way to connect to intelligent life in the universe. Anca is an ambitious cellular biologist determined to be the first to diffuse the microbial time bombs inside ever more fatal viruses. Warren works in numbers and codes. He follows the rules and likes it that way. When Anca uses the opportunity of a romantic camping trip to swipe samples of ancient bacteria from one of Yellowstone National Park’s fumaroles—bubbling pools filled with life more diverse than in a rainforest—Warren sees the writing on the wall: Anca will never behave. They break up, until Anca makes a discovery that is just too mind-blowing to handle alone. Could she have found proof of intelligent design, the signature of the creator himself? Or is it a message left by an unknown—and unearthly—life form? The race that Anca and Warren embark on together will change everything they have ever believed or felt—about life, each other, and the mysteries of the cosmos."

Powers Galleys on abebooks.com

For those of you out there who might be collectors, take a look at what's on offer these days at abebooks. Some very rare stuff--particularly the proofs of the first two novels. Maybe someday....

New Powers Article: "What Does Fiction Know?"

Powers taught a course in Berlin this past Spring, exploring the collision of fact and fiction in writing, and this is his report from the front lines.

My students have swallowed every bastard hybrid genre I’ve thrown at them. Fictocriticism, mockumentary, staged reality, Borgesian simulated lectures, psycho-journalism, unattributed sampling, hip-hop mashup, real actors playing imaginary authors making pixelated media appearances while selling brutally frank memoirs filled with the slightly altered real-life experiences of some other, dissembling author. My sales pitch has worked so well with this group that, by the end of the semester, I’m appalled at what I’ve unleashed. James Frey, J. T. LeRoy, lonelygirl15, COPS and Survivor and America’s Next Top Model: bring it all on, my German students say. The blurrier the better. They have grown up in a world that laughs at the very distinctions that I’ve come here to challenge, and in class, they regard me with affectionate pity for my quaint belief in the existence of boundaries that a writer might still hope to exploit by transgressing.

Amazon.com Unilaterally Dumps its California Associates

Just FYI for readers of this blog--in the past I have been able to help support this website through amazon associate sales. As of last week, amazon dumped all of its California associates, including yours truly. Therefore I would request that you not purchase any Powers titles through this blog, but patronize your local independent bookstore instead.

Respectfully,

--David Dodd

Powers First Editions

A fun post about the writer's copies of first editions of Powers's first two books: Three Farmers On Their Way To a Dance, and Prisoner's Dilemma.

Powers is Nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award

Powers has been shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke award for the best science fiction published in the U.K.

...and this year's list also sees an author coming in the other direction, with a nomination for Generosity by Richard Powers. Powers, a previous winner of the US National Book Award and the WH Smith literary award, has often written about science in the past, and Generosity explores the biochemistry of happiness.

Powers Writes Epilogue for New Book

Powers has contributed the epilogue for the newly-published volume, Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, from the University of Chicago Press. The volume includes essays by "leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act."