Karl Schroeder is the author of Permanence, The Engine Of Recall, New York Times Notable Book Ventus, and the Sci-Fi Essential Book Lady Of Mazes. His novels offer a lot to chew on after you put them down. This is the literature of ideas.

At the same time, Karl Schroeder is concerned with making his hard-science fiction novels accessable and marketable to fans of non-science fiction, such as fantasy and adventure. Don't be deceived by appearances in the first few chapters of, for instance, Ventus– it's a very clever disguise for a hard science fiction feast. He will probably go a long way to whet more appetites for hard SF who otherwise would not have read it. Karl also is a technology professional. We look forward to hearing from Karl at Penguicon on such topics as the emergence of the internet as a layer on the physical world, busting the metaphor of the brain as a computer, and technology as legislation.

On his blog, Karl says:

Friday 7:00 p.m. Small is beautiful: embedded desktop devices (useful stuff like the Desktop Lara from tombraider.com)

Saturday 1:00 p.m. Worldbuilding (an increasingly essential skill)

7:00 p.m. Economics 101 (Eric Raymond and I go at it hammer and tongs)

8:00 p.m. Why didn't SF Predict that? (short answer: it did, you just didn't read that particular story)

Sunday 11:00 a.m. Copyrights and Trademarks (I will bring my Cory Doctorow sock puppet)

12:00 noon Best in SF 2005 (at which I talk about myself)

Here is Karl Schroeder's schedule for Penguicon 4.0 in 2006.

Friday, April 21, 2006:

7pm-8pm, St. Claire A - Small is Beautiful: embedded technology coming to the desktop - RobLandley, KarlSchroeder - Big bloated environments like GNOME and KDE take up valuable space on a live CD, and it’s hard to fit them on a handheld at all. Battery-powered devices want to cram as much as they can into less memory and slower processors, and are turning to embedded technologies to do it. What small, focused applications are available to streamline your desktop?

Saturday, April 22, 2006:

1pm-2pm, The Pit - Worldbuilding – SteveMiller, KarlSchroeder, NancyAtwell, JohnScalzi - Some worlds you believe in, and some interfere with the story. How to build and portray your fictional world.

7pm-8pm, Renaissance C1 - SF Economics – KarlSchroeder, RichardHerrell - It's not rare for the science in science fiction to be sketchy at best, but that's *nothing* compared to the viability of the economics of most SF societies. Our panelists discuss who does it well, and what doing it well means.

8pm-9pm, Renaissance C1 - Why Didn't Science Fiction Predict That? – KarlSchroeder, JohnScalzi - SF predicted moon colonies by 2001 and computers so big they'd mostly exist in hyperspace. That wrong-headedness has something to say about predictions we're making today. And why DIDN'T SF predict Frogurt instead of yeast cigarettes, anyhow?

Sunday, April 23, 2006:

11am-12pm, Renaissance B - Copyrights and Trademarks – CathyRaymond, KarlSchroeder, CarlGregory - This panel offers a detailed look at the legal ins-and-outs of various methods of protecting intellectual property. Looks at how to, why to, and whether to.

12pm-1pm, Renaissance C1 - Best SF Books of 2005 – JeffBeeler, JohnScalzi, Tobias Buckell, KarlSchroeder - What were the outstanding works of 2005? What are the titles to look for, and who are the authors to watch?