Books
drorzel | March 21, 2008The Hugo Award nominees for this year have been released. The category I care most about is Best Novel, where we have:
The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, Fourth Estate)
Brasyl by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor; Analog Oct. 2006-Jan/Feb. 2007)
The Last Colony by John Scalzi (Tor)
Halting State by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)
Does Robert J. Sawyer have secret mind control powers, or something? The Chabon is a fantastic book, Scalzi's book is the best thing he's written, the Stross is very good and he's a buzz-worthy author, and I've…
drorzel | March 20, 2008Over at Making Light, Abi has proposed a parlour game using books as Tarot cards. As always for Making Light, the resulting comment thread is full of dizzyingly erudite responses, and clever literary in-jokes.
But it strikes me that there's a fundamental flaw in the game-- Abi's examples all involve selected works, chosen to be appropriate for the subject of the reading. For true divination, though, you need an element of randomness, whether it be yarrow stalks tossed in the air, or the iTunes randomizer. Fortunately, we have LibraryThing: if you look at our library, you'll see a "Random…
drorzel | March 19, 2008As approximately six billion other blogs have noted, Arthur C. Clarke is dead. His obit in the Times runs to three pages, which is a good indicator of just how long and distinguished his life was.
My initial reaction is similar to Matt McIrvin's: it feels like the passing of an age. Bradbury and Pohl are of the same generation, but they don't feel like the same sort of writers as Clarke and Asimov and Heinlein, the ruling triumvirate of old-school SF.
I was never a huge fan of his fiction-- I went through Asimov and Heinlein phases, back in the day, but didn't get as deeply into Clarke. I'm…
drorzel | March 18, 2008Joshua Palmatier, whose first two books I enjoyed, and probably ought to booklog, has organized the "Plot Synopsis Project," in which a bunch of published SF authors post copies of the plot synopses they sent with their successful novel pitches, and talk about the writing process. Most of them have lists of the participants posted, but here's a link to Tobias Buckell's post because he has just the list, independent of his plot summary, so you don't need to worry about accidentally reading spoilers.
This is a terrific idea, as the plot synopsis thing is one of the more mysterious and…
drorzel | March 2, 2008Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack computers, commit vandalism, and thwart law enforcement, it gives them detailed instructions on the best ways to do those things. It even comes with two afterwords and a bibliography pointing them to even more resources on how best to subvert the political order.
If-- oh, who am I kidding, when Little Brother is challenged and banned from school libraries, it will richly deserve it.
And when that happens, you should go buy five copies and hand them out to…
drorzel | March 1, 2008The Science Fiction class for which I agreed to guest lecture is an 8am class, which is earlier than I like to be up and about. Knowing this, I went to bed early on Thursday night. Of course, being a bookaholic of long standing, I needed something to read to put me to sleep. Genius that I am, I grabbed the ARC of Cory Doctorow's upcoming YA novel Little Brother...
So, I hadn't really had enough sleep when I got to campus for the class on Friday. Still, adrenaline can make up for a lot...
I was introduced as "Not only a physics professor, but also a world famous blogger," though I suggested…
drorzel | February 28, 2008Yesterday's cheery hypothetical came about because I've agreed to do a guest lecture in a Science Fiction class in the English department. I'm going to be talking about Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," whose connection to the hypothetical should be obvious to people who have read it, but is a spoiler for those who haven't.
My guest spot will be this Friday, and I sat in on a class last week (where they discussed a Zelazny story and one of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles) to get an idea of what the class is usually like. This will be a different experience for me. It's been fifteen years…
drorzel | February 27, 2008Say you were offered the chance to be introduced to the great love of your life, your absolute perfect soul mate. The two of you will be perfect together-- compatible personalities, the same taste in movies and books, sex so good you'll temporarily lose the power of speech-- but you'll only be together for five years. At the end of five years, your partner will die, absolutely and inevitably-- you'll be told the time, place, and manner of their death, and nothing you do can stop it.
This person is perfect for you, but there is absolutely no way you will ever meet by chance. The only chance…
drorzel | February 27, 2008Scott McLemee writes about the shelving of books, spinning off Matt Selman's list of rules for shelving books
RULE #1: THE PRIME DIRECTIVE -- It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman's living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman. If you are in the home of Matt Selman and see a book on the living room shelves, you know FOR SURE it has been read by Matt Selman.
(has anyone ever seen Selman and Mike Kozlowski in the same place?) and Ezra Klein's…
drorzel | February 26, 2008That "post three sentences from page 123 of the book closest to you" Internet "meme" has come around again, with Bora calling me out in hopes of getting a short preview of Bunnies Made of Cheese (or whatever the book ends up being called). Unfortunately for him, I blog from a desk heaped with books, and that's not the closest physical book to me.
The book at the top of the nearest stack is Volume I of Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood, and the relevant sentences are:
Tarzan hangs from a vine, swining back and forth in a gentle arc. At the moment when he reaches his maximum…
drorzel | February 22, 2008A reader writes in with a literary query:
I was asked to teach a 400-level course on Nanotechnology at my U. In addition to the usual technical content, I would like to include a critical view of how nanotechnology is portrayed in popular culture. So I am looking for suitable works that can be examined. Naturally, Stephenson's Diamond Age and Crichton's Prey come to mind. You know of other examples that would make for meaty discussion by a bunch of engineers? [...] I want to stress that most of the course will focus on technical content, so whatever work we pick has to have *some* basis…
drorzel | February 22, 2008The Hugo Award nomination deadline is fast approaching, so I've been doing a bunch of reading to make sure I've covered a reasonable range of potential nominees. I've been really bad about book-logging recently, but I thought I'd at least post some brief comments on my crash reading here, for those who are just dying to know my thoughts on the awards this year.
Recently read books:
Undertow by Elizabeth Bear: A professional assassin on a corporate-controlled frontier planet gets involved with a group of people who want to help the exploited indigenous aliens. I probably would've liked this…
drorzel | February 5, 2008It's Hugo nomination season again, which means that I need to come up with a list of works to suggest for SF's premier fan-voted award. It also means that there are lots of publications out there putting out lists of recommended works to help potential Hugo voters narrow their ballots.
Last year, there was a bit of a fuss kicked up because the list of nominees was almost all white males. Looking at my potential list of nominees (more detail below the fold), I would say at least my ballot is headed in that direction again. If you are a person who would like to see more books and stories by…
drorzel | January 18, 2008Amazon conveniently informed me today of a very positive development in SF: Night Shade Books is republishing Glen Cook's space opera novel The Dragon Never Sleeps, which I reviewed quite some time ago. I've re-read it since then, and if anything, my opinion of it improved. It's "New Space Opera" written years before there was such a thing.
You can pre-order it from Amazon or get it direct from the publisher, but if you like Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Neal Asher, and that sort of crowd, you should buy this at once. It's terrific.
drorzel | January 16, 2008While browsing through Border the other day, I noticed a book called Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance, which is the latest entry in the subgenre of mysteries in which improbable literary figures turn into detectives. In fact, it may represent the end of the genre-- I think they may have exhausted the possible sources, unless somebody out there has a great idea for an Emily Dickinson mystery...
This got me to thinking, though, that science is a criminally underused source of material for this sort of thing. Yeah, there's a swashbuckling Nikola Tesla book or two, and Einstein turns up…
drorzel | January 10, 2008Kate and I got our Hugo nomination ballots in the mail yesterday (as members of the 2007 Worldcon, we get the right to nominate works for the 2008 Hugo Awards). The nomination deadline isn't until March 1st, but this still seems like a good time to ask:
What should I be nominating for the 2008 Hugo Awards?
I usually use the Locus Recommended Reading issue as a template to remind myself what's eligible, but that won't be out for a while, and I've got this blog just sitting here, begging to be used. So, leave your suggestions in the comments.
Given last year's kerfuffle over the lack of female…
drorzel | January 10, 2008As I mentioned a few days ago, a colleague asked me if I'd be interested in doing a guest lecture for a class on science fiction. She suggested that a good way to go might be to pick one story to have the class read, and talk about that.
Kicking ideas around with Kate, I latched onto the Ted Chiang story "Story of Your Life," from the Starlight 2 anthology (and also his collection Stories of Your Life and Others), because it's got a lot of great stuff in it-- linguistics, physics, math, really alien aliens, and fantastic human characters and interactions. If you haven't read it, it's a great…
drorzel | January 8, 2008In my email this morning, I have a note from everybody's favorite online retailer, informing me that:
We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Christopher Moore have also purchased Esther's Revenge at Susa: From Sennacherib to Ahasuerus by Stephanie Dalley.
OK, fine, they see a correlation, and are sending me a heads-up. Of course, they then go on to provide the jacket copy for the book being recommended:
Why are the names of the chief characters in the biblical Book of Esther those of Mesopotamian deities? Stephanie Dalley argues that the narrative reflects real…
drorzel | December 10, 2007"Do you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -- Steven Brust, Dzur
Way, way back in October, when I was annoying you all with DonorsChoose fundraining posts, I offered to sell post topics for $30. I've paid off most of these, but I have three left, one of which was for something more regarding Robert Jordan.
As I noted at the time, the Wheel of Time books were ridiculously important in my life-- because of them, I got involved with the Robert Jordan group on Usenet (I take obscure pride in being there from before the founding of rec.art.sf.written.robert-jordan), and through…
drorzel | December 9, 2007Kate and I went to see The Golden Compass last night because, dude, armored bears! Also, we both really enjoyed the book, back when it first came out (though I haven't re-read it since The Amber Spyglass, to see if it was retroactively ruined by the third volume).
From the opening titles in the left-over Lord ot ht Rings font, it's clear that this is New Line's bid to reassert their dominance over the "movie adaptations of popular fantasy books" genre, and as a spectacle, it's very good. There's a nifty steampunk aesthetic to Lyra's world and, dude, armored bears!
I didn't walk out of the…