Books
drorzel | January 5, 2007Jack McDevitt is a prolific SF author, with a couple of running series that recently appeared in booklog entries here (see, for example, Antiquities Dealers in Spaaaace!!!). Coincidentally, he's also talked to the Slush God, in an interview posted at SciFi Weekly. He says a bunch of interesting stuff, and not just about his books:
The problem with space travel is that you don't really get much benefit from it. Not the sort that makes, say, for better transportation or better toothpaste. NASA is always trying to sell it that way, but the money would be better spent developing the toothpaste…
drorzel | December 6, 2006Continuing the year-end wrap-up theme, I'll invite suggestions for the best books of the year. Since I'm so far behind on the booklog, it's much harder for me to remember what came out in 2006, and come up with a ranking, but I have some ideas. I'd like to hear what other people think, though, so:
In your opinion, what was the best non-fiction book of 2006?
"Non-Fiction" in this case would include, well, anything that's not made up. Books of essays, collections of reviews, polemics about science, anti-religion screeds, so-fifteen-minutes-ago political tracts, whatever you like.
drorzel | December 6, 2006Continuing the year-end wrap-up theme, I'll invite suggestions for the best books of the year. Since I'm so far behind on the booklog, it's much harder for me to remember what came out in 2006, and come up with a ranking, but I have some ideas. I'd like to hear what other people think, though, so:
In your opinion, what was the best book of fiction of 2006?
"Fiction" in this case would include both novels and story collections, and also plays and poetry, I suppose, if you'd put one of those at the top of your list. There will be a separate non-fiction post, so if you're really hot to declare…
drorzel | December 4, 2006Another idle thought inspired by the Bond movie (I may or may not post comments about the movie as a whole, but you can check out Kate's spoiler-laden comments. I liked it a little more than she did, but I'm more familiar with the genre, and willing to cut them more slack...):
From what I can tell, this movie appears to have gotten about 50% of its budget from product placement. Any time Bond uses his laptop, the shot is carefully set up to put the big "VAIO" logo right in the center of the screen. His magic cell phone gets almost as much screen time as the girl, and there's even a scene…
drorzel | November 22, 2006I scan the titles reviewed by the Onion AV Club through their RSS feed every week, and only click over there for things that look particularly interesting. I don't regularly check their feature stories, which is why I'm a week late in noticing that they have an interview with Donald Westlake, one of my very favorite fiction writers, talking about his career, the writing process, and his best-known characters:
DW: This sounds like a joke, but in a way, I mean it straight: Dortmunder's the most realistic stuff I do. Stark is much more of a romantic. The example that I've given in the past is,…
drorzel | November 21, 2006Following up on the weekend's reading suggestions, I should point to John Horgan's list of the Ten Worst Science Books. These aren't obscure self-published tracts on the Theory of Everything, either-- Stephen Jay Gould, Malcolm Gladwell and E. O. Wilson make the list, and there are more best-selling suggestions in the comments.
drorzel | November 19, 2006We're out of town for the weekend visiting family, so if you usually depend on this blog for entertainment, you'll need to find something else to do. How about a good book or two?
You can't decide what to read? Well, the Internet is here to provide suggestions. You might, for example, think about the list of most significant SF books that was compiled by the SF Book Club. It's the usual mix of influential and popular and has been making the rounds in LiveJournaldom, where it has come in for some criticism.
Not in the mood for genre fiction? Well, Discover has put together a list of the…
drorzel | November 17, 2006If you go into any big-box bookstore these days, you'll find a huge section of manga titles (that is, Japanese comic books), including dozens of different series, many of them running to a dozen or more volumes. This section is always impeccably organized, with all the series grouped neatly together, and the overall section alphabetical by series.
Right next to that, there will be a considerably smaller section of "graphic novels" (that is, Western comic books). The shelving for this section always appears to have been done by poorly trained chimpanzees. They rarely even mange to have books…
drorzel | November 10, 2006I would post some sort of wrap-up about the Lisa Randall chat yesterday, but Discover is broken. They don't have a link to a transcript on the site-- in fact, they haven't updated the front page to reflect the fact that the chat was yesterday, and is now over. There was a link that would sort of give you access to a transcript, but it's broken now, or at least doesn't work in either Opera or Firefox on my home computer.
It's pretty much of a piece with the chat itself, actually-- I thought it was pretty sharp of them to email physics bloggers with invitations to the chat, but the chat itself…
drorzel | November 2, 2006November has been dubbed "National Novel Writing Month" or "NaNoWriMo" for those with too short an attention span to handle full words, in which people will commit to trying to write an entire novel in just thirty days. If you look around a bit, you'll see lots of blogs and LiveJournals tracking the progress made by various writers for the next month. The artificial deadline probably helps at least some inveterate procrastinators to actually sit down and write, though I wonder whether it's really possible to produce a commercially viable first novel this way.
At this time, I would like to…
drorzel | October 15, 2006Jim Henley proposes a "meme" about literature:
Adrienne Aldredge has a twist on Bookish Questions I'm herewith turning into a meme:
What authors have you given up on for good? And why?
I'm going to stick to authors who continue to produce work, and whom I used to follow eagerly, not authors I felt obligated to try and didn't like once I did.
Jim offers Dan Simmons and Alan Furst as his choices (read his post to see why). Simmons would be an excellent choice, but, um, I bought both Ilium and Olympos in hardcover. (In my defense, I read Ilium from the library first, and it seemed like a…
drorzel | September 25, 2006The Slush God offers all-too-typical news:
Today SCI FI Wire published a piece I wrote about Terry Brooks's latest novel, Armageddon's Children, which is the first in a series that will connect his Word and the Void trilogy with his Shannara series.
Is there any surer sign that an author has fallen to the Brain Eater than writing books to tie different fictional universes together? It got Heinlein, it got Asimov, and it's getting Terry Brooks, too.
drorzel | September 24, 2006When Brandon Sanderson's debut novel, Elantris first appeared on store shelves, I was tempted to buy it. It had a lot of things going for it: good review quotes, a striking cover, an interesting description, and it's published by Tor, who are usually pretty reliable. I couldn't quite figure out, though, whether it was the first book in a series or not, and I'd really rather not commit to another long fantasy series if it can be avoided.
The paperback edition helpfully addresses this in the back cover copy:
"Elantris delightfully proves that a great complete fantasy story can still be told in…
drorzel | September 12, 2006The two most talked-about books in physics this year are probably a pair of anti-sting-theory books, Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, which shares a name with Jacques Distler's favorite weblog. I got review copies of both, but Not Even Wrong arrived first (thanks, Peter), and gets to be the first one reviewed.
Of course, I'm coming to the game kind of late, as lots of other high-profile physics bloggers have already posted their reviews, and various magazine reviews have been out for months. Peter has collected a bunch of links in various posts. I don't…
drorzel | September 8, 2006One of the perks of this corporate blogging gig is that it's put me on the radar of book publishers, who have started sending me free stuff. We like free stuff, here at Chateau Steelypips, and we like books, so that's a Good Thing.
It's becoming almost too much of a Good Thing, though-- In the past week or so, I've received:
Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit (thank you, Peter), which I finished last night (review forthcoming).
The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, in the spiffy new paperback edition.
The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (thrown in with tRWoS by the publisher).
The…
drorzel | September 5, 2006That's the number of books in our collection at the moment. Kate went nuts with a bar-code scanner, and entered them all into LibraryThing. Well, OK, that's just the stuff at home-- it doesn't include the textbooks I keep in my office, or the maybe twenty science-related books I keep in there for extra reading material.
Still, a lot of books, now browsable on the Web.
drorzel | September 1, 2006Here are the answers to last week's list of quotes from seventeen books:
1) "The way to a man's heart is through his chest." Use of Weapons, Iain Banks. This one was a little sneaky, as it's in the poem on the opening page.
2) "...Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Necessary to Know..." One for the Morning Glory, John Barnes. A surprisingly delightful little book from an author whose other works inspired the rule "John Barnes books containing forcible sodomy are bad." (Nothing was said about dinosaurs.)
3) "All is waves, with nothing waving, across no distance at all." Songs of Earth…
drorzel | August 28, 2006Here's the other quote from Chuck Klosterman IV that I mentioned earlier, this one from an essay in Esquire on people who feel betrayed by pop culture:
Do you want to be happy? I suspect that you do. Well, here's the first step to happiness: don't get pissed off that people who aren't you happen to think Paris Hilton is interesting and deserves to be on TV every other day; the fame surrounding Paris Hilton is not a reflection on your life (unless you want it to be). Don't get pissed off because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren't on the radio enough; you can buy the goddamn album and play "Maps" all…
drorzel | August 28, 2006It feels a little silly to quote Chuck Klosterman as some sort of Deep Thinker-- this is a guy whose whole claim to fame revolves around the expression of weirdly absolute opinions about pop culture ephemera, after all. Then again, the best political reporting being done these days is done by a pair of comedy shows, so maybe it's not so stupid.
Anyway, there were two passages in his new collection, Chuck Klosterman IV, that really struck a chord when I read them the other night. Well, OK, there were more than two, but there were two that struck me as worthy of blog posts. Here's the first:
It…
drorzel | August 27, 2006This year's Hugo Awards (either the Oscars of the Golden Globes of the science fiction/ fantasy field, depending on who you ask) were announced last night at the Worldcon in LA. Pleasant surprises abound:
1) Spin by Robert Charles Wilson won the Best Novel Hugo. As I've said before, I think it was far and away the best book in the field, but I didn't think it would win. They've made a lot of bad calls in recent years, but this one, I like.
2) The Best Professional Editor Hugo goes to David Hartwell. This is nice to see not just because David is a nice guy, and does good work, but because…