SF
drorzel | August 21, 2011As noted a while back, the Hugo Award nominations for this year were pretty uninspiring. The actual awards were handed out last night and, well, yeah. I wasn't all that wild about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but it at least would've been an interesting choice. But giving it to Blackout/ All Clear, a pair of books that almost nobody had anything good to say about? The only possible outcome that would've been less inspiring would've been a tie with Cryoburn.
Lower down the ballot, things are a little better. I don't read much short fiction, but lots of people who do said before the voting…
drorzel | August 20, 2011I've heard a bunch of good things about Dan Wells's John Cleaver series (a trilogy at the moment, consisting of I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, and I Don't Want to Kill You, but the ending of the last leaves an opening for more, should he want to write more), but I somehow didn't expect them to be quite as strongly in the Young Adult category as they are. It's a bold call, but it actually works pretty well.
The set-up here is that the first-person narrator of the series, John Wayne Cleaver, is a sociopath with all the usual traits of a serial killer in the making: pyromania, frequent…
drorzel | August 14, 2011Lev Grossman's The Magicians never got a full entry to itself, but as I said when I mentioned it in this round-up post, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a magical school novel about recognizable American teenagers attending Brakebills, a sort of liberal arts college for the wizarding set, somewhere in the lower Hudson valley (presumably near the Lake of the Coheeries). It's not to all tastes, but it resembles my actual college experience a lot more than most other magical college novels, so I enjoyed it quite a bit.
It's essentially impossible to say anything about the new sequel The Magician…
drorzel | August 11, 2011Yesterday was apparently Gender in Science day here, while the theme for today is Tab Clearance-- a couple of shortish posts about things that deserve more than just a Links Dump mention, but don't really cohere into any kind of grand synthesis of deep thoughts, or whatever.
This particular link was prompted by an item in the SF Signal links dump for today, with the title Writing Science Fiction as a Non-Scientist, by Jamie Todd Rubin. that made me blink a little, because it's never really seemed like a science degree was a necessary condition for writing SF. Even within so-called "hard SF,"…
drorzel | August 5, 2011Last week, I asked for advice on the show Fringe, because I need to be able to speak sensibly about it for the purpose of talking about parallel universes. I've been working through Janne's list of recommended episodes, watching on my laptop while SteelyKid goes to sleep, and have got up through the Season 3 premiere. So, what's the verdict?
The three-word review is "Entertaining but maddening." Because it's pretty well done in an X-Files kind of way, but partakes of all the things that drive me nuts about the portrayal of science in fiction.
The chief problem with this is that, in fine…
drorzel | August 2, 2011I was just tagging this for the Links Dump, but I thought it deserved better. Fred Clark, blogdom's best writer on politics and religion, is putting together a book-like thing from his blog, and has posted the introduction to the section on creationism:
The oldest book in our Bible contains a hymn of praise to the Creator that rambles on for chapter after chapter. It's the longest such hymn in the Bible, skipping about through all the earth and all the universe with the wide-eyed, giddy enthusiasm of a kind in a candy shop, marveling at all the wondrous things that God has made.
But this isn'…
drorzel | July 31, 2011One of the problems with a long-running series is that it accretes backstory as you go (unless, of course, you go the Rex Stout route and just pretend that time doesn't pass for the characters, even when you have the client in a later book being the son of a character from one of the earlier volumes...). This is particularly troublesome for the sort of series in which the characters become more experienced and powerful as they go along. After several books, it starts to become difficult to find credible threats for your protagonist to face.
For the 13th volume of the Dresden Files, Jim…
drorzel | July 29, 2011I'm not a huge Mieville fan, but the descriptions I read of Kraken sounded like good fun. As I like fun books, and a fun book written by China Mieville seemed sufficiently improbable that I just had to see it, I picked it up a little while ago, and read it over the last week or so while biking to nowhere or waiting for SteelyKid to go to sleep.
The book follows the adventures of Billy Harrow, a biologist working for the Darwin Center in London, who was responsible for preserving the giant squid they have on display there. It's the pride of the collection and a big tourist draw, so when Billy…
drorzel | July 27, 2011For the past few years, astronomer and SF author Mike Brotherton has been running the Launch Pad Workshop, a program bringing interested SF authors to Wyoming (where he's on the faculty) to learn about modern astronomy. The idea is to teach writers the real facts about the weird and wonderful things going on in astronomy these days, so they can write better stories about astronomical objects and ideas, and reach a wider audience through fiction. This year's workshop just ended, and Brotherton has links to some of the presentations, and blogs about it from the attendees.
I really like this…
drorzel | July 26, 2011Michelle Sagara's rant about convention panelist behavior reminded me that I never did get around to writing up the other panel from this year's Readercon that I wanted to say something about, namely "Why We Love Bad Writing"
James D. Macdonald, Anil Menon, Resa Nelson, Eric M. Van, Harold Torger Vedeler (leader).
In the Guardian, writer Edward Docx bemoaned the popularity of such writers as Stieg Larsson and insisted on a qualitative difference between "literary" and "genre" fiction. Critic Laura Miller, writing in Salon, disagreed with most of Docx's assumptions, but wondered what it is…
drorzel | July 23, 2011Contrary to Jo Walton's prediction, I didn't love this book. In fact, I didn't even like it very much.
Much has been made over the long wait for this latest installment in the Song of Ice and Fire series, building it up to the point where actually reading and reviewing it feels a little like being asked to review a unicorn, to lift a phrase from Chuck Klosterman. Much of the discussion leading up to this had to do with whether fans were unreasonable for complaining about the wait, and talked about whether readers had any right to make demands of authors.
Sort of lost in that was the real…
drorzel | July 18, 2011This past weekend, Kate and I were at Readercon, a SF convention outside Boston. This particular con is, as the name suggests, very literary in nature, and features a lot of panels of a more academic inclination. Unfortunately, my feelings about the humanities side of academia are in the "Oh, please," phase of their oscillation, so I ended up skipping a lot of it in favor of working on edits for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. I did go to a couple of panels, though, one of them on "Book Inflation:"
Tom Easton, Leigh Grossman (leader), Walter H. Hunt, Rosemary Kirstein, Howard Waldrop.…
drorzel | July 13, 2011Like a lot of people in SF/ Fantasy circles, I stayed up late reading last night. Unlike most of those people, though, what I was reading was not A Dance with Dragons from George R. R. Martin, but Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson, the sequel to Spin and Axis, concluding a series that he said in 2007 he was "trying very hard not to think of as the Spin Cycle."
Like Axis was to Spin this is a somewhat indirect sequel, and it's in a very different style than the previous volumes. Where the earlier books closely followed a small number of protagonists through a single series of events, Vortex…
drorzel | July 9, 2011A little while back, I bought The Dragon's Path by Daniel Abraham. Abraham is the author of the highly-regarded but not all that highly sold Long Price Quartet. I've heard nothing but good things about this, but I couldn't get through the first book, for reasons that are entirely personal and no reflection on the quality of the book(*). Since this is the start of a new and unrelated series, I figured it was a good way to give him a shot, so I picked up the ebook.
A little more recently, I picked up Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, a new space opera that's gotten some good reviews. "James…
drorzel | June 12, 2011I've heard a lot of buzz about The Quantum Thief-- see, for example, this enthusiastic review from Gary K. Wolfe, so I was psyched when it finally became available in the US a little while back. Of course, the down side of this sort of buzz is that it's almost impossible to live up to the promise.
the thief of the title is one Jen Le Flambeur, who is in prison when the novel starts. But not an ordinary prison-- the Dilemma Prison, in which infinite replicas of the minds of the imprisoned find themselves in little glass cells which open to reveal one other prisoner. Each of the prisoners has…
drorzel | June 4, 2011In past years, I have griped at length about the awful, maudlin dreck that Mike Resnick keeps putting on the Hugo ballot-- see this 2009 post for example. I think Abigail Nussbaum put it very well back in 2009, when she wrote of Resnick's "Article of Faith" from that year's short story ballot that "his greatest failing is and has always been the one encapsulated by "Article of Faith"--his ability to take a subject that underpins some of science fiction's seminal works, write his own spin on it which is neither innovative nor unusual nor particularly good, and send it out into the world…
drorzel | May 30, 2011I had intended last Wednesday's post on the Many-Worlds variant in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity to be followed by a post on the other things I said when I did a guest lecture on it for an English class. What with one thing and another, though, I got a little distracted, and I'm only getting around to it now.
Anyway, this was a guest lecture for a class on Science Fiction taught by a friend in the English department. To give you an idea of the stuff they covered, here's the "required books" list from the syllabus:
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (VBFSF)…
drorzel | May 28, 2011Kij Johnson's "Ponies" is the second on Locus's Short Story Club list of award-nominated stories. More than that, though, it's an actuall award winner, having claimed a share of the Nebula for Best Short Story.
I enjoyed Johnson's two novels, The Fox Woman and Fudoki quite a bit, so I'm happy to see her doing well, with award-nominated short stories the last two years. The problem is, like last's year's "Spar," which was up for the Hugo, my primary reaction to this story is "Oh, ick."
The set-up is simple and heavy-handed: like all young girls, Barbara has a Pony, some sort of artificial…
drorzel | May 25, 2011If I ever decided to abandon any pretense of integrity or credibility, and just shoot for making a bazillion dollars peddling quantum hokum, the particular brand of quantum philosophy I would peddle has already been laid out, in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity. In the story, the narrator is given a copy of a "crank book" by Carl G. Soziere, titled You will Never Die, which makes an argument that is essentially a variant of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics:
And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the…
drorzel | May 23, 2011As I have admitted previously, I have a fondness for tv shows about UFO's, the loonier the better. So, when I learned that there was a show called When Aliens Attack airing last night on the National Geographic channel, I was all over that. I'm happy to report that it did not disappoint-- it brought the crazy, in exactly the manner I was hoping for.
The premise of the show is a look at what would happen if aliens turned up on Earth, and turned out to be hostile. It claims to be a look at military contingency plans for dealing with an alien invasion, though the "plans" in question seem to be…