SF
drorzel | October 9, 2010I missed last week's installment of Short Story Club while traveling, but want to get caught up again with this week's story, "Miguel and the Viatura." I'm not sure this will be posted in time to get into the discussion post, but we'll see.
The title character, Miguel, lives in a future city that is not clearly identified, but based on the names is presumably in Brazil. The story opens as he is trailing behind his brother Joaõ on the way to see his father. His father, it turns out, has quite literally sold himself, allowing his body to be filled with magic nanotechnology, and inhabited by…
drorzel | September 26, 2010I'm way, way behind the discussion of this week's story, but having read it, I thought I'd post a couple of comments. This will be short, because there isn't a lot to say.
This is a sort of alternate Christianity story, a story in which Jesus gave in to the temptations offered by the devil in the desert (the relevant passages from the Gospel of Luke, in three languages), and threw himself off the Temple to be caught by angels. Once the angels had appeared, he went the secular power route, and in the story an aging Balthasar, one of the magi who visited Jesus in the manger, makes a second…
drorzel | September 18, 2010Hannu Ranjaniemi's The Quantrum Thief has generated a lot of buzz, but doesn't seem to be available on this side of the Atlantic (not without exorbitant shipping charges, anyway). As a result, I haven't read anything of his, so I was happy to see "Elegy for a Young Elk on the Short Story Club list.
This is a story in the trendy posthuman post-apocalypse genre. The main character, Kosonen, is a former poet living a rustic existence on an Earth largely devoid of humans after some sort of past catastrophe that has left most animals sentient (his best friend is a talking bear, and he has to…
drorzel | September 12, 2010I do intend to keep reading and commenting on the stories for Torque Control's Short Story Club, but I missed last week's because I couldn't really think of anything to say about it. The story was nicely written, and all, but it's just kind of... there.
This week's post was delayed by my annual day of blog silence, so it will probably miss inclusion in the discussion post, but that's okay, as this is another one where my reaction will be dominated by my own idiosyncratic reactions. This is the type of story where the real point is just to introduce the richly detailed world in which it takes…
drorzel | September 5, 2010The 2010 Hugo Award Winners were announced on Sunday night. Of course, this being a science fiction award, it's only appropriate that they be announced from THE FUTURE, so the results were available early this morning, US time.
It turns out that I voted for 1.5 of the fiction award winners: China Mieville's The City and The City shared the Best Novel award with Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, and I also voted for the Charlie Stross novella. The other two categories, I'm basically OK with-- I "NO AWARD"-ed "Bridsicle," but that whole category was pretty weak, and it wasn't as awful as "…
drorzel | August 28, 2010Over at Torque Control, Niall Harrison is doing a Short Story Club, hosting discussions of SF short fiction. As I always vaguely regret not reading enough short fiction to make sensible nominations for the Hugos, this seemed like a good opportunity to read a selection of stories that a smart person with pretty good taste thought were worth discussing. As a bonus, these all appear to be available online for free, so it doesn't require me to buy, let alone subscribe to, one of the big magazines.
The first story up in this year's edition is "The Things" by Peter Watts. It's a fast read, if you…
drorzel | August 21, 2010Nobody who likes both SF and the graphing of odd things as much as I do could possibly fail to link to Orbit's charts of fantasy art. These include the frequency plot of various elements seen at right, a comparison of fashion trends for urban fantasy heroines, color trends in cover dragons, and a study of word and font frequencies in titles. If you're planning a fantasy series, Bloody Death Dragon of the Magic Shadow God would apparently be a good title choice.
drorzel | August 14, 2010Tongues of Serpents is the nth book in the Temeraire series started with His Majesty's Dragon (in the US, anyway), and another "Meh" review from me. In this case, this is probably less to do with the book itself than with the fact that I am not really in the target demographic for this book.
The series, for those who aren't familiar with it is basically Patrick O'Brian crossed with Pern: our chief protagonist is William Laurence, a sailor in the Biritsh Navy in the Napoleonic Wars who captures a dragon's egg, and inadvertently becomes the human captain of Temeraire, a Chinese Celestial dragon…
drorzel | August 14, 2010I don't believe the actual book is out yet, but you can get an electronic Advance Reading copy of the Nth Miles Vorkosigan book, Cryoburn already. Kate picked up a copy, and while she hasn't gotten around to it yet, I read it this week while putting SteelyKid to bed.
The book is another "Lord Auditor Vorkosigan" story, with Miles on a mission to Kibou-Dani, a half-terraformed planet with a positive fetish for cryopreservation. A quirk in local laws gives the "cryocorps" that preserve millions of frozen citizens the right to proxy vote for their clients, and control of their property, so they…
drorzel | August 6, 2010In comments to yesterday's post about my favorite Many-Worlds story, a couple of people mention "All the Myriad Ways," a Larry Niven short story. I don't think I've ever actually read the story, but it gets brought up all the time, so I'm familiar with the concept. It's an angle on Many-Worlds that I don't like, and has something in common with the central conceit of Inception, which is also not high on my list of literary tropes, though my reaction isn't anywhere near as negative as Scott's.
If you're not familiar with it, here's the summary from Wikipedia:
A police detective, pondering a…
drorzel | August 6, 2010We haven't yet gotten to the point where we're comfortable leaving SteelyKid with a babysitter, so seeing the movie everybody's talking about took a while. Since she's off at Gammy's, though, we got a rare night to ourselves and went to the movies.
My immediate reaction is that it's great to see a movie that's kind of smart and not based on anything dominating the box office. If this helps break us out of the endless cycle of re-makes and comic-book movies, I'll be as happy as anyone.
This is an extremely well-done movie, with everything shot, acted, and choreographed very well. There was…
drorzel | August 5, 2010Today, Tor.com has posted the complete story "Divided by Infinity" by Robert Charles Wilson. This remains probably the best science fiction story ever using the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum physics (though it doesn't call it that explicitly), and also the creepiest:
In the year after Lorraine's death I contemplated suicide six times. Contemplated it seriously, I mean: six times sat with the fat bottle of Clonazepam within reaching distance, six times failed to reach for it, betrayed by some instinct for life or disgusted by my own weakness.
I can't say I wish I had succeeded,…
drorzel | August 1, 2010The voting for the 2010 Hugo Awards closed last night. I sent in my ballot yesterday, but I'm trying to limit my computer time this weekend, so I didn't post about it until today.
The following lists are my votes, with miscellaneous commentary. The Hugos use a complicated vote-counting scheme, including a "No Award" option to distinguish between works you wouldn't mind seeing win, even if they're not your first choice, and works you consider so bad you would rather see them cancel the award than win.
Best Novel
The City and the City by China Mieville
Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson…
drorzel | July 24, 2010It was miserably swampy for most of the day today-- when it wasn't actually raining, it was so humid that you expects water to condense out of the air at any moment-- so I spent a while sitting on the couch watching tv with SteelyKid. The best kid-friendly option seemed to be an episode of the new Doctor Who on BBC America, which was pretty much a perfect distillation of why I can't take the show seriously, despite the rave reviews of many people I know.
It's not just that every single episode introduces an alien menace that the Doctor knows all about already, either because it was featured…
drorzel | July 19, 2010Over at Jeff Vandemeer's blog, Rachel Swirsky has a series ofm guest posts (start here if you prefer direct post links) about the recently completed Launch Pad workshop. this is a NASA funded workshop bringing a group of writers together for six days of lectures on modern astronomy from working astronomers. From the workshop web site:
Launch Pad is a NASA-funded education/public outreach effort supplementing Mike Brotherton's space-based astronomical research. Our budget allows us to provide a workshop that is essentially free to participants. Our primary goal is to teach writers of all…
drorzel | June 30, 2010I have now finished all of the short fiction on this year's Hugo Award ballot (links to most nominees are available here), and I have to say, the pickings here are pretty slim. The stories that aren't forgettable or preachy are deeply unpleasant, leaving me wanting to put a lot of stuff below "No Award." And there's one story that makes me want to bleach my frontal cortex.
More detailed comments, category-by-category, below the fold:
Best Novella
“Act One”, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s 3/09)
The God Engines, John Scalzi (Subterranean)
“Palimpsest”, Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace, Orbit)
Shambling…
drorzel | June 18, 2010When the Hugo nominees were announced, Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest was the only one of the three Best Novel nominees I hadn't already read that I was pretty sure I would read. I have very little interest in Robert Sawyer's work, and I've read just enough of Paolo Bacigalupi's short fiction to dread the thought of reading something of his at novel length. I may yet read The Wind-Up Girl out of a sense of obligation, because people keep saying it's brilliant, but his previous Hugo-nominated short fiction was so crushingly depressing that I'm not excited by the prospect.
I wanted very badly…
drorzel | June 14, 2010I've already read three of this year's six Hugo-nominated novels, and am highly unlikely to read two of the remaining three, but since I have voting rights, and want to be as responsible as I can about this, I started on Palimpsest by Cat Valente last night. The language is very rich, and I'm not far enough in yet to tell if it will eventually develop a plot, but I was jarred very badly by one early section, in which a Japanese character visits a Kyoto landmark, the Silver Pavilion:
The temple grounds were deserted. She settled onto the grass a ways off from the great silver temple. She…
drorzel | June 5, 2010Over at Tor.com, Kate has a Lord of the Rings re-read post about the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, which includes a shout-out to me that I missed because I was driving to NYC:
Ãomer is "scarely a mile" away when the standard unfurls and is clearly seen to bear the White Tree, Seven Stars, and a high crown. If I were at home, I could ask the resident scientist to tell me how big these elements would need to be to be visible at a mile, but I'm finishing this post on the train down to New York City (vacation! Woo! I'm going to try and write the next post while I'm there, too, so as to make up…
drorzel | June 3, 2010A number of SF-related sites have been talking about the "Periodic Table of Women in SF" put together by Sandra McDonald, presumably passed around at Wiscon. James Nicoll has a list of the authors, and SFSignal has a link to the table, which I will reproduce here to save you the annoyance of opening a PDF:
This is an area where my nerdiness gets the best of me, because while I appreciate the concept-- listing a whole bunch of really good female authors as a way to draw attention to them-- the execution is dreadful. It's particularly disappointing given that the whole project is in reference…