Category: links, lists, and snippets

Here Is The News

Orbital reports and/or discussions can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, linked from here, and no doubt in many other places on this vast internet. You can see a bajillion photos here.

There’s a Spooks spin-off in the works:

The new spy drama, titled Spooks: Code 9, is currently being shot in Bradford and will hit screens later this year.

The drama is set in 2013, when London has been evacuated following a nuclear attack, and MI5 must establish field offices across the UK.

Four immediate thoughts:

  1. Hey, more near-future sf on the BBC!
  2. Are they just trying to out-24 24?
  3. This rather puts an expiry date on the original version.
  4. Can anyone think of another example of a non-sf show spawning an sf spinoff?

The debate about genre cover art is doing the rounds again. See here, here, here, here and here.

Chinese sf writers bid farewell to Arthur C. Clarke.

A bit more detail about Anathem:

Neal Stephenson’s ANATHEM, based in a universe similar to but not our own, where mathematicians and philosophers are sheltered from an illiterate and unpredictable “saecular” world, until the day they must leave their safe haven to save the entire world from destruction, to Ravi Mirchandani at Atlantic Books, for publication in September 2008, by Rachel Calder at the Sayle Literary Agency.

Adam Roberts hasn’t found a new home for his Clarke shortlist review (what with Infinity Plus closing down), so has been snapped up by that eagle-eyed Paul Raven chap to write a Clarke shortlist review for Futurismic. In the meantime, he’s posted some general thoughts on his website and is reviewing the individual books over here. The Red Men gets a kicking:

One of the 08 Clarke nominees, this, and now that I’ve read the entire shortlist I feel in a position to say: by far the worst book nominated, and one of the worst novels I’ve read in a long time. […] The blurb promises a thriller salted with ‘the imminent technologies of tomorrow’, but the novel delivers a very yesterday set of sf tropes: a pinch of Dick, a scattering of Gibson. Most notably. the central topic of the novel, the establishment of an entire virtual town of Red Men upon which marketing and other ideas can be tested, is a tired and belated retread of Fred Pohl’s 1955 story ‘The Tunnel Under the World’ (from the collection Alternating Currents). The rest of the book reads like a sub-par episode of Nathan Barley, which is very far from being a recommendation

The H-Bomb Girl gets praise, but not without caveat:

The worst that can be said of it is that it’s, perhaps, slight. The difficulty, as far as critical judgment is concerned, is to determine how far such an assessment reflects the novel itself, and how much it simply voices a prejudice against children’s literature as such. The latter position, of course, would not be defensible. Yet I finished reading The H-Bomb Girl with a sense of it as a minor addition to the Baxter canon. It treats the same topics as most of his recent fiction has done: alternate history and timelines parsing the same ethical dilemmas of how individual choice creates our mature selves, how much agency we possess as individuals in the face of larger historical forces, what possibilities for escape and for atonement are at our disposal. These are the themes of the Times Tapestry books; the Manifold novels and to an extent the Destiny’ Children books as well. I don’t think it’s just the larger canvas, and greater scope, that these novels provide that is responsible for their greater sense of heft and sway. I think that Baxter’s current Big Theme just needs more space in which to be developed than a novella-length YA title allows. [… But …] all in all The H-Bomb Girl is a find: splendidly evocative of a place and a time, it manages to be morally serious without ever losing its playfulness, its charm or its scouse nous.

The rest is still to come, but are the books just more of the same?

Overall it’s not a shortlist about which I can say me gusto: not, although this has been the complaint of some others, on account of the proportion of ‘mainstream lit’ titles it features, for I don’t see anything wrong in that, but because it’s all rather samey. All of these books are historically-proximate alt-historical or near-future thrillers/adventure stories. […] The best books on the list are probably the Baxter and the Morgan, but none of the titles here embody the mind-stretching, the sense-of-wonder, the conceptual metaphoricity and poetic, imagistic penetration of the SF that first made me fall in love with the genre. […] apart (to some extent) from the Baxter, they’re all rather straightforward texts. Irony is not their idiom. They are books that if they are serious (about dystopia, the situation of the world today etc) are strenuously serious, and that if they are intertextual are ponderously rather than playfully intertextual.

Of course, elsewhere James thought The Execution Channel had “an ending of hope and wonder and fun and brilliance and audacity.” The most satisfying thing about watching discussion of the shortlist this year, actually, as I was almost saying earlier, is that every book on the shortlist (bar The Red Men, admittedly) seems to have its advocates this year; Cheryl Morgan fancies The Raw Shark Texts, Nick Hubble (in that thread I just linked) is for The Carhullan Army, etc etc. Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting the Clarke judges have got it right, or anything; just that it’s fun to watch.

Swiftlinks

Singularity’s Links

It has been pointed out to me that I’ve been somewhat remiss about posting link round-ups recently. Sorry about that; I’m going to try to get back to doing them about once a week. In the meantime, here’s a bumper load.

In other news, the Baroque Cycle Reading Group is go! I’m going to start Quicksilver this month, and hope to post about the first part of it (ie “Quicksilver”) either just before, or more likely just after, Eastercon.

No Country For Old Links

… but some of these are pretty old. Still, that only means you’ll be able to find something to read, right?

Burning Links

  • Sarah Hall’s “tough portrait of life in a near-future Britain after the oil runs out”, The Carhullan Army, has won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, which recognises the best work of literature from Britain or the Commonwealth by an author under 35. Hall talks about the book’s inspiration:

    One novel in particular inspired me in writing Carhullan – Z For Zachariah by Robert O’Brien. Its setting is agricultural, and the human struggle is of a defiant female spirit. I first encountered this novel in my early teens, when I was not a great reader of fiction. I found reading a lonely and difficult undertaking. I was never quite convinced by the worlds portrayed, nor did I did connect with the characters. But this book resonated. Perhaps because it was a novel about being alone and in difficulty, or perhaps because its protagonist was only a little older than me.

  • Matt Cheney points out several conversations about The Book of the New Sun. Waggish:

    But because Gene Wolfe is praised to the skies by many “intellectual” sci-fi fans while being ignored by everyone else, I think he represents a position that is worth exploring. I.e., why is Wolfe still occupying a marginal place in literature in spite of praise from the likes of John Clute and Michael Swanwick, while Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson have made it into the mainstream canon?

    I think there are discernible reasons for this. Wolfe may not be any worse than Stephenson or Gibson, but his particular weaknesses are much more problematic for non-sf readers than theirs.

    Response one; Response two; and separately, OF Blog of the Fallen is focusing on Wolfe.

  • Sarah Monette’s rewatch of the first season of Due South reaches “Victoria’s Secret”.
  • Paul McAuley’s introduction to Alastair Reynolds’ collection Zima Blue and Other Stories: “Before I tell you about Al Reynolds and the stories collected here, I need to say something about the New Space Opera.”
  • Abigail Nussbaum reviews Battlestar Galactica: Razor.
  • Daniel Abraham on the role of setting for fantasy: “There was a time when we read books for excitement. The word itself — novel — is a give-away. Reading was the way people could go places they couldn’t go, see things they’d never seen, experience things they would never do. That role has been taken up by some other media and the relative ease of air travel. For the most part, those of us who are still reading are doing it for comfort.”
  • “Hachette Livre UK is taking the radical step of moving its backlist publishing to a firm sale basis for environmental reasons.” I do not know what this actually means, specifically: is it going to make it easier or harder to find books that are a few years old in bookshops? On Amazon?
  • Andrew Wheeler posts the sales figures for the books in the SF Awards Watch “poll of polls”.
  • Hey look, another unthemed original anthology.
  • Farah Mendlesohn is editing a book of critical essays about fantasy for Cambridge University Press.
  • Contents for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 2.
  • And finally: “I, Malcolm” (Reynolds).

Catching Up

Or, well, not really catching up at all. But at least putting something up here, so that you don’t all think I’ve dropped off the edge of the world. So what have I been doing?

Reading: Mostly Clarke Award submissions, of course, about which I cannot speak. (The pile is now down to just over knee-height, or about 66cm, which means I’ve got to read about 8mm of book a day, or near-as-dammit 100 pages.) However, I have managed to fit in a few other things. Notably, like a few others of this parish, at the end of last week I received a proof copy of the new Iain M. Banks novel, Matter, and immediately put all else aside. (Well, I had to get it read before the BSFA meeting interview a week on Wednesday, didn’t I?) Having just finished it, I can say that (1) I will have more to say about it later, and (2) it’s good, possibly very good, and (at least compared to The Algebraist, of which I was not particularly fond) a real return to form. I’ve also, in my lunch hours, been making my way through Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology, Eclipse, about which I may well say more later this week; and I finally got around to reading Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, which is as beautiful and moving as everyone has said it is.

Planning: Once again this has already been reported elsewhere, but the 2008 SFRA conference, which was going to take place in Dublin, has been relocated to Lawrence, Kansas, where it will be held jointly with the 2008 Campbell Conference. This is disappointing, since I’d been looking forward to going, and there’s no way I’m going to get to Kansas at that time of year; it also means that the second SF Foundation Masterclass in criticism is being relocated, although in that case to London, which is actually somewhat more convenient for me than the usual venue (Liverpool). So I still plan to apply for the Masterclass, even if I haven’t got around to it yet.

Somewhat more imminently, I’m moving house! On the 8th of December, to be precise, if all goes according to plan. So at the moment, on top of two hours’ commute a day and those 100 Clarke pages and Strange Horizons work and Vector work, I’m attempting to organise removals and boxes and all the other logistics of moving. So it’s entirely probable that things will stay quiet around here until the New Year — although I have big plans for when I’ve freed up a bit more time, don’t worry.

Watching: Not a huge amount of this going on at the moment. I’m still enjoying Pushing Daisies, which is interesting given that I wasn’t a huge fan of either of Bryan Fuller’s last two series, Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls. The difference that makes Daisies, I think, is the extreme and conscious artificiality of the whole enterprise. The most fantastical thing about it, in many ways, is not Ned’s magical ability, but the technicolour world in which Ned lives. I’m still enjoying Heroes, more than not, anyway; I’m a little bit concerned by the interview Kring gave, because while I agree with some of the things he identifies as flaws, I don’t agree with all of them, I don’t agree with the fixes when I do agree they’re flaws, and there are issues with the portrayal of various characters that he doesn’t touch on at all. This last is understandable, perhaps — saying to Entertainment Weekly, “yeah, we know [plot point or character] came over as [racist|sexist], but we’re going to fix that” strikes me as a good way to commit commercial suicide. But the rest seems to assume that the root problem is not giving the audience what it wants, rather than executing the writers’ vision badly. Case in point: saying that Monica, Maya and Alejandro “shouldn’t have been introduced in separate storylines that felt unnattached to the show”. Yes, they should have been; that’s one of the things that will help to differentiate Heroes, to give it scope and a sense that there’s more to the world than just New York. The flaw is not introducing separate storylines, but introducing separate storylines that the audience didn’t connect with. (Although personally speaking, I thought they were strong.) The same goes for Kring’s comments about pacing: I don’t care whether Heroes tells stories about people discovering their powers or whether it sticks with the people we know. I’d be happy if they dumped the whole cast at the end of a season and started with a clean slate the following year — as long as the stories being told are interesting. (In point of fact, I think Peter and Sylar have both outstayed their welcome; they were both so intimately tied to the season one story arc that they can’t help feeling like spare wheels now.) I do agree with Kring about one thing — no romance — but that’s only because so many shows do revolve around romance that it’s refreshing when one doesn’t.

And some links to finish:

And that’s your lot.

Hello Links, Goodbye

If On A Winter’s Night A Linker

  • John Clute’s “Fantastika in the World Storm“, a lecture delivered in Prague earlier this month. Possibly notable for including a four-stage model of sf to go with the models of fantasy and horror outlined in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy and The Darkening Garden, respectively; at least, I think it’s the first time I’ve seen such a model written down:

    Science Fiction. The basic premise is that the world depicted has an arguable relation to the history of the real world. The underlying impulse of twentieth century SF has been to view the world in this manner in order to see what’s wrong; and then fixing it. SF is the most optimisitc of genres. SF bronco-busts the world. It rides the world storm. I’ve cobbled a narrative model for SF out of other writers’ work. Though it uses a different terminology, this model closely resembles an earlier model constructed by Farah Mendlesohn for similar reasons in her essay, Is There Any Such a Thing as Children’s Fiction: A Position Piece (2004):

    1. Novum. Darko Suvin’s term for that aspect of the SF world which differs measurably from our given world.
    2. Cognitive Estrangement. Suvin’s term — modified from Vikor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht — for arguable and therefore structured defamiliarization of the world, which derives in part from the fact of Novum, and which allows the defectiveness of the ruling paradigm to be seen whole.
    3. Conceptual Breakthrough. Peter Nicholls’s term, from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979), for the thrust of release when a defective paradigm collapses and the new world — the true world — is revealed. A sense of wonder is often felt, sometimes in spaceships.
    4. Topia (U- or Dys-). The Jerusalem whose gates have been opened by conceptual breakthrough for those who have won through. From this point life is going to be led in accordance with the truths discovered.
  • Michael Swanwick’s “A Nettlesome Term That Has Long Outlived Its Welcome“, an essay about the term “fix-up” that first appeared in NYRSF.
  • I’m sure most of you have seen Ursula Le Guin’s review of Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel The Stone Gods by now, but in case not, here it is. And here is Tim Adams’ review from the Observer.
  • John Clute’s obituary for Robert Jordan (and Andrew Wheeler’s comment)
  • Jeff VanderMeer’s interview with M. John Harrison to mark the US release of Nova Swing (and Andrew Wheeler’s comment)
  • In The Guardian, Patrick Ness reviews Pratchett’s Making Money
  • Abigail Nussbaum reviews two novels by Anna Kavan
  • Jonathan McCalmont reviews Interzone 212
  • Another review of Jeff Prucher’s Brave New Words
  • Richard Larson’s thoughts on Spaceman Blues
  • Matt Cheney reports from a Jonathan Lethem/PKD event, and has the lineup of the next Library of America Dick volume: Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, and Now Wait for Last Year
  • Jeff VanderMeer’s working definition of the New Weird
  • The winners of the British Fantasy Awards. In Best Novel, Tim Lebbon’s Dusk beat Nova Swing and various others; in Non Fiction, Julie Phillips’ Tiptree bio lost to Mark Morris’ Cinema Macabre
  • Fantasy Debut: a blog that tracks, well, fantasy debuts
  • Eugie Foster has been “summarily dismissed” from Tangent Online; Dave Truesdale will be taking over as managing editor.
  • And finally, not sf but interesting: Stephen King on the state of the American short story

Making Links in Madrid

Linkyland