Category: SF Links

Linkcandescence

The Link-Away World

And just because I can, here’s a picture of all the tasty books that have dropped through my letterbox in the last week or so:

I want to read all of these right now (especially Superpowers), but sadly they’re going to have to wait for a month or so, while I get through the SFF Masterclass reading. However! Baroque Cycle reading continues apace, and there’ll be a post about King of the Vagabonds tomorrow.

Manhattan Linksfer

The Linksital Plague

  • An interview with Junot Diaz, including some “throat-clearing” from his planned next novel, Dark America:

    I’m somewhere in the Zone, traveling on top of an transport. Bound for City.

    The only City there is.

    What I see. Usually just the f-ckedup hide of the truck. Every now and then I lift my head a little and see the other Travellers sucked onto the metal of the container like remora. See the fresca from the night before, long hair whipping back in thousands of everchanging streams. See: fields of white crosses, an endless proliferation of kudzu, a basketball game between the Junior Klan and the Uncle Muhammed Youth League–a regular five on five with a ref and everything so you know we’re in the End Times for real. And sometimes, if I’m not careful, I see my mother and my brother standing by the edge of the road.

    There full extract is a bit longer, but are you pondering what I’m pondering, Pinky?

  • Free books! Get a pdf of John Kessel’s new collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, or sign up for a proof of Nick Harkaway’s debut The Gone Away World (it has ninjas, I gather).
  • Colin Greenland reviews Will Ashon’s The Heritage
  • Karen Burnham has started working her way through the reading list for the SF Masterclass. Here’s her take on Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer
  • Gwyneth Jones reviews Matter, and generates some discussion
  • An in-depth look at The Carhullan Army
  • Philip Palmer on why The Raw Shark Texts isn’t sf
  • Jonathan McCalmont on Brasyl
  • The latest SF Signal mind-meld: Is the short fiction market in trouble?
  • Catherynne Valente on last week’s Doctor Who
  • The Bookseller reports that Quercus have bought David Wingrove’s “nineteen-book epic” Chung Kuo. Last time I checked it was only eight volumes, so clearly he’s been busy.
  • And finally: something to look forward to …?

Tiptree Award Winner

Locus Online is reporting that

The winner of this year’s James Tiptree, Jr. Award, given to works of SF and fantasy that explore gender roles, is Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army, published last year in the UK by Faber and Faber, and just published this year in the US by HarperPerennial as Daughters of the North. Jurors this year were Charlie Anders, Gwenda Bond (chair), Meghan McCarron, Geoff Ryman, and Sheree Renee Thomas. The award, which comes with $1000 prize money, will be celebrated May 25, 2008, at WisCon 32 in Madison, Wisconsin.

To which I at least have no objections. In fact, I think it’s an excellent choice. There’s no sign of the honour list yet, but I’ll be interested to see what else is on there.

EDIT: SF Awards Watch has the honour list:

  • “Dangerous Space”, Kelley Eskridge, (Dangerous Space, Aqueduct Press, 2007)
  • Water Logic, Laurie Marks (Small Beer Press, 2007)
  • Empress of Mijak and The Riven Kingdom, Karen Miller (HarperCollins, Australia, 2007)
  • The Shadow Speaker, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Hyperion, 2007)
  • Interfictions, Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds.) (Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press, 2007)
  • Glasshouse, Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
  • The Margarets, Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Collins 2007)
  • Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Pia Guerra (available in 60 issues or 10 volumes from DC/Vertigo Comics, 2002-2008)
  • Flora Segunda, Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

That has a couple of entries I am somewhat more surprised to see, but they’re more than made up for by the presence of Y: The Last Man.

FURTHER EDIT: Full press release.

YET MORE EDIT: And another discussion, this time touching on the book’s timeliness (or lack thereof).

The Linkimous Depths

(Four Clarke books down, two to go; and I’m up to p.217 of Quicksilver.)

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?