Category: SF/F

Things Are Different

The world today is a subtly changed place, full of mystery and curiosities.  The tide of popular opinion waxes on strange shores:

greatreads

Long familiar things have mutated into nearly unrecognizable forms:

wrongforeverwar

But the most important change of the day?  That would be this:

FerrettAsimovs1

What?  You don’t see it?  Understandable.  Look closer:

FerrettAsimovs2

My friend and former roomie Ferrett‘s first pro sale, “Camera Obscured,” hit the stands today.  I got to see the first draft of this story at Clarion, and was thrilled for him when it was bought by Asimov’s only a few months later.  This makes Ferrett the first Clarion ’08er to crack one of the so-called “big three.”  Asimov’s was the one my parents subscribed to when I was a kid, and thus retains a special, nostalgia-tinged place in my affections.  Holding a copy of it that has a friend’s story inside is pretty exciting for me.  Way to go, Ferrett!

The 2009 Hugo Best Novel Shortlist

It’s an incredibly strong year for the best novel Hugo.  The nominees are Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, and Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children. I’ve now read four of these five, and though I don’t know if I will be buying an Anticipation membership and actually voting, I think I know what this part of my ballot would look like.

A caveat: I haven’t read Zoe’s Tale.  I’ve read Old Man’s War, the first book set in the series.  Zoe’s Tale is supposed to be able to stand on it’s own, but I understand that it covers the same period of time as the previous book set in this universe, The Last Colony, which makes reluctant to jump straight to it.  I enjoyed Old Man’s War well enough that I will probably read the rest of the series, but I found it to be solidly in the light entertainment, read-it-in-a-day category.  Combine that with my current attempt to read books I already have rather than buying more new books, and I might not get to it before the convention.  While I love Scalzi’s blogging, the fiction of his I’ve read makes me suspect that his contribution would be at the bottom of my ballot in this absurdly strong year.  But I could be wrong.  If I manage to get to Zoe’s Tale any time soon, I’ll update this.

The ones I’ve read, in ascending order of how I would vote:

4) Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross.  Stross’s work has so far been hit-and-miss for me, but when it misses it’s a near miss and the hits are incredibly solid.  I found Accelerando and Glasshouse absorbing, but I put down Singularity Sky after about 100 pages, and I’m honestly unlikely to ever return to it.  (Can anyone tell me if Iron Sunrise stands alone?)  Halting State also failed to grab me, though I think I will give it another chance at some point.  The books that worked for me are hard, big idea SF carried out with astonishing verisimilitude, and Saturn’s Children follows in this mode.  In addition, it continues Stross’s trend of incorporating alternative sexuality and kink–especially BDSM–in a way that is neither judgmental nor sensationalistic.  So I loved Saturn’s Children, and the only thing that keeps me from putting it higher on this list is that there were several plot reveals crucial to the climax, and I saw all of them coming well in advance of where I thought I was supposed to.  I found it a brilliant but unfortunately predictable book, in a way that neither Accelerando nor Glasshouse were.  Almost any other year this would probably be higher.

3) Anathem by Neal Stephenson.  This was the hardest one for me to settle on a place for.  On the one hand there are few books that I’ve spent more time thinking about after I closed the cover.  On the other hand, there is no way for me to think of this book where it doesn’t seem to have a flaw right at its heart.  A big problem for me is that, for all of the interesting philosophy, Stephenson just gets the physics wrong.  He conflates multiversity and many-world QM in a way that, the more you follow through the implications, undermines nearly every scientific conceit in the story.  (Briefly: he’s internally inconsistent in his handling of the interactions between atoms from different universes.  It’s a big problem.)  My conception of Anathem is as a book that essentially fails to hit it’s target–but at the same time, the target itself is so grand that even coming close makes for an impressive work.  And I continue to just lap up Stephenson’s prose; I tore through this 1000 page novel in a matter of days.

2) The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman.  A gem, and my favorite of his works since American Gods.  If Anathem seemed to somehow miss its target, then The Graveyard Book is a milimeter-precision bullseye.  It is beautiful and sad and funny, and it’s lessons about bravery and self-sufficiency and how to make mistakes and respond to having made them are timeless.  And it is this timeless quality–which made it a supremely worthy winner of the Newberry award–that has me placing it second on the Hugo ballot rather than first.

1) Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.  My top two books this year are both YA, both engrossing, and both made me want to find the nearest precocious young person and put it immediately into their hands.  I think, and this is not hyperbole, that these are two books that have the potential to change people’s lives.  The Graveyard Book is perhaps the slightly more polished of the two.  But while the lessons of The Graveyard Book are timeless, Little Brother sets out to educate us about our own immediate, onrushing future.  That’s a task to which science fiction is uniquely suited, and the Hugo is science fiction award.  All other things being largely equal, it is this quality of Little Brother being more essentially SFnal that makes me think it the worthiest winner of the Hugo this year.

Theodore Sturgeon!

My parents met and socialized with Theodore Sturgeon at the University of Kansas before they were married–they claim to have the only copy of Venus on the Half-Shell (written by Phil José Farmer pseudonymously) signed by the real Kilgore Trout.  EDIT: My father wrote to correct me: they got Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut, signed by Sturgeon as Trout.  I grew up on Sturgeon stories.  Memory fades, but I think my first Sturgeon was “Microcosmic God,” which was either actually read to me as a bedtime story, or was put in my hands by my parents as something to read myself to sleep with.  In college I wrote a comparative literature paper on the treatment of the mentally disabled by Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick.

This week’s story in Strange Horizons is a Theodore Sturgeon reprint.  And I can tell you, because I just got off the phone with them, that my parents are totally geeking out about their son’s name appearing next to Theodore Sturgeon’s on a table of contents.  My mother insists she is going to print out the page and frame it.  I’m pretty happy with this turn of events also.  I told my dad, “This is the nicest thing that doesn’t really mean anything at all that’s happened to me in a while.”  So thanks for the unexpected gift, SH!  As a Sturgeon fan, this is a clipping for my archives:

sturgeonfischerjpg

Sarah Miller in Everyday Weirdness

My Clarionmate Sarah Miller has had a lovely, elegant flash piece published at Everyday Weirdness.  Take a few moments and make your day a little stranger by experiencing “The Music at Bash Bish Falls.

Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” Available Online

Ted Chiang has a story, “Exhalation,” up for a Hugo award this year.  It was originally published in the anthology Eclipse 2, and now Night Shade Books has made it available for download.  I just read it, and loved it.  It is in structure and tone very similar to one of my very favorite short stories, “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges.  In fact, the similarities are such that I wonder if Borges was a direct inspiration.  Compare the first lines.

Borges: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, series of hexagonal galleries.”

Chiang: “It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life.”

Additionally, both stories end with the narrator drawing comfort from imagining a universe which extends beyond what is commonly conceived of as the boundaries of the one he inhabits.  Borges’s story uses combinatorial complexity as the basis of its thematic explorations, while Chiang’s uses the laws of thermodynamics.  Basically, Chiang has written the physics-y version of my favorite math-y story ever, and has thus made my inner scientist very happy.

Paul M. Berger in INTERZONE

I urge you to find a way to get your hands on the current issue of Interzone, which contains the story “Home Again,” by Paul M. Berger.  Paul was my Clarion classmate and roomie, and I got to read the first draft of this story at the workshop.  I don’t actually know of anyplace in San Antonio that sells Interzone, but I’m going to have to track down a copy, because this story was a creepy little gem even at its earliest, and I must have it in a form that I can thrust in the faces of others.

Two Exciting Forthcoming Books

Martin Millar blogs that he is under contract to deliver a sequel to his novel Lonely Werewolf Girl, provisionally entitled Queen Vex.  I just read Lonely Werewolf Girl last week and I thoroughly adored it, saying that it should be made into a television miniseries immediately.  I even spent some time after I finished it writing, with an eye toward emulation, about interesting things Millar does with tying character motivation to dialog.  My only complaint about it was that it didn’t end as neatly as the the other Martin Millar novel I’ve read, the also excellent Good Fairies of New York.  So I welcome news that the story is going to continue.

The other exciting news, which I comes via Nalo Hopkinson, is that Beacon Press, the publisher of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is in the process of recruiting an illustrator to produce a graphic novel adaptation for the 30th anniversary of the book’s publication.  Graphic novels and Octavia Butler novels are two of my favorite things in the world; I can’t wait to see how these tastes go together.

“Don’t Stop” Nominated for Nebula Award

The final ballot for the Nebula Awards has been released, and my Clarion instructor James Patrick Kelly’s story “Don’t Stop” is on it!  Jim is a prolific podcaster of his fiction–in fact he has previously won the Nebula specifically for the podcast of his novella “Burn,” the first ever awarded for a podcast.  When it was originally nominated for the Nebula, Jim released “Don’t Stop” on his Free Reads podcast, which you can listen to here.  It is a hauntingly sweet story, and I listened to it while exercising, which, given the focus on running, is maybe not a bad way to go.  There is a scene with a track coach which should resonate strongly with anyone who has ever had the experience of losing themselves in transcendent physical activity.

Congratulations, Jim!  Good luck!