Science Fiction
cevans | March 1, 2010
Photograph by Benjamin Reed.
Ursula K. Le Guin is a internationally-recognized, award-winning science fiction writer, an elegant badass and the author of such classics as the Hugo and Nebula-award winning The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe Of Heaven, and the Earthsea novels. Last year, she began mounting formidable opposition to the Google Books Settlement, an inscrutably complex 303-page agreement reached between the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google regarding the Web giant's desire to scan the libraries of the world. The Settlement, if approved -- it…
jdupuis | February 19, 2010John Scalzi is one of my guaranteed Friday Fun go-to guys. Always amusing, always entertaining and occasionally controversial and provocative.
He's definitely in the controversial and provocative mode here in a 2006 blog post entitled The Lie of Star Wars as Entertainment.
The post is scathingly funny, cruel and vicious and sarcastic and brilliant. And spot on.
So let's not pretend that the Star Wars series is this great piece of entertainment.
Instead, let's call it what it is: A monument to George Lucas pleasuring himself. Which, you know, is fine. I'm happy for Lucas; it's nice that he…
jdupuis | February 17, 2010I've always been a huge vampire fan -- I watched my first Dracula movie when I was about 8-10 years old, on TV, one of the vintage Hammer films with Christopher Lee. I read the original novel when I was a teenager and was a fan of the Marvel comic versions as well. Since then, I've read a zillion vampire novels, read more comics and watched a ton of vampire movies and TV series -- Dark Shadows, Buffy and more. My favourite Dracula will always be Lee though I've also appreciated Lugosi, Louis Jordan and especially Jack Palance. The more romantic versions by Gary Oldman or Frank Langella…
drorzel | February 13, 2010Since I'm at Boskone, talking and listening to people talking about science fiction and fantasy literature, it seems appropriate to do a quickie post listing notworthy genre stuff I've read recently. There isn't that much of it, as I've been doing a lot of non-fiction reading, and also slightly preoccupied with book promotion. Still, I've been reading a few things while putting SteelyKid to bed, and might as well comment on them here:
The Alchemist's Apprentice, The Alchemist's Pursuit, and The Alchemist's Code by Dave Duncan. Duncan occupies a literary position similar to that of the late…
cagapakis | February 11, 2010BioShock2 came out a couple days ago, the sequel to the wildly successful video game BioShock. BioShock is a first-person-shooter video game set in Rapture, an underwater city overrun by violently insane genetically engineered mutants called "Splicers", creepy zombie-like girls, "Little Sisters", that harvest corpses for "ADAM"--sea slug stem-cells that provide super-human strength, regenerative powers, and the ability to rewrite the human genome with the injection of "plasmids"--and genetically engineered "Big Daddies" that protect them, mentally blank superhumans grafted into enormous…
jdupuis | February 5, 2010Continuing my strange obsession with lists of books...
Locus Magazine is the bible of the sffh business -- both in print and online. Every year they poll their reviewers and various other industry people and come up with a pretty extensive recommended reading list for the year. Their categories include: sf novels, fantasy novels, YA books, first novels, collections, original anthologies, reprint anthologies, best of year anthologies, non-fiction, art books, novellas, novelettes and short stories.
I'm obviously not going to reprint all their lists here -- just the sf novel one to give you a…
milhayser | January 7, 2010
ScienceBloggers liked Avatar, but that hasn't stopped them from picking the science apart from the science fiction. On The Scientific Indian, Selva wonders how communication between the humans and their avatars could take place inside the "vortex," when all other kinds of transmission are disrupted. PZ Myers on Pharyngula lauds the detailed flora and fauna imagined for Pandora, but laments that the natives ended up looking so safely human in an otherwise alien world. On Greg Laden's Blog, Greg turns a critical eye to the film's anthropological undercurrents, comparing the representation…
jdupuis | January 1, 2010Ok, I promise, this is the last Lovecraftian Friday Fun for a while. I double promise. It's also possible that I can't be trusted in this matter.
Anyways, to celebrate the the fresh possibilities of the new year, let's mosey on down to Tor.com and see how S.J. Chambers is doing -- a horror fan who's never read Lovecraft coming to his works for the first time! "The Alchemist" and "The Outsider" are up first.
I have a dark confession to make. For all my love of the Gothic and weird, for all the Stuart Gordon movies I've seen, and for all the issues of Weird Tales and Innsmouth Free Press I'…
jdupuis | December 18, 2009What better way to celebrate the yuletide season that with some gifts that honour and celebrate everyone's favourite Great Old One, Cthulhu!
Ellen Datlow has a couple of cool posts on Tor.com with some Lovecraftian gift ideas here and here.
Take a look:
Despite the fact that he's been dead for over seventy years, and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft's work is still widely read, and has remained influential for generations. Evidence of this is in the 2005 publication of H. P. Lovecraft: Tales by Library of America, that bastion of literary respectability. The…
jdupuis | December 11, 2009...on Tor.com!
Check it out:
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn...
In deference to the Great Old Ones, Tor.com has devoted this December to everyone's favorite cosmic tentacled thing-that-cannot-be-described from Vhoorl. All month long we'll be posting articles, stories, and comics relating to the Lovecraft Mythos, and we've invited scholars, editors, and fans of the snuggly beast to contribute. We're thrilled to welcome as bloggers Ellen Datlow, Stephen H. Segal, Seamus Cooper, and others on Tor.com for this very special occasion (along with our regular lineup, natch).
We'll…
jdupuis | November 28, 2009From the most recent issue of Locus magazine, November 2009, talking about his most recent novel Makers:
The people in Makers experience a world in which technology giveth and taketh away. They live through the fallacy of the record and movie industries: the idea that technology will go just far enough to help them and then stop. That's totally not what happens. technology joes that far and them keeps on going. It's a cycle of booms and busts. There are some lovely things about when you're riding the wave and some scary things.
The Information Revolution is not bloodless. There's plenty…
milhayser | November 23, 2009
Good science takes time, but good science fiction hinges on impatience. Why wait for the invention of real technological marvels when you can imagine them yourself or see them on TV? On The Quantum Pontiff, Dave Bacon ponders the formative links between fantasy and reality, spurred by an Intel talk on the possibilities of "fictional prototyping." He writes, "the creative act of telling a story shares many similarities with the creative act of developing a new research idea or inventing a new technology." On Built on Facts, Matt Springer compares phasers with lasers, writing "it's a nice job…
razib | November 21, 2009Perhaps because we only remember the good stuff? Or only the good suff & famous authors get reprinted. I'm prompted to offer this hypothesis in response to Chad Orzel's commentary that there was a lot of bad space opera even during the "Golden Age" of science fiction. I recall that Zadie Smith once noted that 99.99% (or something to that effect) of Victorian fiction is forgotten and out of print. All that remains read are the "classics," so contemporary audiences have a biased perspective as to the median quality of Victorian-era writers. Of course the insight can be generalized to the…
jdupuis | October 23, 2009Ah, but maybe he would if they were Cthulhu plushies!
Check this out from Sci Fi Wire: 14 great Cthulhu toys that make devouring souls fun!
H.P. Lovecraft's elder god Cthulhu is supposed to be terrifying, hideous and awe-inspiring--but whoever knew he could be this darn cute? Check out 14 toys that take a slimy monster and turn it cuddly.
It's sick, twisted fun. My favourite is the Cthulhu Santa, but the wall trophy, suction cup, plush slippers and "My Little Pony Cthulhu" are all great too.
razib | October 14, 2009Is Harry Turtledove? Compare the similarity in output to Patterson. I just noticed that Glenn Reynolds received a copy of Turtledove's second book in a quasi-alternate history series he's been working on. Turtledove shines when he's applying what he knows. Even if the Videssos cycle wasn't artful prose, the books had plots which moved along, while his historical, Justinian, had incredible source material to work with. But a lot of his more recent production just crawls along, rather like the later books in The Wheel of Time. Additionally, I have to say that some of it definitely has an almost…
jdupuis | September 28, 2009Those of you with long memories may recall that I was on the jury for the 2009 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.
Well, the names of the winners have just been released:
Adult: The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
Young Adult: Little Brother by Cory DoctorowYou can check out the shortlists and recommended reading lists here.
The two winning books are both amazing examples of fantastic fiction, both well worth reading. The rest of the shortlists and recommended reading lists are also worth checking out. Congratulations!
I would also like to say at this point that being on…
jdupuis | September 18, 2009As many have not doubt noticed over the months and years of my blog's existence, I am a hardcore science fiction fan. And just as with the science/librarian world, there are countless blogs and other sites about the science fictions/fantasy/horror worlds. And of course, I have trouble keeping up with all the happenings in that particular blogosphere.
To make it a bit easier (and more enjoyable) on myself, I created a Friendfeed group and added a bunch of feeds to it -- a smallish assortment of reviewers, authors, publishers and news sites. I created it a few weeks ago and it's really made…
jdupuis | September 11, 2009No, I don't mean the werewolf entry in Wikipedia, I mean the use of Wikipedia by werewolves.
You see, I recently received a review copy of The Werewolf's Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten by Ritch Duncan, Bob Powers and Emily Flake.
As you can imagine, it an imaginary non-fiction book helping new werewolves to cope with their newly transformed lives -- it talks about work, romance and all the rest. I'm not quite finished it yet, but it's very amusing and definitely worth a look if you like that kind of thing.
What struck me, though, is something from the entry on figuring out when…
ejohnson | September 8, 2009
Labor Day marks the traditional transition into fall. It also boasts some of the busiest days for moviegoers, and ScienceBloggers have early reviews of two of the season's films. The Primate Diaries takes a critical look at Peter Jackson's blockbuster film District 9 through the eyes of an anthropologist, citing its "eerily familiar" messages about race politics and colonialism: "District 9 is an exciting, action-packed thriller but it would be missing the point to simply enjoy the spectacle without looking at what the filmmakers had intended to reveal." And on SciencePunk, Frank Swain…
jdupuis | August 28, 2009John Scalzi has a couple of very amusing posts at the AMC TV website, John Scalzi's Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design:
Stormtrooper Uniforms
They stand out like a sore thumb in every environment but snow, the helmets restrict view ("I can't see a thing in this helmet!" -- Luke Skywalker), and the armor is penetrable by single shots from blasters. Add it all up and you have to wonder why stormtroopers don't just walk around naked, save for blinders and flip-flops.
And John Scalzi's Guide to Epic SciFi Design FAILs - Star Trek Edition:
V'Ger
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a…