SF
drorzel | August 14, 2007In just a few days, Kate and I are leaving for Japan, for a couple of weeks of tourism before Worldcon. Most of the important things have been done-- we've got tickets, and hotel reservations, and JR Pass vouchers, and that sort of thing. Things remaining to be dealy with (a partial list):
Medication. What a drag it is getting old-- when I went in 1998, I didn't take anything other than Advil and Aleve, but now, Kate and I rely on a variety of prescription medications. We need to pick up refills of our various drugs, and copies of the prescriptions are supposed to be in the mail to us-- I'm…
drorzel | August 6, 2007While I was out, John Scalzi had an interesting post about the changing economics of short story writing. Back in the day, Robert Heinlein made a living selling stories at a penny a word:
As I was reading this again I was curious as to what at penny in 1939 would rate out to here in 2007, so I used the Consumer Price Index Calculator from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis to find out. Turns out that to you'd need fifteen cents in today's money, more or less, to equal the buying power of that 1939 penny. Dropping Heinlein's $70 into the calculator, you find that it was the equivalent of…
drorzel | July 25, 2007Live Granades has a survey of current SF, done in the form of a school walk-through with new principal Michael Capobianco (who won the SFWA election discussed earlier this year). It's pretty amusing if you know the authors involved, but one bit made me just about spit my drink at the monitor:
Of course. I'd be happy to discuss the students' groupings with you. Let's start with the fellows in the camouflage. They're very interested in military science fiction. It's all guns and dropships and the like with them. The student who's holding forth very loudly is John Ringo, and that's David Weber…
drorzel | July 19, 2007Speaking of dubious and oft-cited "Laws", I've run into a number of citations of "Clarke's Laws" recently. Of course, these were apparently subliminal mentions, because I can't seem to locate any of them again, but it put the subject in my mind, which is partly why I was primed to be annoyed by the subject of the previous post.
Anyway, "Clarke's Laws" are statements by the noted science fiction writer (and, no doubt, personal friend and mentor of Jonathan Vos Post, which I really don't want to hear about in comments) Arthur C. Clarke:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that…
drorzel | July 17, 2007Having finished all of the fiction nominees, I'm now basically ready to submit my votes for the Hugos. Though it occurs to me that I've actually seen two of the five movies up for "Best Dramatic Presentation," so I might Netflix the others, and check off yet another category.
At any rate, I'm sure you're all dying to know how I plan to vote, so here you go:
Best Novel
Rainbows End Vernonr Vinge
His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik
Eifelheim, Michael Flynn
Blindsight, Peter Watts
No Award
Glasshouse, Charles Stross
This ended up being an odd category for me. The Vinge wound up being the clear…
drorzel | July 16, 2007This is the final Best Novel Hugo nominee of this year's field, and given James Nicoll's immortal description of Watts's writing ("When I feel my will to live getting too strong, I pick up a Peter Watts book" or words to that effect), I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about picking up Blindsight. I was on something of a roll, though, and took it along to read on the plane to our Internet-less vacation weekend in Michigan. In the end, I think my reaction to the book was colored by James's comment, but it wasn't as bad as it might've appeared.
Blindsight is narrated by Siri Keeton, who had a…
drorzel | July 7, 2007Andre at Biocurious points out an interesting piece in Nature. They interviewed four prominent SF authors--Paul McAuley, Ken Macleod, Joan Slonczewski, and Peter Watts about biology in science fiction. The resulting article is a good read, with lots of interesting anecdotes and examples, and if you go to the supplementary information page for the article, you can get a longer version, including bits that were cut out of the print edition.
That is, of course, assuming that you are surfing the Web from an institution that happens to have a site license for Nature, or have a personal…
drorzel | July 1, 2007Via PZ, a blog on biology and science fiction is griping that biology gets no respect, and links to a Jack Cohen article complaining that authors and filmmakers don't take biology seriously I was particularly struck by this bit:
Authors, film producers and directors, special-effects teams go to physicists, especially astrophysicists, to check that their worlds are workable, credible; they go to astronomers to check how far from their sun a planet should be, and so on. They even go to chemists to check atmospheres, rocket fuels, pheromones (apparently they're not biology....), even the…
drorzel | June 30, 2007My intention of reading all of the nominees for the Hugo Awards in the fiction categories hit a bit of a snag yesterday. I finished all the short fiction (novella, novelette, short story), and most of the novels, leaving only Peter Watts's Blindisght and Charlie Stross's Glasshouse. James Nicoll described Peter Watts as the sort of thing he reads when he feels his will to live becoming too strong, and the description of Glasshouse did not fill me with joy. Plus, my copy of Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson just arrived (a birthday present), and I'd really rather read that.
(I'll pause here for…
drorzel | June 26, 2007This is the last of the short fiction categories. You can read my comments on the Best Novella and Best Short Story nominees in the archives. This means the only fiction nominees I have left to read are Blindsight and Glasshouse.
The nominees in the Best Novelette category (the full text of all the stories can be found via the official nominations page) are:
"Yellow Card Man,"Paolo Bacigalupi
"Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth," Michael F Flynn
"The Djinn's Wife,"Ian McDonald
"All the Things You Are,"Mike Resnick
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy),"Geoff Ryman
Best…
drorzel | June 21, 2007I've never really understood the distinction between "Novellas" and "Novelettes"-- I know it's a length thing, but I don't have a good feel for where the dividing line is, and I can never remember which is longer. And, as far as I can tell, the only place this ever comes up is in SF awards.
Anyway, there are two Hugo categories for really long short fiction, and this is one of them. The nominees are:
"The Walls of the Universe" by Paul Melko
"A Billion Eves" by Robert Reed
"Inclination" by William Shunn
"Lord Weary's Empire" by Michael Swanwick
"Julian: A Christmas Story" by Robert Charles…
drorzel | June 17, 2007Via Jeff "jefitoblog" Giles, who wrote the Editor's Notes, the collaborative review site Rotten Tomatoes has generated a list of the top 100 science fiction films, based on their user ratings. It's split over 100 individual pages, and tarted up with lots of slow-to-load graphics, so here are their top twenty films:
20) Mad Max
19) Frankenstein (the 1931 version)
18) 2001: A Space Odyssey
17) Solaris (the 1972 version)
16) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1956 version)
15) The Terminator
14) Brazil
13) Galaxy Quest
12) Bride of Frankenstein
11) The Road Warrior
(The top 10 are after the cut…
drorzel | June 15, 2007As Kate and I will be attending the Worldcon in Japan, we're eligible to vote for the Hugos this year. In an effort to be responsible voters we downloaded the electronic version of the short fiction nominees that are available from the official nominations site, and I've been working my way through them. To this point, I've finished the Best Short Story nominees:
"How to Talk to Girls at Parties"Neil Gaiman
"Kin" Bruce McAllister
"Impossible Dreams" Tim Pratt
"Eight Episodes" Robert Reed
"The House Beyond Your Sky"Benjamin Rosenbaum
If anybody would like to make a passionate argument in…
drorzel | May 30, 2007John Scalzi is asking for discussion of the Hugo Award nominees, noting that other than a brief controversy over the fact that only one nominated work in the fiction categories is by a woman, there hasn't been much discussion. This reminded me that it would be good to put in another plug for the foolproof solution to the problem:
Buy a membership to next year's Worldcon, and vote for whatever you like.
The membership rates will go up after tomorrow, but for right now, $40 will get you a supporting membership, which carries full voting rights for the next round of Hugos, and I believe gives…
drorzel | May 26, 2007I'm not particularly pining for WisCon, but for those who are, let me throw out a movie topic for discussion:
Three Strikes and You're Out: Why Do Third Movies Suck So Much?
It's a well-known phenomenon in genre film: in a series of movies, the third movie is almost always where the series goes off the rails. Examples abound: X-Men 3, Superman 3, The Matrix Revolutions, Return of the Jedi. What are some of the reasons for this problem? Are tthere examples of film series that avoid it? Can the Star Wars prequel trilogy be thought of as following this trajectory in reverse?
Comments are open.…
drorzel | May 26, 2007There's a popular science fiction convention going on this weekend in Madiscon, WI. Of course, not everyone can make it to these things, so some people in LiveJournal Land have put together BitterCon, and online event for those unable to attend WisCon.
Kate's jumped right in, providing space for a bunch of panels in the form of comment threads:
The Napoleonic Wars in SF/F
Risky Narrative Strategies
Levels and Limits of Metafictionality
Thieves Guilds and Other Criminal Societies
Wish Fulfillment
(She's got a convenient BitterCon tag as well, in case she adds more stuff later...)
So, if you…
drorzel | May 7, 2007Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days:
I'm going through one of my "I would kill for some new SF" phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having just read some startling New Fact [Black holes could be very small! Mercury isn't tide-locked! The Galilean moons are far more interesting than we thought!], would craft some thrilling tale intended to highlight whatever it was that the author had just learned.
I suspect this is mostly due to James's…
drorzel | May 6, 2007Yesterday's New York Times features an article about SF conventions, in the travel section, of all places.
Officially, the 25th annual staging of MidSouthCon, a three-day-long celebration of science fiction, role-playing games, fantasy artwork, medieval weaponry and just about every leisure pursuit that prefers to envision the cosmos as it might have once been or might someday be, would not begin until later that afternoon.
But everywhere you looked, there were signs that the fantastic was already encroaching in a "Twilight Zone"-like manner upon this ordinary 400-room, airport-adjacent hotel…
drorzel | April 7, 2007There's been a fair bit of discussion of this year's Hugo nominees around the Internets, most of it centering around the gender of the nominees (that link goes to a fairly civilized discussion, which includes links to a rather more heated argument). For those who haven't been following the controversy, only one of the twenty nominated works in fiction categories was by a woman.
What follows will be rambling and discursive and probably not terribly productive, but I've become accustomed to thinking by typing, so there you go. If you're not fascinated by squabbling over SF awards, scroll down…
drorzel | March 30, 2007The Hugo Award Nominees for 2007 have been officially announced. The one award I usually watch closely is Best Novel, and this year's nominees are:
Eifelheim, Michael Flynn (Tor)
His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Glasshouse, Charles Stross (Ace)
Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge (Tor)
Blindsight, Peter Watts (Tor)
Kind of a mixed bag, really. I thought Rainbows End was terrific, and His Majesty's Dragon was good fun, and there's been really good buzz on Blindsight. Glasshouse frankly sounds pretty bad to me, though, and I'm not hugely enthused about Eifelheim.
In other Hugo news,…