SF
drorzel | May 21, 2011As mentioned a little while ago, Locus is running a Short Story Club to discuss the award-nominated stories that are available online. First up is Aliette de Bodard's "The Jaguar House, in Shadow". Like her novels and other notable short fiction, this has a Central American theme, though it's alternate-history SF rather than fantasy.
This is a sort of caper story, set in a high-tech Mexica empire, where the elite order of Jaguar Knights are the only survivors of a bloody purge instigated by the new emperor, which has wiped out all the other orders. Xochitl, a young-ish female knight started a…
drorzel | May 17, 2011For both of the readers who enjoyed last fall's Short Story Club, there's another round starting up soon, this time run by Locus, featuring award-nominated works. I'm busier now than I was in the fall, so I'm not sure I'll be able to participate in all of these, but then, I've already read two of the five stories, so that makes it a little easier...
Also in short fiction news, I have to do a guest lecture on Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by Infinity" for an English class on science fiction this Friday. Which means I probably ought to find some time to figure out what I'm going to say about…
drorzel | May 8, 2011One of the perils of book reviewing, or any other form of literary analysis is putting more thought into some aspect of a book than the author did. It's one of the aspects of the humanities aide of academia that, from time to time, strains my ability to be respectful of the scholarly activities of my colleagues on the other side of campus. And it frequently undermines reviews of books that I've already read.
A couple of good examples come from this Paul Di Filippo column for Barnes and Noble, where he reviews two books I've read, and one I haven't. I haven't actually read his comments on the…
drorzel | April 27, 2011The nominees for the 2011 Hugo Awards were released on Sunday, which is the sort of thing I usually blog about here, so you might think it's just our flaky DSL that's kept me from saying anything about it. that's only part of the story, though. I haven't said anything about them in large part because it's a really uninspiring bunch of works.
I've only read two of the Best Novel nominees at this point, Cryoburn and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and I'm not enthusiastic about either. I have fairly low expectations for a Miles Vorkosigan novel relative to a lot of fans, but Cryoburn failed to…
drorzel | April 20, 2011(Alternate Title: "Epic Fantasy Is What We Point to When We Look Down on Epic Fantasy.")
I've been on a bit of an epic fantasy kick lately, evidently due to the thousand-ish pages of The Crippled God not being enough. This means that I was in a weirdly appropriate mental space to catch the recent furor over a fairly dumb NYTimes review of A Game of Thrones on HBO that said some snide things about the genre, particularly that women don't read it. Which has led to a lot of discussion of what epic fantasy is, and whether women read or write it.
A lot of what's been said is dumb in various ways…
drorzel | April 9, 2011Over in LiveJournal land, nwhyte just finished reading all the Hugo-winning novels, and provides a list of them with links to reviews or at least short comments. He also gives a summary list of his take on the best and worst books of the lot.
The obvious thing to do with such a list, particularly in LiveJournal land, is to take the list and mark which ones you've read, and so on. In th interest of a little variety, though, let me suggest an alternate game: the academic parlor game "Humilation," invented by David Lodge, in which literary academics admit to not reading various classic works,…
drorzel | March 13, 2011OK, having spoken vaguely about The Crippled God, here's a post for spoiler-y comments about the book and the series as a whole. If you haven't read it, but think you might, save this post for reading after you're done.
SPOILERS:
There's a bit early in the book (too far back for me to find now) where somebody says of Shadowthrone and Cotillion that they became gods because it seemed like the next logical step after conquering a vast empire. Once they were gods, though, and saw how the world worked, they decided they didn't like it, and set out to fix things.
That's kind of the core of the…
drorzel | March 13, 2011(This is a post about the concluding volume of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, so if you clicked through here because the title made you expect a rant about religion, you're at the wrong blog.)
It's hard to say anything coherent about this other than "Wow." I mean, this is the tenth thousand-page book in an epic fantasy series, and it actually ended! He took all the myriad storylines of the previous nine books, and brought most of them together in a way that made them fit! Most of all, it didn't suck!.
It's also sort of hard to write a blog review of the book, because it's the tenth in a…
drorzel | February 28, 2011Every year, Kate runs a fundraiser to help support SF fans who want to attend Wiscon, which takes the form of an auction of various cool items, such as a signed book about quantum physics. You can find a big listing of everything at the Con or Bust community on LiveJournal, but some items of possible interest to readers of this blog include:
A sixpack of books from Small Beer Press
Homemade cookies
Math and/or science tutoring from an EE PhD student
Hand-spun yarn
Homeade truffles
A slightly used Sony Reader
One photo a week for a year
John M. Ford books
A signed set of Rosemary Kirstein's…
drorzel | February 18, 2011I'm leaving today for the AAAS meeting in DC, where I'll be through the weekend. The AAAS works much differently than the physics conferences I'm used to, most notably requiring speakers to upload their presentation several days ahead of time. This means that my usual night-before-a-talk process of fiddling with my slides is right out. I mean, I could fiddle with my slides, but any changes won't be reflected in the pre-uploaded ones I'll get to do the actual talk, so what would be the point?
This puts me in the unusual (recently) position of having some time available to read fiction. I'm 50-…
drorzel | January 31, 2011This is a difficult book to review, which is probably fitting, because it's a very personal book. My reaction to it is largely personal as well, and may or may not be of any use to anyone else. Given the surprising number of people who had Opinions regarding my recollections of telecommunications, I almost think I might be better off not saying anything, but it's going to nag at me unless I write something about it, so what the hell...
So. Among Others is the story of Morwenna "Mori" Markova (previously Phelps), a girl from Wales who sees fairies and whose mother is an evil witch. Literally.…
drorzel | January 22, 2011Last year, Kate was one of the people who helped organize a fundraising auction to send a few people to Wiscon. It's that time again, and she's seeking donations for the auction:
Last year, Con or Bust raised $6,183.89 and helped thirteen people of color attend WisCon. We weren't able to meet all the requests for assistance, however, so I'm tentatively setting this year's auction goal at $7,000. Bidding on the auction will start Monday, February 21, 2011, at 12:01 a.m. EST (GMT -5) and end Sunday, March 6, 2011, at 11:59 p.m. EST. You may post auction offers and make donations now.
If you're…
drorzel | January 9, 2011Every genre reviewer in the world seems to be raving about Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, so I picked it up for Hugo nomination consideration. I'm about a third of the way into it, now, and to be honest, it's kind of bugging me. There are some good bits, but also stretches where the author seems inordinately impressed with his own cleverness, which is kind of grating.
Also, I realize that this is more magic realism than SF-- the time travel is clearly more of a literalized metaphor than an attempt to do something traditionally science-fictional-- so it's a…
drorzel | November 26, 2010The first rule of Short Story Club is that you must talk about Short Story Club...
So, the Short Story Club run by Niall Harrison over at Torque Control is finished, and Niall's asking for concluding thoughts. I meant to write this up last night, but SteelyKid had a major meltdown just before bedtime, so everything got scrambled.
A perennial topic of discussion in science fiction and fantasy fandom is "the death of the magazines," with lots of hand-wringing about how nobody reads short fiction any more, and short fiction is where the novelists of tomorrow hone their craft, etc. This never…
drorzel | November 20, 2010The final Short Story Club story is "Throwing Stones" by Mishell Baker. Once again, I find myself without a whole lot to say about it.
This is a gender-reversed Asian-flavored fantasy story. The nameless narrator lives in a city with canals and teahouses in an Empire with rigid class and gender roles, a writing system based on ideograms, and a system of temple examinations that offer the narrator a way out of low station. The big difference between this and other fantasy derived from Asian sources is that the gender roles are flipped: women hold all the positions of power, and a man's "only…
drorzel | November 14, 2010I just realized that I haven't posted anything about this week's Short Story Club entry, "Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory" by Paul M. Berger.This is largely because I don't have a great deal to say about it.
This is another "After the magic apocalypse" story, only this time the magic apocalypse takes the form of a return by conquering armies of Elves. The story is set a couple of generations after the human resistance was crushed at the Gray Fort, which was the final holdout of the human resistance, and recounts the visit to the fort by an Elf who fought in the war and…
drorzel | November 6, 2010This week's Short Story Club story is "The Heart of a Mouse" by K. J. Bishop, from Subterranean Press (which means I'm faintly surprised not to have to pay $15 for it). I recognize Bishop's name, and think I have a copy of The Etched City upstairs that I've never gotten around to reading, but don't think I've read anything of hers before.
This is an after-the-magic Apocalypse story. Some time before the start of the story, there was a dramatic and magic change in the world, with basically all high technology disappearing, and people being turned into anthropomorphic animals. Most people…
drorzel | October 30, 2010This week's Short Story Club entry is "My Father's Singularity" by Brenda Cooper. Who I keep having to remind myself is not the Brenda-with-a-surname-starting-with-C that I remember posting to rec.arts.sf.written back in the day (that was Brenda Clough).
This is set in the not-too-distant future in the Pacific Northwest, and is the first-person tale of a boy who grew up on a farm with his father telling him he'd go through the Singularity someday:
In my first memory of my father, we are sitting on the porch, shaded from the burning sun's assault on our struggling orchards. My father is…
drorzel | October 23, 2010This week's Short Story Club entry is a Tor.com story, "The Cage" by A. M. Dellamonica. This is a story about a general contractor and the Most Adorable Werewolf Pupppy Ever.
In the world of the story, supernatural monsters are "out," known to the general public (though I don't think it mentions anything other than werewolves directly), with varying reactions-- mostly hostile in the US, more ambivalent in Canada. The story is set in Vancouver, where a woman whose werewolf sister was shot by an American fortune-hunter hires the narrator to build her a soundproof and indestructible room on the…
drorzel | October 16, 2010This week's short story club entry is Carol Emshwiller's "No Time Like the Present," a sort of timeless time-travel story. It's narrated by a teenage girl in an unnamed town somewhere in the US whose town sees a sudden influx of tall blond people who behave very oddly. While it's pretty obvious to the reader that something science-fictional is going on, the narrator takes a while to get to that realization, and even when she does, it's mostly buried in typical teen concerns-- friends, parents, potential romantic relationships.
This story has a sort of timeless quality, partly because it's a…