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Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction


A few days ago I said I was going to do something further on Hard SF to follow up on my posts of a few days ago. Well, I'm several hundred words into it, but it looks like it might end up being longer than originally imagined, so it might be another few days before it appears. So I started casting around for another reprint to appear here and happened upon this essay about alternate history. It is clearly something I wrote, but I have no memory of writing it, I have no idea who I might have written it for, and I have no record of whether it was actually published anywhere.'Give me one firm spot on which to stand,' Archimedes once wrote, 'and I will move the earth.' The spot necessary for those who would change our past, and our present, is one not-so-firm moment in history when things might have gone either way. Such a turning point is the first requirement for anyone who would essay an alternate history, and there are plenty of them. History is remarkably fluid, and very few of the certainties which made the world turn out the way we know it are as sure as all that. Rumour has it that whenever military colleges carry out wargaming exercises that refight the Battle of Waterloo, they invariably end up with Napoleon winning.Of course, the starting point that can set an alternate history on its way does not have to be a battle. In his new novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson imagines that the Black Death was even more devastating than in reality and wiped out the population of Europe. In Pasquale's AngelPaul McAuley has Leonardo da Vinci kick off the Industrial Revolution three hundred years early. And in the linked stories, collected as Agent of Byzantium, that first made his name as a writer of alternate histories, Harry Turtledove imagined that Mohammed became a Christian saint.Nevertheless, the turning point that most alternate historians choose is war or revolution. These are treacherous times: a lucky shot, a slight delay, a mislaid order, a misunderstood report can all affect the outcome not just of one battle but of an entire war, and therefore all that might flow from its result. 'For want of a nail,' the old rhyme has it, 'the battle was lost', and alternate histories are all about the want of that nail. Sometimes that nail can be the loss of an important leader at a vital moment: Keith Roberts, inPavane, has Queen Elizabeth assassinated just before the Spanish Armada sails; MacKinley Kantor, in If the South had Won the Civil War, has General Grant thrown from his horse and killed at a crucial point in his Vicksburg campaign; in The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick has Franklin Roosevelt assassinated in 1933. More often it's a change of fortune on the field of battle. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry actually does foment the slave rebellion he dreamed of, as Terry Bisson describes it in A Fire on the Mountain; the Nazi high command heeds a premonition and does not invade Russia in 1941 in Hilary Bailey's 'The Fall of Frenchy Steiner'; and vital orders are not lost on the eve of Antietam in Harry Turtledove's How Few Remain.But there is another reason why so many alternate historians choose war or rebellion as their turning point. Alternate history needs more than just a twist in time; it needs something to depend upon that twist. There have to be consequences spinning out from that moment of change so that in some significant way the resultant world is different from the one we know. What is the point of finding a dramatic turning point, only for it to make no difference whatsoever? That is why, if you go to something like the Uchronia web site (www.uchronia.net) and look at their Points of Divergence (the term they use for what I call, more simply, turning points) you will see huge clusters around certain key dates, notably the 1860s and the 1940s. The American Civil War and the Second World War are gifts to the alternate historian, not just because they are stuffed with appropriate turning points (look closely at the Battle of Gettysburg, for instance, and you will find at least a dozen points during those three crucial days when the outcome could easily have gone the other way), but also because the consequences of a change in history are so great. Upon the Civil War hinged the unity of the United States (with all that implied for its future international wealth and power), and the fate of the slaves, a moral issue that still has repercussions today. Upon the Second World War hinged the independence of most of the countries that make up Europe (with all that implies for our current well-being), and the fate of the Jews, a moral issue of unimaginable importance. In other words, one horseshoe nail lost during either of those wars could totally overturn everything we take for granted in the world around us, and all the moral certainties we possess.The way that alternate history highlights the fragility of the past and the spectacular consequences that might result from a very small change has always fascinated historians. That is why so many of them have experimented with the sub-genre, from the contributors to J.C. Squire's If It Had Happened Otherwise in 1931 (G.M. Trevelyan, A.J.P. Taylor, Winston Churchill) via William L. Shirer's 'If Hitler had Won World War II' to the contributors to Robert Cowley's What If? in 1999 (John Keegan, David McCullough, James M. McPherson). Though it has to be said, few enough of them have been able to turn their speculations into compelling narratives. Of course, you don't need to be an historian to find a simple, significant turning point and examine the consequences that have flowed from it. Terry Bisson, after all, wrote a biography of the slave rebel Nat Turner, while MacKinley Kantor researched the Civil War for decades, resulting in the award-winning novels Long Remember and Andersonville, before he turned to the alternate historical speculation of If the South had Won the Civil War. But this is where Harry Turtledove wins out, for he is an historian with a great storytelling ability, a combination of talents which, if not exactly unique, has at least made him pre-eminent in the field of alternate history.His PhD was in Byzantine history, an area of expertise that comes out in his first venture into alternate history, Agent of Byzantium, and also provides the setting for his excellent straight historical novel, Justinian, published under the not exactly opaque pseudonym of H.N. Turteltaub. In collaboration with the actor Richard Dreyfuss he has also played with the American Revolution as a turning point in The Two Georges. The second edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says of Turtledove: he 'has never failed to be exuberant when he sees the chance', and this light-hearted book which makes fun of technology and historical figures while keeping up a fast-paced mystery plot illustrates the point precisely. Other than this, though, most of his attention has been focused on rewriting the last 150 years, particularly those two great nodes of alternate historical speculation, the Civil War and the Second World War. The resultant string of novels – The Guns of the South, How Few Remain, the four Worldwar novels, the three Colonisation, the three Great War and now the beginning of a new sequence, American Empire: Blood and Iron – have revealed both strengths and weaknesses in Turtledove's approach to alternate history. The weaknesses include a tendency to use ahistorical turning points – time-travelling Afrikaaners, alien invaders – and a perhaps overly exuberant love of teasing out the consequences of change to the extent that seven novels have so far been needed to consider the effects of an alien invasion in World War II; five, with more to come, to consider the effects of a Confederate victory in the Civil War. His strength is the way Turtledove can use such apparent weaknesses to his own advantage.The 1993 edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction concluded its entry on Harry Turtledove by saying: 'he has not yet written any single book that has unduly stretched his very considerable intellect.' But the year before, in 1992, he had done just that with the publication of The Guns of the South. It is a novel which shows, at every juncture, it was written by an historian. There is the precisely chosen moment of change, the eve of Grant's Virginia campaign in early 1864 when the Confederacy had no realistic hope of victory, but when the judicious introduction of a new weapon – the AK47s provided by our time-travelling Afrikaaners – could still turn the tables. There's an historian's sensibility obvious in the first small but notable effect of these weapons, which lies not in their killing power but in their lack of sparks. One of the most horrific incidents in the war occurred during the Battle of the Wilderness, the first battle in the Virginia Campaign and Lee's first opportunity to put the AK47s to use. It was fought in dense, tinder-dry woodland that was set alight by sparks from the muskets in use at the time. In the night, after the first day of fighting, wounded soldiers between the lines were burned to death by the fire. With the AK47 contributing no sparks, in this history there is no fire.The point of any alternate history is not the moment or nature of the change; that's a matter for more academically-minded counterfactuals. The point is what happens after the change. If the two issues that make the Civil War such an obvious choice for the alternate historian are the disunity of the States and the moral dilemma of slavery, then one really must examine how authors have dealt with these issues. Turtledove's distinguished predecessors in the field have tended mostly to focus on the issue of disunity. Winston Churchill, in 'If Lee had not Won at Gettysburg', imagines a divided America which does not dominate the world stage. His curious essay-story is actually very little about the effects upon America, but rather how British political history is changed: the great Tory Prime Minister Disraeli becomes a leader of the radicals, the great radical Gladstone becomes the leader of the Conservatives. Ward Moore, in Bring the Jubilee, imagines an impoverished North until his hero travels in time and effectively puts history right. MacKinley Kantor imagines North and South being gradually drawn back together through their involvement in world events, until on the centenary of the war they are reunited. Turtledove is the only alternate historian of any note to focus on the South after the war, and in so doing makes the issue of slavery, or rather of black emancipation, the central issue of his book. This is emphasised by the device which puts his plot into motion: the Afrikaaners have travelled back in time to establish a state in which blacks continue to be subservient. Once the war is over, therefore, the drama centres upon the struggle between the White Supremacists, the Afrikaaners and their ally Nathan Bedford Forrest (the genius of the Confederate cavalry who, in our history, went on to found the Ku Klux Klan), and Lee, inevitably swept into the Confederate presidency, and his allies who are trying to create a modern and viable Confederate state. Churchill had Lee free the slaves, and so does Turtledove. Again this is the mark of an historian: the real Robert E. Lee freed his family slaves, was never more than ambivalent about the institution, and late in the war incurred the wrath of his political masters by suggesting that slaves be freed in order to recruit blacks into the Confederate army.(For further evidence that this is the work of a serious historian fully engaged with his period, just turn to the back of the book where you will find a detailed, state-by-state breakdown of the popular and electoral college votes in the first post-war presidential elections North and South. The figures are plausibly extrapolated from actual voting patterns before, during and after the war, and provide the sort of detail only an historian would think to provide.)The exuberance that the Encyclopedia spoke of might also be termed playfulness. Even in so serious and powerful a work as The Guns of the Souththere is an element of play, the sense of an historian having fun with the idea of turning events on their head. One such incidental pleasure in the novel is the role played by Henry Pleasants. In our history Pleasants devised a plan to tunnel under the Confederate lines at Petersburg and set off a bomb. It was a brilliant idea, spoiled by the execution. The Union officer charged with leading his men through the breech in the Confederate lines spent the entire incident drunk under a table. His men were untried coloured troops who were not told to go around the crater rather than into it, and were not equipped with any means of getting out of the hole once they were in there. The fight, known as the Crater, was a fiasco. But, of course, it happened after the point at which Turtledove's history changes and is unknown to the participants in that story, until Lee discovers a history of the war brought by the Afrikaaners. He and Pleasants are then able to replicate the Crater, successfully this time, at a crucial point in the plot. It is this sort of resonance between the alternate history and our history that is one of the chief joys of this sort of novel if it is done well. Turtledove tends to do it well.Turtledove's examinations of history have always tended to concentrate on character, and I suspect that one of the things he likes doing most in his novels is looking at how real people might have behaved in very different circumstances. The Worldwar books, for instance, use the character of Skorzeny in much the same way Pleasants was used in The Guns of the South. In our history, Skorzeny was the dashing hero of the Nazi cause responsible for a succession of daring exploits such as the rescue of a recently-deposed Mussolini from jail in 1943. In this alternate history he is equally dashing, equally devoted to the Nazi cause, but here his exploits are subtly transposed into attacks upon the alien lizards.I make no great claims for the Worldwar sequence; I think it is an example of Turtledove's natural exuberance winning out over the more sober historian. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a romp. Turtledove loads the dice shamelessly: the aliens expect human technology to be no further advanced than Roman times and are constantly astonished by human ability to adapt to rapid change. They are further hampered by the climate (Earth is far colder than their worlds) and by a suddenly discovered addiction to ginger. Turtledove even makes his invaders the archetypal green scaly monsters. The British publisher, depicting these aliens fairly faithfully on the covers, created the sort of garish work that sensitive souls might once have wrapped in brown paper rather than be seen in public with such books. And Worldwar is a garish sort of work. It is not meant to be taken seriously. At least, I hope it isn't. But having chucked a bloody great rock into the pool of history, Turtledove then watches the ripples with careful attention. And along the way there are innumerable incidental delights for the historically minded. The distrustful relationship between the Soviet government and the Nazi high command is beautifully judged. The decision of Polish Jews to work with the aliens against the Germans is shockingly perceptive. The casual anti-Semitism experienced by a Jew in the British army is disturbing because it rings so true. It's almost jokily done, but again Turtledove tackles the great moral dimensions highlighted by this change in history.This curiosity about what might have changed and what might have stayed the same is, I think, the driving force behind all of Turtledove's work. It can lead him, as I think it has done in Colonization, the sequel to Worldwar, into something not much different from militaristic soap opera. But it can also lead him into glorious perceptions of the nature of history and of historical characters. That is what you find in Turtledove's return to the Civil War, How Few Remain. This is a genuine alternate history with no trace of time travel, his turning point is an historians' delight, one of those curious incidents that chroniclers of the war love to recount. In the days preceding the battle of Antietam, a couple of Union soldiers found three cigars in a field. The cigars were wrapped in an order issued by Lee which described in detail how he had divided up his army. History does not record what happened to the cigars, but the orders went straight to General McClellan. McClellan was, at this time, the ranking field commander in the Union army, but he had a propensity for finding any excuse to avoid action. A few months before, during the series of battles known as the Seven Days, he had won all but one of the battles, but he had still retreated until he comprehensively lost the campaign. Now, for the first time in his career, he had detailed and accurate knowledge of the disposition of the enemy troops. He still delayed long enough for the Battle of Antietam to be, in strictly military terms, a draw, but Lee was forced to withdraw from the field so Lincoln could claim the victory and issue the Emancipation Proclamation which changed the nature of the war. So those cigars made a very big difference. Turtledove imagines they were never lost.As I said before, there's no point in writing an alternate history of the Civil War if the South doesn't win; it's what comes after that matters. This time, Turtledove has North and South going to war once more in the 1880s. Again, there are the touches, the insights that only come from an historian's perspective. We have, for instance, a hyperactive Teddy Roosevelt getting into cavalry charges twenty years before San Juan Hill. More interestingly and intriguingly we have Lincoln, escaping assassination in this history, touring the West delivering lectures that are all but communist in tone, though what he says is largely and cleverly derived from what he actually said in life. Despite such wonderful moments, however, How Few Remain is not a great success as a novel, largely because it is simply there to provide a point of transition leading up to his next (and current) sequence of novels which portray an alternate First World War. But there are good reasons for a historian to provide such a point of transition.If you have ever wondered why we are positively overburdened with alternate civil wars and visions of Hitler winning World War Two, while there are virtually no alternate versions of the First World War, the answer is twofold. In the first place, apart from a couple of possible moments during the Germans' headlong dash towards Paris in the first days of war, the Great War is not over-endowed with turning points. There just aren't the possibilities for tweaking events enough to make a difference. Secondly, changing the course of the war wouldn't necessarily have had a great dramatic effect anyway. Unlike the prospects of slavery continuing or concentration camps proliferating, no great evil was defeated by the First World War, there was no huge moral dimension hanging over the static network of trenches and wasted lives. So the alternate historian is lacking the two most basic tools at his command: a place to make a change, and a difference to make. Looking back half a century gives Turtledove his necessary turning point; it also gives his novels their point: with North and South on opposite sides, he gives the First World War a chance to have a greater effect upon the character of the world. And now, carrying the story forward with American Empire, he begins to add a moral dimension to the mix: in this post-war world of the 1920s America is not a land of flappers and Hollywood, but rather of socialism in the North, fascism in the South.In The Guns of the South we have one of the finest alternate histories yet written. That achievement alone would be enough to make any author worthy of serious attention. But if Harry Turtledove's subsequent alternate histories have tended to be more exuberant, they have never shirked the serious moral questions that are raised whenever anyone tries to change the world. It is not given to everyone to be able to produce novels that are so briskly readable yet which are able to contain within them nuggets of genuine and often disturbing thoughtfulness.

I'm not sure why, but the floodgates appear to have opened.  After more than a year of struggling with my reading, I've found myself doing nothing but.  I'm not that interested in examining the situation for fear of scaring my resuscitated bibliophilia away, but I will note that this year's Tournament of Books seems to have done well by me--I've read four of the participating novels (three of which are covered here), and though I have reservations about all of them, it's certainly an eclectic and interesting selection.  Onward to the reviews.

   
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn - On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne's wife Amy disappears in what appears to be a home invasion.  Nick's chronicle of the days following Amy's disappearance, in which a media circus develops around the case, alternates with Amy's diary entries describing the history of her and Nick's relationship.  As both narratives progress, it becomes clear that Nick has been keeping secrets from both the readers and the police--an affair with a younger woman, financial difficulties, problems in the marriage with Amy--and Amy's diary entries grow less romantic and more fearful as she approaches the day of her disappearance.  Gone Girl is a novel with a twist, which, given that it's probably the most successful and widely-discussed thriller of the last year, was pretty hard to stay ignorant of before I picked the book up (in fact, knowing the twist is the main reason I decided to read Gone Girl, since otherwise a thriller about a man who appears to have murdered his wife would be pretty far outside of my interests).
  
  
  
  To my surprise, however, I found that knowing the twist made the first half of the novel, in which readers are meant to be bamboozled into suspecting Nick, a lot more fun.  Knowing that both of the narratives in this segment of the book are unreliable made it a sort of puzzle, as I tried to work out where the truth lay in the gap between Nick and Amy's increasingly conflicting accounts of their marriage.  The book actually loses a lot of energy in its second half, when the twist is revealed and that sort of active participation in the story fades away, making it easier to notice its flaws: that Flynn's plot only hangs together because the usually intelligent and calculating Amy suddenly becomes stupid and irrational just when the plot needs her to be; that the novel's descriptions of the economic deterioration of Nick's midwestern home town, or of the way the media, led by a Nancy Grace analogue, gleefully spins a narrative of his guilt, don't really connect to the central mystery plot or the examination the breakdown of Nick and Amy's marriage; and that towards the story's end, Amy engages in some stereotypical Bad Girl behavior (false rape accusations, stealing sperm) whose straight-faced, unexamined presentation left me feeling rather uncomfortable.
  
  Despite these flaws, Gone Girl is a tense, involving read, one that I gulped down and enjoyed immensely.  For that reason as well as several others, I was reminded while reading it of another massively successful, much-discussed potboiler, Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin.  Like Gone Girl, Kevin is an epistolary novel that revolves around a heavily publicized crime, and has a twist that everyone probably knows by now.  More importantly, Gone Girl and We Need to Talk About Kevin both seem to be using their propulsive plots to do the same thing--launch a discussion of a social institution (motherhood in Kevin, marriage in Gone Girl) that women are expected to desire and enjoy, and of the ways in which that expectation can warp and damage them.  They both also undermine that discussion in exactly the same way--by making one of their main characters a sociopath.  Gone Girl piles high the reasons for the implosion of Nick and Amy's marriage--Nick's immaturity and self-absorption, Amy's impossibly high expectations, financial difficulties, meddling parents, Nick and Amy's mutual belief that they need to assume a cool, carefree persona to please one another, and their disappointment when the other stops putting in the effort to maintain that facade.  But the more we get to know Amy, the clearer it becomes that she is incapable of love, and that even if none of these problems existed, she and Nick would still have a sham of a marriage.  Where Gone Girl improves on Kevin, however, is in not taking itself nearly as seriously as Shriver's novel, which aspires to a political significance that it can't really achieve.  Gone Girl, in contrast, is consciously shlocky, which not only makes the problems of its plot easier to swallow, but also suggests that the best way to read the novel might be as a very dark satire, in which Nick and Amy become trapped by the narrative that has been spun around them, forced to perform the perfect, effortlessly happy, Hollywood rom-com marriage for the cameras while behind closed doors the only thing keeping them together is mutually assured destruction.  If Gone Girl does have anything to say about the institution of marriage, it is this deeply cynical conclusion, that the only way to achieve this romantic fantasy is to be insane.
  
• Seraphina by Rachel Hartman - It's hard to know where to start discussing Hartman's debut, a busy, wide-ranging story with more characters, plot strands, and worldbuilding details than such a relatively short novel should be able to support.  So perhaps I'll start with the dragons.  Hartman's dragons are coolly logical creatures who, when they're not amassing hoards of gold coins or devouring human flesh, enjoy math and philosophy, and neither understand nor approve of emotions.  They can also take human form, which is how the titular heroine came to be conceived.  Considered an abomination by both races--to dragons because she represents her mother's succumbing to the emotion of love, and to humans because despite a peace that has lasted decades, the dominant religion of the novel's world still teaches that dragons are soulless, inferior beings--Seraphina has spent her life hiding what she is and coping with the unpredictable effects of her mixed heritage, such as psychic contact with people she's never met, or inherited memories from her mother that overwhelm her at inconvenient times.  Despite which, and the danger of being discovered and executed, Seraphina, who is also a gifted musician, takes a position as assistant choirmaster to the royal court, where hiding her heritage presents not only practical but emotional difficulties.  Is Seraphina a bad person for lying to her new friends?  Can she ever trust someone completely?  What about the observant captain of the guard Kiggs, whose attraction to Seraphina is repeatedly hamstrung by his conviction that she is lying about something?
  
  You would think that all this would be quite enough for any author to be getting on with, but the difficulties and emotional toll of passing for human make up only one of the novel's plot strands.  In others, Seraphina helps to prepare for a visit of the dragon king marking the anniversary of peace treaty between dragons and humans, and to investigate an assassination plot spearheaded by warmongers on both side; she discovers the existence of other dragon/human hybrids, and learns more about her dragon powers and ancestry; she deepens and repairs her relationships with her human father and dragon uncle, both of whom still carry the wounds left by her mother's transgression and death; and she gives us a guided tour of her world, its politics, history, religion, geography, and culture.  The ease with which Hartman weaves together these plot strands and subplots into a narrative that never feels overstuffed, and whose pace never slackens, reminded me of the early Harry Potter books (though Seraphina is pitched at an older audience).  And like those books, the result is a world that feels fully lived in and real, and some ways more interesting in its own right than the story used to illustrate it.
  
  Just as interesting as what Hartman does with her premise is what she doesn't do with it, the YA clichés she doesn't indulge in.  Seraphina is special, but not precocious; burdened, but not angsty.  Being skilled or special, in this novel, isn't an excuse for the narrative (or the other characters) to treat you like a special snowflake, but for the people in charge to give you more work--though her musical talent is frequently commented upon, most of Serpahina's work as assistant choirmaster is logistical, and involves wrangling musicians, arranging performances, and placating her ornery boss; when her hybrid superpowers are discovered, they too are wondered at only briefly before Seraphina is conscripted to help keep the peace.  Seraphina's matter-of-factness reflects both her and the narrative's recognition that though her experiences are transformative, and will affect the rest of her life, neither they nor she are the most important part of the story she's living through.  It's a recognition that is also reflected in the refreshingly undramatic resolution of the novel's romance, in which Seraphina and Kiggs recognize that they can't be together because what's going on around them is more important, but also promise not to give up on each other.  Even the novel's most resonant theme, Seraphina's passing and the self-doubt it breeds in her, are treated with a bracing practicality that doesn't obscure how difficult it has been for her to live with the constant threat of exposure.  Though I found the resolution of this strand a little too neat--Seraphina's friends are perhaps too quickly and uniformly willing to accept that she is something they've been taught to hate and fear--that resolution doesn't undermine the work Hartman does throughout the novel to put us in Seraphina's headspace, and I suspect that the novel's sequels will complicate the seeming ease with which Seraphina's secret has been accepted.  For that reason, as well as the chance to spend more time in this wonderfully detailed and realized world, I'm looking forward to what Hartman does next.
  
• Zero History by William Gibson - I had made up my mind to pass on the third volume in Gibson's Bigend trilogy, but coming across a copy of it in a used bookstore convinced me to give it a try.  I wish I could say that it turned out to be a fortuitous find, but my suspicions about Zero History proved correct.  Despite some cosmetic alterations, it is more or less a retread of the previous books in the trilogy, full of meditations about consumer culture in the post-9/11 world delivered by disaffected jet-setters who always know the exact brand name of all the objects they use, own, and see (a car isn't simply a Toyota, it's a Toyota Hilux, and always referred to by that full name).  This was new and unusual in Pattern Recognition, and overdone in Spook Country.  In Zero History it's pretty much unbearable--not to mention that the trilogy's "the future is now" slant on technology, which felt like a revelation in 2003, is practically old hat in 2013.
  
  
  
  Gibson's focus this time around is on clothing, as Spook Country heroine Hollis Henry is dispatched by PR wunderkind Hubertus Bigend to find the maker of a super-exclusive, highly secretive, high-end brand of jeans, so that Bigend can commercialize and market it.  Meanwhile, former drug addict Milgrim, another Spook Country character who is now working for Bigend, is sent to do a little industrial espionage on designers of military clothing, on the grounds that these styles influence commercial streetwear.  There are some interesting ideas here--though Gibson loses me on the connection between military and street fashion when he illustrates it through a character who wears a particularly utilitarian bra and claims that it was designed by the IDF; we are now at least two decades past the point where any reasonable person could still believe that all Israeli women are Mossad commandos who can strip an Uzi in their sleep, and as a former woman in the IDF I can assure you that I, and all my fellow female soldiers, bought our bras in the lingerie store like normal people--but they end up drowned out by an action plot that reiterates the previous two books even more than Gibson's fondness for dropping brand names.
  
  Where Zero History deviates from its two predecessors is in finally coming out against Bigend, who here is presented as almost a devil, and his attempts to monetize the jeans that Hollis is looking for an act of corruption that she must protect their designer from.  Which ends up rubbing me the wrong way.  Pattern Recognition and Spook Country were filled with an appreciation for objects that transcended their love of brands, an appreciation rooted in how well those objects had been designed and made, how perfectly they fit their purpose.  When Zero History fetishizes Hollis's mysterious jeans, it does so not simply because they're well made, but because they're exclusive, and it treats Hollis's efforts to keep them that way as almost a holy quest.  There are a lot of things wrong with the global fashion industry--its reliance on cheap, near-captive labor and poor working conditions, its perpetuation of distorted body images, the damage it does to the environment--but I don't think that the near-universal availability of cheap clothing is one of them.  To valorize an object because it is exclusive, and available only to those in the know (and, implicitly, those who are rich enough to drop everything and fly to Australia on a moment's notice when the designer announces a release there) doesn't strike me as the blow against evil that Gibson clearly intends me to see it as, no matter how problematic the commercialized, homogenized alternative is.
  
• This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz - Díaz's second collection, and his follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, doesn't break new ground.  Once again, the focus is on the lives of first and second-generation Dominican immigrants to the US, and once again, the narrator is Díaz's alter-ego Yunior, a smartass with good grades and a bad attitude who can never get far enough away from the country he was born in or the neighborhood he grew up in.  As the title suggests, the topic of most of the stories here, as it was in Yunior's strand in Oscar Wao, is his inability to remain faithful, and the way that his infidelity destroys one relationship after another.
  
  Though Yunior's Dominican background and his family history play a role, as they did in Oscar Wao, in his behavior, Díaz isn't interested in making excuses, and indeed the point of the stories isn't to assign blame--Yunior is always willing to admit to being a fuckup.  What the stories in This is How You Lose Her try to do instead is get at Yunior's humanity, painting a portrait of a man who knows that he's the one destroying his own happiness, but still wants to be loved and forgiven, and is still heartbroken when the relationships he betrays actually do break down.  (Reading between the lines, Yunior comes off like the male equivalent of the romance heroine who doesn't know who she is without a man; he can't stop himself from cheating, but he doesn't know what to do without a woman in his life.)  Keeping all this running is, of coure, Díaz's narrative voice, a sing-song, fast-flowing blend of English, Spanish, and slang that is still, after two collection and a novel, stunning in its immediacy and vitality.  It makes the slight repetitiveness of the ideas in This is How You Lose Her--and in Díaz's career--seem worthwhile, but still I wish that Díaz would do something different--that, as promised, he'll expand his apocalypse-in-the-DR story "Monstro," from the New Yorker's science fiction issue a few years back, into a novel, and use that remarkable voice to tell us stories we haven't yet heard.
  
• Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple - Told through email exchanges, newsletters, magazine articles, and the connective tissue of its teenage narrator's reminiscences, Where'd You Go, Bernadette describes the events leading up to the disappearance of Seattle housewife Bernadette Fox.  A pioneer of green architecture and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Bernadette built only two houses before flaming out spectacularly and retreating to the suburbs of Seattle.  As the book opens fifteen years later, Bernadette is a shut-in, living in a dilapidated mansion she'd intended but never got around to renovating with her Microsoft genius husband and their precocious daughter Bee, who is just on the cusp of working out how abnormal her life and parents are.  Most of the comedy in the novel's early chapters comes from Bernadette's snobbish disdain for her mundane neighbors, and their part-curious, part-scandalized fascination with her, a madwoman who lives on the hill and never participates in the school bake sales.  These chapters, with their skewering of suburban small-mindedness and groupthink, have a whiff of Nicola Barker about them, but there's a dark undertone to them that Semple won't quite acknowledge.
  
  
  
  As Dan Hartland writes in his review, the narrative castigates Bernadette for her misanthropy, and her neighbors for being judgmental (and, since this is ultimately a benevolent comic novel rather than a satirical one, allows them to outgrow it) but it has nothing to say about her privilege.  One of Bernadette's methods for avoiding the world is to hire a personal assistant in India who handles shopping, household repair, travel arrangements, and even doctor's prescriptions for $30 a week.  This assistant is later revealed to be an identity thief who nearly clears out Bernadette's bank accounts, which absolves both her and us from having to wonder about the kind of person who sees nothing wrong with paying so little for so much work while sprinkling her emails with thoughtlessly privileged proclamations about her and her assistant's relative quality of life.  Instead, the only criticism that is expressed towards Bernadette is over her choice to give up her creative work--if you do not create, a former teacher tells her, you will become a menace to society--and if Where'd You Go, Bernadette has a message underpinning its social humor it is this examination of how to be a brilliant, creative person while dealing with the frustrating realities of a world that won't always let you do the work you were meant to do (one of the book's more interesting and subtle touches is that as she discovers her own genius--for investigating her parents' lives--the previously happy-go-lucky Bee starts to exhibit some of her mother's impatience and misanthropy).  The fact that some geniuses are never given the opportunity to exercise their creativity because they lack Bernadette's privilege is never discussed, and that, along with the slight sentimentality of the novel's resolution, undercuts what is otherwise a sharp, witty story about what it means to be special, and the obligations--to yourself and to others--that come with it.
  
• The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson - The premise of Johnson's novel--a bildungsroman set in North Korea--put me off as soon as I heard it, and its winning the Pulitzer prize (an award whose previous winners include Memories of a Geisha) wasn't an enticement either.  It was the repeated and consistent praise from the judges of this year's Tournament of Books (which Johnson went on to win) that finally persuaded me to give the book a try, and though what I found certainly justifies the tournament judges' praise, it also confirms my doubts about the novel's project.  Beautifully written and expertly plotted, the novel follows Jun Do, the titular orphan master's son, as he alternately rises and falls through the strata of North Korean society, going from lowly army grunt to professional kidnapper to spy to envoy the US to prisoner to the inner circle of Kim Jong Il.  What he's searching for is an identity he can bear to call his own in a nation that doesn't give its citizens the option of living a righteous life.  At the same time, his story is repeatedly being appropriated--as propaganda, as patriotic, anti-American lies to keep himself and his colleagues out of prison, as a cover to fool his American hosts into taking him seriously, and as a means of rescuing the people he cares about from Kim's clutches.  The malleability of story and identity lie at the heart of the novel, as do their twin uses as instruments of both oppression and liberation (by the end of the novel, Jun Do is modeling himself on Rick from Casablanca, and like him, sacrificing himself so that the woman he loves can escape oppression).  So it could be said that Johnson's use of North Korea is purely symbolic (as indicated by protagonist's punning name), a backdrop of oppression against which to set his story of an individual finding freedom through reinvention.  But The Orphan Master's Son is also painstakingly researched and detailed.  Though I can't speak to its accuracy, there is an obvious sense that Johnson isn't merely writing a parable, but trying to give his readers as complete a picture of life in North Korea as he can.
  
  Which, paradoxically, is why I finished the novel feeling uncomfortable at the fact that Johnson is speaking for people who have been denied their own voices, and has been rewarded for it.  As a corrective, I followed the book up with Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, an oral history based on Demick's interviews with North Korean defectors.  Nic Clarke, who called my attention to the book, has already written eloquently about its power, so I'll just add that as a counterpoint to Johnson's novel, the testimonies of Demick's interviewees make for powerful reading, and helped to crystallize some of my problems with the novel.  Even taking into account the selection bias that affects the book's subjects--these are the people who had the courage, the strength of will, and sometimes though not always the resources to leave their home--I was struck, while reading their accounts, by a vitality and a will to better their lives that is missing from almost all the characters--including, sometimes, the lead--in Johnson's novel.  Even before they gave up on North Korea, Demick's interviewees were working hard to survive, even if doing so meant rejecting, in action if not in word, the dogma they'd grown up with.  They start businesses, read illicit literature, and try to contact their relatives in the South.  Their minds are free, even if their lives aren't.
  
  In contrast, the prevailing tone among most of the North Koreans Jun Do meets is one of fatalism.  They survive by not acting, and by parroting the newspeak of the day, agreeing that up is down and black is white in order to survive--as when Jun Do steals the uniform of a high ranking official who visits his prison and escapes despite looking nothing like the man, because everyone he meets is too afraid to challenge him.  This is obviously in service of Johnson's project, which mimics the absurdist fiction of Soviet writers, who tried to put the insanity of living under a totalitarian regime into words by taking it to its illogical extremes.  But unlike those writers, Johnson isn't writing about his own country; whether or not he intended it, one of the results of his choice to write a North Korea in which everyone but the hero simply accepts things as they are is that it echoes a tendency of Western writers to treat foreigners as if their strange culture makes them less human, less likely to strive for better things and to use all their intelligence and ingenuity to achieve that goal.  The Orphan Master's Son is an excellent piece of literature, but I can't be entirely happy at its success.
  
• Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi - Oyeyemi's most recent novel (which is the first of her works that I've read) is possibly a novel in stories, and definitely a novel about stories, and about the way that they both shape and are shaped by reality.  Mr. Fox, an author in the pre-war US, is visited by his muse Mary Foxe--who may or may not be a figment of his imagination--who complains about his penchant for killing women in his fiction.  The two--or rather versions of them--then star in a sequence of stories, in which Mary tries to show Mr. Fox the error of his ways (or just to punish him for them) while he tries to get his wayward muse under control.  Meanwhile, in the framing story, Mr. Fox's wife Daphne believes that her husband is having an affair, but is Mary Daphne's competition, or an inspiration to take up her own creative work?
  
  
  
  Most of the stories in Mr. Fox take fairy tales as their starting point, in particular the title work, a variant on Bluebeard in which the storyteller is the intended wife and victim, who is able to turn the tables on her future husband and murderer by telling his story and revealing him for what he is.  One of Oyeyemi's focal points is the prevalence of wife murder in  fiction (and in real life), the way that the husband, so often the hero  in the traditional romantic narrative, can become its monster; but she  is also treating that murder as something more symbolic, the murder of  ambitions and talent, as one partner (usually the wife) sublimates their  creative drive to  please the other, sometimes without even realizing that they've done so.  That slipperiness, the shift between symbolic and actual murder, between good husband and bad, between fairy tale and modern fiction, is reflected in the stories that make up Mr. Fox, as Oyeyemi and her two storytellers/protagonists riff and extemporize on the title fairy tale in a way that makes shifting roles the central idea of the novel.  Authors become characters, animals become human, loving husbands become murderers,  supportive wives become consumed with their own work--and vice versa.  The result is a rich stew of allusions, references and parallels that chime against each other and come down not to an answer but a set of questions: can Mr. Fox be a good husband and stop killing women, both as an author and in real life?  Can Mary Foxe trust him instead of seeing him only as a monster?  Can Daphne Fox be a wife who is the equal of her husband, and an author in her own right?  What they also come down to, however, is a love story--with a particular screwball tone that suits the framing story's 30s setting very well--between three people who despite their shifting roles in it still emerge from the novel as vivid characters.  Both thought-provoking and delightful, I'm sure that Mr. Fox won't be the last of Oyeyemi's books that I will read.

Posted by  Abigail Nussbaum     at  9:47 PM

  |      Jurassic: New audio, new bundles and a mummy or two          Stories in every format!
Dark Fiction Magazine have recorded three stories for audio for their special issue on the "outsider", called "ONE OF US":

   
• Alastair Reynolds' "A Map of Mercury" (The Lowest Heaven)
• S.L. Grey's "We'll Always Be Here" (The Lowest Heaven)
• Sam Sykes' "Wish for a Gun" (A Town Called Pandemonium)

They all sound magnificent and, better yet, they're completely free. (In fact, they're beyond free - they come with a cheeky discount code from Spacewitch.)
Amazon have started their Matchbook program of bundling ebooks and paperbacks. For shoppers on Amazon.com, you'll find the following books have been matched:

   
• The Lowest Heaven (buy the paperback, get the ebook for $2.99)
• Lost Souls (buy the paperback, get the ebook for $1.99)
• A Town Called Pandemonium (buy the paperback, get the ebook for $1.99)
• Speculative Fiction 2012 (buy the paperback, get the ebook for free)

The offer hasn't been extended outside of the US... at least not on Amazon. Our chums at Spacewitch have picked up the slack, and you can get those same deals through their site.
We've also uploaded 'second printing' paperbacks of A Town Called Pandemonium and The Lowest Heaven to Amazon - the primary advantage of using POD is that we (the world's tiniest press) can sell all over the world. The secondary advantage is that we can (given some breathing room) make a few tiny typo corrections when we spot them. (For those that prefer their books locally printed, we suggest getting our copies through Spacewitch or Forbidden Planet).
October is looking very busy, with three new releases. Unearthed and The Book of the Dead are looking fantastic, and we're about to start taking pre-orders for the latter (hinthint-mailinglist-hinthint). The hardcover is strictly limited to 100 copies, and they're... something special.
The third release is Ash, which, against all odds, is ahead of schedule. So we're moving it up a month. The stories are great, the cover is bonkers and, as always, it'll be free on all major platforms.

oh, bice sad kontroverznih prepucavanja, letece sekire & stihovi ce teci... 

Science fiction author Orson Scott Card has been appointed to serve a two-year term as a trustee for UNC-TV public broadcasting network by the North Carolina state legislature.  The 22-member Board of Trustees, which meets quarterly, serves as an advisory council to the Board of Governors, which holds UNC-TV's broadcast licenses and is responsible for the organization.  UNC-TV produces many hours of original broadcasting each year.

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/09/10/4303991/controversial-author-named-to.html#.UjFbU9hBuid

by Patrick Hester



Elmore Leonard passwed away this week.  In his honor, I thought I'd share Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing:


1)  Never open a book with the weather
If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people.

2)  Avoid Prologues
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword.

3)  Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking their nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied.

4) Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"
... he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing themself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange.

5) Keep your exclamation points under control
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

6) Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7) Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop.

Avoid detailed descriptions of characters
In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9) Don't go into great detail describing places and things
Even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10) Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip
Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them... I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.
~P
Elmore Leonard's #10RulesofWriting

 








A friend sent me the above photo this morning. "You probably know more about Sci Fi and Fantasy publications than anyone I know," he wrote, "so can you possibly identify the book that Jerry Garcia is reading in the attached photo. It would mean a lot to thousands of Deadheads."

I like a challenge. The picture is of such low resolution I almost couldn't make out anything helpful about the book, but I was determined. The title seemed long and the more I stared at it, the more it looked like some sort of anthology title ... The Best something? ... maybe a best of the year collection? ... no, best of fantasy and science -- The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, I bet. I've got a few copies of that longrunning series of stories from the venerable magazine, but all mine are old hardcovers picked up at library sales. I'm not sure I've ever even seen one of the paperbacks, or knew that there were paperbacks of the series. But God invented ISFDB for just such moments. I didn't know which volume of the series this was, but figured if I looked up some of the paperbacks from the 1960s, I might be able to figure it out. I tried the 18th first. No, but the text and layout looked like I was maybe in the vicinity. So I just kept trying.

And there it was. The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 14th Series.

I was particularly amused to see that the ever-wonderful Kit Reed had a story in the book ("Automatic Tiger"). I stuck the info on Facebook and asked her if she'd gotten a fan letter from Jerry. Alas, no. But still, it's nice to find direction around some corner where it's been waiting to meet you. 
Posted by Matthew Cheney http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/

Aj molim te kači i linkove odakle si preuzela, ovo forumsko rasformatiranje ubiva čitanje dužih tekstova...

pa kacim... link je na dnu posta.

In 1989, when "climate change" had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58 percent.


The timeline of these polls defines my career in science. In 1982 I was an undergraduate physics major. In 1989 I was a graduate student. My dream was that, in a quarter-century, I would be a professor of astrophysics, introducing a new generation of students to the powerful yet delicate craft of scientific research.


Much of that dream has come true. Yet instead of sending my students into a world that celebrates the latest science has to offer, I am delivering them into a society ambivalent, even skeptical, about the fruits of science.


This is not a world the scientists I trained with would recognize. Many of them served on the Manhattan Project. Afterward, they helped create the technologies that drove America's postwar prosperity. In that era of the mid-20th century, politicians were expected to support science financially but otherwise leave it alone. The disaster of Lysenkoism, in which Communist ideology distorted scientific truth and all but destroyed Russian biological science, was still a fresh memory.


The triumph of Western science led most of my professors to believe that progress was inevitable. While the bargain between science and political culture was at times challenged — the nuclear power debate of the 1970s, for example — the battles were fought using scientific evidence. Manufacturing doubt remained firmly off-limits.


Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, "creationism" was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as "creation science" and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.


Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists' PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination.


The list goes on. North Carolina has banned state planners from using climate data in their projections of future sea levels. So many Oregon parents have refused vaccination that the state is revising its school entry policies. And all of this is happening in a culture that is less engaged with science and technology as intellectual pursuits than at any point I can remember.


Thus, even as our day-to-day experiences have become dependent on technological progress, many of our leaders have abandoned the postwar bargain in favor of what the scientist Michael Mann calls the "scientization of politics."


What do I tell my students? From one end of their educational trajectory to the other, our society told these kids science was important. How confusing is it for them now, when scientists receive death threats for simply doing honest research on our planet's climate history?


Americans always expected their children to face a brighter economic future, and we scientists expected our students to inherit a world where science was embraced by an ever-larger fraction of the population. This never implied turning science into a religion or demanding slavish acceptance of this year's hot research trends. We face many daunting challenges as a society, and they won't all be solved with more science and math education. But what has been lost is an understanding that science's open-ended, evidence-based processes — rather than just its results — are essential to meeting those challenges.


My professors' generation could respond to silliness like creationism with head-scratching bemusement. My students cannot afford that luxury. Instead they must become fierce champions of science in the marketplace of ideas.


During my undergraduate studies I was shocked at the low opinion some of my professors had of the astronomer Carl Sagan. For me his efforts to popularize science were an inspiration, but for them such "outreach" was a diversion. That view makes no sense today.


The enthusiasm and generous spirit that Mr. Sagan used to advocate for science now must inspire all of us. There are science Twitter feeds and blogs to run, citywide science festivals and high school science fairs that need input. For the civic-minded nonscientists there are school board curriculum meetings and long-term climate response plans that cry out for the participation of informed citizens. And for every parent and grandparent there is the opportunity to make a few more trips to the science museum with your children.


Behind the giant particle accelerators and space observatories, science is a way of behaving in the world. It is, simply put, a tradition. And as we know from history's darkest moments, even the most enlightened traditions can be broken and lost. Perhaps that is the most important lesson all lifelong students of science must learn now.


Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, is the author of "About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang" and a founder of NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog.




link

nego, kad smo već kod "climate change" kontroverze iz prethodnog posta: sećam se kako me šokirao otvoreni animozitet (to uglavnom prema naučnicima koji tu teoriju zastupaju) u Crihtonovom romanu State of Fear. On u apendiksima elaborira taj animozitet u detaljnom rušenju te "histerije", kako je on naziva, sve u podršku svom stavu da je popularizacija nauke zapravo sinonimna sa njenom politizacijom. Recimo, povlači detaljnu paralelu sa ne tako davnašnjom teorijom eugenike i njenim plasmanom koji je bio kamufliran u popularizaciju nauke ali uglavnom preko ne-naučnug establišmenta, to uglavnom političara i umetnika.
Enivejz, interesantno je to štivo, ili bar znatno interesantnije nego sam roman. 

http://www.jackiemorris.co.uk/blog/writers-notebooks/


neke od ovih beležnica mi izgledaju kao propovi za sajko-triler...  [size=78%] [/size]

'Well, that's the end of the Booker prize, then'


Allowing US writers entry into the UK's most prestigious prize spells disaster, says Philip Hensher



When the news that the Man Booker prize is to be opened up to the vast and dominant fields of the American novel broke this week, I heard of a well-known London agent who remarked succinctly: "Well, that's the end of the Booker, then." When eligibility shifts from the UK, Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe to English-language novels published in the UK, it is hard to see how the American novel will fail to dominate. Not through excellence, necessarily, but simply through an economic super-power exerting its own literary tastes, just as the British empire imposed the idea that Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived throughout its 19th-century colonies. The tendency was already at work in this year's Booker shortlist, where a superficial multicultural aspect concealed a specifically North American taste. Jhumpa Lahiri's Lowland had fascinatingly airport-bestseller features, including the favourite trope of two brothers divided by the currents of history. NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names dutifully covered all the external and societal concerns about African society that a creative writing student, or a devoted viewer of CNN's nightly special, might believe significant – NGO, exorcisms, corruption, the plight of the white Africans, etc. Ruth Ozeki's novel about Japan, A Tale for the Time Being, covered the cute aspect, the Salaryman aspect, the Buddhist aspect, the suicide aspect and so on in approved Murakami-esque tones. Curiously, all these novels, effectively written by American-based authors about exotic places, were unable to do so without placing the exotic places in the reassuring context of an American suburb. The novel written by an Indian, living in India, about India, without reference to his later life in Cincinnati was dead this year. From next year, the floodgates open, and we can expect never to hear again from an Indian novelist.

The Commonwealth Writers' prize provides a cautionary tale: in 2011, they made the decision to stop the main prize, and just continue with a first novel prize. Two years later, this was abolished, too. All that remains of a once very useful prize is a short story competition to which nobody pays the slightest attention, and which, in 17 years, nobody of the slightest reputation has ever won.

The Booker has done a great deal of good in its 45 years. It has given novelists from a huge range of national traditions a wider readership, and has done so by its limits. It is just about confined enough in scope to allow every judge to read every book submitted – the year I judged the prize, in 2001, it was about 120 books in total, which was probably not far from the upper limit of possibility. Reading all the books gives the judges real freedom of movement apart from conventional taste. A prize that hands over a large part of the reading to a pre-reading panel, or that divides up the reading between judges, instantly loses a large part of its authority. I spoke to AS Byatt, who won the prize in 1990 for Possession. She made an important point about what will happen when the number of submissions increases next year. "The Booker prize is the only book prize that doesn't sift – odd things crop up. It's a major undertaking, every judge reading everything. This will no longer be possible."

Readers across the globe have understood that the Booker is a recommendation about the British or Commonwealth novel. If you want a recommendation about the all-dominating American novel, there is no shortage of American prizes. But, you will say, the American novel is so much more exciting than the UK or Commonwealth novel. It deserves to be recognised. Perhaps we would be better off with the winners of the Pulitzer, rather than the winner of the Booker. Towering figures such as N Scott Momaday, Michael Shaara, James Alan Macpherson, William Kennedy, Robert Olen Butler, Geraldine Brooks and Elizabeth Strout would, in the last 45 years, have formed the pinnacle of literary achievement: winners of the Pulitzer prize for fiction, all of them. The assumption that an American input to the Booker would have resulted in the triumph of the great masterpieces of American fiction rather than the limp products of British fiction is not very sound. Perhaps, in 1969, N Scott Momaday would have won in the place of PH Newby, which doesn't seem like much of an improvement.

The fact is that prize committees sometimes get things right, and sometimes get things wrong. To increase the apparent diversity available to their choices is not necessarily to increase the final diversity; it often results in the triumph of the most dominant ideology or faction. Of course, prize committees are at the mercy of what is submitted, and the Booker specifically at the mercy of what London publishers think will sell in London. They can't work entirely against that. But it is hard to think of any prize that has gained in authority by demolishing its boundaries. The prize starts to go to any old stuff that demonstrates that the boundaries have gone. It will be a brave Booker panel in 2014 that doesn't give the prize to an American novel, and the precedent of the Booker international prize, open to Americans and consistently won by Americans, is not encouraging.

Many British novelists feel now that the prospect of things that sustained them have been held out, and then withdrawn one after the other. There was the Net Book Agreement, abolished in 1997. There was the collapse of ordinary booksellers under the weight of Amazon. There was the prospect of Google claiming copyright over their out-of-print books. There is the imminent collapse of all those pages of newspaper book reviews, paying the odd and helpful £200 to the not-very-successful writer. There was the collapse of the public library system, which even 40 years ago would guarantee a couple of thousand copies sold of the mid-list English novelist. And so on. Soon, most publishers will prefer the Fifty Shades of Grey model: publish your books yourself for nothing, and if they prove successful with the public, then we'll publish this one, and maybe even the next one. You never know. The pattern of business that produced a Beryl Bainbridge or a Hilary Mantel by supporting a career, and believing in the possibility of rewarding achievement through discrimination, is fading, and will be gone in five years. The sort of English novelists who speak to an English readership about English matters, however refined or profound their technique and subject, is gone. If they do not speak to a global readership – if their jokes give American academic critics a baffled face and elicit the expression "go figure" – then forget it. It doesn't deserve reward or recognition, because the ideal of "diversity" means that all novels, from now on, must be very much the same. Does it matter? Well, only if you want to live in a world where all the different voices of literature matter, I suppose.

No writer embarks on a career with any illusions that the world owes them a living. But I don't think I've ever heard so many novelists say, as over the last two or three days, "Well, we might as well just give up, then." It seems quite baffling to many writers that a major prize that has so successfully promoted them should move its terms so radically and for no good reason. Is there really a problem in making readers aware of the best American novels – one that a revised Booker needs to address? There is a strong danger that the Booker will become viewed as a minor American prize, of some small interest when it, as usual, goes to an American writer, otherwise bafflingly open to a lot of strange foreigners, who thankfully never win. On the other hand, there is no possibility whatsoever, I would say, of the great American prizes opening themselves up to non-Americans. They know what they're about.


http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/sep/18/booker-prize-us-writers-end

http://yellowhairedreviewer.blogspot.com/2012/05/lottery-and-other-stories-by-shirley.html


Despite being a fan of scary stories I had never read anything by the legendary horror writer Shirley Jackson until last year when I stumbled upon and was completely blown away by We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Upon finishing this wonderfully creepy novel, I felt eager to read more by Jackson, and immediately added both The Lottery and Other Stories and The Haunting of Hill House to my 'to-read' list.
The Lottery and Other Stories is a collection of strange, ambiguous and at times unsettling short stories. Many of them feature a mysterious 'Mr Harris' character; In fact it was originally published as The Lottery: The Adventures of James Harris, but he doesn't actually appear in all the stories so I'm unsure as to why this should be the case. I cannot deny that Shirley Jackson's writing is superb; she certainly has a real way with words and succeeds in creating an atmosphere and sucking you in to her tales.
However, contrary to popular opinion, I didn't enjoy this collection. As I have already said, a key element the majority of these tales share is ambiguity, which can be fine, but these particular stories take this to the extreme; so much so that many of them end abruptly without anything being resolved and oftentimes without anything having happened at all! Apart from the recurrence of James Harris, there seems to be little that ties this group of stories together. For example, on the one hand we have 'The Lottery', which is very mysterious and has a shock reveal at the end, and it keeps you hooked and intrigued about what on earth is going on in the little village. However most of the others I would barely qualify as stories at all, and are what I can only describe as random segments of life or filler scenes from a longer novel, and I found this quite infuriating since well over half of the collection is of this nature. The tales that fall into this category include: 'Like Mother Used to Make'; 'The Villager' and 'An Afternoon in Linen', amongst others. Even one of the longer ones, 'Elizabeth', which initially I thought was pretty decent and intriguing just sort of, well, ended at a really peculiar point in the story and I was left feeling thoroughly dissatisfied with it.

Despite the negatives there are some enjoyable stories in this collection: the title story 'The Lottery' was brilliant, and I would also recommend 'The Daemon Lover'; 'The Witch'; 'The Renegade' and 'Seven Types of Ambiguity'. Even so, apart from 'The Lottery' itself, these stories are not anything particularly special, and are not commendable enough as to render the entire collection as good; I felt that the poor stories certainly overshadowed the better ones.This collection of short stories is generally well reviewed, but I wouldn't recommend it. Perhaps Jackson is more skilled as a novel writer, because We Have Always Lived in the Castle was truly fantastic and I am still looking forward to the prospect of reading The Haunting of Hill House. Unfortunately though, The Lottery and Other Stories just didn't do it for me; I found I was bored for most of it, and it was a bit of a struggle to get through. I would, however, recommend reading some of her short stories individually, such as the ones I listed above, but I wouldn't bother with the entire collection. Rating: 4/10 as a collection, 9/10 for 'The Lottery' alone.


My other Shirley Jackson reviews:
]The Haunting of Hill House
] Posted by  The Yellow-Haired Reviewer     at  18:19

http://dirkloechel.deviantart.com/art/Size-Comparison-Science-Fiction-spaceships-398790051

http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/project/the-tall-tower/
The tower project began when Neal Stephenson started asking a simple question: how tall can we build something? As he started working with structural engineer Keith Hjelmstad, it turned out that this question has some surprising answers. To learn more about the project or get involved, check out the Tower Group.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXKrreaJp8k&feature=player_embedded#t=0

U potrazi za letnja zabava / oldiz-gudiz krimi romanima, dosao red i na Parkera  :






Parker hits the page fully formed and deep into his own story: walking across the George Washington Bridge, on a rainy day in what was probably 1962, wearing a worn-out suit and without a penny to his name. It's enough to make you feel sorry...for anyone in his way.

The Hunter was not just the first book credited to "Richard Stark" and the first exploit of professional heister Parker, it was the first really ambitious book written by Donald E. Westlake, coming after a long string of quickie sex books and three prior crime novels under his own name (The Mercenaries, Killing Time, and 361). From this point, Westlake's apprenticeship was over: the sex novels would end almost immediately, and the pseudonyms would be for specific series (Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt) or for one-off oddities (Judson Jack Carmichael, J. Morgan Cunningham). So, even though it came out under a different author's name, The Hunter is really the book where Donald Westlake found a compelling voice and a strong path forward for his career. He would find other voices later -- funny caper books, starting with 1965's The Fugitive Pigeon and climaxing with the Dortmunder books from 1970's The Hot Rock; and his darker psychological novels, crystallizing with 1981's Kahawa -- but Stark's voice was first.

Parker is a big, blunt man with a will like a freight train, a single-minded machine for committing big robberies and an almost-complete lack of human feeling. He doesn't like to kill, since that draws attention, but he can and does do it, whenever he needs to, as easily as flexing his fingers. His world is populated by a nationwide loose network of similar men -- heavies, drivers, fingermen, safecrackers, and others with skills best used on the dark side of the law. They're not part of organized crime; they're just all independent operators in the same line of work, who make connections for particular jobs, relying on past experience, recommendations from others, and their own gut feelings. Parker and Stark never talk about such men having a code or standards -- this is a world where your compatriots can and will double-cross you, but those men don't last long: either they do a big job and get away, or word gets out and no one will work with them again. It's a tough world made of tough men, who can rely on their own instincts, skills and knowledge, but nothing else.

And Parker is their epitome: smarter and more focused than any of the others we see, exactly as tough and ruthless as he needs to be without shading into sadism, the perfect criminal to lead a team to rob a bank or payroll truck or arms shipment or anywhere else there would be a large pile of money in the early '60s. The novels featuring him take that as a given, and then Stark tosses complications in his way, as dispassionately as Parker himself, to see how he jumps and find out how he can get himself through this time.

In The Hunter, Parker has been living this life -- doing a few big jobs a year, getting ten or thirty thousand dollars at a time, and hiding it in small banks around the country as he lives between jobs at resort hotels like a rich dilettante -- for eighteen years, since we was kicked out of the army in 1944 for dealing on the side. He's just shy of forty, then, still in the prime of life and the peak of his game. But that all fell apart in one job six months before: he was double-crossed, robbed, shot, and left for dead in a burning building. They thought he was dead, but he survived, getting picked up for vagrancy but breaking out and mostly walking his way from San Francisco to New York.

They think he's dead: Mal Resnick, who set up the double-cross to buy his way back into the Outfit, and Parker's wife, Lynn, who shot him rather than be killed by Resnick herself. But Parker finds Lynn, leaves her to kill herself, and moves on to get revenge on Resnick. But, more importantly: to get back the money that Resnick took -- he and Lynn cleared out Parker's accounts on their way back to New York, so his entire support structure is gone. And the money is at least as important to Parker as the revenge.

Stark tells the story inside-out: he leads with Parker returning broke to New York, on the trail  of Lynn and Resnick, and only flashes back to the double-cross at the end of the first section, after Lynn is dead but Resnick still hidden somewhere under mob protection. Then Stark jumps to Resnick, following him as he learns Parker is back in town, ending his section with a parallel flashback to that double-cross. And then Stark doubles back again, to explain in a third section how Parker found Resnick. But that's not the end -- for Parker, Resnick was a necessary but not sufficient end. He demands to get back his money from the mob, even though it would be safer and simpler for him to let it go and start fresh.

And that, more than anything else, sets the model for Parker: he follows his own goals, his own unshakable sense of what he's owed and how to operate, no matter where that leads him. That will drive the plots of the next several books, because he makes the Outfit take notice of him here, makes them pay him back, and has them actively looking to find and kill him. But that's still in the future: by the end of The Hunter, Parker has solved his current situation and is ready to deal with the next one: he needs a new face if he wants to slip back into his old life without worrying about the Outfit behind him every moment.


http://antickmusings.blogspot.com/

Good Writing vs. Talented Writing
by Maria Popova


"Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn't."






The secrets of good writing have been debated again and again and again. But "good writing" might, after all, be the wrong ideal to aim for. In About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews (public library), celebrated author and literary critic Samuel Delany — who, for a fascinating factlet, penned the controversial 1972 "women's liberation" issue of Wonder Woman — synthesizes his most valuable insights from thirty-five years of teaching creative writing, a fine addition to beloved writers' advice on writing. One of his key observations is the crucial difference between "good writing" and "talented writing," the former being largely the product of technique (and we know from H.P. Lovecraft that "no aspiring author should content himself with a mere acquisition of technical rules"), the other a matter of linguistic and aesthetic sensitivity:

"Though they have things in common, good writing and talented writing are not the same.
[...]
If you start with a confused, unclear, and badly written story, and apply the rules of good writing to it, you can probably turn it into a simple, logical, clearly written story. It will still not be a good one. The major fault of eighty-five to ninety-five percent of all fiction is that it is banal and dull.
Now old stories can always be told with new language. You can even add new characters to them; you can use them to dramatize new ideas. But eventually even the new language, characters, and ideas lose their ability to invigorate.
Either in content or in style, in subject matter or in rhetorical approach, fiction that is too much like other fiction is bad by definition. However paradoxical it sounds, good writing as a set of strictures (that is, when the writing is good and nothing more) produces most bad fiction. On one level or another, the realization of this is finally what turns most writers away from writing.
Talented writing is, however, something else. You need talent to write fiction.
Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn't."

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/20/good-writing-vs-talented-writing/

The US military has cloned infamous serial killers in an attempt to harness the genetics of violence, and when some of the bad clones (all in their teens) escape and start doing what serial killer clones do, a retired and dented special ops hero has to track them down with the help of a sixteen-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer clone.
Where does an idea like this come from?The expected answer involves wrestling with universal expressions of human Identity and Morality and exploring Nature/Nurture, Self. Blah blah. An ethos of American and Male Violence... Blah. And the honest answer has more to do with loving books more than anything else in the world and wanting my name on the cover of one and fancying that ex-girlfriends or my parents will see CAIN'S BLOOD in the bookstore and concede aloud how awesome I am.
In either case, these answers prove too reductive. It would be like condensing the origins of YOU to that one night where mom and dad had some alone time. A whole lot more, even in the most seemingly-random circumstances of conception, and the process of WHERE/HOW/WHEN/WHY a writer first got the idea for a book or story is often long and muddled. [Note: There are some authors who claim to wake up and start writing as if inspired only by their last dream. That ain't me]. And so, I've tried to capture some of my various muses/inspirations here as I worked on CAIN'S BLOOD for five-plus years. For those readers and future-writers drawn to such things, I hope it proves helpful or interesting:
1] Creative Theft. (or 'Inspiration' if you want to be kind) I was at a writer convention in Nashville doing a panel on horror writing with an author named Jason Brannon. At some point, Jason mentioned the idea of his next book: A sideshow circus featuring legendary monsters: Bigfoot, the Chupacabra, Jersey Devil, etc. GREAT IDEA! Loved it. I'd actually written a book about The Jersey Devil and so this was right up my alley. Kinda wanted to taser Jason and steal the concept from him right then and there. But writers don't really do that to each other. So I started thinking instead. How could I commandeer the idea and appropriate something new with/from it? [Somewhere online there are pics of me sitting next to Jason... I look completely out of it because I'm thinking with every brain cell on how to make his idea MY new idea]. I got as far as a sideshow of famous serial killers. No, a museum. No... a private collection. No... Hmmmm. Why the heck would someone collect serial killers? I had no answer yet, but it lingered quietly in my mind for almost a year until I needed that answer. Oh... and is there a little Jurassic Park here? Sure. Or The Road or Sixth Sense or Huckleberry Finn. Maybe just a smidge. Thousands of people have been telling me stories for decades and there're a whole lot of toys collected in my brain to play with in new ways. [Jason's eventual book is called THE CAGE. Buy it here]
2] Market (Part 1). I'd become friends with the publisher of Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, a popular speculative magazine which specialized in, well, stories that combined science fiction and horror. Friends notwithstanding, dude hadn't bought any of my stories yet. Fair enough. My science fiction stuff lacked horror, my horror stuff lacked sci-fi. So.... Driving to an Apex book event one night, a two–hour trip, all I thought about the whole drive was a story that somehow offered the perfect blend for Apex. I'd read every issue of the magazine up to that point. Knew what their editors liked and added some goodies accordingly. Cloned serial killers. Science and horror. Toss in some evil scientists, a couple lab-produced monsters. Done. I pitched the story that same night as a 40k-word novella. Apex said yes and then serialized the tale in four installments throughout 2007. The "Cain Universe" had finally started taking shape...
3] Write What You Know. I teach high school English and one day (many years after the Apex story was published) the students got on the subject of serial killers (it comes up more than you'd think in a room of boys...) One student started quizzing the rest of us. In what city...? What is the name of...? How many... Etc. I got every question right. While my knowledge of the Shakespearean sonnet or Hemingway's influence on postmodernism was tolerated at best, I'd now proven I also knew a lot about something the guys found extremely interesting. Freaky dark stuff. Horrible stuff. But stuff I'd been following like a fan for decades. And since most of the clones would be teens, and as I taught at an all boys' high school and had two teenaged sons, and... yeah, this was something I could write about with some genuine authority I pulled out the Cain novella that same night, and started thinking what I could do with it if given another 60k words to play with.
3] Research. The first rule of writing is "Write What You Know." The second is "Know More." (The third has something to do with "not talking about Fight Club.") Research has always been my favorite aspect of writing, and I will research for six months to a year before writing a single word. Before I began CAIN'S BLOOD, I read and watched and listened. Fifty books, hundreds of web articles. I asked my sons and students what they would do "If...." Watched hours of taped interviews with actual serial killers and psychologists. Scientists. Teen counselors and social workers. Visited serial killers' personal websites (which some produce while in prison). At one point, my oldest son finally asked me to "please stop talking about Jeffrey Dahmer all the time." It was hard not to. My head swimming with facts and arguments regarding serial killers, government conspiracy, military testing, development in teens, the 'anger' gene, cloning, etc. Like a stew or soup, I guess. Tossing in everything I could find, stirring the pot again and again until I thought I had something worth serving.
4] World View. Everyone has one. What makes a "good" person? What is the cause of Evil? Sin? Is there a cure? Should there be? What is the role of government? Do we have a good one? What is the role of our military? Of science? Of a father? What function does The Past play in our lives? When is a boy a man? How responsible are we for your own actions? And so on... Literature allows writers (and, by proxy, readers!) to explore, test and maybe pronounce these worldviews. Try out some new answers. Challenge our own previous notions. Maybe tackle different sides of the same question using two characters. CAIN'S BLOOD (and it's little brother, PROJECT CAIN, a spinoff novel for teens told form the POV of Jeff Jacobson, the Dahmer clone) provided a stage with plenty of opportunity and space for these kind of considerations. This is THEME land: A place where English teachers aren't full of shit. Where writers and readers gather for a short time and get to, even if in fictional encryption, share honestly about being human.
Add all that up. Maybe you'll have an idea to start a book. I did.

Humans Are Already More "Enhanced" by Technology Than We Realize







Or, take the explosion of writing that Internet connected tools facilitate. Thompson approximates that through e-mail and social media alone "we're composing at least 3.6 trillion words daily, or the equivalent of 36 million books every day." As a helpful point of comparison, he reminds us that the "entire U.S. Library of Congress ... holds around about 35 million books."

ALL NEW PODCAST! A whole podcast about Wolverine is  Claws For Celebration!

Discuss: Can Cuarón's 'Gravity' Reverse Oscar's Sci-Fi Dry Spell?by Joey Magidson     
October 7, 2013
       By now I hope most (if not all) of you have seen Alfonso Cuaron's terrific new film Gravity at least once. Some of you have probably even seen it a bunch of times already. Not only is it an epic piece of cinema and among the year's best movies, it also represents a rare science fiction Oscar contender (and yes, I know calling it "sci-fi" is debatable, but it's close enough). That genre has had a hard going in the Best Picture field over the years, but it's possible that the days of knowing that a sci-fi flick was a surefire Academy loser might very well be over this year. I don't actually think that Gravity will take home the Oscar at this point, but it could make a stronger play than just about any other contender of its ilk over the last decade or so.

Some of you might be curious about the history of sci-fi and the Academy Awards. Well, it's not the longest history ever. Basically, of the over 500 films nominated for Best Picture to date (503, if you want the specific number), only a half dozen have ever been science fiction. Yes, only six. The first was Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (surprisingly 2001: A Space Odyssey was not nominated for Best Picture but did win Best Effects) and the most recent was Nolan's Inception. Between those two, Avatar, District 9 (in the same year for those, a feat we may never see again), E.T., and Star Wars were also nominated for Best Picture. They all lost too. So sci-fi is zero for 503. Gravity will almost assuredly become the 504th nominee, but will it be a serious player to win? I doubt it, but it's not impossible.

To get to the bottom of that particular question and the reason for my answer, you have to look at Cuaron's Gravity both as a sci-fi masterpiece and on its own as an awards contender. What it has in common with those aforementioned sci-fi movies is that it is likely to go down as an all time classic for the genre. The trouble is, that kind of longevity takes years to establish, not months, so by the time most accept it as a classic, the Oscar ceremony will be long over, for this year at least.
Now, considering how Gravity is one of the more universally praised sci-fi outings in a long time (just look here at all that Alex had to say) and a certified blockbuster now to boot, does that improve its chances somewhat? Sure it does, but at the same time, if the Academy rejected the highest grossing film of all time, that doesn't bode well for this one here. Money is a factor here, but Oscar likes to have "their" sorts of films make money and then reward, as opposed to leaving their comfort zone to reward a financial success.

If you want something to grab on to as a reason for why the film could possibly pull the upset, you can look to how this is the rare movie of its ilk that displays a very auteur-ish bent. This feels almost more like an indie flick than a true blockbuster, so that could certainly sway some voters. Going by my predictions from a few days ago here, I have Gravity scoring nine nominations, but double digit nods are hardly out of the question. In fact, many have it getting a dozen noms. That would put it in play to be the most nominated film of the year, something it will need if it wants any chance to compete for the biggest prizes out there.You can mark the movie down for Best Picture, Director, Actress, and most technical nominations, so where we'll truly see if the Academy adores Gravity is in the Supporting Actor and Original Screenplay fields. If Oscar truly is on board with this flick, the Screenplay nomination should be easy, but if George Clooney can score a nod for his small part, that'll truly say something. He's a dark horse in this race now for sure.

As for wins, if only Sandra Bullock hadn't already won, this would be the spot for Gravity to dominate (she's not assured of a loss, but I wouldn't bet on her winning a second Oscar so soon). Bullock does have a chance to pull a major upset though. I'd put her in third place right now, behind Amy Adams (in American Hustle) and Cate Blanchett (in Blue Jasmine), so if the former disappoints and the latter fades during the precursors, it's possible Bullock could wind up the last woman standing. She certainly has her crusaders, as we saw with the Criticwire Critics' Poll from TIFF which embraced her quite a bit and the movie itself.

As it stands now, I think Gravity will take the majority of the tech categories (notably Best Visual Effects, which seems a forgone conclusion already). Should it do better than the four wins I currently predict, that could mean something for sure. For example, Avatar won three Oscars while coming in second place to The Hurt Locker. Granted that had District 9 also competing in some of the same categories and splitting votes (something Gravity won't have to deal with), but the tech categories are where the film will do its damage.

Keep this in mind... not everyone agrees with me about Gravity probably not taking Best Picture. A cursory search on Twitter (tweets here, here, and here for example) will find plenty of folks who feel strongly that this is a frontrunner for Best Director and/or Picture.  Also working in its favor is that the Academy could be warming towards sci-fi. 2010 was a pretty good year for the genre, though up until then it was sort of a wasteland for films of its ilk, so one line of thinking has this potentially groundbreaking film being the one to finally shatter this glass ceiling, as it were.
Even if Gravity doesn't wind up winning Best Picture, and again, I expect that it won't when all is said and done, fans of the movie (myself included) can take solace in the fact that this likely going to go down in the annals of sci-fi history as an all-time classic. That should mean something, right?

http://www.firstshowing.net/2013/discuss-can-cuarons-gravity-reverse-oscars-sci-fi-dry-spell/

Read Them Now, Watch Them Later: Science Fiction & Fantasy Adaptation Watch!



The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey

James S.A Corey is the pseudonym of the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who have written a rousing space action/mystery series called The Expanse. Currently comprised of Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, Abaddon's Gate and the recently announced Cibola Burn (with two more novels already planned), the series explores mankind's travels through our solar system and ultimately beyond it. The books have been getting rave reviews for their engrossing plots and the interesting longer story arcs. The first novel, Leviathan Wakes, was also nominated for a Hugo Award.


Chaos Walking Series by Patrick Ness

Books originally targeted at young adults (like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games series) have proven to be goldmine for Hollywood, so it shouldn't be a surprise when young adult books are optioned for film. That's what happened to the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness. The series is made up of three novels (The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men) and is set on a dystopian world where all living beings can hear each other's thoughts in a stream of images, words and sounds called Noise. The first book (and likely the adaptation) is about a young boy—Todd, the last boy on a planet where there are only men—who discovers something that puts him danger: a young girl named Viola.

Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) is the name being bandied about as the director of the film adaptation, titled Chaos Walking. Whoever it will ultimately be, let's hope that they keep one of the features that the series has been praised for: having the young protagonists deal with moral issues and with meaty themes of gender issues and the gray area between good and evil.



All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill

Time travel is not a new trope in fiction or Hollywood, but Cristin Terrill's All Our Yesterdays does what few of them manage to do: use time travel to good effect. The book, another one aimed at young adults, has two young main characters escaping from a totalitarian future by traveling back in time to assassinate a loved one whose death will prevent their oppressive future. This upends common young adult conventions by putting the protagonists in the role of hunters instead of prey, and also by showing a young girl who comes to appreciate herself through her own observations instead of those of others.

Not much is known about the film adaptation beyond the main stakeholders in the project, although Brian Miller, who scripted the film Apollo 18, is going to write it.


The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

Let's hear it for the classics! H.G. Wells wrote The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1896. The story concerns a shipwrecked man who is rescued and left on the island home of a curious individual: Doctor Moreau, a man who creates humanlike beings from animals via vivisection. Like many of Wells' novels, the books are metaphors for deeper themes, in this case moral responsibility, pain and cruelty, what it means to be human, and mankind's interference with nature.

This particular story is no stranger to film. It has already been adapted three times: in 1932 (as Island of Lost Souls starring Charles Laughton and Richard Arlen), in 1977 (with Burt Lancaster and Michael York), and a horrendous attempt in 1996 (with a clearly uninterested Marlon Brando   and Val Kilmer). I'm crossing my fingers that writers Brian McGreevy and Lee Shipman (Hemlock) will do the weighty themes justice.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/read-now-watch-them-later-science-fiction-fantasy/

I, na kraju, malo o tom velikom Doctor Who bu-ha!

Over 100 long-lost Doctor Who episodes found by dedicated fans - in Ethiopia   
     
The Sunday People can exclusively reveal that 106 BBC programmes have been  unearthed featuring the first two doctors

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/106-doctor-who-episodes-uncovered-2343474

i


Doctor Who: Yeti classic among episodes found in Nigeria




Nine missing episodes of 1960s Doctor Who have been found at a TV station in Nigeria, including most of the classic story The Web of Fear.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24467337

http://youtu.be/5Krz-dyD-UQ

Spominjao sam codex na ovom forumu pre par godina.

http://horrorhomework.com/blog/2013/10/amazing-pumpkin-carvings-from-villafane-studios/

elem, ja stvarno, ali stvaro obozavam Landona. Mislim, pogledajte samo ovaj 'rivju' pa ko ga ne bi do koske obozavao?



Parasite by Mira Grant (Guess who's back?)





It's been a long time since I used this particular trick. Cheryl is back.

Why do I use Cheryl? Because I tend to finish everything I start. If I only read things that I enjoy, how will I ever stretch myself? I'm also loathe to spend 800 words eviscerating someone's baby. Thus, Cheryl was born. Cheryl is my imaginary personal assistant who helps me "review" novels I really did not like. Instead of just doggedly attacking a novel's failures, I try to have some fun with it.

What follows is a conversation I had with Cheryl about Mira Grant's new novel, Parasite.



Justin: Cheryl! Guess what?! I just finished the new Mira Grant novel!

Cheryl: What's it called? Something clever like Go to Press? Or Syndicated? Or (Word)Pressed?

Justin: Seriously? Her Newsflesh Trilogy is over, Cheryl, get with the times. It's called Parasite!

Cheryl: Let me guess. It's about parasites.

Justin: Yes! Er... how'd you know?

Cheryl: That's about as subtle as Freddie Mercury's leather pants.

Justin: You don't have to be rude. You're just jealous because she's a successful published urban fantasy author and your quirky, yet cynical novel, Vascular Viper, can't even find an agent.

Cheryl: I'm am not! All her books are the same! She's got one basic narrative structure and one voice, which she uses over, and over, and over again. I was into it with Feed, but at this point I'm all tuckered out.

freddieJustin: Tuckered out? Are you seventy? No wonder you can't get an agent.

Cheryl: Fine. Tell me all about this wonderful book that in no way treads old ground.

Justin: Well, there's this girl. Her name is Sally, but she likes to be called Sal.

Cheryl: You mean like her main character in Feed named Georgette who liked to be called George? I'm noticing a theme...

Justin: Don't interrupt! Anyway, turns out Sal was in a brutal car accident, but lived because this company developed tapeworms that provide internal medication to people. Her survival makes her something of a poster child for the company, but she's lost her memory, making her an equal liability if the tapeworm had anything to do with it.

Cheryl: Let me guess. Zombies show up.

Justin: No. C'mon. You're embarrassing yourself, Cheryl. Do you really think a best selling author could just do the same thing again and get away with it?

Cheryl: ....

Justin: Well, what happens is that people start becoming shambling unthinking things that attack people. And it's spreading. And all these bad things seem really attracted to Sal.

Cheryl: Sooo... zombies?

Justin: No, no, I mean... not really. They're like medical zombies with an explanation and stuff. It's a condition Cheryl! Not some made up shenanigans.

Cheryl: Oh give me a fucking break. Are you telling me this is another biomed thriller?

Justin: It sure is thrilling. There's even a twist.

Cheryl: Words... I have none. You mean to tell me Parasite is a biomed thriller with a female protagonist who has a shortened masculine appellation that has to solve a riddle revolving around masses of shambling human-things? And there's a huge twist at the end?

the notebook
Justin: Well, when you put it like that...

Cheryl: No, I'm not putting it like anything! Isn't that exactly what it is?

Justin: Fine. You're right.

Cheryl: It doesn't bother you that's the EXACT description of Feed?

*poof*

Justin: *groan* Look what you did Cheryl...

Fizbane: Shit, what did you do this time Cheryl?

Justin: She brought you, you idiot. What kind of product placement am I going to have to suffer this time?

Cheryl: *pointedly ignoring*

Fizbane: Actually, I'm not here with Amazon this time, although I'd point out that Francis Knight's Fade to Black is currently on sale for $2.99. No, I'm here on behalf of my client Mr. Sparks. He's very concerned that another author is challenging his rule as Overlord of Writing the Same Book Over and Over Again®. I'm here on an information gathering assignment. Is Mira Grant a threat to my client, Mr. Landon?

Justin: No! Parasite is completely different. Sal has a boyfriend, something George never had in Feed. And there's no zombies because it's a totally different mechanism that turns things into zombies.

Fizbane: I don't see the distinction. It sounds like she's using the same narrative.

Justin: But, it's fun! And super readable.

Fizbane: *sigh* You're not familiar with the romance genre are you? It's pretty clear that Mira Grant is trying to export the romance mentality to science fiction readers. In romance the plots are extremely predictable. The characters fill archetypes. The goal is to recreate the same squishy feeling that you got from the book before. My client, Mr. Sparks, has mastered this. He's used Alzheimer's, amnesia, terminal cancer, and a host of other excuses to simultaneously drive people apart and pull them together. Replace the bad shit with another kind of bad shit and the novel is the same. It doesn't change.

Cheryl: Ugh. I hate to admit it, but the blog wizard has a point. Don't you see it? Mira Grant writes books that appeal to a segment of reader that wants to have the same reading experience every time they read her!

Justin: Huh. So you're telling me I'm getting suckered?

Cheryl: No. Just that you don't want to think very hard when you read. In fact, fans of Parasite are pretty much the literary equivalent of zombies. They know what they want and they'll consume it forever until someone forces them to stop.

Fizbane: Mr. Sparks has changed my assignment. You've been served for defamation. *hands notice to Cheryl*

Justin: Ha. Maybe you should consider some rewrites to Tumid Tentacle. Because Parasite is going to sell like a mother fucker regardless of what you say.

Cheryl: ...Damnit.

Book editor and critic Joshua Glenn has worked to bring classic early science fiction back into print with his Radium Age Science Fiction Series. Now here's his definitive list of the best adventure stories of all time! (Remember — these are not just scifi, but action/adventure scifi.)



Below, please find a list of one hundred and one of my favorite science-fiction adventures — arranged not qualitatively (which would be impossible) but chronologically. The forty-two titles marked with an asterisk (*) are from my Top 200 Adventures list; the others are second-tier favorites.





http://io9.com/the-top-101-science-fiction-adventures-listed-in-chron-1463897780

When Real Life Honors Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Writers

by John DeNardo on November 27, 2013 | https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/when-real-life-honors-science-fiction-fantasy-horr/#continue_reading_post





Speculative fiction—an umbrella term I use to encompass the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres—has long had a reputation problem. Stemming back from the early days of cheap pulp-fiction during the golden age, science fiction in particular has been the red-headed stepchild of literary fiction. But the global mindset of the reading population is finally coming around—one look at the influence of speculative fiction in pop culture proves that. Moreover, beyond pop-culture references, science fiction, fantasy and horror are literally invading our streets and watching us from the skies...but in a good way.

Here' a look at how real life honors science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Science Fiction Author Gets a Rock Named After Him

Scottish author Iain M. Banks is notable in science-fiction circles for his Culture novels, a series about an advanced, interstellar society managed by advanced, benevolent artificial intelligences. They also have the tendency to use hollowed-out asteroids as vehicles of transportation, travelling faster than the speed of light. In this futuristic post-scarcity society, production and physical labor is largely accomplished by machines, everything if free, and as a result, crime is low and there is little need for law enforcement. The science-fiction field was dealt a strong blow with Banks' passing and he will be remembered by his canon of Culture novels (the latest of which is The Hydrogen Sonata)


Banks will be immortalized in another way. Taking a cue from the Culture itself, Dr. Jose Luis Galache of the Minor Planets Centre in Cambridge, Mass., applied to have an asteroid named after the author, a tribute conceived when Banks was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The application was approved. From now on, Asteroid 5099 will now officially be known as Iainbanks. Sadly, Mr. Banks did not live to see this honor bestowed upon him. He died two weeks before the renaming became official.

The Intersection of H.P. and Lovecraft

H.P Lovecraft is a legend in the field of horror fiction. Born in Providence, R.I., the author carved a name for himself by writing eerie, gothic horror fiction that tapped into the base fears of humanity. His fiction was essentially immortalized with the creation of the Cthulhu mythos, a series of connected stories about an ancient race of otherworldly creatures. The Cthulhu mythos has since been expanded by countless authors since the first story Lovecraft wrote ("The Call of Cthulhu" in a 1928 issue of Weird Tales) and it's still going strong. Many of today's writers cite Lovecraft as a major influence of their writing. For examples, see Black Wings of Cthulhu: Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, edited by S.T. Joshi, Volume 1 and Volume 2.Ocean at the End of the Lane, Gaiman

Recently, Lovecraft's hometown of Providence honored the author by naming an intersection after him. The intersection of Prospect and Angell Streets has been renamed as "H.P. Lovecraft Square." Not far from here is Lovecraft's home and the library where he often wrote his particular brand of dark fiction. I haven't visited H.P. Lovecraft Square, but I hear that, so far, there has been no sign of winged creatures with octopuslike heads and faces full of feelers.

I Live on The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Neil Gaiman is one of speculative fiction's superstars whose works spans books, comics and graphic novels, theater, television and films. He's known for his popular Sandman series of graphic novels, his books Stardust and Coraline (which were adapted into films) and for winning a Hugo Award for his work writing an episode of Doctor Who. Earlier this year, Gaiman released The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a novel about a man who finds the horrible memories of a decades-old accident resurfacing when he returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral.

Even more recently, Gaiman was honored by Portsmouth, England, the town where he was born, which saw fit to name a street after Gaiman's latest book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Gaiman was noted in a recent issue of Locus Magazine as saying, "When you make things up, you never expect them to creep out into the real world." Indeed, this street naming is just one of the ways in which the world of fiction affects the world in which we live.

http://damiengwalter.com/2013/06/14/harlan-ellison-the-interview/


When Damien Walter tweeted he'd 'literally kill' to interview the multiple award-winning author Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman replied 'What if the person you had to kill was ... Harlan Ellison?' Here Ellison talks about running away from home, the rights and wrongs of paying to read books and how his job on this planet is annoying people.

DW: Harlan, first of all, can you confirm that you are indeed the great Harlan Ellison?

HE: For all my sins – and I assure you, the only thing that has ever held me back from God-like greatness is my humility – I am the Harlan Ellison, the only one. I'm in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, right between Ellis Island and Ralph Ellison.

DW: Are you the writer of over 1,000 stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays and essays?

HE: Yeah, it's probably more like 1,800 now. I find that I have continued to write. I had 10 books last year, and that at my age I think is pretty good. While I always aspired to be Alexandre Dumas, if I reach the level of – I don't know, Donald Westlake – I'll be more than happy.

DW: You must have seen and done as much in speculative fiction as anyone, so can you tell us just what is speculative fiction?

HE: I will give you the only answer that there is. It is the game of "what if?". You take that which is known, and you extrapolate – and you keep it within the bounds of logic, otherwise it becomes fantasy – and you say, "Well, what if?". That's what speculative fiction is, and at its very best, it is classic literature, on a level with Moby Dick and Colette and Edgar Allan Poe.

DW: So it's definitely not fantasy.

HE: Fantasy is a separate genre, and it allows you to go beyond the bounds of that which is acceptable, where all of a sudden people can fly, or the Loch Ness Monster does not have a scientific rationale, but is a mythic creature. It is in the grand tradition of the oldest forms of writing we know, all the way back to Gilgamesh, the very first fiction we know, and the gods. Fantasy is a noble endeavour. Science fiction is a contemporary subset that goes all the way back to Lucian of Samosata, and Verne and Wells, and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

DW: It seems to be everywhere, with video games, massive movie franchises and millions of people going to conventions. So why is it so popular now?

HE: Well, we live in a technological age. Time has passed, and we have stepped over the ruins of our own societies, and our own civilisations, and we come now to the fruition of those things about which the human race has dreamed. We have flight and we have electronic assistants. The entertainment media – which are always very timorous and step very carefully out of fear and loathing – don't know what they're doing so much. So they go back, and they are catching up on the kind of science fiction – and they call it, in that ugly, ugly phrase, "sci-fi," which those who have worked in speculative fiction despise, it's like calling a woman a "broad" – they are catching up on ideas that were covered with hoarfrost 60 years ago. That's why you have an overabundance of zombies and walking dead, and world war and asteroids from space. They have not yet tackled any of the truly interesting discussions of humanity that are treated in speculative fiction. But they are a break from standard 19th, early 20th-century fiction, and so they seem fresh to an audience that is essentially ignorant.

DW: You famously described sci-fi fandom as an "extended family of wimps, twinks, flakes and oddballs." But don't the geeks kind of run the world now?

HE: I am a steadfastly 20th-century guy. I've always been pathologically au courant. Even today I can tell you the length of Justin Bieber's hair. But it has now reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form, that it is beyond my notice. I look at things like Twitter and Facebook, and "reality TV" – which is one of the great frauds of our time, an oxymoron like "giant shrimp" – and I look at it all, and I say, these people do not really know what the good life is. I look at the parched lives that so many people live, the desperation that underlies their every action, and I say, this has all been brought about by the electronic media. And I do not envy them. I do not wish to partake of it, and I am steadfastly in the 20th century. I do not own a handheld device. Mine is an old dial-up laptop computer, which I barely can use – barely. I still write on a manual typewriter. Not even an electronic typewriter, but a manual. My books keep coming out. I have over 100 books published now, and I've reached as close to posterity as a poor broken vessel such as I am entitled to reach.

DW: I think I know what you're going to say as the answer to this question, but I want to ask you anyway. Because a lot of writers today – and I'm thinking of people like Cory Doctorow, and Neil Gaiman, who set up this interview for us – say that they can give their work away for free, and they can still sell it. Do you think there's any chance that they're right?

HE: I think without question they are wrong. I don't know that Neil has ever said that. I think I've known Neil so many years, that I think I've whipped him, flayed him, and browbeaten him enough that he knows that he gives nothing away for nothing. But he has a kind heart, and so people can touch him, and they will ask him to do something for nothing because, "Well, we don't have the money." They have the money to buy drugs, they have money to go to the movies, they have money to buy themselves new shoes, but they don't have the money to pay the writer. Cory Doctorow's philosophy I find egregious. Egregious in the extreme. Stephen King tried to give things away for free on the web, and was screwed. I think any writer who gives away his work demeans himself, demeans the craft, demeans the art, and demeans the buyer. It is not only caveat emptor, it is caveat lector. I don't mean to be crude when I say this, but I won't take a piss unless I'm paid properly.

DW: [Laughter] What I wanted to talk to you about – and it was kind of the reason for the interview, the starting point – was All The Lies That Are My Life.

HE: Ah, All The Lies That Are My Life. One of my great apologias for being the idiot I am. It was based upon – well, there are two legs upon which it stands. One of them is the relationship that I have had with another writer all my life, who was at one time a very, very close friend of mine, who I discovered later was less a good friend than I had thought, and who had held me in some contempt. And then the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and Griswold, who became his bibliographer after he died, and kept Poe a minor figure in literature for over a hundred years. This was a sort of getting even story where a famous writer talks about another famous writer he knew.

DW: You've said that writing is the hardest work of all, harder than being a truck driver. Harder than being in the army?

HE: Well, being in the army is like being in prison. You are not your own person. You are constrained 24/7. You are told what to do. They keep you in your place. You are not allowed to have an awful lot of self-respect, or pride of place, or pride of self. And I've been in jail, and I've been in hospitals, and I've been in the army. They constrict me. They're a straitjacket. I am a mad thing, and wildness asserts itself. I'm like your average dopey teenager, who lies down in the middle of traffic just to see what it feels like to have a car run over you. I'm blessed. I'm blessed. I'm less than a month shy of the age 79. By all rights – I ran away from home when I was 13, not because I was being abused, just because I couldn't stand it any more, and I had to get out on my own. I was on the road at age 13, and I should have bought the farm at age 14, duelling with Richelieu's guards on the parapets, and instead I have lived to this ripe old age.

DW: OK then, I want to ask you a question about one of the stories that seems to haunt people the most, Demon with a Glass Hand.

HE: That's just been picked up again to be remade as a movie, as a motion picture. But it's remarkable that something that's more than 30 years old has had this kind of life. People say, "Well, Ellison is always suing everybody." Well, I never sue anybody unless they pick up one of my ideas from 40 years ago and do a bad job of it in a movie. Then I say, "Well, if you used me as the source, by God get your hand out of my pocket. Pay me." I've won every lawsuit that I've ever gotten into, except last year, there was a movie came out that was pretty close to my famous story 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman, the one that's one of the 10 most reprinted stories in the English language, and I started to sue, and then I went and saw the movie, and it was so bad – so bad – I withdrew the case saying, no, let this movie fall into complete obscurity, and the universe forget it, and don't attach my name to it, the way they did The Terminator, which is a good film.

DW: In many of your stories there is the oppressor or the bully, who wants to have their way with humanity, with whoever is in the story. The worst of these, I think for me, is I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which is a story of –

HE: Oh, yes, God. God is a shit.

DW: Yeah. It's a story you wrote in a single night. I read it in my teens in a hallucinatory state over the course of a single night. Is there something about – you have to be in this state to find that oppressive being out there? You have to find it in the night?

HE: Well, I wrote another story – I'm not steering away from the question, I'm answering it in an ancillary way, but I'll get right back to it – I wrote a whole book of stories called Deathbird Stories, which are retellings in a modern way of the godlike myths. And one of the short stories that I did, that is in the Best American Short Stories, is called The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore, and it is in a way my atheist tract. I'm a stiff-necked Jewish atheist, and I, like Mark Twain, do not believe that there is a great bearded avuncular spirit up there watching us carefully to see whether we masturbate or not. He's got better things to do creating star systems than to worry about whether we do Feng Shui with the furniture.

When I talk about God, I talk about him not believing in him. If there were a God, and you believed in him, and then instead of saying something ridiculous like, well, God has these mysterious ways, we are not meant to know what it is he's doing, or she's doing, or it's doing, I say, in defiance of Albert Einstein, yes, the universe does shoot craps – God does shoot craps with the universe. One day you'll win £200m in the lottery and the next day you'll get colon cancer. So when I wrote I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, I put God in the form of a master computer, AM – cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am – and had him preserve these half a dozen human beings, after having destroyed the world, to keep them down there and torment them forever, for having created him but giving him no place to go. And I believe – much to the annoyance of my various fervid aficionados – they wish I had more faith.

I say, I have faith in the human spirit, that something noble enough to have created Gaudí's cathedral in Barcelona is noble enough not to have to go to war over sheep in the Falklands. That's what I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream says. In fact I did a video game called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, and I created it so you could not win it. The only way in which you could "win" was to play it nobly. The more nobly you played it, the closer to succeeding you would come, but you could not actually beat it. And that annoyed the hell out of people too.

[Laughter]

HE: I spend a lot of time annoying people. That's my job on this planet.

DW: That's a good job to have. You've always been a political writer and politically active as well. You famously marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King.

HE: Yup.

DW: Why don't speculative fiction writers today cause more trouble?

HE: Ah, kiddo, I wish I could give you an answer. I sigh woefully, [sighs], because that's what writers are supposed to do, afflict the contented. But most of them don't. Most of them just want to tell a story, and I guess that's a noble endeavour in and of itself, to tell a story. Storytellers can be teachers, like Aristotle, or they can just be storytellers like – I don't know, who's writing the trash these days? I don't know who's writing trash over there where you are, but whoever it is, you pick the name, put it in for me.

DW: When you were starting out, and you'd run away from home, and then you were in the army for a short while, and you were writing through the night to get all of this stuff done, did you expect, did you dream, of becoming as famous and as successful as you have as a writer?

HE: Absolutely. At one point in my career – I don't think I was married at the time. I've been married to my wife for 27 years, and God knows how she's been able to stand it. But she's my fifth wife. At one point I had a T-shirt that said, "Not tonight dear, I'm on a deadline." And you stop and think how many movies you didn't go and see, how many parties you didn't attend, how many concerts you didn't get to hear, because you were working. And I've worked endlessly through my entire life. I've never been a sluggard, and yet I've never felt that I've done one twentieth of what I was capable of doing.
And when I stopped at some point – and I've done this on numerous occasions – and said, "Why? Why am I doing it?" I am reminded of the quote from Heinrich von Kleist, who said, "I don't stop writing, because I cannot." And it is a compulsion. It's like breathing. It's systole and diastole. I just go in and out, and I do it. I do it because it is part of what I do. But the reason I do it is because I want it to last. I live in vain hope that one day, 50 years from now, or 100 years from now, when taking down Dumas, or Chaucer, or Colette, or somebody really worth reading, they say, oh, let's try another Ellison, and they take down Angry Candy or All the Lies That Are My Life, and they say, he did know how to write. He knew how to put words together. He knew how to transform the human condition into translatable prose that could draw a smile or a tear. And that's hoping for fame. That's hoping for longevity. That's hoping for reality. It's the same thing that drove Magellan and drove Julius Caesar and drove Imhotep. It's the hoping that you last beyond the shell.

DW: Harlan, I have no doubt that you will. No doubt.

HE: You are enormously kind and gracious. Just for the record, I never, ever threw anybody down an elevator shaft.

DW: [Laughter] I didn't want to ask you that question, because I'm sure you always get asked that, Harlan. Everyone always seems to ask you, have you killed anybody, did they survive?

HE: Well, that's a different question. That's a different question. I've never thrown anybody down an escalator shaft, and I did not grab Connie Willis's breast.

DW: I didn't want to ask you that question either.

HE: Oh, that just infuriates me. That just infuriates me.

DW: Do you want to – do you have anything you want to say about it?

HE: About Connie Willis? I think she's a brilliant writer.





• Harlan Ellison's graphic novel 7 Against Chaos launches from DC in July. Volumes three and four of his unproduced television scripts, Brain Movies, are available at harlanbooks.com

• No one was killed in the making of this interview

Svonvik na svom blogu a za priliku Čipovog proglašenja za Grand Mastera:




Grand Master Chip!



SFWA has just announced that the 2013 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award will go to Samuel R. Delany!  This is an award meant to be given to people who obviously, blatantly deserve it.  People like Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe . . . and Chip (as his friends call him).  So I don't think anybody had any doubt that would happen sooner or later.  But sooner is better.

I had the good fortune of discovering Chip's works early in his career and relatively late in my pre-career.  The Einstein Intersection shaped my writings-to-be in ways that will never be mapped out and may in fact be responsible for my fondness for creating works that sprawl across the boundaries of genre without concern for what they properly "should" be.  I've been following his works, both of fiction and of criticism, with enormous joy ever since.

Just how important is Chip to science fiction?  More so even than most of his admirers -- and they are a fervent lot -- realize.  Some years ago, my pal Gardner Dozois put together two anthologies of SF, one titled The Good Old Stuff and the other The Good New Stuff.  The first was to introduce the virtues of classic SF (what might be and once was called the Old Wave) to a new generation of readers.  The second was to highlight the virtues of those who came later (post New Wave, mostly).  Afterward, he told me that in his researches it became obvious that every writer in the first book had in some way or another been influenced by Robert A. Heinlein.  Those of the second had all been influenced by Chip.

You want specifics, but alas I do not have the time to write the book explicating them.  So I will only observe that John W. Campbell once observed that you could have too much innovation in a story, that if everything is new and bright and interesting that distracts from the central thesis of the work.  But Chip said no to that.  Interesting people, interesting worlds, interesting ideas, prose that feels free to turn a handspring if it feels like it.

Science fiction got a lot more interesting when Chip came into it.  As a reader, I just want to say:  Thank you, Chip.  I appreciate that.


a sama vest je ovde.

A Liptak odlucio da svoje kolumne o ranom sf palpu fino uoblici u knjigu:




I'm very happy to announce that I've sold the rights to a book on SF History to British publisher Jurassic London! Since April 2012, I've been writing a column on the subject for Kirkus Reviews, which has been a fantastic experience thus far. Since starting with them, my end goal has always been to collect the columns together into a larger work, and Jared has been a vocal and enthusiastic proponent for it. (Seriously, he calls it required reading!)

I'm pretty thrilled to have this land here. I'm a big fan of the books that Jurassic London has put out, especially their short fiction anthologies: The Lowest Heaven was a fantastic read, and I'm eagerly getting ready to read their latest, Book of the Dead.

This book isn't going to be a collection of the columns, but they are going to form a bit of the backbone. My aim here is to look at the history of the genre and its relationship with the readers and authors, but also the relationship between society and technology. In my work with Kirkus, I've been trying to emphasize some of the important, but lesser known authors and editors working within the genre, and I'm hoping that it'll be a nice addition to some of the other popular works on SF history.

This is going to be Jurassic London's first foray into original non-fiction, and while we don't have a title for this book yet, we are aiming for an early 2015 release.


http://andrewliptak.com/2013/12/05/book-sale-history-of-sf-to-jurassic-london/

Wesley Chu, author of Lives of Tao and Deaths of Tao, built a book tree. He used pine cones and ornaments and bows and a weird book about male fashion (see bottom!). He conveniently placed his own books at the trees pinnacle, standing on the shoulders of Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin. The tattered copies of Fires of Heaven and Lord of Chaos demonstrate the fact that Chu is no dabbling genre author, but a true blue fan of the highest order. Wait a second... is that Terry Goodkind?[/size][/font]

With no further ado or parsing of terms, here are four great anthologies from 2013:
[

We See a Different Frontier (Edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad) - I got to review this at length here, but, needless to say, I'm a big fan. One of the major themes of the anthology is that these are perspectives that challenge the science fictional 'status quo', a theme that is a) right up my street and b) inherently linked to wanting to read every story. In every tale in We See a Different Frontier, anything can happen - and that sense of adventure and excitement alone is worth its placement on this list. (Also, J.Y. Yang's "Old Domes".)



Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Edited by Sarah Weinman) - Meanwhile, Sarah Weinman makes the case for reprint anthologies as an art form. Troubled Daughters collects fourteen tales of 'domestic suspense' (a genre that she explores in the introduction, in individual forewords and on a companion website), from female crime writers. A simply brilliant piece of work (and, weirdly, a really excellent present for the holidays and whatnot). Remarkably, this crime anthology also contains one of the year's best SF reprints: Margaret Millar's "The People Across the Canyon", a wonderfully twisted tale that reads like the best of Ray Bradbury.



Glitter and Mayhem (Edited by John Klima, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas) - I... don't Kickstart often, but occasionally it the crowd-funded primordial goo spits up niche anthologies that are niches that I niche and I'm like, "ah, that's why this exists". And, yes, discopunk (?!) is so silly that I had to get on board. I'm glad I did. The stories in this were bonkers enough that I didn't like all of them (in fact, a few I really didn't like), but it also produced two of my favourite short stories of the year: the unclassifiable "Such & Such Said to So & So" by Maria Dahvana Headley (a bit like falling into an old Felix the Cat cartoon and hitting King Rat on the way down) and the Afrofuturistic space opera "The Electric Spanking of the War Babies" by Maurice Broaddus & Kyle S. Johnson.



]World War Cthulhu (Edited by Jonathan Oliver) - Lovecraftian monsters and the Third Reich! I think this went slightly under the radar because it was published by Cubicle 7, but it isn't tie-in fiction as much as, well... Lovecraftian monstesr and the Third Reich. And check out the contributor list: Sarah Lotz, Lavie Tidhar, Gaie Sebold, James Lovegrove, Rebecca Levene, Jonathan Green, Archie Black... a collection of some of my favourite short story authors, writing on tentacle-beasts-that-eat-Nazis.



And a few that are very much worth mentioning:


[Fearsome Journeys (Edited by Jonathan Strahan): At least one shaggy dog tale [not my thing] and a few that rely on knowing/caring about a pre-existing setting [also not my thing]. Still, worth it for Scott Lynch's story alone - he delivers an outstanding lesson on how to write short fantasy, as he establishes a world, the characters, a complex magic system, the historical background, a conflict and its resolution in the space of one short story. Plus, KJ Parker on dragons, in a thoroughly Parkery way - a surprisingly wistful piece that maintains the author's high standards of ambiguity and inventiveness.



[Random musing - although there have been plenty of epic and sword-and-sorcery type fantasy anthologies this year, of those I tried, the only one I like at all is Fearsome Journeys. Is that just me? Or are crime & SF are better genre 'tools" for writing short fiction that's self-contained and resolves? (Two things that fantasy often struggles to do in small spaces.)]



[Something Wicked: Volume 2 (Edited by Joe Vaz and Vianne Venter): Always my favourite SF/F/H magazine and now my favourite SF/F/H magazine-turned-anthology-series.
Terra Nova (Edited by Mariano Villarreal) : Six exceptional stories, finally translated to English - plus a very useful round-up of the Spanish SF scene (historical and contemporary). My favourite: Lola Robles' "Deirdre", a slightly heart-rending ... romance?... about made-to-order robots.





After the Apocalypse (Edited by Paula Guran): Admittedly, I'm biased - this anthology of contemporary reprints contains two Jurassic stories. But that's just why I picked it up: once I read it, I was surprised how well Ms. Guran managed to uncover twenty very different looks on a well-worn topic, but one that still very much interests me.



]Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond: An exceptional showcase of authors from around the world, and a mixture of original and reprint stories. I'm glad that Lauren Beukes' "Unathi Battles the Black Hairballs" has been re-released after its initial publication in Home Away (2010). [Incidentally, alsohighly recommended] I'm equally glad to find new stories like Lisa Allen-Agostini's twisty "A Fine Specimen".



Plus one random bonus from the distant past:

Nelson Algren's Book of Lonesome Monsters (1962) (Edited by Nelson Algren) - Ok, granted, the contributors include Thomas Pynchon and Saul Bellow, so this is a piranha amongst guppies, but still, that Algren fellow know a bit about wordification. Lonesome Monsters is kind of astounding, a work from that wonderful late-50s/early-60s period where noir/literary/speculative/whatever all coalesced into an experimental goo of spine-chilling and bizarre fiction. Granted, several of the entries are a little too odd for me, and, for the most part, actual "plot" has gone by the wayside... but this is a fascinating collection of razor sharp literary desolation. Algren's own introduction might be the best part.

Jared on Friday, December 20, 2013 in Books, Friday Five, Science Fiction

ovo je neka vrst novogodišnje čestitke... 








What If the 21st Century Begins in 2014?



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-31/what-if-the-21st-century-begins-in-2014-.html







This what-if isn't technological, social, political or even science-fictional. Rather, it's a bit of wholly unscientific, superstitious pattern-recognition. The last two centuries (and possibly more) didn't "start" at their official point, the turning of a calendar from 00 to 01. That wasn't when they began in essence, nor when they first bent the arc of history.



No. Each century effectively began in its 14th year.


Think about it. The first decade of the 20th century was filled with hope and a kind of can-do optimism that was never seen again -- not after the horrific events of 1914 shattered any vision that a new and better age would arrive without pain. Yet until almost the start ofWorld War I, 19th-century progress seemed unstoppable and ever-accelerating.


Consider the world of 1913, when regular middle-class folks in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and so on were acquiring unexpected wonders: clothes-washing machines, gas stoves, gas and then electric lighting, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, vaccinations, telephones, radios, motor cars. Stepping outside you would see and hear human beings flying through the sky -- with a looming confidence that soon you would get a chance to join them.


Science was pouring forth what seemed unalloyed goodness. New dyes and industrial textile methods doubled a working family's access to fresh and beautiful clothes. Cheap iron bedsteads kept cheap spring mattresses clean, making sleep both healthier and far more comfortable. Nations were banning child labor and providing free schooling. Astronomers discovered what galaxies were. Physicists were pushing their pure and harmless science to fantastic frontiers. And the Haber-Bosch process brought cheap fertilizers that tripled crops, as chemistry proved itself to be everybody's friend.


Think our era is similarly fast-changing? Just compare the kitchen of today with a kitchen of 1950. Sure, everything nowadays is shinier, smarter. Still, a person from 1950 could use our apparatus with fluid familiarity. But the drudgery-saddled housewife of 1880 would blink in bedazzlement at what her daughter used in 1913. Life itself was changing at a pace never-before seen, and mostly for the better.


Yes, all of those techno-advances continued after World War I. Social changes such as women getting the vote were harbingers of more to come. But after 1914, the naivete was gone. People realized that the 20th century would be one of harsh struggle accompanying every step of advancement. And along the way to hard-won better times, the age would spiral downward first, into the deepest pit that humanity ever knew, before our parents (or grandparents) clawed their way out of the nadir of 1944 -- the focal year of a century that truly began in 1914.


All right, that's just one data point. Is there another? Well, look at 1814, the beginning of the Congress of Vienna and the so-called Concert of Europe that made possible the continent's longest extended period of overall peace, as the great powers turned from fighting bloody wars to perfecting their colonial empires. Those two years -- 1814 and 1914 –- each marked a dramatic shift in tone and theme (in the West, that is), so much so that they represented the real beginnings of the 19th and 20th centuries.


Suppose the pattern holds -- and remember this is just a thought experiment -- what might it mean about the true 21st century? What theme will typify or represent its arc?


First, let's dismiss one parochial notion -- that the terrorist attacks of September 2001 were the major break point between centuries. Nonsense. We were engaged in the same struggle before and after. The U.S. shrugged off more damage during any month of World War II. Indeed, nothing could be more "twen-cen" or 20th century than the overwrought focus that some (not all) Americans apply to Sept. 11. Much of the world assigns no particular relevance to that date.


Oh, we are still in the 20th. Consider the pervading doom and gloom we see around us, right now. Post-apocalyptic tales and dystopias fill our fiction, films and politics, especially the Young Adult genre where today's teens seem terminally allergic to stories containing hope. How very '60s. And '70s. And so on.


There was a similar sense of apocalypse in 1813 Europe, but at least there were good reasons, after decades of ferocious struggle that seemed poised to last forever. What excuse do we have, in a time when per capita violence has been plummeting for decades? When the fraction of kids -- worldwide -- who are well-fed and in school is higher than ever? Sure, the planet faces dire problems. But the things keeping us from addressing pollution, oppression, climate change and all of that are political inanities. The War on Science that has hobbled innovation, for example, can be won if we do one thing -- tell the gloomcasters of both left and right to get out of our way and let us get back to problem-solving.


Indeed, the only real obstruction we seem to face is a dullard-sickness of attitude, dismally ignoring every staggering accomplishment since 1945. Hence the question: Is it possible that a new theme for our 21st century requires only that we snap out of our present funk?


If only. That would truly be the Dawning of an Age of Aquarius, forecast by hippies long before the old 20th was anywhere near done with us, but arriving at last. You shake your heads, but it could happen.


We can still choose our own fate. Next year, we might decide to cheer up and rediscover the can-do optimism that was crushed by the czar and kaiser and a small group of insipid, inbred aristocrats, exactly 100 years ago. We could choose to become problem-solvers, in part, because (let's imagine) someone in 2014 discovers a simple, cheap and safe IQ-boosting pill. Or politicians decide to get over their self-serving snits and resume the adult craft of negotiation. Or some cable news owner decides to rediscover citizenship. Or some brave director releases an inspiring film that astounds people with an unexpected idea called hope.


Or else go ahead and wallow in the obvious notion that 2014 will see a violent ruction of its own. A phase transition into a century whose theme we'll all regret. Or we'll see a continuing retreat from confident civilization, a turning away from the Enlightenment Dream, relapsing into fearful obeisance to a leader, or New Lords, or some simplistic ideal.


That, too, could take place. In which case, please don't give me any prediction points. All I did was spot a pattern. I don't want respect from a people who would allow something like that to happen.

Real scientists can be the harshest critics of science fiction. But that doesn't mean they can't enjoy a movie just because it bends the laws of nature. We polled dozens of scientists and engineers to discover the sci-fi movies they love.

 


Indian Trail, N.C., Councilman David Waddell pens Klingon resignation letter 

The plumber-turned-politician, who's eying a U.S. Senate run, lent his withdrawal from his first term some humor by issuing a letter written in the language of sci-fi TV show 'Star Trek.' Mayor Michael Alvarez called the move an 'embarrassment.'


Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/n-pol-resigns-klingon-article-1.1565452#ixzz2pmqzbGvC

Očito je da se ljudska imena moraju opisno porevoditi na klingonški...

opisno, opisno... 

inače, ovo se fino poklapa sa nekim mojim zapažanjima o onoj famoznoj tezi da upravo smisao za humor najbolje dokazuje kako su muškarci poreklom sa Venere a žene sa Marsa: muškarci svoju pedomorfiju konzistetno (od)nose sa sobom u penziju, dok se žene jos u pubertetu nauče da foliraju ozbiljnost odraslosti, da bi se tek u menopauzi bacile u verbalna očijukanja kakva inače priliče samo šiparicama.

A što se izdavaštva tiče, Jared odlučio da razbije iluzije onima koje tvrde kako upravo elektronski samizdati imaju najveće šanse da postanu bestseleri:


http://www.pornokitsch.com/2014/01/self-publishing-a-best-seller.html#more



Digital Book World have just put out a list of the 2013 ebook 'best sellers', and it has been making the rounds since being picked up by Forbes (with a slightly misleading title). Proponents of indie publishing are especially delighted as "self-published" ranks four on the table.


Rank

Publisher

eBest-Sellers

1 Penguin Random House 478
2 Hachette 258
3 Self-published 99
4 HarperCollins 91
5 Simon & Schuster 72

(Complete numbers here.)

The methodology of how DBW calculates a best-seller is here. It includes all six major online ebook retailers and is US focused.

My criticism isn't with the methodology. It is with the conclusion that these figures demonstrate the "success of self-publishing". And many of the more vocal proponents of indie publishing have been making hay of that conclusion - erroniously.

However, if we compare these to the available publication statistics, conveniently provided by Bowker, we get a different story...


Sadly, 2013 numbers aren't out yet, but we can use 2012 as stand-ins:
•2012 US self-published titles: 391,000 total (234,000 hard copy only; leaving 157,000 ebook-only or ebook/print)
•2012 US traditionally published titles: ? (301,000 hard copy only)

Let's make another assumption and use the same proportion across both publication methods, which gives us 503,000 traditionally published titles and 202,000 ebook-only or ebook/print titles.

If we aggregate the traditional publishers from the top five:


Publisher

eBest-Sellers

Total eBooks

% eBest-Sellers

Traditional 899 202,000 .45%
Independent 99 157,000 .06%

And if you include the rest of the top 10, in search of a slightly more precise number...:


Publisher

eBest-Sellers

Total eBooks

% eBest-Sellers

Traditional 1069 202,000 .53%
Independent 99 157,000 .06%

It tails off pretty dramatically after that, so I'll stop there.

Still the odds look a bit like this:


Happening

Odds

USA winning the World Cup 1 in 160
Having an eBest-Seller by traditional publishing 1 in 191
Houston Astros winning the 2014 World Series 1 in 200
Iran winning the World Cup 1 in 1,000
Swansea winning the Premier League 1 in 1,250
Having an eBest-Seller by self-publishing 1 in 1,586

Go Swans.

This also excludes the chances of having a print best-seller, and all of those are traditionally published. "Best-seller" is an annoying phrase, but, no matter how you define it, you seem more likely to achieve it with the marketing, distribution, rights, negotiation and sales power of a traditional publisher behind you.

I'm sorry to rain on any parades. The growth of self-publishing might very well be the story. But the "success" isn't. Based on these rough numbers (which we can replace as soon as the 2013 stats are out), a book is over 9 times more likely to become a best-seller if you don't self-publish it.




Jared on Thursday, January 02, 2014 in Spurious Theories

Entries on Interesting Obscure and Lesser-Known Writers, Artists, Literary Folk, etc., I've Happened to Encounter


http://desturmobed.blogspot.com/

Jared se ne propusta dobru priliku da malko bocne raju povodom ovogodisnjeg Hjuga, i, naravno, u komentarima se to odmah osetilo  :




I'm not giving my entire ballot, but that's because I don't have it yet.

When the shortlists come out, I'll probably do another activity like this, but, for now, here are a few selections and, in case it is helpful, some of the reasoning behind why I'm voting the way I will.

Best Novel:

I'll jump right in with what is, by far, my most controversial choice.

The awards-related scandal of the week is the fact that this enterprising Tor.com columnist has discovered that the entire Wheel of Time series somehow qualifies as a single "Best Novel".

I'll be voting for it.

For two reasons:
•I find this wonderful - I'm always supportive of bureaucratic subversion and this is genuinely hilarious: a case of more rules = less sense. I don't mind using one of my 4 nominations as a protest vote.
•This is utterly stupid, but, if it is allowed - and it is, I think there's a case to be made. Is the Wheel of Time good? No. It is awful. Is it one of my favourites? No. Much the reverse.

But the Hugo Awards don't ask about either of those things - they ask for 'Best', which is the worst and woolliest word in all awardsdom. And, for a certain definition of "best", that is "important and influential", Wheel of Time more than qualifies. It may be rubbish, but it is rubbish that inspired and influenced most of contemporary fantasy. Will we be able to say that about many of the other contenders? Will Ocean at the End of the Lane be as influential in 10, 20 years? Will Doctor Sleep reinvent (or, at the very least, crystallise) an entire genre? Etc. Etc.

Anyway, I've now spent 200 words defending the last and least of all my votes. My other "Best Novel" selections will be more seriously made. I'm not sure what they are yet, but I'm juggling books like The Violent Century, Fangirl, American Elsewhere, The Shining Girls, Gun Machine, The Golem and the Jinni, Life After Life, More Than This... I'm not a Kitschies judge, so I haven't read my normal swathe of 150+ recent titles, but I've still read 50-odd 2013 books that I can choose from.

Many more categories below the jump...





Best Novella:

I have no idea. Did I read any? I'm not certain I did. Normally I have a K.J. Parker Subterranean book to plug in here, but no such luck.

Best Novelette*:

I'm fairly sure that novelettes have snuck into some of my favourite anthologies from this year... 

A few great stories that I'm almost positive are the right length:
•Pat Cadigan's Chalk (This is Horror)
•Joseph D'Lacey's Roadkill (This is Horror)
•Lola Robres' "Deirdre" (from Terra Nova)

All of which are exceptional.

Best Short Story*:

So many. Here are a few that I've really enjoyed:


•Lisa Allen-Agostini - "A Fine Specimen" (Mothership)
•Maurice Broaddus & Kyle S. Johnson - "The Electric Spanking of the War Babies" by  (Glitter & Mayhem)
•Maria Dahvana Headley - "Such & Such Said to So & So" (Glitter & Mayhem)
•Stark Holborn - "Nunslinger" (Nunslinger)
•China Miéville - "The Ninth Technique" (The Apology Chapbook)
•Shweta Narayan - "The Arrangement of Their Parts" (We See a Different Frontier)
•Lavie Tidhar - "Dragonkin" (Tor.com)
•J.Y. Yang - "Old Domes" (We See a Different Frontier)

If you're low on short stories, and are keen to find great work from outside the usual suspects, I highly recommend these anthologies, as well as pretty much anything from Stone Skin Press (cross-over bonkersness), NewCon (SF) or Solaris (horror). Plus many others - the UK has a great short fiction scene (see below).

Best Related Work:

I'm going to break my * code and pitch a Jurassic work: Speculative Fiction 2012. This isn't "my" work any more than it is Justin's - we were just the two slobs who got to play at "editor" and pick 50 of the best articles from the interwebs. It was surprisingly easy/hard (take your pick): we could've chosen 100, or 2,000 or... The reason I think SpecFic is important is because it represents the idea that online criticism is important, valid, noteworthy... choose your word. We set out to "embiggen the blogosphere", and I think we succeeded.

I also want SpecFic to be nominated so that every blogger that's in the collection ever gets to be part of a "Hugo nominated series". And I really, really want it to win so that Justin can make a Hugo speech that's a bit like this. I'll even bust out my Mathletes jacket.

That said, this category is so woolly and broad that there are really a lot of things I like:
•"Visions of the Universe" at the National Maritime Museum - sadly, this has closed. But, wow. A wall of high resolution Mars video, images of galaxies and deep space that seemed unreal, a look into the heart of the Sun... it was so utterly spectacular, it brought me (and many others) to tears. If you'll pardon the cheese, it was the sort of eye-opening, jaw-dropping, brain-expanding wonderful that drew us all to science fiction in the first place. Here's a review. Here's another.
• "Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film" - the British Film Institute's astounding run of film and online content related to the origins of horror in cinema.

On a slightly jingoistic note, it is amazing how Britain has so much collaboration between its cultural institutions and its genre community. A lot of people, on both sides, work really hard at this, and the results are something that we should be extremely proud of.

And two more traditional suggestions if that's all too wacky:
•"Rich Men's Skins: A Social History of Armor" by K.J. Parker
•"Going Forth by Day" by John J. Johnston (the introduction to Unearthed, yes, another Jurassic publication, but I can claim zero credit for John's utterly genius history of mummies in fiction). (Here's a potted version for Tor.com, but the actual full-length piece is fascinating.)

Best Graphic Work:

Not my area of expertise, but I did pick up a few volumes that I really enjoyed and will happily rationalise as genre interest:
•Rob Davis' Don Quixote
•Sally Jane Thompsons' Atomic Sheep
•Gary Northfield's Teenytinysaurs

The two comics publishers represented above - SelfMadeHero and Markosia - are fantastic, and are doing brilliant things. (Teenytinysaurs is from Walker, who are also lovely, but mostly do book-books.)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form):

No idea. I saw nothing last year. Thor 2?

Best Dramatic Presentation (Doctor Who):

As above.

Best Editor (Long Form):

My normal rant about Hugo injustice has two pillars. I'll get to one below, but the other is that the UK editorial scene is ridiculously underrepresented on ballots.

Editors are naturally hard to identify, and their contributions are often intangible (at least, to the readers). My hunch is, the great editors are especially difficult to spot because they're busy making sure their authors get the glory. And, a great editor is more than an author factory - he is or she is the the unsung hero of genre - moving it forward, establishing trends, bringing in new readers.

With that in mind, here are a few of my favourites:
•Anna Gregson (Orbit) is the guiding force behind many of my favourite authors, including Simon Morden, Mike Carey and Kate Griffin.
•Tim Holman (Orbit) is behind Jesse Bullington and KJ Parker. Which, right there: awesome.
•Gillian Redfearn (Gollancz), is the person behind, amongst many, many others, Joe Abercrombie and Joe Hill and Patrick Rothfuss and Elspeth Cooper and Chris Wooding and... (the list goes on and on). Her importance to genre - especially the rocket-like growth of contemporary fantasy - goes far beyond just a few names.
•Ruth Tross (Mulholland Books) published Warren Ellis, Joe Lansdale and Austin Grossman this year. Hell, she's brought the Saint back this year. She has amazing, bonkers and utterly trustworthy taste: if Ruth publishes it, I'm pretty I'll love it.

And that's a very, very slim selection. There are dozens more that belong on this ballot. If nothing else, I strongly suggest taking a few minutes to look at the blog of your favourite author's publisher, and reading up on who the people are behind the scenes.

Obviously I'm a little biased towards the excellence of the Hodder & Stoughton team as well, but I can understand if you don't want to take my word for it.

Best Editor (Short Form):

A tricky one, as I don't really read magazines. On the anthology front, however:
•Irene Gallo for Tor.com: I mean, geez. Enough of an obvious pick that I'm even setting aside my shameless regional bias.
•Jonathan Oliver for Solaris: I left Jon off the list above, as I think his contributions are even more prounced here on my ballot here. As well as being Britain's finest Weird and horror editor, Jon's also leading from the front when it comes to finding new and diverse authors. If you pick up one of his collections, you'll find a fantastic, international table of contents that combines 'big names' and new voices.

There's a fantastic small press scene in the UK, with a lot of people that deserve a space on the ballot. I'll also be looking at Ian Whates and Adele Wearing, amongst others, not only for their contributions as publishers of fiction but also as leaders of a lively, cooperative community.

Best Professional Artist:

I could go on for ages, but four that will definitely be on my ballot:
•Zelda Devon
•Joey Hi-Fi
•Sarah Anne Langton
•Vincent Sammy
•Fiona Staples

I'm going to be sad when Joey Hi-Fi makes the ballot this year, as it'll ruin the other half of my  "greatest Hugo injustice" rant. Zelda Devon I discovered through word of mouth, and her work is just... my style. Ditto Fiona Staples, who is astounding. Vincent Sammy covers are now de rigeur in the horror and magazine scene, as they should be.

But the one I want to pitch at you, like, properly pitch, is Sarah Anne Langton.

Sarah is, amongst other things, the in-house talent for Forbidden Planet, the unofficial creative director for at least four small presses, a children's book illustrator, web-site designer and the first-port-of-call for anything visual and geeky.

Which means if you live in the UK and you like science fiction or fantasy, you have encountered her work. It may be one of FP's foxy anniversary bags, a Joss Whedon poster, the logo for a major publisher's genre website, an event poster or a tube pass. Or one of, what I count, twenty covers that she produced in 2013.

Also, Zombie Attack Barbie.

She's the heart of British geekery. Or, at the very least, the skin. (That sounded creepy, sorry.) She works on dozens of projects at once: in stores, on screens, on posters and on covers. And our blossoming (and kind of amazing) science fiction scene simply wouldn't exist without her.

Best Semiprozine:

Strange Horizons.

(Ok, I don't really understand this category, but I remember this site was nominated last year and I like this site. More of my feelings about Strange Horizons here.)

Best Fanzine & Fan Writer:

I'm genuinely not sure about these categories and probably won't be until the last minute. I will, however, be voting on an agenda: picking bloggers and fans. I know professionals are allowed to win Fan Writer, and if folks like Kameron Hurley or N.K. Jemisin win, that's genuinely a great thing.

But I'm personally subscribing to a definition of "fan" that means that the person has no professional relationship to SF/F at all and isn't paid for their writing in any way. Again, I don't begrudge authors for winning, but I need to do some sort of filtering to narrow down to a list of 10 for these two categories.

Similarly, I'm pro-blogger. I read blogs, I write blogs and right now, I think they're the dominant medium for reasonably-intelligent SF/F discussion.

According to my browser history, the two I check most often are The Book Smugglers and Staffer's Book Review. So they're definitely on my ballot. I also think both sites really raised their game this year - the Smugglers seemingly doubled the amount of work they were doing across all online platforms and Justin started what I joking call "investigative journalism". Posts like this are exceptional, and what we need in "fan writing".

Granted, I'm friends with them, but I hope I could say that about many bloggers. I like that they're bloggers that aren't afraid of tackling big issues head on. And, with both sites, I don't actually agree with all (or even that many of) their reviews, but I do like what they add to the discussion and how they add it.

Anyway, I follow a zillionty bloggers on Twitter and there are sixteendozenty sites that I check on a regular basis. So,... yeah. I have 8 spots left and no idea.

Best Fancast:

I don't actually listen to podcasts. (Ok, before I sound rude, I've gotten to go on podcasts as a guest, which is incredibly flattering and I've loved it. And when I do that, I study up ahead of time on their work because that's polite and a reasonable expectation of how I should behave. But I don't consume them naturally and am not really someone that knows anything about this medium so I'm not even going to pretend. THE END.)

If you're not listening to Mahvesh Murad, you should. But she's a professional.

Best Fan Artist:

I'm totally drawing a blank here. I'm not even sure I see fan art? Am I getting the definition wrong? All suggestions welcome.

___________________________________________

*In the interests of transparency, at least part of my ballot in this category will be spent on things published by Jurassic in 2013. We published six novelettes and a lof short stories, and as well as being proud of them, I like them a lot.


http://www.pornokitsch.com/2014/01/my-2014-hugo-ballot.html#more

... a Justin otkriva jos zanimljiviju kontorverzu :



Do the successful get a free pass?




Patrick Rothfuss just completed an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit in the  r/fantasy subreddit. It was a huge event, with over 1500 comments, and something like 25,000 unique visitors. During the event, the following conversation took place:



My response was most closely approximated to shock. I put it on Twitter. It was retweeted. Some female fans decried it. Otherwise, silence. I should not be surprised. Successful people with gobs of social power are often left to their own devices. I cannot in good conscience let this one go.

See, people who are immensely successful, with a massive following and the kind of social power that political candidates would salivate over, are in essence providing a model of behavior for their fans, admirers, and imitators. It's a responsibility whether they want it or not, something former NBA player Charles Barkley parodied in this ad,


http://youtu.be/nMzdAZ3TjCA



I hate to break it to you, Chuck. But you were a role model then and you're still one today. And so is Pat Rothfuss.

By not objecting to the comment on Reddit, Rothfuss functionally condoned the behavior. By responding to it, and participating in the masturbatory exchange that followed, Rothfuss demonstrated a camaraderie with the concept that his female characters exist solely for the benefit of the male gaze. He is normalizing a culture in which men feel entitled to have access to "attractive" women, judge women's worth on their "attractiveness", and not consider women as anything other than objects for view/consumption. I think what bothers me most of all is that the science fiction and fantasy community has done nothing but rail against this kind of mentality for the past several years and yet one of its most successful is perfectly fine participating in it.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that Reddit as a community has an underlying reputation for misogyny. It is widely populated by young men in the 18-35 demographic. What, from a marketing perspective, you might call "the holy grail". Jim Hines, an author heavily committed to gender equality, decided not to participate in a Reddit AMA for exactly this reason. He believed, that by participating on the site he was condoning their behavior. I think Hines took things a little far, but the sentiment is right on. If we want change we must participate in helping it occur. By engaging in this behavior on Reddit, Rothfuss is telling them their past, and future, behavior is fine. I'm of the opinion that allowing this to skate does irreparable damage the message we're trying to send.

If the Reddit question was the first example of Rothfuss doing something questionable as it relates to women, I would keep my mouth shut. But, for the past several years he has published a pin-up calendar for his Worldbuilders charity that depicts female characters from genre novels in alluring poses. He's even got some high profile women authors to contribute their characters to the project. Why is the calendar problematic? Because the man is framed as the viewer, and the woman as the viewed. The calendar is celebrating science fiction and fantasy, and thus framing the woman as a passive recipient in the art excludes them from an active role in the making, creating, and consuming of the genres themselves. Of course, none of that is nearly as egregious at the comment that opened this post, but it points to a pattern of behavior. A pattern which none of the big dogs have deemed appropriate to call out.

I'm aware that many of women involved in the project have argued that the calendar is not inherently sexist. There have been others who disagree, generally people with no power. Natalie Luhrs, editor of Masque Books and blogger at Radish Reviews, recently wrote about the subject. It was met with deafening silence. Katie Baker wrote about the subject for Jezebel in 2011. Baker also highlighted some other odd interactions from Rothfuss. Yet, in all this, we've yet to see any major figure from within the science fiction and fantasy community say anything that would correct what is, at least occasionally, sexist behavior. But, this really doesn't have to do with Patrick Rothfuss. As often as he's wrong, he's been right a lot more. He is overall a force for good. The larger issue though is the implied free pass that someone gets when their profile is such that they become untouchable.

Most of the individuals with real power to provide a mallet of loving correction are people just like Rothfuss. Authors with major platforms who don't mind carving out a social position. The term, mallet of loving correction, is probably familiar. It's a John Scalzi-ism, one of the internet's self proclaimed police force for the good and righteous. Except, when it comes to the successful. When it comes to people who fall under the "don't shit where you eat" axiom, the internet is eerily silent.

The Reddit comment was buried in a place such internet raconteurs may not frequent. It's quite possible despite my Tweeting (I am, after all, not a big deal) none of them saw it. It's also quite possible that they spoke to Rothfuss about it in private. It's also entirely possible that every one is a little nervous about the social power of the immensely successful and it's best not to poke the hive of rather energetic fan bases. I don't know. But, we seem perfectly happy to speak out both sides of our mouth when it comes to people with power. And as far as I'm concerned that is bold faced hypocrisy. Our internet police force cannot only choose to engage when it can't harm their own professional standing. At least it can't if their genuinely interested in change.

Or, maybe they're just pandering by engaging when it's convenient. Tell me I'm wrong. Oh, and donate to Worldbuilders. It's a really great cause.


http://www.staffersbookreview.com/2014/01/author-privilege-do-we-give-them-a-free-pass.html#more-4259

Justin je neumoran  :


Thursday, January 23, the short lists for the Kitschies were announced. Many of the novels on the list were not shelved as science fiction or fantasy, including a Thomas Pynchon novel and one previously short listed for the Man Booker Prize. In other words, the Kitschies awards are full of novels no one in the genre communities have read and many have never heard of. Fantasy author Saladin Ahmed made this statement shortly after the announcement:

Quote
I think the Kitschies, like the WFAs, do great work. I just wish juried awards didn't smack of subtle derision toward deep-genre readers.

— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) January 23, 2014

I'd like to introduce Ahmed to my 2012 self. That version of me wrote:


In recent years, SFF bloggers (myself included) have tried to convince mainstream readers that the things we read have merit.  Awards like The Kitschies seem created, almost exclusively, to serve this purpose.  It seems as if reviews like the ones written by Bourke are geared towards eradicating a certain type of incredibly popular genre fiction and posts like Walter's almost shame (for lack of a better term) readers into reading those things accepted by the mainstream.  I believe we should demand better writing and better storytelling.  Where we differ, is that I believe in demonstrating value in the things that the mainstream rejects, not only those things they embrace.

[I'm going to riff on my own words at this point, inspired by Ahmed's Tweet. Nothing should be construed as me making any assumptions about Ahmed's points. I think by qualifying his statement as he did he groks this very conflict I'm going to describe.]

My opinions in 2012 advocated the notion that juried awards are predisposed to diminish the fiction that people (and by people I mean those who only read a handful of books a year) seek out, consume quickly, and remember with an affection comparable to a good buzz. They also imply that the vast majority of what we consider genre sits within that definition as opposed to say inaccessible, intellectually rigorous, and memorable in a gut wrenching soul shriveling way.

I was right, but also utterly wrong.

Such a position makes the assumption that juried awards by their nature are judging entertaining fiction and finding it unworthy of any merit. Implied in all of this is an accusation that we're trying too hard to be something we're not. Basically, don't forget where you came from. This position is not only grossly unfair to those authors pushing the envelope, but one that, given its head, would be incredibly damaging to the future of genre fiction.

The phrase, don't forget where you come from, is an interesting one. On the surface it supports the idea that success shouldn't change anything. It's often used in reference to athletes in the United States, many of whom are young black men from difficult backgrounds who find themselves overwhelmingly wealthy before they can legally drink a beer. Don't forget where you come from is often levied to remind them that it took a lot of people to help them become millionaires and they ought to remember that in the form of hundred dollar bills.

To me, it's always been an idea that completely devalues the hard work the athlete put it to achieve the pinnacle of their sport. It serves as a nagging suggestion that it could all come tumbling down at any moment and you ought to make sure you have someone to catch you should you fall. What it actually does is retard growth. It shames success. And it certainly isn't restricted to athletes.

Bringing the discussion back to literature, authors who write in speculative terms, but appeal to an audience wider than the "deep-genres", as Ahmed describes them, are just like athletes. They are writing something that dares to be great. It dares to ascend beyond the standard expectations and tropes laid down by the "deep-genres" and we resent them for it. We want to remind them that, if the mainstream rejects them, they better not forget who lifted them up in the first place, without whom they would be just another voice in the crowd of literary fiction (which is even more difficult to succeed in than genre).

When we talk about "genre awards" that recognize these kinds of works and make statements that imply they ignore the "deep-genre" we are functionally making this exact argument. We are demanding that fiction with genre trappings, but tries to be something more, must restrain itself for our own sense of importance. Just like the best friend of an athlete, left behind because of a knee injury or an over appreciation of Oreos, we want our most successful to come back to the block and let it be like old times.

I have some words that describe how that idea makes me feel. They start with F and in that.

I just finished reading a book that was published in 1984, Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin. It neither complex nor funny. It is fun though, in a sort of whimsical no nonsense way, but only because it's inherently nostalgic. It reminded me of a kind of fiction that is mostly dead and gone. Today, we demand more from our fiction, even the deepest-genrest works. We want characters who change, prose that describes more than what is obvious, and structures that make us reconsider our place within our own narrative. And we get it! Even from novels like Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon, whose cover could have been published in 1972, offer deep discussions of faith and aging amid sword fights and wizard battles.

The fact that deep-genre no longer means static characters and wooden dialogue is one-hundred percent a function of recognizing those who excel. It's a function of not holding themselves back to make me feel better about my reading choices. While I may not always agree with the choices juried awards make, I will always (now) defend their importance. Do not change. Keep insisting on the most unique, compelling, and sometimes esoteric work for recognition. Because only by giving our best the freedom to grow and succeed and leave their old skin behind can we hope to lift everyone behind them.

... a Niall se oduševljava (zanosi?    ) idejom o Barkerovom kombeku:


Inspiration, Interrupted: Chiliad: A Meditation by Clive Barker




For more than twenty years, Clive Barker was terrifically prolific. During that period, a year without a new novel by the author seemed—to me at least—incomplete. Sadly, when Barker started work on the Abarat, that was that. Since the first part of the series was released in 2002 we've seen, for various reasons, just two sequels and one short novel in the form of Mister B. Gone.

That may change in 2015 with the belated publication of The Scarlet Gospels: a return to Barker's beginnings by many measures. A sequel, indeed, to one of his very earliest novellas—no less than The Hellbound Heart, which found fame later when it became the basis of the film Hellraiser. Before that, though... this: an amoral meditation on humanity's spiralling history of violence which certainly whet my appetite for more from the man who helped define dark fantasy.

Chiliad, to be sure, is neither a novel nor new. Rather, it is an arrangement of two tales intertwined with a maudlin metatext about an author who has lost his voice, and though its relevance today remains great, both "Men and Sin" and "A Moment at the River's Heart" were previously published in Revelations, the Douglas E. Winter-edited anthology of short stories intended to celebrate the millennium.

That said, the overarching narrative seems particularly prescient here, at this point in Barker's career. We find our unnamed narrator mid mid-life crisis, having forsaken all his old haunts and habits because of a bone-deep despair; a hateful malaise that says, to paraphrase: all he had in his life, and all he had sought to make, was worthless.

But at the river, things are different. At the river, contradictory as it is, something like a vision hits him:


Tales had kept coming even in the chasm, like invitations to parties I could not bear to attend, cracked and disfigured as I was. This one, however, seemed to speak to me more tenderly than the others. This one was not like the stories I had told in my younger days: it was not so certain of itself, nor of its purpose. It and I had much in common. I liked the way it curled upon itself, like the waters in the river, how it offered to fold itself into my grief, and lie there a while if necessary, until I could find a way to speak. I liked its lack of sentiment. I liked its lack of morality.

These lacks become apparent in both "Men and Sin," which describes the journey of an ugly man called Shank to avenge the brutal murder of his partner Agnes, and in "A Moment at the River's Heart," which has a husband set out to identify the killer of his beloved wife, who "had met death by chance, because she had wandered its way."

There are surprises in store in both stories; twists, if you will, but Barker, to his credit, deploys them deftly, and in the interim the two tales relate to and engage with one another in various ways. They and their characters and the violence that befalls them all are joined—at the lip, if you will—by the river. The same river that inspires the framing tale's narrator; the same river that runs through the changed landscape of his paired parables, which—though there is a thousand years between them: a chiliad, in fact—take place in the same location.


In my mind, the river flows both ways. Out toward the sea, toward futurity; to death of course, to revelation, perhaps; perhaps to both. And back the way it came, at least at those places where the currents are most perverse; where vortexes appear, and the waters are like foamy skirts on the hips of the rocks. [...] Don't trust what you hear from shamans, who tell you, with puffy eyes, how fine it is to bathe in the river. They have their mutability to keep them from harm. The rest of us are much more brittle; more likely to bruise and break in the flood. It is, in truth, vile to be in the midst of such a commanding torrent: not to know if you will be carried back to the womb—to the ease of the mother's waters—or out into cold father death. To hope one moment, and be in extremis the next; and not to know, half the time, which of the prospects comforts and which arouses fear.

The thousand years that separate the stories simply melt away in the final summation, revealing two torrid tales about the cruelty of creation; about what it gives, only to take away.


You know what happens next. The parable is perfectly transparent. But I have to tell you; I have to believe that my meaning resides not in the gross motion of the tale, but in the tics of syntax and cadence. If not, every story may be boiled down to a few charmless sentences; a sequence of causalities: this and this and this, then marriage, or death. There must be more to the telling of stories, just as there must be more to our lives.

As above, so below—for there is so much more to these stories. Packaged as a pair as opposed to the extended parentheses they represented in Revelations, both "Men and Sin" and "A Moment at the River's Heart" are given a second lease of life, and indeed death, in this terrific new edition. Hauntingly illustrated by the Mistborn trilogy's cover artist Jon Foster, whilst the author plays his own artful part perfectly, Chiliad is as cold as it is contemplative, and as cerebrally thrilling as it is viscerally chilling.

Welcome back, Clive Barker.

'Coherence': The Best Sci-Fi Movie of 2014 That You Haven't Seen

A Podcast I'm Looking Forward to is Based on The Worst Novel Ever Published: GALAXY 666 by Pel Torro


By John DeNardo





Science fiction fandom seldom agrees on anything, but if there's one thing that unites them it's that the worst novel ever written is Galaxy 666 by Pel Torro (the pseudonym used by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe).

Although mostly lost to the annals of time, we've talked about this historical gem before. What is it about this book that makes it so memorable?

For starters, check out this stellar prose (and by "stellar" I mean "laughable"):


There were pinkish streaks among the rock, and it seemed that some of the chromatic tint from the atmosphere owed its origin to these. There were a number of white veins in the rock, which bore some kind of resemblance to marble, but the majority of it was grey. It gave an over-all impression of greyness streaked with pink and white, rather than an over-all impression of whiteness tinged with grey and pink, or an over-all impression of pink streaked with grey and white.
Greyness was the dominant background shade; neither black nor white, but something midway between the two. It was a light rather than a dark grey, yet could never have been so light that it might be mistaken for an off white.

..and...


The things were odd, weird, grotesque. There was something horribly uncustomary and unwonted about them. There were completely unfamiliar. Their appearance was outlandish and extraordinary. There was something quite phenomenal about them. They were supernormal; they were unparalleled; they were unexampled. The shape of the aliens was singular in every sense. They were curious, odd, queer, peculiar and fantastic, and yet when every adjective had been used on them, when every preternatural epithet had been applied to their aberrant and freakish appearance, when everything that could be said about such eccentric, exceptional, anomalous creatures had been said, they still remained indescribable in any concrete terms.



Ok, sure...the book is a product of its time (1963), written in an era of high-speed pulp-science fiction production. But who really cares when it's stuffed full of gold like that?

What's even more surprising than the book's original publication is that it was reprinted several times. One of those reprints sported the Star Trek Enterprise ripoff cover you see in the middle image above.

Is this book so bad that's it's worth paying or that $40 for a copy? I wouldn't pay that much even if they were someone else's dollars. (I did luck out and find it used for about $2 — hilarity ensued.)

Thankfully, The wonder that is Galaxy 666 is not yet destined to be forgotten. Not only has Gateway converted this to eBook late last year, but there will now be a podcast based on it.

The Galaxy 666 Podcast is set to premier on iTunes, Tumblr and WordPress Halloween night 2014. I can think of nothing more scary. And I can't wait.