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The Best Nonfiction of 2014–Collected Lists

knjige za mart 2015:




FLEX: Distilled magic in crystal form. The most dangerous drug in the world. Snort it, and you can create incredible coincidences to live the life of your dreams.

FLUX: The backlash from snorting Flex. The universe hates magic and tries to rebalance the odds; maybe you survive the horrendous accidents the Flex inflicts, maybe you don't.

PAUL TSABO: The obsessed bureaucromancer who's turned paperwork into a magical Beast that can rewrite rental agreements, conjure rented cars from nowhere, track down anyone who's ever filled out a form.





In a world where diplomacy has become celebrity, a young ambassador survives an assassination attempt and must join with an undercover paparazzo in a race to save her life, spin the story, and secure the future of her young country in this near-future political thriller from the acclaimed author of Mechanique and The Girls at Kingfisher Club.

When Suyana, Face of the United Amazonia Rainforest Confederation, is secretly meeting Ethan of the United States for a date that can solidify a relationship for the struggling UARC, the last thing she expected was an assassination attempt. Daniel, a teen runaway turned paparazzi out for his big break, witnesses the first shot hit Suyana, and before he can think about it, he jumps into the fray, telling himself it's not altruism, it's the scoop. Now Suyana and Daniel are on the run—and if they don't keep one step ahead, they'll lose it all.

The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But, at least, the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. Axl and Beatrice, a couple of elderly Britons, decide that now is the time, finally, for them to set off across this troubled land of mist and rain to find the son they have not seen for years, the son they can scarcely remember. They know they will face many hazards—some strange and otherworldly—but they cannot foresee how their journey will reveal to them the dark and forgotten corners of their love for each other. Nor can they foresee that they will be joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and a knight—each of them, like Axl and Beatrice, lost in some way to his own past, but drawn inexorably toward the comfort, and the burden, of the fullness of a life's memories.

Sometimes savage, sometimes mysterious, always intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in a decade tells a luminous story about the act of forgetting and the power of memory, a resonant tale of love, vengeance, and war.

The Explosive Conclusion to Nexus and Crux

Global unrest spreads through the US, China, and beyond. Secrets and lies set off shockwaves of anger, rippling from mind to mind. Riot police battle neurally-linked protestors. Armies are mobilized. Political orders fall. Nexus-driven revolution is in here.

Against this backdrop, a new breed of post-human children are growing into their powers. And a once-dead scientist, driven mad by her torture, is closing in on her plans to seize planet's electronic systems, and re-forge everything in her image.

A new Apex species is here. The world will never be the same.




A novel for our times, from the Booker-shortlisted 'master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting new territories' (Observer).
     Meet U. -- a talented and uneasy figure currently pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London. His employers advise everyone from big businesses to governments, and, to this end, expect their 'corporate anthropologist' to help decode and manipulate the world around them -- all the more so now that a giant, epoch-defining project is in the offing.
     Instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions, zombie parades. Is there, U. wonders, a secret logic holding all these images together -- a codex that, once cracked, will unlock the master-meaning of our age? Might it have something to do with South Pacific Cargo Cults, or the dead parachutists in the news? Perhaps; perhaps not.
     As U. oscillates between the visionary and the vague, brilliance and bullshit, Satin Island emerges, an impassioned and exquisite novel for our disjointed times.



Devoted readers of Lady Trent's earlier memoirs, A Natural History of Dragons and The Tropic of Serpents, may believe themselves already acquainted with the particulars of her historic voyage aboard the Royal Survey Ship Basilisk, but the true story of that illuminating, harrowing, and scandalous journey has never been revealed--until now.


Six years after her perilous exploits in Eriga, Isabella embarks on her most ambitious expedition yet: a two-year trip around the world to study all manner of dragons in every place they might be found. From feathered serpents sunning themselves in the ruins of a fallen civilization to the mighty sea serpents of the tropics, these creatures are a source of both endless fascination and frequent peril. Accompanying her is not only her young son, Jake, but a chivalrous foreign archaeologist whose interests converge with Isabella's in ways both professional and personal.


Science is, of course, the primary objective of the voyage, but Isabella's life is rarely so simple. She must cope with storms, shipwrecks, intrigue, and warfare, even as she makes a discovery that offers a revolutionary new insight into the ancient history of dragons.




Publication Date: March 11, 2015

The Thyme Fiend by Jeffrey Ford is a dark fantasy novelette about a young man who can only prevent seeing visions by eating or smoking thyme. When he finds the skeleton of a missing man the skeleton begins to haunt him. What does it want?




The Man with the Compound Eyes: A Novel Paperback  – March 3, 2015

When a tsunami sends a massive island made of trash crashing into the coast of Taiwan, two very different people—an outcast from a mythical country and a woman on the verge of suicide—are united in ways they never could have imagined. Intertwined with the story of their burgeoning friendship are the lives of others affected by the tsunami, from environmentalists to Taiwan's indigenous peoples—and, of course, the mysterious man with the compound eyes. A work of lyrical beauty that combines fantasy, reality, and dystopian environmental saga, here is the English-language debut of a new and exciting award-winning voice from Taiwan.

I find that Raj Kamal Jha's prose is very hard to describe and I've already started writing this review couple of times without any success worth mentioning. The problem lies with the fact that Jha's novels often feel like poetry and I never know how to adequately describe the feelings that they tend to stir up. "She Will Build Him a City" is built as a cycle of connected stories with Delhi as their center. Jha's Delhi is a dangerous and frightening place that can eat you alive, one which at times becomes almost like an evil caricature of itself. Similarly to Jha who works in the city, each of his characters is full of stories and lifes its live despite all the chaos and menace in the air. But not everything is doom and gloom. There's hope if you want to find it - all those immigrants coming to build their lives out of nothing. Some of them will even succeed in reaching their dreams. Similarly to Delhi, "She Will Build Him a City" is a palimpsest with layer upon layer of stories to discover.

Stories themselves revolve around characters known only as Woman, Man and Child who are caught in everyday situations built around social tensions in this vibrant and ever changing community. Wealthy Man looks from the safety of his car as police is using water cannons on the protesters and dreams of murder while the Woman spends time telling tales of the past to her daughter. Child, on the other hand, comes from different side of the spectrum and is an orphan abandoned by its mother on the doorsteps of the orphanage. As the story unfolds, the three characters become connected by fourth and the final strand of the tale comes into view. Ultimately, its really not that important as by then you'll be perfectly aware of the city and its constant evolution. No matter what happens with our protagonists the city will go on with its endless onslaught of death, violence and occasional laughter.

Raj Kamal Jha's "She Will Build Him a City" is also notable for breaking the traditions of a classic Indian novel. Ruminations about the past are almost nonexistent and Jha is more willing to embrace the future however chaotic is might seem. More importantly, it also beckons full attention from its reader. Superficial glance will hardly do it justice because just as every metropolis only reveals its true colours when you stray off the tourist trail, "She Will Build Him a City" works best when you fully embrace and understand its symbolism and concepts. "She Will Build Him a City" is raw novel about Modern India and, equally as its subject, is irresistibly alluring.

http://upcoming4.me/news/book-news/review-she-will-build-him-a-city-by-raj-kamal-jha

Glaze by Kim Curran

What happens when the social network goes – literally – inside your brain? Facebook is even deader to young people in Glaze than it is in real life. And why wouldn't it be? They have Glaze, a network so pervasive that there are things you simply can't do without it.

Progressive? Curran's young people resonate: they have problems, feelings, moral ambiguity, and they even are on the cusp of recognising that the stupid adults in their lives have complex motivations as well.

Intelligent? The book is mainly about a technology going pervasive – what if you could, today, vote on Facebook? What are the feelings of the haves and have-nots? The ramifications – while sometimes hyped up – are logical and often terrifying.

Entertaining? Explosions. A race against time. Power-mad corporations. All the fun of a cyberpunk romp without tedium. Curran is a master of sticking her characters in a crucible and boiling them while they try to get out of it.




Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge

Hardinge is rapidly becoming one of my favourite writers, constantly creating worlds that any author with a gram of commercial sense would milk down over 3-13 books. Not Frances, though. Under that hat is a clockwork brain tended by faeries who spin webs from the finest – and strongest – spider silk. This is a story of the beginning of film, the jazz age in Britain – and what it means to really make a jazz record worth listening to – and the clash of modernity. It could go so wrong, but it is so very right.

Progressive: Brickwork and tea shops, the way that children sometimes know more, jazz and modernity, and films that come alive. Oh my yes.

Intelligent: There are no winners and losers – progress is a fact of the modern world, but what there is how that affects family and relationships in a subtle way.

Entertaining: Car chases and hidden villages, idiosyncratic people living through their anachronisms, living, breathing jazz drinkser all stuck together with a tale of love lost. Hell yes

Glen Mehn is director of The Kitschies and also served as one of this year's judges. You can thank him (or heckle him) at @gmehn and, of course, @thekitschies.
http://www.pornokitsch.com/2015/02/friday-five-5-books-that-cant-be-kitschies-finalists.html#more

     I tako, eto, naletim prošle godine u jednom epub-dampu na osam romana Rossa MacDonalda, to njegov Lew Archer serijal. Jadac torenta, to da knjigu koju tražite uglavnom dobijete u paketu sa još par stotina naslova...  i naravno, znatiželja tu redovito pobedi – kao, ajde samo da gvirnem čega tu sve ima – i par sati kasnije završite sa najmanje dvadesetak knjiga koje ste odavno pročitali, malo ili skoro nikad o njima razmišljali, ali sad kad ih vidite na listi, odmah shvatite da imaju sentimentalnu vrednost zbog koje bi bilo skoro pa bogohulno šutnuti ih u risajkl bin. Doba obilja, puno iskušenja.

Tako završim u obnavljaju MacDonaldovog opusa, nešto u originalu a nešto malo i u prevodu (www.vdt.hr), i zateknem se kako samo potvrđujem svoju davnašnju listu favorita... ništa se značajno nije promenilo u mom doživljaju, sva remek-dela su mi i dalje to ostala, a za one malo slabije romane sam malko jasnije utvrdila zašto me se tako doimaju: naime, svi Rossovi romani su podjednako odlično napisani, ali neki od njih naprosto imaju meni impresivniji splet okolnosti zapleta ili, to još češće, draže mi protagoniste. Recimo, scena kad devojka privija na grudi umiruću pticu, natopljenu naftom koja se izlila iz tankera čiji je vlasnik upravo njena prebogata porodica. Ili  kad Aleks Kinkejd unajmljuje Arčera da mu pronađe ženu koja je nestala nepun dan nakon venčanja, dok ga svi ubeđuju kako je naprosto pobegla jer niko normalan njega ne može da voli... eto, takvi momenti meni odnesu prevagu kod MacDonalda, jer on se na to i fokusira - na porodične drame i ljudske tragedije, na nepravde koje se najčešće i najjače okome na najnedužnije, naprosto zato što su oni uvek i najranjiviji. MacDonald budi protektivne instinkte, razgoljavajući svet kao surov i bezosećajan: naravno, u samom tom procesu ga prokazuje kao korumpiran i iskvaren, da bi se u epilogu posvetio njegovom obnavljanju i uspostavljanju. Ali to ne znači da svi romani završravaju hepiendom, nego naprosto završavaju uspostavljanjem prava, ako već ne i same pravičnosti. MacDonald je nepokolebljivo dobrostiv i moralan, pa otud i nudi nepokolebljivu nadu da se svi zločini mogu i moraju sanirati, jer je bazična ljudska egzistencija sinonimna sa pravdom i brigom za svog bližnjega. U MacDonaldovom svetonazoru, zlo je anomalija koju treba ispravno prepoznati i sa njom se adekvatno razračunati, da bi svet nastavio da postoji u svom najzdravijem obličju. Kod MacDonalda zlo može biti i moćno, i zavodljivo, pa čak i impresivno, ali nikada nije idelizovano, nikada vam nije ponuđeno kao privlačno. MacDonaldov svetonazor je jednako neuzdrman u svim njegovim romanima, otud je i Archer jednako pouzdan i nedvosmislen – gluv za zavodljive pesme sirena, slep za obilja nepravično stečenog bogatstva, indiferentan ka iskušenjima strasti i slasti kakvu uglavnom nemoralna egzistencija obećava. Ukratko, Archer je stena na kojoj se gradi karakter.

Tu negde usput, ima još jedna stvar koju sam preko tog opusa utvrdila - ja zapravo ne nalazim serijale odbojnima, naprotiv, prilično mi prijaju. Ali to samo u krimićima.    Ne znam zašto, ali eto, tako je: ne mogu da zamislim sebe kako čitam serijal od 10 knjiga u cugu, to čak ni najbolji SF serijal (kad bih ja za takav znala). No eto, odmah posle Arčera zateknem se kako mi treba novi krimi serijal, ali ovaj put ne obnavljanje oldiz-gudiz serijala, nego da to bude nešto baš novo.

Izbor je pao na Mickey Hallera, to uglavnom zbog odličnog filma The Linkoln Lawyer.






Uzgred budi rečeno, film je perfektna ekranizacija predloška, doslovna i fokusirana obrada prilično zgusnutog materijala, garnirana odličnim saundtrakom koji filmu daje kul dimenziju kakva romanu ipak nedostaje. Ali svejedno, odličan je zaplet Connelly isporučio, i vrlo intrigantnog protagonistu, koji je zapravo sušta suprotnost MacDonaldovom heroju.

Kao prvo, Mick Haller je advokat. Kao drugo, Mick je vičan ulici i njenim pravilima, otud se i udobnije oseća kad zastupa krivog klijenta, negoli onog nedužnog. Zapravo, nedužan klijent je Mickova noćna mora, jer baš kako mu je otac rekao – a otac mu je isto tako bio slavni advokat koji je zastupao i uspešno odbranio Al Kaponea bradom – nema nišeg strašnijeg od nedužnog klijenta, jer ako uprskaš odbranu i on zbog toga završi u zatvoru, grižnja savesti ima da te otera u grob. Otud je Mick daleko srećniji kad zastupa krive klijente, pa makar ga to koštalo i braka sa predivnom ženom koja je inače javni tužilac, pa otud i nije u stanju da živi sa čovekom dok on iz zatvora izvlači ološ koji je ona uz teške muke stavila iza rešetaka.

Ali onda Mick naiđe na veoma bogatog mladog čoveka koji tvrdi da je nevin. Mickova pohlepa za parama navodi ga da prihvati odbranu, a sama ideja da mu je klijent nedužan tera ga da se te odbrane prihvati savesnije nego inače. No uskoro se sve okolnosti radikalno menjaju i Mick suočava najgoru od svih mogućnosti – da je već odavno stekao ogroman razlog za grižnju savesti, samo ga u svom neznanju nije uspeo da na vreme prepozna.

Dobro napisan krimić, odličan lik i duboka moralna drama – svi neophodni sastojci za  uživanje u krimiću. Nedavno je izašao peti u nizu, ali naravno, treba se ići po redu, tako da sleduje The Brass Verdict.  4/5

Jesi li primetila koliko su Mekdonaldovi romani kasapljeni u Tragu? Kakva je to šteta!

Ja sam tek par pročitao u originalu i upoređivao prevode. Čitavi pasusi su izostavljani, izbacivano je ono što se prevodicu činilo teškim, ili su naprosto ukalupljavani u zahtevani broj stranica. Čitao sam jednu kritičku studiju Mekdonaldovih romana i pisac toga ukazuje na prelepo poklapanje opisa prirode sa Arčerovim osećanjima, ali kad sam pokušao da to pronađem u svom primerku Traga, tog pasusa naprosto nema.


Ono što mene oduševljava kod njegovih najboljih romana je to što su vrlo često uzroci problema duboko u prošlosti i slojevi prljavštine se polako ljušte i otpadaju, ostavljajući zlo ogoljeno i, kao što kažeš, uvek izloženo pravdi. Takođe, dobro si primetila, kod njega nikada složenost zapleta ne dovodi do lošijeg rezultata već upravo suprotno.

Više slutim negoli tačno prepoznajem dimenzije kasapljenja u Tragu, jer ja sam kao tinejdžer imala poprilično slabe standarde po pitanju jezika...    ali definitivno znam da jesu kasapljeni, pošto mi se nekoliko puta desilo da tek na polovini romana prepoznam da sam ga zapravo čitala. Isto tako, onih nekoliko novijih prevoda koje sam overila nisam dovršila nego se eventualno vratila na original. Ovaj put ne zbog kasapljenja, nego naprosto, ton u prevodima mi nikako nije odgovarao.

     Ovu knjigu sam htela da zgrabim još odmah po izlasku, ali logistika mi tu najcrnje podbacila tako da sam se nje dokopala tek ove godine. Naravno, mi koji smo imali tu sreću da praktično odrastemo uz Zelaznija dočekujemo ovakva štiva kao obavezno čitanje, ali stvarno jeste prijatno čitati pedantne analize dela koja ste pomalo uzeli zdravo za gotovo, kako se to već ponekad radi sa žanrom. Otud čitanje ove knjige oživljava sve davnašnje konverzacije među nekim ljudima zvonkog glasa i blistavih očiju, jer hoće žanr da tako označi svoje ljubitelje.    Danas kao da toga više nema, ili bar nema u negdašnjim količinama, pa se otud i ovakav pomalo jednostrani surogat takvih konverzacija daleko više ceni.

Za razliku od analiza koje se trude da obuhvate svu širinu žanra i njegove poetike, ova kao da se odlučila na suprotno: samo jedan pisac, i aspekt unutar njegovog opusa. Ali Zelazni je pisac čiji opus sa lakoćom može da iznese tako intenzivan fokus na aspekt koji se poput zlatne žice provlači kroz svu njegovu prozu. Tokom niza godina čitanja pojedinačnih dela ta žica nekako bude slabije vidljiva onima koji  ne prilaze autoru metodično i sistematski, pa otud i ovakve studije umeju neretko da iznenade nekim svojim zaključcima. Vrlo energičan osećaj, kad shvatite koliko vam je toga promaklo u tkanju za koje ste smatrali da vam je dobro poznato.

Doduše, ja nisam čitala Amber nakon prvog naslova, ali većinu ostalog jesam, tako da glavnina ove temeljite analize nije bila sasvim izgubljena na ovom konkretno pomalo zaboravljivom ljubitelju Zelaznija. U nekoj meri smatram da jesam bila isuviše nezrela kad sam čitala neke njegove kompleksnije romane, ali opet, drago mi je što sam ih čitala upravo tada, jer Zelazni jeste od onih impresivnih autora koji najpunije dosegnu čoveka upravo u formativnim godinama. Zauzvrat, sad kad jesam (valjda, donekle ) spremnija za ozbiljnije čitanje Zelznija, taman je na vreme došla je ova knjiga, da me ubedi kako neke romane naprosto moram još jednom da pročitam: Zovem se Konrad i Onaj koji oblikuje su tu svakako na vrhu liste, pošto Gospodara svetlosti ionako poslovično iznova overim bar jednom u deceniji.

Odlična knjiga, jezgrovito i pedantno napisana, lako navodi da joj naklonost uzvratite: nezaobilazan naslov za sve ljubitelje Zelaznija i perfektan sagovornik kakvog se danas sve ređe nalazi u formatu krvi i mesa.  5/5

Hope City, Antarctica. The southernmost city in the world, with only a glass dome and a faltering infrastructure to protect its citizens from the freezing, ceaseless winds of the Antarctic wilderness. Within this bell jar four people–some human, some not–will shape the future of the city forever:

Eliana Gomez, a female PI looking for a way to the mainland.

Diego Amitrano, the right-hand man to the gangster who controls the city's food come winter.

Marianella Luna, an aristocrat with a dangerous secret.

Sofia, an android who has begun to evolve.

But the city is evolving too, and in the heart of the perilous Antarctic winter, faction will clash, dreams will shatter, and that frozen metropolis just might boil over...


+
When Lumen Fowler looks back on her childhood, she wouldn't have guessed she would become a kind suburban wife, a devoted mother. In fact, she never thought she would escape her small and peculiar hometown. When We Were Animals is Lumen's confessional: as a well-behaved and over-achieving teenager, she fell beneath the sway of her community's darkest, strangest secret. For one year, beginning at puberty, every resident "breaches" during the full moon. On these nights, adolescents run wild, destroying everything in their path.


Lumen resists. Promising her father she will never breach, she investigates the mystery of her community's traditions and the stories erased from the town record. But the more we learn about the town's past, the more we realize that Lumen's memories are harboring secrets of their own.


A gothic coming-of-age tale for modern times, When We Were Animals is a dark, provocative journey into the American heartland.



Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.



Now, we approach our destination.

iiiii... prva impresivna romančuga ovogodišnjeg uroda! 




Tema odlična i daleko od izraubovane (post-prvi kontakt), a pristup donekle sličan Axisu, pa još uz primese čisto Klarkovske podozrivosti prema Rimljanima što poklone nose. Šta drugo reći doli – milina! 

Povrh svega, McAuley je ovaj roman izokola izgradio u nekoliko svojih kratkih priča koje se mogu naći u raznim antologijama, tako da je zahvalan za rivjuisanje. Znači, sve što u ovom postu sledi nije suštinski spojler, jer neću ni reči ovde da zucnem o samom zapletu i protagonistima uopšte, pošto to zaista spada sasvim u domen ukusa – nekome će se dopadne, nekome ne.  Meni se dopalo, veoma, ali sam svet romana, dakle post-prvi kontakt pozadina, mi se dopada daleko više.


(Ko nije upoznat sa pričama iz Jackaroo kolekcije, može da overi jednu od njih onlajn ovde: Crimes and Glory


daklem, Jackaroo su nas pronašli, i to u vreme koje je upravo ovo današnje, sa sve fejsbuk nam i vikipedija momentima.   

Jackaroo su izluđujuće puni takta i ljubaznosti, ekstremno diplomatično raspoloženi vanzemaljci koji se na zemlji pojavljuju niotkuda, u sasvim ljudski izgledajućim avatarima. Isto tako, Jackaroo sa sobom vode i primerke nekih drugih ET vrsta, također zakamuflirane po pitanju izgleda i porekla. I pored njihove sveprisutnosti, niko zapravo ne zna ko su Jackaroo, ni odakle su originalno, ni kako zapravo izgledaju. Jackaroo žele da svoj uticaj na ljude svedu na neophodni minimum.

Što se darova tiče, Jackaroo nude sijaset tehnoloških i inih čuda, od kojih su verovatno tu najvažniji 15 relativno teraformisanih planeta i intergalaktički brodovi koji do njih stižu kroz kosmičke crvotočine. Jackaroo u znak dobro volje nude zemljanima trajni boravak na tim planetama, a jedini uslov je da ne bude povlaštenih što se odlaska tiče: otud UN koordinira i nadgleda besplatnu lutriju u svakoj zemlji sveta, koja srećnim dobitnicima nudi na poklon odlazak na jednu od raspoloživih planeta. Jackaroo ne kriju da je to proces kojim se dočekala svaka novootkrivena inteligentna vrsta, i da su i sami Jackaroo svojedobno prošli kroz istu tu dobrodošlicu. Ali naravno, pri tom diplomatski prećutkuju ko je to njih otkrio i, uopšte, ko je tu bio prvi, ko je napravio taj projekat sa 15 planeta, ko je tu najzaslužniji da ponese titulu 'drevne inteligencije', plus ono najvažnije – gde su oni sada.

I kao što se da pretpostaviti, tih 15 planeta su u svojoj istoriji omogućile boravak nebrojenim vrstama inteligentnog života, a one su za sobom ostavile raznorazne materijalne tragove, to od biomehaničkih živuljki koje su postale neka vrst nativnog života na tim planetama, pa sve do tehnoloških artefakata za koje se ne zna ni da li su živi ili neživi, a kamoli šta zapravo rade i čemu zapravo služe.

E sad, kad imate tako konceptiran svet, dobra priča dalje nastaje sama: lutrija obezbeđuje da na planete stignu ljudi doslovno svakojaki, ali onih valjanih ima u stravično, stravično malom procentu; biomašine su u suštini mirna i bezazlena stvorenja koja bi samo da pasu travuljke i razmnožavaju se u tišini, ali ljudi ne bi bili ljudi kad ne bi saznali da krv i meso biomašina ima uvelike halucinogena svojstva; tehnološki artefakti su veoma retki i rasuti po planeti, što ljudima uglavnom znači da su basnoslovno skupi i kao suveniri, kamoli kao oružje.

I u svom tom obilju naravno da ubedljivo pobeđuje haos - dokaz da čovek kao vrsta ima dva prepoznatljiva talenta: prvi je urođeni poriv da uništi sve čega se dohvati, a drugi je nesavladiva želja da sanira posledice prvog. Naravno, 99,99% populacije ispoljava samo i isključivo prvi talenat, otud McAuleyu adekvatna pozornica za dramu.

Ovom romanu je već najavljen nastavak (Into Everywhere), ali ako je uzeti za primer The Quiet War, McAuley ne razvlači zaplete van jednog naslova, tako da će verovatno biti u pitanju nekakav labavi serijal kojeg povezuje samo pozadina univerza u kom se radnja odvija. Što se ovog zapleta tiče, zaokružen je potpuno, iako ostavlja velik i dobro osmišljen prostor da se ponovo vidimo sa nekim od ovih likova.

Bude li zaista tako, biće to ponovni susret starih poznanika, a tome se svako od nas raduje, ionako. 5/5 

This is a monumental collection of thirty-eight Gregory Benford stories, including some of the best science fiction of the last fifty years, chosen from the more than two hundred he has published to date:

At the end of the 1960s, Benford expanded his novella "Deeper than the Darkness," to become his first novel of the same title in 1970. He hit his stride in the 1970s, making his reputation with stories such as "Doing Lennon" and "In Alien Flesh." By the end of that decade he had written In the Ocean of Night, the first of his impressive Galactic Center novels. He entered the 1980s a Nebula Award-winner for his classic novel, Timescape. That decade continued with the impressive stories "Relativistic Effects" and "Exposures," the novel, Against Infinity, and ended with "Matters End" and "Mozart on Morphine."

By the middle of the 1980s he had also taken the leadership position of spokesman for hard science fiction, and contended with the rising cyberpunk reformers of hard SF. He has remained the most articulate defender of science's role in science fiction to this day, and perhaps the most literate and literary of its writers. In the 1990s, by now an acknowledged master of hard science fiction, he became more playful in some works, in particular stories such as "Centigrade 233," a riff on Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451, and "Zoomers," a dot-com bubble superman fantasia, while still holding to the center with the majority of his writing, completing his long series of Galactic Center novels and even writing in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe.

That playful thread became central after the turn of the millennium, with shorter satirical pieces originally published in Nature, such as "Applied Mathematical Theology" and "Reasons Not to Publish." But he still wrote the innovative stories "Bow Shock," "Mercies," and "The Sigma Structure Symphony" and in the second decade of the new century embarked on a major collaboration with Larry Niven, in the novels The Bowl of Heaven and Shipstar.

We have here a series of snapshots of a moving target, a writer who has been growing and changing for decades, extending his art, and the art of science fiction writing. Benford continues building himself challenging structures to write in with two story series in progress that may emerge as major works. He's not slowing down. But for the record we now have this book, a permanent chronicle of a major career. Six decades so far.

And here's the table of contents...

1."Nobody Lives on Burton Street" (1970)
2."Doing Lennon" (1975)
3."White Creatures" (1975)
4."In Alien Flesh" (1978)
5."Redeemer" (1979)
6."Dark Sanctuary" (1979)
7."Time Shards" (1979)
8."Exposures" (1981)
9."Relativistic Effects" (1982)
10."Of Space/Time and the River" (1985)
11."Time's Rub" (1985)
12."Freezeframe" (1986)
13."Proselytes" (1988)
14."Matter's End" (1989)
15."Mozart on Morphine" (1989)
16."Centigrade 233″ (1990)
17."World Vast, World Various" (1992)
18."In the Dark Backward" (1993)
19."A Desperate Calculus" (1995)
20."Zoomers" (1996)
21."The Voice" (1997)
22."Slow Symphonies of Mass and Time" (1998)
23."A Dance to Strange Musics" (1998)
24."Anomalies" (2001)
25."Comes The Evolution" (2001)
26."Twenty-Two Centimeters" (2004)
27."A Life with a Semisent" (2005)
28."Applied Mathematical Theology" (2006)
29."Bow Shock" (2006)
30."Reasons Not to Publish" (2007)
31."The Champagne Award" (2008)
32."Penumbra" (2010)
33."Gravity's Whispers" (2010)
34."Mercies" (2011)
35."Grace Immaculate" (2011)
36."Eagle" (2011)
37."The Sigma Structure Symphony" (2012)
38."Backscatter" (2013)


http://subterraneanpress.com/store/product_detail/the_best_of_gregory_benford

Tužno. Samo par priča  je prevedeno...

Pa, to se uvek može ispraviti... 

nego:


5 Brilliant Board Games Based on SF/F Books



The Dune board game is as old as I am and I think it went out of print around the time I left kindergarten. So if you want to try this one out, be prepared to scour a lot of flea markets or to pay a hefty sum on the internet. Or you could settle for the recent rethemed version, Rex: Last Days of an Empire. But then you'd miss out on one of the game's greatest strengths: the masterful way it blends its game mechanisms with Frank Herbert's world.

On a large map of Arrakis, you will order your troops around to collect the precious Spice and take control of strongholds, all the while avoiding sandstorms and sandworms. Inevitably, fights ensue. The rules are simple but its your unique faction powers that add spice (see what I did there?) to the game. The Harkonnens are extra treacherous, the Fremen know all the ins and outs of the planet, the Bene Gesserit can use The Voice on you, and so on.

In the end, it's the player who made the most opportune alliances and manipulated his fellow gamers best, who wins. Plans within plans within plans...



By my last count, there are about 3.7 gazillion LotR board games but this is one of the more interesting ones. It's a "Living Card Game" which means that new cards come out on a monthly schedule, providing an ever growing card pool from which you can build decks to play with your friends. But unlike Collectible Card Games like Magic the Gathering, you buy all the new cards in one pack and don't have to chase rare cards in randomized boosters. Of course, you can also just stick with the base set which is already a bunch of fun.

Another big difference between this game and its brethren is that it's a cooperative game. So when you roll up with your Gimli & Legolas bromance deck and your friend whips out his hobbit deck, your parties will actually go on a quest together, fighting Sauron's minions instead of duking it out between yourselves.

The game has been going for a long time already and so it covers a lot of Middle Earth, even some of its more obscure nooks and crannies, all illustrated with beautiful card art. And they've even introduced some new characters, most notably some more women, as these are rather lacking in the books.

If you like the idea of Living Card Games but can't be bothered with all this hippie cooperative nonsense, there's also a Living Card Game based on A Game of Thrones which is far less friendly.



Another game with amazing artwork. Lord Vetinari has disappeared and everybody's vying for power in Ankh-Morpork. But your identity is hidden from the other players. Will you be one of the Lords, trying to control enough of the city, or Chrysoprase, trying to get rich in the chaos, or maybe poor Sam Vimes who just wants to see game end without too much destruction?

Gameplay is as simple as playing a card and drawing card, but as your henchmen occupy parts of the city, you'll gain extra income and abilities. And then there's all the card effects, each one a clever reference to the Discworld books (just don't play too many wizards because they cause nothing but chaos and grief).

If you're willing to track it down, there's a limited edition which avoids any mention of the number between seven and nine.



In a deck building game like this, each player has his own deck of cards which starts off pretty crappy. In this case, you get Maria Hill and some non-descript S.H.I.E.L.D agents. But during the game, you will recruit superhero cards to your deck and watch your team grow in strength. Play well and your team will rival the Avengers, play badly and it'll be like watching an episode of Heroes.

At the start of each game you'll combine an evil mastermind with a master scheme, recreating great conflicts from Marvel's history. Maybe the Red Skull is trying to unleash the power of the Cosmic Cube, or maybe Stryfe has kidnapped Baby Hope (if he's not too busy unleashing the Legacy Virus). Sometimes the effect might be more comical as when you're trying to stop Galactus from robbing a bank while he's eating up the planet. In the end, the player who defeated the most villains will win.

There are plenty of clever thematic touches. Some Hulk cards give everybody a wound (a useless card which takes up space in your deck) while other Hulk cards let you get rid of a wound for extra attack strength. Doesn't that perfectly capture the Hulk? Or there's Daredevil, whose cards reward you for knowing the top card of your deck (and who lets you put cards there, to help you along).

If your sympathies have always been with the villains, no worries, there's also a Legendary: Villains game where you can beat up Spider-Man and Cyclops.



Okay, to be honest, this game isn't as good as the previous four games. Those are perfectly playable with friends who are unfamiliar with the source material. This one, on the other hand, is strictly for the fans. BUT IT'S A BOARD GAME BASED ON GORMENGHAST! If you're anything like me, that's more than enough reason to make you run out and buy the game.

It plays as a reverse Cluedo. You take on the roles of kitchen boys, trying to influence and manipulate the people of Gormenghast to your benefit. Yes, everybody's a Steerpike. You will have secret mission cards telling you which characters and objects you need to get to certain places. For instance, send MR FLAY to the SILENT HALLS to search for MICE in your plot to further Lord Groan's delusions of being the Great Owl.

The game is clearly a labour of love. The character artwork is wonderful and there are quotes everywhere. There's even a Book of Ritual which you'll have to consult throughout the game in a random manner, not that different really from its arcane use in the books.

In the realms of fantasy, the battlefield is where heroism comes alive, magic is unleashed, and legends are made and unmade. From the War of the Ring, Tolkien's epic battle of good versus evil, to The Battle of the Blackwater, George R.R. Martin's grim portrait of the horror and futility of war, these fantastical conflicts reflect our highest hopes and darkest fears, bringing us mesmerizing visions of silver spears shining in the sun and vast hordes of savage beasts who threaten to destroy all that we hold dear.

Now acclaimed editor John Joseph Adams is sounding the battle cry and sixteen of today's top authors are reporting for duty, spinning never-before-published, spellbinding tales of military fantasy, including a Black Company story from Glen Cook, a Paksenarrion story from Elizabeth Moon, and a Shadow Ops story by Myke Cole. Within these pages you'll also find World War I trenches cloaked in poison gas and sorcery, modern day elite special forces battling hosts of the damned, and steampunk soldiers fighting for their lives in a world torn apart by powers that defy imagination.

Featuring both grizzled veterans and fresh young recruits alike, including Tanya Huff, Simon R. Green, Carrie Vaughn, Jonathan Maberry, and Seanan McGuire, Operation Arcana is a must for any military buff or fantasy fan.

You'll never look at war the same way again.




In this "mission debrief" Yoon Ha Lee talks to Sandra M. Odell about his Operation Arcana story "The Graphology of Hemorrhage"...


Yoon Ha Lee's work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed. Lee's short story collection Conservation of Shadows came out in 2013 from Prime Books. Lee's stories have also appeared in the anthologies The Year's Best SF 18, ed. David Hartwell; The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012, ed. Rich Horton; and The Year's Best Science Fiction 29, ed. Gardner Dozois. Lee lives in Louisiana. Learn more at yoonhalee.com.
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Sandra M. Odell: The characters for "The Graphology of Hemorrhage" are as rich as the setting, and as intricate as the system of magic you have devised for the story. Where did you find your inspiration for Nawong and Kodai?

Yoon Ha Lee: I knew I would only have two "real" characters in this story—two characters who had names and who would have lines of dialogue and become real to the reader–so I wanted them to have a close, amiable relationship. I liked the idea of this poor aide expecting to be assigned to some spoiled rich brat of an magician and being won over by the fact that she was not, in fact, what he expected her to be. I also knew there would be a class divide along with the rank one, so that while they would be close, they wouldn't ever entirely overcome that divide. Both characters grew from there.

SMO: The system of written magic is very precise, much like the machining of the gears of a war machine, yet are threatened by something as small as a drop of rain. The cost to the magician of wielding such power is also very precise. When creating such magic, how did you see it having come about, the pitfalls and victories of the research?

YHL: I like to think of most fantasy magic systems as coming in two general flavors, ambient and technological. (I apologize for my terminology! I've never developed a good vocabulary for this.) Ambient magic is what I see in Patricia McKillip's fiction, and a lot of fairy tales, where magic is part of the environment and it's not something you can really control in precise ways; it operates more like metaphor.

Technological magic is what you see in L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Recluce stories, or in pretty much anything by Brandon Sanderson that I've read, such as the Mistborn books, where magic is worked out according to defined principles and its ramifications are carefully considered–if those laws of magic existed in our world, I could guarantee that some engineering-minded person would use magic as portrayed and you would be able to codify it in math.

Although I didn't have the space to work out great levels of detail, I thought of the calligraphy magic as being more like a technological system. I expect it would have the same pitfalls and victories as learning how to build good bridges before people developed the mathematical tools. (This is my guess, anyway; I'm not an engineer or an architect, so the question of how to make a good bridge is very mysterious to me.) There would be a lot of trial and error at first and then people would start codifying principles in the interest of saving lives, or even just out of sheer scientific curiosity.

SMO: Concepts such as diversity and inclusion are almost continuously under attack by those who feel the deliberate and open representation of characters that reach beyond the expected cis-gendered, Caucasian "norm" is somehow a threat to SF/F. Your works are filled with characters that speak to readers of any number of races, preferences, and ideologies. Did you deliberately set out to forge a new mold for SF/F, or are you adding elements of your own life to write stories you would like to read?

YHL: Some from column A and some from column B. I grew up writing stories about cis-gendered straight Caucasian characters because that was what I grew up reading. I had little concept that anything else could exist because the examples weren't available. Some years back, I started becoming aware of this as a problem by reading people's book and social justice discussions on LiveJournal and similar venues.

I'm not an online activist; I don't have the temperament for it. But I do write stories. And I think about people who might want to see themselves represented in stories, the way I used to want to see myself represented. I have an eleven-year-old daughter and I remember taking her into a comic book store when she was five or six, and she walked past all the male superheroes and made a beeline for the $40 Wonder Woman statue I couldn't afford to buy her at the time. When I write female protagonists, I think of her.

I'm also trans, identifying as male, and I'm queer. I don't write about gender as much because I still find it painful to talk about. But back when I was reading science fiction in high school, as a trans teenager, pretty much the only representation I got was in the works of Jack L. Chalker and Piers Anthony. The trans representations in their works are deeply problematic and I wish there had been some other alternatives. I took what I could get–I still have nostalgic fondness for Jack L. Chalker, maybe I'm the only person for whom that's true–but I want there to be better options too.

I may not be the right person to write such stories, but maybe I can make some attempts in that direction. When I wrote "Wine" (Clarkesworld, January 2014), that story has a trans* protagonist, and it was hard–maybe one of the hardest stories I've ever written–because of the autobiographical elements that came along for the ride. Different people are going to want different things from their fiction. Some people want to envision a happier future, and that's completely legitimate–God knows, this world we have is far from perfect. In my case, I prefer to write about the world I've lived, because that's how I'm able to be honest about my own experiences. Reading about happy alternate futures just makes me more sad and bitter that I'm stuck here, so that's the direction I took. The more people do this kind of writing, the more options there will be so that readers can find what is right for them.

SMO: We never learn much of the Spiders' grievances and motives. How do you see the conflict between the Spiders and the Empire having come about?

YHL: The sad, prosaic answer to this is probably a combination of fighting over wanted resources and trying to secure defensible borders. (I'm so tempted to say "sheep." My husband and sister are really into Age of Empires 2 right now.) I should have made this more vivid in the story, though. I once wrote a (now-trunked) fantasy novel in which a war was incited, fundamentally, by the closing of an alum mine screwing up the local economy. Every single one of my beta readers agreed that this was a boring reason to go to war. Lesson learned! Now I go in for genocides. It's much easier to get readers behind a good (fictional) genocide.

(Just to be absolutely clear, I do not endorse genocides in real life!)

SMO: The depth of detail you give to the process and interpretation of calligraphy is amazing. Do you practice this art?

YHL: Sort of? Yes? Not really? I self-taught myself basic Western (Roman alphabet) calligraphy when I was a kid using those chisel-tipped marker pens, mostly Italic. I never got very good at it, but I had fun and eventually worked my way up to dip pens, including a set of Brause nibs that are honestly much nicer than my skill level. I have a book by Cari Buziak that I keep meaning to learn from, _Calligraphy Magic_, except I keep getting distracted by staring at her beautiful examples.

There is apparently legitimate (Asian) calligraphy in my family: my mother once told me that she used to watch her father do calligraphy when she was younger. He would have learned this under the Japanese occupation; he attended university in Japan. I never got to see any of this. I don't know anything useful about East Asian calligraphies, although I've messed around with a brush. Mostly what I learned is that trying to make a single clean stroke is a lot harder than it looks!

Although the calligraphy in the story is loosely based on what I know of East Asian calligraphy, the whole concept of calligraphy magic comes instead from my small but ridiculous collection of books on Western graphology (not graphanalysis). I started reading these in libraries as a child and find them wacky and delightful, especially when they start making predictions about deviant bedroom predilections based on how you form y's and g's.

SMO: What is the appeal of military fantasy? Why do so many writers–or you yourself–write about it? Why do readers love it so much?

YHL: I like it for the same reason that I like military sf–as a fictional playground for examining questions of military ethics. When I was in high school I started reading up on things like My Lai and genocide and related topics, and I've remained interested in the ways that history and human nature play out in war. Maybe that's a dark reason to be attracted to a topic. I don't, personally, have a military background of any form, although you can make me dewy-eyed about the terrible Lipton tea we used to get from the Commissary back when my dad was an Army surgeon.

I also enjoy the more intellectual side of thinking about tactics and strategy and logistics–military history is one of my favorite types of nonfiction–and the historical pageantry of reading about colorful military history figures. I'm guessing that's part of the appeal for many readers as well.

SMO: What are some of your favorite examples of military fantasy, and what makes them your favorites?

YHL: Steven Erikson's Deadhouse Gates, #2 in the Malazan Books of the Fallen. I was on tenterhooks reading about Coltaine's campaign. I really had the sense of being there, except from the nice safe comfort of my house because honestly, I am a marshmallow and I don't *really* want to have been anywhere near the brutal things that happened to Coltaine's army. Glen Cook's Black Company books for their grittiness. Paul Kearney's Monarchies of God series has military fantasy elements, although it's also epic fantasy. Pure grimdark, which is great because I *love* my grimdark. His trilogy starting with The Ten Thousand is supposed to be military fantasy but I haven't been able to get the first book in the trilogy out of any local bookstore, which is driving me mad. And while we're at it, does Warhammer 40,000 count as fantasy or science fiction? I adore the over-the-top unending war of grimdarkness, but it doesn't seem very science-based to me...

For female authors/co-authors, I enjoyed the first books of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, although I don't know much about Napoleonic or air warfare. And for something rather older, alongside the adventure/epic strand, the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman has a military strand that I enjoyed very much, especially since you have two capable female military leaders–Kitiara on the evil side, and Lauralanthalasa stepping up on the heroes' side. I was addicted to Dragonlance in middle school and learned a lot about writing from those books!

For authors of unknown sex/gender, K.J. Parker's The Company–the last paragraph sort of paraglides into what-on-earth territory, but up until that point there's a lot of great esprit and tension and a killer plot. I kind of had a crush on Kunessin for the longest time, which tells you something about me right there.

Subterranean Press has just announced a new Harlan Ellison collection Can & Can'tankerous, publishing later this year:

Here's the book description:


Harlan Ellison has been compared to an annoying gnat, a no-see 'em buzzing in your peripheral vision till you try to swat him, and he's gone.

The great English writer Michael Moorcock—and if his name does not leave you dumbstruck with awe, you should move on—called Ellison a "fox in the sf hen-coop" whose presence will "produce a brighter, faster hen, with improved survival characteristics, laying a tastier, more nourishing egg" and went on to say Ellison was "a brave and lively little beast, who makes a great show of himself to the hounds, but remains too wary ever to lead them to his lair."

The brilliant novelist Joanna Russ, in admiring frustration, opined that Ellison's stories "have an assault on you," but complained that "they're not like a piece of sculpture that you can stop and walk around and look at from all sides." Ellison's reply: "Absolutely not; I want them to grab you by the throat and tear off parts of your body."

Ellison's a double agent who lures you into the bush, and when you blink, he's gone; you don't know whether to turn left or right, or just dig a hole. He crafts enigmas set to entrap you. When Ellison sees where a story is going, he figures—since he's writing for the smartest readers alive—you do, too. So he stops and turns left. Or right. Or widdershins. Or digs a cave with 200 tunnels.

Can & Can'tankerous gathers ten previously uncollected tales from the fifth and sixth decades of Harlan Ellison's professional writing career: a written-in-the-window endeavor that invites re-reading from the start before you've even finished it; a second entry in his (now) ongoing abcedarian sequence; a "lost" pulp tale re-cast as a retro-fable; a melancholy meditation for departed friend and fellow legend, Ray Bradbury; a 2001 revision of a 1956 original; an absurdist ascent toward enlightenment (or its gluten-free substitute); a 200-word exercise in not following the directions as written (with a special introduction by Neil Gaiman that weighs in at four times the word count of its subject); a fantastical lament for a bottom-line world; the 2011 Nebula Award-winning short story; and Ellison's most recent offering, a fusion of fact and fiction that calls to mind Russ's frustration and Moorcock's metaphor while offering a solution to the story's enigma in plain view.

Strokes be damned! Ellison's still here! HE's still writing! And with more new books published in the last ten years than any preceding decade of his career, his third act is proving to be the kind other living legends envy.

Can & Can'tankerous will be oversize, printed in two colors throughout. The signed limited edition will be over 100 pages longer than the trade hardcover, and include written-decades-earlier versions of two stories, and alternate takes of two others.

Here's the table of contents...

Table of Contents
1.How Interesting: A Tiny Man
2.Never Send to Know for Whom the Lettuce Wilts
3.Objects of Desire in the Mirror Are Closer than They Appear
4.Introduction to "Loose Cannon" by Neil Gaiman
5.Loose Cannon, or Rubber Duckies from Space
6.From A to Z, in the Sarsaparilla Alphabet
7.Weariness
8.The Toad Prince, or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-domes
9.Incognita, Inc.
10.Goodbye to All That
11.He Who Grew Up Reading Sherlock Holmes

Bonus Material (LIMITED EDITION ONLY)
12.Who Wilts the Lettuce? (The original 1957 typescript)
13.Blonde Cargo (The original 1958 typescript)
14.Weariness (The original 2005 typescript)
15.Sensible City (The 2009 revised version)


http://subterraneanpress.com/store/product_detail/can_cantankerous

Cover Reveal: Scott Lynch's The Thorn of Emberlain

Summary: Kepler had never meant to die this way — viciously beaten to death by a stinking vagrant in a dark back alley. But when reaching out to the murderer for salvation in those last dying moments, a sudden switch takes place.

Now Kepler is looking out through the eyes of the killer himself, staring down at a broken and ruined body lying in the dirt of the alley.

Instead of dying, Kepler has gained the ability to roam from one body to another, to jump into another person's skin and see through their eyes, live their life — be it for a few minutes, a few months or a lifetime.

Kepler means these host bodies no harm — and even comes to cherish them intimately like lovers. But when one host, Josephine Cebula, is brutally assassinated, Kepler embarks on a mission to seek the truth — and avenge Josephine's death.

Thoughts: North has this wonderful knack to turn idle daydreams of mine into full fleshed-out stories that are darker and more complex than I ever tend to deal with in my own mind. First with The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, and now with Touch, I think it's safe to say that I'm hooked on North's insightful and downright poetic writing, and her ability to turn a simple "what if" into something brilliant.

Kepler is a ghost, transferring from body to body by a touch, flitting from one person to another and leaving them with no memories of the time when someone else was in control of their body. Kepler has been around for centuries, sometimes inhabiting a host for years, sometimes only a few mere seconds. This is how it's always been, until one day everything changes, and Kepler is being hunted by a group that wants to eliminate ghosts and their takeovers. Only it's not quite as simple as all that, and there's a larger mystery afoot.

For all that pains are taken to leave Kepler's original gender out of things, to me, Kepler reads as very much male. I can't quite put my finger on why, and possibly I'm dead wrong, but that's how the character came across to me. Very little is said about Kepler's origins, only their mode of dying, and that heightens the mystery and leaves you with no concrete answers by the end. And what I love is that it doesn't really matter. Kepler is Kepler. Even by their own definition. Kepler is whoever is being inhabited at that moment. Male or female, it makes no difference. There is no preference. It seems to be quite similar for many of the other ghosts that are encountered through the novel, too. I like that notion, that gender is a thing that ceases to mean anything after numerous decades and numerous hosts have passed. When you can jump into any body and live whatever life you choose, having one hard-and-fast gender that you must be for any length of time does seem a little bit too rigid a notion to keep around for long. North did wonders with expressing that without saying it outright, or trying to beat the reader over the head with the idea.

The mystery itself, of who is behind the attempted assassinations of ghosts (for ghosts can actually die if their host bodies die and there's nobody else to jump to), is interesting, though for all that there are assassination attempts, the book isn't a very action-heavy book. There are a few scenes, yes, but most of the novel involves discovery and contemplation, with plenty of flashbacks for context and to keep the reader jumping around almost as much as Harry August did. It's not quite as nonlinear as that, but it does have a large number of flashbacks, all of which do provide wonderful context and backstory and flesh out the characters and the situation a lot, and the way North handles it is skillful and deft, so while it may be a little tough for those used to more linear stories, I find that it works very well to tell numerous branches of a long story that are all coming together at pivotal points.

I mentioned earlier that North has twice written novels about concepts I've daydreamingly entertained myself with over the years. I'm somewhat obsessed with the notion of immortality, in the sense that there are multiple lives I would love to live and remember, so many things that I want to do that I don't think I could reasonably fit them into a single life. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August tackles one aspect of that, while Touch tackles another. Living your own life over again versus being mentally immortal and being able to take over a body and living whatever kind of life you can make for yourself. Both involve large amounts of money (which translate to freedom, in a sense, because some things you just can't accomplish in a timely fashion without a lot of funds on hand), which is handled as well in this book as the one before, and just as realistically. So thus far North has written 2 books that appeal to me on a very deep and personal level, and she explores the ideas in ways that I hadn't previously considered and that are far more complex and realistic than my little daydreams ever allowed for. I kind of love these books for that reason alone, that they feel like they were almost written specifically to appeal to someone with exactly my kind of mindset, and as such there's a lot of wisdom and things to reflect on that I take away from Touch. Perhaps more than the author even intended.

All this is why even when the plot slowed down or got a little too tangled in itself for a while, I loved Touch. It's a fascinating exploration of character, of what people can do when they're given the chance to live forever and lead any kind of life they want, from any point, so long as they can find the appropriate person to take over and be. The writing is beautiful, the story intricate, the characters endlessly fascinating. It questions what we accept as normal and forces us to bend our minds around an entirely new viewpoint. Utterly amazing, and well worth reading for anyone who wants to submerge themselves in a unique and powerful story.


http://bibliotropic.net/2015/03/11/touch-by-claire-north/

elem, ja sam stvarno pristrasna kad je Patrick Lee u pitanju... 



Book 2 of 2 in the  Sam Dryden Series

From the bestselling author of RUNNER comes the next thriller featuring Sam Dryden, in the series that has captured the imagination of readers worldwide. In the middle of the night, ex-Special Forces operative Sam Dryden gets a urgent call from an old colleague, desperate for his help in a last-minute secret mission. Without a moment's hesitation, Dryden agrees. The two race to a remote shack in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, where they break in, rescue four kidnapped girls, then flee into the hills just seconds ahead of the arriving police and FBI team. It's then that Sam Dryden learns the real secret behind this mission. His former teammate has been working security for an old friend whose company discovered something, and developed a device around that discovery, which had the power to change the course of history. But, as Newton's laws predict, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. There are some very bad people determined to get their hands on this device, and will stop at nothing to do so. This hidden group apparently has the money, the connections, the men, and the material to accomplish anything they want. Now the only thing standing in their way is Sam Dryden.





Bioengineer Peter Bernhardt has dedicated his life to nanotechnology, the science of manipulating matter on the atomic scale. As the founder of Biogineers, he is on the cusp of revolutionizing brain therapies with microscopic nanorobots that will make certain degenerative diseases a thing of the past. But after his research is stolen by an unknown enemy, seventy thousand people die in Las Vegas in one abominable moment. No one is more horrified than Peter, as this catastrophe sets in motion events that will forever change not only his life but also the course of human evolution.

Peter's company is torn from his grasp as the public clamors for his blood. Desperate, he turns to an old friend, who introduces him to the Phoenix Club, a cabal of the most powerful men in the world. To make himself more valuable to his new colleagues, Peter infuses his brain with experimental technology, exponentially upgrading his mental prowess and transforming him irrevocably.

As he's exposed to unimaginable wealth and influence, Peter's sense of reality begins to unravel. Do the club members want to help him, or do they just want to claim his technology? What will they do to him once they have their prize? And while he's already evolved beyond mere humanity, is he advanced enough to take on such formidable enemies and win?




Six-time Hugo Award winner Ben Bova chronicles the saga of humankind's expansion beyond the solar system
In Ben Bova's previous novel New Earth, Jordan Kell led the first human mission beyond the solar system. They discovered the ruins of an ancient alien civilization. But one alien AI survived, and it revealed to Jordan Kell that an explosion in the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy has created a wave of deadly radiation, expanding out from the core toward Earth. Unless the human race acts to save itself, all life on Earth will be wiped out.

When Kell and his team return to Earth, many years after their departure, they find that their world has changed almost beyond recognition. Not only has a second wave of greenhouse flooding caused sea levels to rise, but society has been changed by the consequences of the climate shift. Few people want to face Jordan Kell's news. He must convince Earth's new rulers that the human race is in danger of extinction unless it acts to forestall the death wave coming from the galaxy's heart.




Margaret Atwood's upcoming novel, The Heart Goes Last, is about the effects of a social experiment on a couple who is finding it hard to make ends meet.

Here's the cover and synopsis for The Heart Goes Last...




Living in their car, surviving on tips, Charmaine and Stan are in a desperate state. So, when they see an advertisement for Consilience, a 'social experiment' offering stable jobs and a home of their own, they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month – swapping their home for a prison cell. At first, all is well. But then, unknown to each other, Stan and Charmaine develop passionate obsessions with their 'Alternates,' the couple that occupy their house when they are in prison. Soon the pressures of conformity, mistrust, guilt and sexual desire begin to take over.

Haunting and elegant, Hausfrau is the exceptional debut novel from the prize-winning American poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum.



Anna was a good wife, mostly . . .



Anna Benz lives in comfort and affluence with her husband and three young children in Dietlikon, a picture-perfect suburb of Zurich. Anna, an American expat, has chosen this life far from home; but, despite its tranquility and order, inside she is falling apart.



Feeling adrift and unable to connect with her husband or his family; with the fellow expatriates who try to befriend her; or even, increasingly, her own thoughts and emotions, Anna attempts to assert her agency in the only way that makes sense to her: by engaging in short-lived but intense sexual affairs.



But adultery, too, has its own morality, and when Anna finds herself crossing a line, she will set off a terrible chain of events that ends in unspeakable tragedy. As her life crashes down around her, Anna must then discover where one must go when there is no going back . . .




A hundred years ago, the Minotaurs saved Caeli-Amur from conquest. Now, three very different people may hold the keys to the city's survival.

Once, it is said, gods used magic to create reality, with powers that defied explanation. But the magic--or science, if one believes those who try to master the dangers of thaumaturgy--now seems more like a dream. Industrial workers for House Technis, farmers for House Arbor, and fisher folk of House Marin eke out a living and hope for a better future. But the philosopher-assassin Kata plots a betrayal that will cost the lives of godlike Minotaurs; the ambitious bureaucrat Boris Autec rises through the ranks as his private life turns to ashes; and the idealistic seditionist Maximilian hatches a mad plot to unlock the vaunted secrets of the Great Library of Caeli-Enas, drowned in the fabled city at the bottom of the sea, its strangeness visible from the skies above.

In a novel of startling originality and riveting suspense, these three people, reflecting all the hopes and dreams of the ancient city, risk everything for a future that they can create only by throwing off the shackles of tradition and superstition, as their destinies collide at ground zero of a conflagration that will transform the world . . . or destroy it.
Unwrapped Sky is a stunningly original debut by Rjurik Davidson, a young master of the New Weird.











This fourth instalment of S. T. Joshi's acclaimed Black Wings series features seventeen stories that continue to elaborate upon the conceptions, motifs, and imagery of H. P. Lovecraft, the most influential writer of weird fiction of the past hundred years. One of Lovecraft's favourite themes was the tale of archaeological horror, where venturesome explorers unearth hideous secrets of the ancient past that cast a baleful light on the fragility of our own existence. In this volume, a major new novella by the award-winning novelist and poet Fred Chappell, "Artifact," treats this theme with his customary panache and subtlety, while other writers such as Richard Gavin, Lois H. Gresh, Ann K. Schwader, and Donald Tyson broach the same theme in their own distinctive and diverse ways.

The cosmicism that was at the core of Lovecraft's vision finds vivid realisation in stories by Caitlín R. Kiernan, Cody Goodfellow, and Melanie Tem. John Pelan and Stephen Mark Rainey have co-written a vivid novelette fusing horror and science fiction, while Will Murray's tale of governmental espionage leads to a conclusion that bodes ill for the fate of the human race.

Lovecraft was skilled at evoking the terrors inherent in the history and topography of his native New England, and several writers in this volume—notably W. H. Pugmire and Jonathan Thomas—do the same. Jason V Brock finds Lovecraftian terror in Prague, just as Gary Fry locates it in the British countryside.

Lovecraft's patented motif of the "forbidden book" that reveals secrets too horrible to contemplate is the focus of Darrell Schweitzer's story of what can be found in an out-of-the-way bookstore, while stories by Simon Strantzas and Stephen Woodworth elaborate on the Lovecraftian themes of immortal "gods" and of dreams that reveal unwelcome truths about ourselves. The book's final contribution, by Charles Lovecraft, is nothing less than a recasting of Lovecraft's early tale "The Lurking Fear" in a cycle of twelve sonnets.

Black Wings IV shows that H. P. Lovecraft continues to inspire some of today's leading writers of weird fiction.

Here's the table of contents...

1."Half Lost in Shadow" by W. H. Pugmire
2."The Rasping Absence" by Richard Gavin
3."Black Ships Seen South of Heaven" by Caitlín R. Kiernan
4."The Dark Sea Within" by Jason V Brock
5."Sealed by the Moon' —Gary Fry
6."Broken Sleep" by Cody Goodfellow
7."A Prism of Darkness" by Darrell Schweitzer
8."Night of the Piper" by Ann K. Schwader
9."We Are Made of Stars" by Jonathan Thomas
10."Trophy" by Melanie Tem
11."Contact" by John Pelan and Stephen Mark Rainey
12."Cult of the Dead" by Lois H. Gresh
13."Dark Redeemer" by Will Murray
14."In the Event of Death" by Simon Strantzas
15."Revival" by Stephen Woodworth
16."The Wall of Asshur-sin" by Donald Tyson
17."Fear Lurks Atop Tempest Mount" by Charles Lovecraft

It is almost impossible to describe "The Librarian", Michail Elizarov's controversial novel which caused quite a furore when in 2008 it was chose as a winner of The Russian Booker Prize. It is certainly a unique book and, you could easily argue, a book that would be a hard choice for any judge to pick as it is quite obtuse and deserves plenty of reading time to be appreciated fully. Part of the problem lies with the fact that you're never quite sure what Elizarov means with is passages. Story itself is full of symbolism and is a hallucinogenic experience at best. And yet, there's something rather clever about it. Like there's some elusive quality lying just outside of reach. While reading it I was both delighted and frustrated by it and I was often very confused by went on in it. Ultimately, keeping at it paid off though I suspect it will take multiple re-reads to truly reveal its full potential.

"The Librarian", as you would suspect, is not a not a novel about librarians per se. It is actually a book about all those horizons that books themselves open while we read them. I'm sure that since you're reading these pages you know exactly what I'm talking about. There are books that are so good at telling the tale or getting the message across that you can feel them shaping your persona and the way you feel about the subject. There have been plenty of books that singlehandedly started revolutions, religious tomes that caused unimaginable suffering and occasionally joy and those that make us feel like we're superheroes. Imagine now if that was actually true in literary sense. That reading about, say, Superman, can give you supernatural strength for a short while. That's what superficially "The Librarian" is all about. Alexei accidentally becomes one after his Siberian uncle passes away and he comes into a possession of his apartment and one of Gromov's books as part of his inheritance. Books by an obscure World War 2 Soviet author Gromov have these powers and the people who are their keepers are known as Librarians. To explain it more clearly, imagine if Gromov's works were something akin to mind-expanding drugs - some provoke calm and content, some joy and then there's the elusive seventh book that deals with political propaganda and the grasp of its message over the masses.

Elizarov's Alexei is strangely calm while navigating his literary minefield which includes plenty of mayhem and violence but I, as a reader, was anything but. I found its absurdist dimension very appealing, its symbolism less so but that's probably because I don't have the necessary knowledge to completely understand all the references. And yet, despite its many cryptic elements, on the surface of it, "The Librarian's" message is surprisingly simple. Elizarov is fascinated by the power and the powerful sway the books hold over us and simply goes on to explore it through the lenses of modern realism. And this is his brilliant idea. In a country where the concept of free speech is increasingly stamped over, Elizarov uses fantasy to talk about socialism, past times and religion. "The Librarian" has a certain Marmite-y quality to it. You'll either love it or loathe it but whatever camp you'll eventually end up in you'll probably accept it for its uniqueness. Thank goes once again to Pushkin Press for taking me to strange and wonderful heart of contemporary Russian literature.

http://upcoming4.me/news/book-news/review-the-librarian-by-mikhail-elizarov

     Dakle, da ne bude zabune, ovo je stvarno ingeniozan roman! 







Kao prvo, glavni i u svakom pogeldu superiorni protagonist je – žena.
Kao drugo, ta žena je – crnkinja.
Kao treće, ta žena ima samo 15 godina.









E sad, tu negde otpadaju svi čitaoci kojima je to premalo, ili previše... a po mojoj skromnoj proceni, takvih je preko 80%.

A za onih dragocenih 20%, sledi panegirik o fenomenalnom romanu The Country of Ice Cream Star.







Relativno bliska budućnost, stravično post-apokaliptična, s tim da je u pitanju vrlo precizna bio-apokalipsa: bolest koja se po simptomima manifestuje kao nekakav hibrid raka i kuge, koja drži minimalnu populaciju pod restrikcijom životnog veka u okviru nekih dvadesetak godina maksimum. Dakle, glavnina civilizacije je svedena na decu, koja neretko ne dočekaju ni svoj osamnaesti rođendan. I mada bi već sam taj sinopsis ukazao na omladinsku literaturu, The Country of Ice Cream Star je isuviše uverljivo tragična i gorka ispovest da se zadrži u tim okvirima.

Ice Cream Star ima petnaest godina i polako shvata da je prestara da bude majka. Naravno, nije prestara da rodi dete, ali jeste prestara da mu bude majka, jer zna da će umreti pre no što to dete dovoljno odraste da je zapamti. Malo ko od njenog "plemena" pamti svoje roditelje, jer svi oni su deca odgojena od strane druge dece, otud im i takva imena: Ice Cream Star ima starijeg brata po imenu Vozač, koji sa nepunih osamnaest godina već ispoljava čireve i kašalj terminalne bolesti, i većinu vremena provodi pod opijatima koji donekle ublažavaju bol. I mada je iduće po redu muško dete u liniji za vođu plemena tek 16 godina staro, igra slučaja dovodi Ice Cream Star u poziciju najstarijeg pripadnika svog plemena, otud se i laća odgovornosti za ostalih 38ro dece, redom mlađe od sebe, to osim njenog bolesnog brata.

Dalje od toga ne treba ni zalaziti, ne samo zbog eventualnih spojlera, nego zbog činjenice da jednostavno nema tog sažimanja fabule koje bi ovom romanu učinilo ikakvu uslugu: roman se naprosto mora pročitati, i gotovo. 

Ima tu svega, naravno, to od kolonijalizma do ropstva, preko zaista ekstremno religioznog fundamentalizma i najprostijeg od svih ljudskih poriva – potrebe za pljačkom upravo onih najslabijih i najnemoćnijih, koji ni sami nemaju dovoljno ni da prežive. Ali u svom tom crnilu i tragediji, ovo je jedan neverovatno optimističan roman o opstanku, pa je kao takav zapravo i delikatna vivisekcija najosnovnijih psiholoških profila stvorenja kojeg zovemo čovekom.

Drugi fenomenalni kvalitet romana je onaj čisto jezičke prirode, koji sa prividnom degradacijom jezika zapravo proizvodi njegovu krajnju sofistikaciju, ograničavajući fond reči na ekstremnu komunikacijsku suštinu. Već unutar prve trećine romana jasno se prepoznaje da gramatička nakaradnost izraza zapravo destiliše misaone koncepte do tačke u kojoj se otkrivaju njihova osnovna, najsuštinskija značenja, a to celom romanu daje dimenziju koja bukvalno otvara vrata nove percepcije. (nešto slično je uradio i Beckett u Dark Eden, ali ovo je daleko beskompromisnije, pa otud i narativno suštinskije.)

Maestralno napisan roman, sa ekstremno surovom vrstom završnice koja, nadamo se,  obećava skori nastavak. 5/5


http://www.sandranewman.org

Let's face it. It's not very likely that Neil Gaiman will ever return to writing adult novels reminiscent of his illustrious past. Last year's "Ocean at the end of the lane" was by all accounts a fantastic book but it was not anything like "American Gods" or "Neverwhere". While I'm really enjoying next stage of his literary development, I'm still miss reading those feasts of imagination like his past works were and similarly to other readers I've started looking elsewhere for my fix. C. Robert Cargill seems to be a popular choice and I was not immune to his charms. "Dreams and Shadows" was compared to works of Gaiman, Del Torro and Burroughs and I completely enjoyed uniqueness of its tale and its characters. "Queen of the Dark Things", Cargill's latest book, is its sequel and offers more of the same but with a few important differences.

Story picks up six months later and finds wizard Colby in the spotlight. He's still recovering from Ewan's death and while Limestone Kingdom is saved, Colby's troubles are only starting. He is often lost in his thoughts and spends most of the time despairing and it is this despair that leads him to future events. Some old and powerful enemies are rearing their heads and he's quickly losing the remaining few friends he had left. Turn of events pushes Colby to previously unthinkable options and he is forced to enter into some dark and unfortunate alliances with Seventy-Two. Over the course of the book, through a series of flashback and excerpts, we are introduced to back story and the surprising Queen of the Dark Things is slowly revealed in front of our eyes.

"Queen of the Dark Things" is much darker book than its predecessor. Colby's grief is the true catalyst of the entire story and while characters like Kaycee Looes do a lot to offset this overarching sense of darkness, it is his own sense of self-doubt that marks the whole first part of the book. Melancholy is never far away. It will be interesting seeing whether in the next installment focus of the story will shift from Colby to Kaycee. Cargill's rich world is further explored by abovementioned excerpts from the books written by Dr. Thaddeus Ray, Ph.D. which are strewn all across the book. It is also interesting to note that despite being direct sequel to "Dreams and Shadows", "Queen of the Dark Things" works remarkably well as a standalone story so do not be discouraged if you missed the first book in the series. In his new book, Cargill has proved that he has one of the best imaginations around and a writing talent to boot. His strange world is a wondrous creation and I've really enjoyed my visit. Having said that, "Queen of the Dark Things" is far from perfect. At times due to the excessive use of excerpts and flashbacks the story loses its steam but luckily these moments are far and between. I've also really enjoyed the darker aspects of the story and the new characters were all, without an exception, very engaging and fun to read. Cargill is masterful when it comes to creating evil cast and he certainly knows how to their parts .

Ultimately, "Queen of the Dark Things" was a treat to read and well accomplished sequel. I'll be keeping my eye for the next one.

http://upcoming4.me/news/book-news/review-queen-of-the-dark-things-by-c-robert-cargill

Prime Books has posted the table of contents for the upcoming anthology Mermaid's and Other Mysteries of the Deep edited by Paula Guran:



Here's the table of contents...

1."Swell" by Elizabeth Bear
2."Driftglass" by Samuel R. Delaney
3."The Sea Change" by Neil Gaiman
4."Miss Carstairs and the Merman" by Delia Sherman
5."Sea-Hearts" by Margo Lanagan
6."The Drowned Mermaid" by Christopher Barzak
7."Abyssus Abyssum Invocat" by Genevieve Valentine
8."Each to Each" by Seanan McGuire
9."Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home" by Sarah Monette
10."Salt Wine" by Peter S. Beagle
11."The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean" by Caitlín R. Kiernan
12."Flotsam" by Amanda Downum
13."The Mermaids Singing Each to Each" by Cat Rambo
14."Rusalka3″ by Anna Taborska
15."The Mermaid Game" by Chris Howard
16."The Nebraskan and the Nereid" by Gene Wolfe
17."A Good Husband" by Angela Slatter
18."Letters to a Body on the Cusp of Drowning" by A.C. Wise
19."The Corridors of the Sea" by Jane Yolen
20."Forever, Miss Tapekwa County" by Lisa L. Hannett
21."Urchins, While Swimming" by Catherynne M. Valente
22."Magritte's Secret Agent" by Tanith Lee

Yesterday, The B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog revealed the excellent cover for Ken Liu's upcoming collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. It's got some excellent (and award-winning!) stories in the table of contents, too.

But first, here's the book description:


A publishing event: Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his award-winning science fiction and fantasy tales for a groundbreaking collection—including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume.
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken's award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), "Mono No Aware" (Hugo Award winner), "The Waves" (Nebula Award finalist), "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), "All the Flavors" (Nebula award finalist), "The Litigation Master and the Monkey King" (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre's history, "The Paper Menagerie" (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

A must-have for every science fiction and fantasy fan, this beautiful book is an anthology to savor




Here's the table of contents...

1."The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species"
2."State Change"
3."The Perfect Match"
4."Good Hunting"
5."The Literomancer"
6."Simulacrum"
7."The Regular"
8."The Paper Menagerie"
9."An Advanced Readers Picture Book of Comparative Cognition"
10."The Waves"
11."Mono no aware"
12."All the Flavors"
13."A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel"
14."The Litigation Master and the Monkey King"
15."The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary"


isto tako, sad u aprilu izlazi mu i ovo:





Two men rebel together against tyranny—and then become rivals—in this first sweeping book of an epic fantasy series from Ken Liu, recipient of Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards.

Wily, charming Kuni Garu, a bandit, and stern, fearless Mata Zyndu, the son of a deposed duke, seem like polar opposites. Yet, in the uprising against the emperor, the two quickly become the best of friends after a series of adventures fighting against vast conscripted armies, silk-draped airships, and shapeshifting gods. Once the emperor has been overthrown, however, they each find themselves the leader of separate factions—two sides with very different ideas about how the world should be run and the meaning of justice.

Fans of intrigue, intimate plots, and action will find a new series to embrace in the Dandelion Dynasty.

nove knjige u aprilu:


Many years have passed since the events in The Deaths of Tao. The world is split into pro-Prophus and pro-Genjix factions, and is poised on the edge of a devastating new World War. A Genjix scientist who defects to the other side holds the key to preventing bloodshed on an almost unimaginable scale.

With the might of the Genjix in active pursuit, Roen is the only person who can help him save the world, and the Quasing race, too. And you thought you were having a stressful day...



Six months have passed since the release of Nexus 5.  The world is a different, more dangerous place.
 
In the United States, the terrorists – or freedom fighters – of the Post-Human Liberation Front use Nexus to turn men and women into human time bombs aimed at the President and his allies. In Washington DC, a government scientist, secretly addicted to Nexus, uncovers more than he wants to know about the forces behind the assassinations, and finds himself in a maze with no way out.

In Thailand, Samantha Cataranes has found peace and contentment with a group of children born with Nexus in their brains. But when forces threaten to tear her new family apart, Sam will stop at absolutely nothing to protect the ones she holds dear.
 
In Vietnam, Kade and Feng are on the run from bounty hunters seeking the price on Kade's head, from the CIA, and from forces that want to use the back door Kade has built into Nexus 5.  Kade knows he must stop the terrorists misusing Nexus before they ignite a global war between human and posthuman. But to do so, he'll need to stay alive and ahead of his pursuers.
 
And in Shanghai, a posthuman child named Ling Shu will go to dangerous and explosive lengths to free her uploaded mother from the grip of Chinese authorities.
 
The first blows in the war between human and posthuman have been struck.  The world will never be the same.



Publication Date: April 20, 2015

An obscure author, drawn in by the mysterious Guild of Saint Cooper, must rewrite the history of a dying city. But the changes become greater than those he set out to make, and the story quickly unspools backward into its own alternate history — a world populated by giant rhododendrons, space aliens, TV's own Special Agent Dale Cooper.



The Sorrow Proper is a novel-length investigation of the anxiety that accompanies change. A group of aging librarians must decide whether to fight or flee from the end of print and the rise of electronic publications, while the parents of the young girl who died in front of the library struggle with their role in her loss. Anchored by the transposed stories of a photographer and his deaf mathematician lover each mourning the other's death, The Sorrow Proper attempts to illustrate how humans of all relations—lovers, parents, colleagues—cope with and challenge social "progress," a mechanism that requires we ignore, and ultimately forget, the residual in order to make room for the new, to tell a story that resists "The End."

This debut novel explores the hypothetical end of the public library system and a young theory in the hard sciences called Many Worlds, a branch of quantum mechanics that strives to prove mathematically that our lives do not follow a singular, linear path.

At once post-cyberpunk and post-modern, Ing's extraordinary debut novel combines hard science, tarot, and images of late 20th-century Europe, as well as introducing a memorable new heroine to the genre

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/057513061X/sfsi0c-20



A riveting gothic SF adventure set in a bizarre desert city, probing the very fabric of existence, to reveal a sometimes horrifying world within
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/057513089X/sfsi0c-20



Bryan Pierce is an internationally famous artist whose paintings have dazzled the world. But there's a secret to his success: Every canvas is inspired by an unusually vivid dream. When Bryan awakes, he possesses extraordinary new skills...like the ability to speak obscure languages and an inexplicable genius for chess. All his life, he has wondered if his dreams are recollections, if he is re-experiencing other people's lives.


Linz Jacobs is a brilliant neurogeneticist, absorbed in decoding the genes that help the brain make memories, until she is confronted with an exact rendering of a recurring nightmare at one of Bryan's shows. She tracks down the elusive artist, and their meeting triggers Bryan's most powerful dream yet: visions of a team of scientists who, on the verge of discovering a cure for Alzheimer's, died in a lab explosion decades ago.


As Bryan becomes obsessed with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the scientists' deaths, his dreams begin to reveal what happened at the lab, as well as a deeper mystery that may lead all the way to ancient Egypt. Together, Bryan and Linz start to discern a pattern. But a deadly enemy watches their every move, and he will stop at nothing to ensure that the past stays buried.


A taut thriller and a timeless love story spanning six continents and 10,000 years of history, The Memory Painter by Gwendolyn Womack is a riveting debut novel unlike any you've ever read.



Jacob Kelley's family is turned upside down when an old friend turns up, waving a gun and babbling about an alien quantum intelligence. The mystery deepens when the friend is found dead in an underground bunker...apparently murdered the night he appeared at Jacob's house. Jacob is arrested for the murder and put on trial. 

As the details of the crime slowly come to light, the weave of reality becomes ever more tangled, twisted by a miraculous new technology and a quantum creature unconstrained by the normal limits of space and matter. With the help of his daughter, Alessandra, Jacob must find the true murderer before the creature destroys his family and everything he loves.



In our rapidly-changing world of "social media", everyday people are more and more able to sort themselves into social groups based on finer and finer criteria. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities, this process is supercharged by new analytic technologies--genetic, brain-mapping, behavioral. To join one of the twenty-two Affinities is to change one's life. It's like family, and more than family. Your fellow members aren't just like you, and they aren't just people who are likely to like you. They're also the people with whom you can best cooperate in all areas of life--creative, interpersonal, even financial.


At loose ends both professional and personal, young Adam Fisk takes the suite of tests to see if he qualifies for any of the Affinities, and finds that he's a match for one of the largest, the one called Tau. It's utopian--at first. Problems in all areas of his life begin to simply sort themselves out, as he becomes part of a global network of people dedicated to helping one another--to helping him.


But as the differing Affinities put their new powers to the test, they begin to rapidly chip away at the power of governments, of global corporations, of all the institutions of the old world. Then, with dreadful inevitability, the different Affinities begin to go to war--with one another.

For years, Rafi Delarua saw his family suffer under his father's unethical use of psionic power. Now the government has Rafi under close watch but, hating their crude attempts to analyse his brain, he escapes to the planet Punartam, where his abilities are the norm, not the exception. Punartam is also the centre for his favourite sport, wallrunning - and thanks to his best friend, he has found a way to train with the elite.

But Rafi soon realises he's playing quite a different game, for the galaxy is changing; unrest is spreading and the Zhinuvian cartels are plotting, making the stars a far more dangerous place to aim. There may yet be one solution - involving interstellar travel, galactic power and the love of a beautiful game.









Zavcka Klist has reinvented herself: no longer the ruthless gemtech enforcer determined to keep the gems they created enslaved, she's now all about transparency and sharing the fruits of Bel'Natur's research to help gems and norms alike.

Neither Aryel Morningstar nor Dr Eli Walker are convinced that Klist or Bel'Natur can have changed so dramatically, but the gems have problems that only a gemtech can solve. In exchange for their help, digital savant Herran agrees to work on Klist's latest project: reviving the science that drove mankind to the brink of extinction.

Then confiscated genestock disappears from a secure government facility, and the more DI Varsi investigates, the closer she comes to the dark heart of Bel'Natur and what Zavcka Klist is really after - not to mention the secrets of Aryel Morningstar's own past...






For years the human race was under attack from a deadly Syndrome, but when a cure was found - in the form of genetically engineered human beings, Gems - the line between survival and ethics was radically altered.

Now the Gems are fighting for their freedom, from the oppression of the companies that created them, and against the Norms who see them as slaves. And a conference at which Dr Eli Walker has been commissioned to present his findings on the Gems is the key to that freedom.

But with the Gemtech companies fighting to keep the Gems enslaved, and the horrifying godgangs determined to rid the earth of these 'unholy' creations, the Gems are up against forces that may just be too powerful to oppose.




 

REVIEW : A Quantum Mythology by Gavin Smith



Well, I'm just about speechless. How to explain the sheer lunacy that is Gavin Smith's latest novel "A Quantum Mythology" just by using mere sentences? I'll certainly try but just in case here's a disclaimer before I start: this review will probably be a bit of a mess. But before I begin, I would just like to profess my love for his writings, either alone or as a mad combo with Stephen Deas. I believe Gavin is one of the strongest and most enduring new forces in British SF and I can only hope that he'll capture the attention of readers as much as he caught mine. Gavin's latest book "The Age of Scorpio" was something of a departure from his earlier works such as "Veteran" and "War in Heaven". In it he started playing with timelines and most of the plot was filled with oblique references to the events and concepts which were never fully explained. It was a commanding performance but one which was, at the time, perhaps too ambitious. And yet, in my opinion, he somehow pulled it off - I've absolutely loved it and was really looking forward to the development of the introduced technology and universe. "The Age of Scorpio" felt to me like a more fun version of Stephen Baxter - all the high concept jinx you would expect but with over the top action sequences and fun. "A Quantum Mythology" is something of an informal sequel to "The Age of Scorpio" and expands upon the same ideas. However, if you thought the latter was complex, wait until you start reading "A Quantum Mythology". In it Gavin comes out with all guns blazing and will probably leave few of the readers in complete bewilderment!

To paraphrase the synopsis, "A Quantum Mythology" takes place in present, far future and deep past. Story opens up in 1791's Birmingham as Hellaquin and Knight encounters one of many demons that grace this book. Sir Ronald Sharpely is possessed and the whole thing ends in a massacre. The chapter switches and we're in the future. Scab (familiar?) watches as nanites, already known to readers of "The Age of Scorpio" invade a monkey raised in isolation and the story takes of from there. It's a wondrous time, filled with bizarre technology but also unforgiving ruthlessness. In present (actually 6 weeks ago) in Micronesia, Lodup Satakano is preparing for a dive when he's approached by Grace, an incredibly cool woman who gives him an offer he can't refuse . Back in time, in distant past, a few remaining tribes of Northern Britain in Ubh Blaosc are fighting a strange foe that came out of the sea. All these different strands of story are presented in alternating chapters and as it slowly become obvious are connected by something that can change (and changes) the course of history. As these get unified, the story comes to epic conclusion.

"A Quantum Mythology" is a further stage in the Gavin's development as an author and I certainly love the way this is all going. He's not afraid to experiment and his playfulness combined with his knowledge comes up trumps this time. "A Quantum Mythology" is very ambitious. Its complex concepts and multiple strands require reader's attention but not in a way that's distracting. Above all, Gavin never forgets that it is also important to entertain. "A Quantum Mythology" admittedly owes a lot to greats such as Stephen Baxter, especially in those well researched bits set in distant past, but it also comes with Gavin's unique style that thrilled me to bits. This a very readable, fantastical romp across the past, present and future. Well recommended.

http://upcoming4.me/news/book-news/review-a-quantum-mythology-by-gavin-smith

Stay by John Clute

Reviewed by Matthew Cheney
04 March 2015




Even a mere glance through Stay, John Clute's latest collection of book reviews, short stories, and lexicon entries, (or through any of Clute's books, really) will convince you that you are in the presence of genius.

But a genius of what type? The type that can turn a million candy wrappers into a surprisingly convincing small-scale replica of a rocket ship, or the type that zips to the heart of a zeitgeist faster than the rest of us? Is this genius a fox, a hedgehog, an anorak? Does it sing in seemingly effortless perfect pitch, or is its singing, like that of a dog, remarkable simply for being at all?

The desire to taxonomize is inevitable after reading even a few pages of Clute. He is a wild literary Linnaeus: obsessively compulsed to categorize. As someone generally uninterested in taxonomy, I have struggled to learn to read Clute appreciatively. I used to want to shoot his clay pigeonholes, to mock his neologistic frenzies, to clothe the emperor. But then I realized I was enjoying his work too much to do so. Clute's imperative to categorize is contagious. I'd passed through the portal and made my way into Cluteland.

The castle of Cluteland is the lexicon. If there were such a thing as Doctor of Diction, John Clute would have an honorary one from every honorable university in the world. We can talk about Clute's analyses and opinions and concepts and structures, taking them or leaving them by the wayside, but the feature we can never avoid in any such discussion is his words. While Clute has won numerous awards and honors over the years, it seems to me the most fitting and perfect was bestowed on him by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer with their 2009 Last Drink Bird Head Award (for Service to the SF/F Community) for "Expanding Our Vocabulary." True, true, irrefragably true! In Cluteland, the desire to categorize becomes contagious, yes, but the most magnificent plague is the delight in words.

One of Stay's most valuable features is that it reprints (with revisions) Clute's 2006 The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, originally published by the (late, lamented) small press Payseur & Schmidt. While not as impressive in its girth and erudition as Clute's contributions to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, The Darkening Garden is a marvel because it is pure essence of Clute: a tone poem skein of idiosyncrasies born out of the primordial ooze of other texts, strung together via clever lines of demarcation. Consider, for instance, this description:

In terms of the prescriptive four-seasons model of the narrative structure of Horror which governs most of the entries in this lexicon, Sighting, the first stage in that model, signals the moment when the protagonist (or the narrative voice of the story) begins to recognize a Thickening (which is the second stage) in the texture of the world, just as the Wrongness (stage one in the equivalent Fantasy model) is an augur of the Thinning (stage two) of the old world into a condition of desert Amnesia. (331)


Model is a valuable word here, for that is what Clute creates, and what he is a master of. Working through the complexities of Clute's sentences can require some exertion, but it is generally rewarding, not only for the pure sonic and grammatic wonder, but for the way ideas are dictated to dance.

Clute does not usually draw his sentences out of Gertrude Stein's Oakland, California: there's a there there, even if the there looks, on first encounter, like splat of nowhere and eye of newt. Think of the model as a sculpture, as an art object, as something that can exist for itself and by itself, that can be as much imagination as fact. Clute admits that his model in The Darkening Garden is not a definitive or exhaustive description of horror, but rather a cherrypicking in favor of the shape he wants to make: "It should be noted that little attention is paid in this lexicon to texts which frustrate the model, or can be seen as stalled at some point in the grammar, or which parody the model" (313). It is the model and not what lies outside the model that matters most.

Clute believes the model has heuristic uses, and it may, but they are surely minor. If we evaluate his models for their use-value, we miss their wonder. We do not evaluate the contraptions imagined by a Rube Goldberg or a Heath Robinson for their ability to adhere to the mundane any more than we value a Bugatti Veyron for its ability to convey us to the post office.

All roads in Cluteland digress across allusions, whims, and cross-references—well before the Internet, he was hyperlinking. It is often in the digressions that he is at his most insightful and amusing, a truth as well for his stylistic comrades, the critics John Leonard, Greil Marcus, and Lester Bangs. Clute is of their generation, a generation of free jazzers and psychedelic rockers, a generation for whom brief notices in the back pages of mimeographed culture rags could be conceived as sites for art. Leonard and Bangs are dead, but Marcus and Clute carry on in defiance of the overwhelming demand for nonfiction to cower in the shadow of fiction's artful dodges, for reviews to be commodity commentary accompanied by star rankings, for everything to be clear and interchangeable and useful and monetizable and acronymical and brandable and listacle.

Clute's desire for his models to be maps for hermenauts and blueprints for actual structures—to be, in other words, useful—works against his talents as an artist. His best contraptions are the ones most his own, and the flow of his ideas dies when stopped and chopped. Contagious as his tendencies may be, essence of Clute cannot be bottled for sale at the writer's workshop canteen. This is obvious when we see people try to take up his vocabulary. In the key of Clute, fantastika, polder, vastation, fustian, etc., all make music together because they are part of music-making models, but transferred to the dull thrum of everyday writing, they blow clunks. Watching other people wield Clute's idiolect is like watching toddlers play with sex toys: at once funny, gross, and embarrassing.

Once we move beyond the words, what becomes clear about Clute is that he is a man at odds. For instance, his recognition that the Enlightenment project of rationalizing the world can't survive in these post(to-the-nth-power)modern days is at odds with his desire to fit the world, or at least its texts, into a taxonomy—there is no more emblematically Enlightenment project than the Encyclopedia in all its world-grasping imperial glory. In The Darkening Garden, Clute is insightful about how certain literary tendencies arose in the gaps between the Enlightenment's ideals and realities, and he knows, of course, that none of his grand narrative theories can account for everything that is the case, but nonetheless, he will try, and he will labor on his Enlightenmentesque endeavors, all the while knowing his desires are doomed. Perhaps we should dub him John Quixote.

Clute's doom is our delight, however, because if we separate ourselves from the need to judge his use-value or truth-value or any other value beyond the aesthetic and wondrous, we will discover that he is, at least within the form most fitting for his talent, what he has always been: an exciting and extraordinary writer, an artist floating in his own world.

Before The Darkening Garden, Stay offers us some rarities: Clute's short stories, published occasionally over the decades (he has also published two novels, The Disinheriting Party and Appleseed). While it is often assumed that those people we call Critics are separate from those people we call Fiction Writers, this is procrustean pigeonholing, one that would never get past Cluteland's border patrols. Within the small world of science fiction, some of the best early critics were themselves accomplished fictioneers: James Blish, Damon Knight, Judith Merril. Within science fiction, it's actually easier to think of fiction writers who were critics than critics who were never fiction writers.

On the evidence of the stories here, John Clute is not a great writer of fiction, but his stories are also very much, to their credit, richly redolent of Cluteness. For me they lack the mysterious flame that gives fiction life, and are best described by Clute's own phrase for someone else's work as having "difficulty with the beat of Next that drives all great story" (168). Clute's linguistic interests cause his science fiction tales to congeal into hermetic expressions that are admirably unique but don't proffer much pleasure beyond the parsing—the effort of getting there exhausts the remnants of there there. His stories read a bit like science fictional relatives of the work of Greer Gilman, but without the alchemist's magic that transmutes mysterious etymological matter into golden strands of momentum. The stories are, though, so determinedly playing their own tune that perhaps they will delight readers more successful than I at grooving on their wavelength.

The majority of Stay is not The Darkening Garden or the short stories, but rather two hundred pages of essays and book reviews, many of them first published here at Strange Horizons. They are arranged chronologically, beginning with a review from the late (lamented?) SyFy Weekly of Gwyneth Jones's Spirit, or, The Princess of Bois Dormant and finishing with an introduction for a gallery exhibit in New South Wales in 2014. In between, there are excursions through the works of writers young and old, of fiction and non-, of novels, anthologies, story collections, and one movie (Under the Skin).

It is interesting to trace the lines of Clute's thought through the labyrinth of the essays and reviews. He's been writing reviews for over fifty years now—Stay marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of what was, he says in the introduction, his first SF review, of Philip K. Dick's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch in 1964—and the passion that has carried that project through the decades becomes clear in these pages, as Clute repeatedly seeks from his beloved sci-fi not escape, not comfort, not a way to pass some time, but something like transcendent Truth. This explains, perhaps, why his deepest commitment is not to fantasy and horror, which he's certainly written about plenty, but to science fiction, the literature most fully enchanted by the techniques of verisimilitude. Science fiction is often said to be in opposition to realism, yet surely science fiction is the fiction that most fetishizes and worships the Real. All science fiction's powers to sense wonder and to concretize metaphors derive from each story's dogged insistence on the tale's own reality. Science fiction in the mode of Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, Robert Heinlein, and all their ancestors is a determinedly realistic mode, the textual equivalent to Samuel Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley's idealist philosophy by the kicking of a rock. Against the assaults of unreason, slipping signifiers, fevre dreams, and the metatexts of postmodernism, science fiction stands on the threshold of irreality and refutes it thus. (Philip K. Dick is a science fiction writer in his desperate yearning for reality. His books are elegies for the Real.) Hence the title of this collection: reality, as Clute says in his review of Adam Roberts' Jack Glass and M. John Harrison's Empty Space, is what stays. "What truly distinguishes writers like these from postmodernists," Clute writes, "is a conviction that 'reality' matters desperately, that it is worth any cost to gain sufficient skill to bleed yourself dry against the briars that scratch our eyes out in order to fail better at the task of telling it" and, he adds in a new note,—"of making it stay . . . " (155).

The conviction that "'reality' matters desperately" seems to be one Clute shares, but it causes him problems because it puts him at odds with much contemporary science fiction. Again and again in the reviews in Stay, we glimpse Clute's disenchantment with genre core samples. Reviewing Jonathan Strahan's anthology Engineering Infinity, Clute writes that "If there was solace and delight in the book (in retrospect there was a bit), or maybe even a hint of a clue of how to describe the experience of living here in the future, it had gassed through me like phlogiston" (118). (Using phlogiston here is yet another example of Clute's marvelous diction, for the word refers to an idea from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chemistry, an idea important to the early development of chemistry as we know it, but useless for the last few centuries. The sort of science fiction Strahan published in Engineering Infinity, such a word implies, is an archaic remnant of an outmoded idea.) In another review, Clute wonders why we should bother to read Karl Schroeder's Lockstep, "whose megatext models are pure twentieth century, and which features a protagonist less deft with the gurrils than Richie Cunningham, oh Happy Days?" (218). Again and again, Clute shows, whether intentionally or not, that science fiction as science fiction cannot escape the twentieth century, its era of glory, the last time its dreams had much oomph or relevance. Why bother, indeed.

Though reviews are what Clute is perhaps best known for, and represent the longest endeavor of his career, book reviewing does not seem to me to be his natural habitat. This is not to say he's bad at it—far from it—but rather that the form confines him, and not always in the productive way that the formal requirements of lexicon and encyclopedia entries free him through constraint. Clute's reviews are at their best when the material under review allows him to expand on his ideas without riding a hobbyhorse off into the sunset. When he reviews anthologies, for instance, he often gives us all the virtues of both the book review form and his own perspective, because anthologies inevitably provide some sort of argument to bounce off of, even if it's just the argument that the stories collected within the book belong together. The varied contents of an anthology allow Clute to mix and match at will, to paint his abstract expressionist portrait of the book without being stuck to one set of characters, settings, plots. His review of two urban fantasy anthologies is a marvel, for instance—it's got plenty of ineffable Cluteness, plus real insight not only about the books themselves, but about the "urban fantasy" label and how anthologies and labels work together, for better and worse.

Sometimes, Clute collapses into the black hole of his own compulsive obsessions. The worst piece in the book is a review of Andrew Milner's Locating Science Fiction, a book Clute calls "the finest general assessment of sf theory yet published" (197), which is like praising someone for being the finest collector of balls of twine in northwestern Duluth. But this is not to disagree with Clute in his assessment of Milner's perfectly unobjectionable book, because it's not the assessment that's so awful here, but rather the fact that John Quixote can't hold himself back from charging at a windmill, in this case a monster he's mistaken for MLA citation. You read that right. The terrible giant of John Quixote's imagination is a citational practice. More than that, a citational practice he doesn't understand and can't be bothered to learn much about, but which nonetheless apparently causes him enough deep, existential grief to write about it for pages.

It's pointless to argue with a man attacking a windmill. All I will say is: Yes, Milner's citations in Locating Science Fiction are cumbersome and ugly, and some of Clute's points about why are absolutely correct, but Milner and Liverpool University Press are at fault there for not paying enough attention to clarity and precision, which the MLA, at least, encourages in their guidelines. In any case, the many citational systems out there all really do have a logic to their madness, even if their logic is not that of Cluteland. Clute's own use of bold typeface for dates (not to mention the awful all-caps and italics for new parenthetical notes) is annoying, and he himself gives us horrors such as this:

Here is Thomas Mann, ending Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des Deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverküln, Erzählt von Einem Freunde (1947 Sweden; trans H. T. Lowe-Porter as Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend 1948 US), a Pact-With-the-Devil tale ostensibly about Germany . . .  (330)


Those citational briars scratching out our eyes would be cut back quite nicely by the simple addition of a Works Cited page, or even a footnote. But doing so might please Cluteland's mortal enemy, the Illuminati-like MLA.

Clute's review of Milner's citational system is revealing because it shows us that what we value in Clute (the idiosyncrasies, the passionate gabble of garble, the impossible dream of a unified field of taxonomical perfection) comes from the same engine house of compulsive obsession that makes him, at times, vexing. It takes a great eccentricity and a truly weird passion to carry a person through the sorts of work Clute does, wending his way through junkyards of tales often dully written and clumsily conceived, and if we value the work he does, we must also value the moments when John Quixote saddles up a word-powered Rocinante to save us all from evil giants, whether they be hiding as windmills or unfortunate citational practices—mere brambles, really, in the delightful cartography of Cluteland.

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2015/03/stay_by_john_cl.shtml

My debut novel is a "silkpunk" epic fantasy that re-imagines the history and legends surrounding the Chu-Han Contention (202 B.C.E. to 206 B.C.E.) in a brand new archipelago world filled with magic and technology. In The Grace of Kings, two men who seem polar opposites—a descendant of an aristocratic, martial family and a ne'er-do-well commoner-turned-bandit—become good friends in the rebellion against a tyrannical emperor only to find themselves bitter rivals divided by different ideas for the right path to making the world more just.

Let me start by offering an explanation for "silkpunk." Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But whereas steampunk takes as its inspiration the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from classical East Asian antiquity. My novel is thus filled with machines like soaring battle kites that lift duelists into the air, bamboo-and-silk airships propelled by giant feathered oars, underwater boats that swim like whales driven by primitive steam engines, and tunnel-digging machines enhanced with herbal lore, as well as fantasy elements like gods who bicker and manipulate, magical books that tell us what is in our hearts, giant water beasts that bring storms and guide sailors safely to shores, and illusionists who manipulate smoke to peer into opponents' minds. This is a world where the technology vocabulary is based on organic materials historically important to East Asia (bamboo, paper, silk) and seafaring cultures of the Pacific (coconut, feathers, coral) and where machines are constructed along biomechanical principles like the inventions in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The overall aesthetic sense is one of suppleness and flexibility, and I had a lot of fun coming up with the machines.

Historically, the Chu-Han Contention was a period when China was divided by mass rebellions into many kingdoms, from which two powers, Western Chu and Han, emerged as the most dominant and fought for control of all of China. The legends of heroism and betrayal during this era have been retold and re-imagined many times in Chinese literature, and they were among the first stories I learned as a child. Legends of the Chu-Han Contention thus function as one of the foundational narratives of Chinese literature in the same way that works like the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and Beowulf are foundational narratives for Western literature.

My wife was the one who gave me the idea for this novel. When I explained to her that I was having difficulty finding a good story for novel-length treatment, she reminded me that she shared the same foundational narratives with me because she had grown up watching Chinese historical romances in the form of Hong Kong TV dramas. The mythical power of these stories struck both of us, and we had an excited conversation about the potential of transposing one of these Chinese historical romances into a new cultural framework and breathe new life into it.



I decided to re-imagine the Chu-Han Contention using tropes of Western epic fantasy as well as tropes from Chinese genres like wuxia fantasy and historical romance. The novel thus has a different "feel" from many contemporary epic fantasies, with shifting POVs at different levels and an emphasis on "side stories" that advance the plot obliquely. The melded narrative technique draws from Classical Western epic tradition as well as Chinese poetic and prose traditions, leading to an effect that should feel at once strange and familiar, but perfectly fitted to the story I wanted to tell.

Finally, I want to say a few words about why I chose to tell this tale in an archipelago setting that doesn't resemble China in any way. Early on, I made the decision that I did not want to write a "magic China" story. The history of the West's encounters with China from the days of Marco Polo onward is infused with Orientalism and the colonial gaze, and I realized that it would be difficult for readers to perceive the essence of the story I wanted to tell through the haze of problematic tropes and clichés if I didn't radically alter their expectations. Thus, I created an archipelago that is physically distinct form continental China, and populated it with new cultures, peoples, customs and gods—which also forced me to examine every aspect of the source story with fresh eyes and re-imagine it. And then, over all of this, the silkpunk aesthetic overlay connects the imagined world back to its source, leading to a sense of simultaneous estrangement and familiarity that delights.

###

Author Bio: Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Ken's debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster's new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in November of 2015.

I, u oktobru će se najzad kompletirati i ova trilogija, pa ćemo da vidimo kako su (i koliko) odlični utisci prbvog dela opstali do kraja:



The stunning conclusion to the trilogy that began with the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke award-winning Ancillary Justice.

For a moment, things seem to be under control for the soldier known as Breq. Then a search of Atheok Station's slums turns up someone who shouldn't exist – someone who might be an ancillary from a ship that's been hiding beyond the empire's reach for three thousand years. Meanwhile, a messenger from the alien and mysterious Presger empire arrives, as does Breq's enemy, the divided and quite possibly insane Anaander Mianaai – ruler of an empire at war with itself.

Anaander is heavily armed and extremely unhappy with Breq. She could take her ship and crew and flee, but that would leave everyone at Athoek in terrible danger. Breq has a desperate plan. The odds aren't good, but that's never stopped her before.


(Inače, trilogija dobrano osvaja već samim naslovnicama...)

... debi roman u koji treba makar gvirnuti...




A rising star in the weightless combat sport of zeroboxing, Carr "the Raptor" Luka dreams of winning the championship title. Recognizing his talent, the Zero Gravity Fighting Association assigns Risha, an ambitious and beautiful Martian colonist, to be his brandhelm––a personal marketing strategist. It isn't long before she's made Carr into a popular celebrity and stolen his heart along the way.

As his fame grows, Carr becomes an inspirational hero on Earth, a once-great planet that's fallen into the shadow of its more prosperous colonies. But when Carr discovers a far-reaching criminal scheme, he becomes the keeper of a devastating secret. Not only will his choices put everything he cares about in jeopardy, but they may also spill the violence from the sports arena into the solar system.

Through the work of twenty-six writers, emerging to award-winning, The Humanity of Monsters plumbs the depths of humane monsters, monstrous humans, and the interstices between:

Monstrous heralds of change, the sight of whom only children can survive. Monsters born of the battlefield, in gunfire and frost and blood, clothed in too-familiar flesh. Monsters, human and otherwise, born of fear, and love, and retribution all, wrapped tight and inextricable one from the other: the Fallen outside of time, lovers and monsters in borrowed skin, creatures from beyond the stars, and humans who have travelled to them.

In stories by turns surreal, sublime, brutal, and haunting, there are no easy answers to be found. Only the surety that though there be monsters, you will name them false. And when you meet those who truly are, you will not know them.

1."Tasting Gomoa" by Chinelo Onwualu
2."Dead Sea Fruit" by Kaaron Warren
3."The Bread We Eat in Dreams" by Catherynne M. Valente
4."The Emperor's Old Bones" by Gemma Files
5."The Things" by Peter Watts
6."muo-ka's Child" by Indrapramit Das
7."Six" by Leah Bobet
8."The Nazir" by Sofia Samatar
9."A Handful of Earth" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
10."In Winter" by Sonya Taaffe
11."Ghostweight" by Yoon Ha Lee
12."How to Talk to Girls at Parties" by Neil Gaiman
13."Night They Missed the Horror Show" by Joe Lansdale
14."If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachel Swirsky
15."Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream" by Maria Dahvana Headley
16."The Horse Latitudes" by Sunny Moraine
17."Boyfriend and Shark" by Berit Ellingsen
18."Never the Same" by Polenth Blake
19."Mantis Wives" by Kij Johnson
20."Proboscis" by Laird Barron
21."Out They Come" by Alex Dally MacFarlane
22."and Love shall have no Dominion" by Livia Llewellyn
23."You Go Where It Takes You" by Nathan Ballingrud
24."Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" by A.C. Wise
25."Theories of Pain" by Rose Lemberg
26."Terrible Lizards" by Meghan McCarron

I, najzad, svi gudizi okupljeni u jednoj knjizi:



Dust jacket by J. K. Potter



More than twenty-five years ago, Lucius Shepard introduced us to a remarkable fictional world, a world separated from our own "by the thinnest margin of possibility." There, in the mythical Carbonales Valley, Shepard found the setting for "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," the classic account of an artist—Meric Cattanay—and his decades long effort to paint—and kill—a dormant, not quite dead dragon measuring 6,000 feet from end to end. The story was nominated for multiple awards and is now recognized as one of its author's signature accomplishments.

Over the years, Shepard has revisited this world in a number of brilliant, independent narratives that have illuminated the Dragon's story from a variety of perspectives. This loosely connected series reached a dramatic crossroads in the astonishing novella, "The Taborin Scale". The Dragon Griaule now gathers all of these hard to find stories into a single generous volume. The capstone of the book—and a particular treat for Shepard fans—is "The Skull," a new 40,000 word novel that advances the story in unexpected ways, connecting the ongoing saga of an ancient and fabulous beast with the political realities of Central America in the 21st century. Augmented by a group of engaging, highly informative story notes, The Dragon Griaule is an indispensable volume, the work of a master stylist with a powerful—and always unpredictable—imagination.

Limited: 300 signed numbered copies, bound in leather
Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition

Table of Contents
◦ The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule
◦ The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter
◦ The Father of Stones
◦ Liar's House
◦ The Taborin Scale
◦ The Skull
◦ Story Notes

From Publishers Weekly:
"These six stories explore ground far from the high fantasy with which dragons are frequently associated. Fans of Shepard's unusual and often powerful Griaule tales will be delighted to have them all in one place."

From SFRevu:
"The stories may be enjoyed as pure fantasy or as political metaphors to suit the individual reader. Either way, they are the creation of a master storyteller and present a fascinating world different from the usual fantasy world of dragons."

From Tor.com:
"It just goes to show that there's more food for thought in each of these stories than you'll find in most full length novels. Each of them really deserves a review as long as this one, making The Dragon Griaule simply a brilliant collection. Subterranean Press has to be commended for collecting them all in one volume, because they're hard to track down individually but work together so incredibly well. Highly recommended."

From Strange Horizons:
"'The Skull' ends one strain of the Griaule narratives, and leaves an infinity more open for further exploration. It ends at a certain moment of happiness and heroism after many long journeys through sorrow, terror, and ordinary human failure. It dreams itself toward light. As does each story in the book, it makes art out of fantasy and pain... The stories together here show that the last sentence of 'The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule' was the truest one. Regardless of the forces determining our fates and telling our tales, we all live our happy endings in advance."

From SF Site:
"For many readers, several of these stories will be already familiar, three of them were Hugo nominees and widely anthologized. For new readers, rest assured that The Dragon Griaule contains stories that will alternately entrance, amuse, perplex, shock, enlighten, confound, and compel you to keep reading. It's a journey of altered lives in an altered landscape, where the fantastic and the real mingle in the lives of people who are never quite sure where their desires end and the dragon's desires begin. That's left for the reader to ponder, and in that way, the dragon Griaule remains as alive as ever."

From San Francisco Book Review:
"For fantasy lovers, this is the event of the year!"

From SF Crowsnest:
"This collection brings together six short stories and novellas about this enormous dragon, giving different perspectives on his life and influence... 'The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule' tells the story of Meric Cattanay, a man who in 1853 proposes to kill the great dragon by painting an enormous mural on its side and thus slowly poisoning him with the toxic compounds in the paint. In 'The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter', we get a glimpse of the inner workings of the dragon as we journey with Catherine inside his vast body. 'The Father Of Stones' takes us to the nearby town of Port Chantay, where a man accused of murder is pleading innocence because it was the dragon's malevolent influence that caused him to commit the atrocious act. 'Liar's House' is Hota's tale of the beautiful woman he met on the dragon's back and their unusual relationship. 'The Taborin Scale' is the story of George and Sylvia, mysteriously transported to another time at the whim of the dragon Griaule, but for what purpose they do not know. Finally, 'The Skull' brings us to a modern-day story set in a deeply political South America, where a young woman is leading a cult obsessed with the large dragon skull hidden in the jungle."

https://subterraneanpress.com/store/product_detail/the_dragon_griaule

After being in work for many many years, Clive Barker's long expected new novel "The Scarlet Gospels" is finally here and the results are not what you would expect. If I remember correctly, I've read somewhere that Barker mentioned it as far back as 1993 and over the years many claims were made about its content. On one hand it was supposed to be a Barker book to end all Barker books, pushing over 232,000 words, rich in mythology and combining elements and characters from all across his canon in one massive door-stopper. Later reports mentioned that it has been scaled by significantly. Personally, I've kept my expectations in check. First version sounded a bit too ambitious and the horror as a genre has changed a lot in recent times. For me the worst possible scenario was that Barker will try to bring his characters up to contemporary standards in a way I don't like. In hindsight, I shouldn't have worried. "The Scarlet Gospels" is a surprisingly old-fashioned horror novel. It plays for maximum amount scars without using any fancy frills. Straight from the opening pages it brought be back to childhood when I was positively devouring this sort of stuff.

"The Scarlet Gospels" features two of is best loved characters and pushed them against each other. On one hand there's detective Harry D'Amour who's probably familiar to you from "Everville" and the short story "The Last Illusion" while on the other its none other than the iconic Cenobite Hell Priest Pinhead. Story recounts how the two originally met and their first encounter explains a lot about Harry's psyche. Pinhead had huge plans for him but someone Harry managed to resist him. Back in present Pinhead is up to his usual tricks and Harry's friend, blind medium Norma Paine is end up in hell after during one their investigations a Lament configuration box opens a gateway to hell. Harry is desperate and soon his ragtag band which compromises some familiar faces decides to go through the deepest recesses of hell to save her but Pinhead stands in their way. The sequences set in hell are some of the finest that Barker has put to paper.

"The Scarlet Gospels" is first Clive Barker's novel for adults in 8 years and it will instantly appeal to his constant readers. While it can be read as a standalone it's best enjoyed if you're passionate about his work so far. In that case, "The Scarlet Gospels" is a veritable treasure trove of details that explain and enrich many elements of the madcap world he's created. More importantly, "The Scarlet Gospels" is a proper, blood curdling classic horror novel that's been missing for years and that's all you can ask of it really. I've enjoyed it tremendously so here's hoping we won't have to wait another 8 years for the next one. Welcome back Pinhead, we missed you!


Debi roman:

House of Echoes began with both an image and a feeling. The image was of a man watching his dog run through an overgrown field in front of a dilapidated mansion. The feeling was the man's certainty that he doesn't belong there.

This initial flash became the book's first scene, and this sense of alienation became central to the novel. Through the course of the book, the chief characters—Ben and Caroline Tierney and their eccentric son, Charlie—feel increasingly estranged from their peculiar home, the odd denizens of the nearby village, and each other. House of Echoes is a thriller with tinges of horror and crime and winks at gothic conventions, but for me the crux of the story is this young family and how their lives and relationships descend into distrust, fear, and madness.

In some ways, these characters bring the worst of their problems with them when they abandon Manhattan in their search for a fresh start. They arrive in Swannhaven, a tiny village in a remote corner of New York State. Their home, the Crofts, is massive, decrepit, and filled with secrets.

World-building is generally associated with fantasy and science fiction books, but I loved the challenge of creating a place that's both grounded in our reality and governed by its own rules. For me, the key was developing a setting at once evocative, familiar, and flexible. An old house surrounded by dense forests, a village with a bloody history, characters who have no clue what they're getting themselves into: this is a classic setup. Once you establish readers' expectations you can begin to subvert them. That's when the fun starts.

The onset of a blizzard is one of plot's catalysts and I've always found winter especially rich in atmosphere. I've lived a lot of my life in cities, but went to college in Central New York and have spent a good deal of time in Western Massachusetts. Winter is serious business in these places. A bad storm can drop yards of snow and knock out your power and heat, trapping you not just in your home but within an expired century. The season's first snow always gives me a thrill, both of anticipation and of dread. These cold months can be desolate and claustrophobic, but there's also something fantastical about them: the way sound changes as it reverberates among frozen trees, how sunlight and moonlight are caught and amplified by snow and ice. As a setting, it's both beautiful and pregnant with danger.

All of the main characters in House of Echoes evolve through the narrative, but perhaps none of them undergo more of a change than the Tierney's eight-year-old son, Charlie. I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I think he's my favorite. He's an unusual kid: vulnerable but strong. Smart yet lost. He finds himself (and other things...) over the course of many hours spent exploring the old growth forests around the Crofts. Many of the book's early readers had young children of their own, and a universal concern among them was how long of a leash Ben and Caroline give young Charlie. An eight year old allowed to wander the forest for hours on his own. Um, no, I don't think so. I made some tweaks accordingly. What I didn't realize until the end of the revision process was that in writing about Charlie's experiences in his mysterious forest, I was replicating an element from my own childhood. From ages 7-10, I lived on the slope of a mountain where we didn't receive any television signals. I filled my afternoons exploring overgrown footpaths lined by nettles, collecting eggs from stagnant ponds, and building dams along seasonal streams. Like Charlie, I'd just moved from a huge city and this vast, strange, natural space seemed to belong on another planet. His were the perfect eyes through which to witness the wild beauty of the forest and mountains.

Writing from Charlie's perspective was a huge amount of fun. He's a special age, one when the lines between fantasy and reality have not yet solidified. Huge, impossible creatures in the forest can be just as real and frightening and unfathomable as a mother's anger. A dreamer like Charlie is fun to write because he can imagine and believe in both miracles and terrors.

Though, as he and the rest of his family eventually learn, some terrors are all too real.

Paula Guran has shared the table of contents of her new collection, The Mammoth Book of the Mummy. No cover as of yet, but it will debut in the UK in July.



Our endless fascination with the past is based not only on the impressive remains of ancient monuments and temples, but with the care many cultures—most notably the Egyptian, but others too—devoted to immortalizing their dead. Gazing upon faces of those who died centuries ago—sometimes preserved by accident rather than intent—and experience a wide range of emotion. These enigmatic remains of humanity have inspired creators since the early nineteenth century; literature, film, television, games, and graphic stories all reflect their imaginings. The Mammoth Book of the Mummy presents tales written for the twenty-first century and a few brand-new stories. Some delve into the past, others explore alternative histories, and some bring mummies into our own world. Gasp, sigh, shudder, smile, and occasionally giggle at the magic wrought by these authors who all make the mummy live again.

Here's the table of contents:
1.Kage Baker, "The Queen in Yellow"
2.Gail Carriger, "The Curious Case of the Werewolf That Wasn't, the Mummy That Was, and the Cat in the Jar"
3.Paul Cornell, "Ramesses on the Frontier"
4.Terry Dowling, "The Shaddowes Box"
5.Carole Nelson Douglas, "Fruit of the Tomb"
6.Steve Duffy, "The Night Comes On"
7.Karen Joy Fowler, "Private Grave 9"
8.Will Hill, "Three Memories of Death"
9.Stephen Graham Jones, "American Mummy" (original to this collection)
10.John Langan, "On Skua Island"
11.Joe R. Lansdale, "Bubba-Ho-Tep"
12.Helen Marshall, "The Embalmer" (original to this collection)
13.Kim Newman, "Egyptian Avenue"
14.Norman Partridge, "The Mummy's Heart"
15.Adam Roberts, "Tollund"
16.Robert Sharp, "The Good Shabti"
17.Angela Slatter, "Egyptian Revival" (original to this collection)
18.Keith Taylor, "The Emerald Scarab"
19.Lois Tilton & Noreen Doyle, "The Chapter of Coming Forth by Night"

e, ovo je vrlo zanimljivo:


Tom Hunter on "Do genre awards actually sell books?"


Shortly after winning the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award, Dark Eden by Chris Beckett was listed as #4 in the Amazon UK charts for paid books on Kindle.

Not a subsection Amazon chart but #4 out of all the paid books being bought on Kindle at that time.

Dan Brown was #3.

Why is this important?

One of the first things I was told when I initially got involved with the Clarke Award almost a decade ago was that, while all very nice and lovely, no genre award, especially no UK genre award of which the Clarke was certainly the biggest, and ever had any real effect on actual book sales.

If we weren't selling books, the logic went, none of the other awards would be either.


Side Note 1: When I say 'selling books' I'm using this to mean sales in the kind of numbers and time frames that publishers can actually notice. I'm not really talking about a couple of extra sales at a dealer's table, although those definitely help too!



As someone who first heard of the Arthur C. Clarke Award when it was one of the deciding factors in my spontaneously buying an intriguing new book called VURT by Jeff Noon – it was printed in the back copy too, not even on the front! – I wasn't entirely sure this perceived wisdom was true, but then again I was a case study of one.


More research was needed, and since I'd been brought into the Clarke Award team with a specific mandate to increase its reach and public recognition, I knew the question of book sales, and demonstrating that we could move the needle, was going to be a large part of my mission.

Book Scan and similar tools have improved the publishing industry's ability to monitor sales, but they are only half the picture and one of the things publishing is woefully behind on is the ability to link sales to marketing or other activity.

So, let's look again at Dark Eden's sudden jump to the Top 5 spot.

First, I need to be clear that it didn't hold that position for very long compared to many of the other illustrious titles it was briefly rubbing shoulders with, and when it dropped, it was just as quickly out of the Top 100 altogether.

Right now it is number 16,643 in the same chart and, for comparison at the time of writing, last year's winner of the Clarke Award (and everything else), Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, is currently in position 2404.

Still not bad considering the book was actually first published in January 2012 and so was storming the charts over a year after it's initial publication!

Could the Clarke Award win have helped?

Short answer: yes.

A couple of other crucial factors helped too.

Credit to publisher Atlantic Books who helped by moving fast and getting behind the win as much as they could.

For instance, artwork for the paperback edition was quickly updated so that the jacket proudly announced the win in prominent text right at the top of the front cover while people were still talking about the win.

They also took the step of dramatically reducing the Kindle ebook price for a short-term promotional period down to the magic 99p figure.

That's the same magic bullet number that iTunes first insisted upon for the price of a single, by the way, and it still clearly has resonance for impulse and experimental purchasing with readers as long as it is coupled with other motivating factors inspiring people to buy the book e.g. buzz around an awards win.

Research also clearly indicates that an ebook price of 99p on its own is not necessarily going to shift any more units these days. You need the story behind the price offer as well and, of course, the fact that both Atlantic and the Clarke were promoting the heck out of this limited time pricing all over social media so people knew about it didn't hurt.

So, here at least, we can demonstrate a direct link between an award win and a sales spike where a publisher acted quickly and cannily to maximize this moment of attention.



Side Note 2: I've talked about this case study with multiple publishers and their authors since, and it's interesting that there are many different schools of thought when it comes to ebook price strategy and prizes, and I've seen many publishers opt to keep prices fixed when a book wins or is shortlisted precisely because they reason that it's now or never to get more full price sales in.



For ebooks at least, I think the #4 chart position shows it may pay better to reap the maximum number of short-term sales in order to increase and sustain word of mouth for your book in the longer term, especially if it's over a year since it's first publication when there's definitely no more marketing or PR resource in the pot to help get the message out.

This would obviously go double for any book where you know there's a sequel on the way.

This is only one case study, and not every year can work as well, but the Book Scan information I've seen for other recent Clarke Award winners shows that in the month after the win each winner enjoyed an approximate 200% positive jump in sales from their previous numbers.

That's a consistent percentage jump, and a total growth of 200% after the win would be larger the number of books being sold already. In other words, the buzz typically amplifies more the more popular the book is already.

Still, a 200% increase from projected sales of any kind still sounds pretty good to me.


Side Note 3: This is for recent winners excluding Ancillary Justice, although that did have a sales jump, it's just hard to know which bit was related to the Clarke Award as that book was winning everything!



Side Note 4: All of the above is specific about books sales of a winning title immediately following that win and doesn't, for instance, include sales of future books or the additional long-terms benefits a win might have on an author's career or their ability to do new book deals with publishers. Our best recent case study here is definitely Lauren Beukes, who is on record crediting the Clarke win for Zoo City as a major positive turning point in her career. In some cases then and award win can not only sell more of that book it can assist with the creation and sale of future books too.


In conclusion then, given the right combination of a popular winning title, an agile and willing publisher, some canny pricing and a little social media magic, it's definitely possible for a genre prize to sell rather a lot of books, even if neither the publisher or the award has a huge budget to help with the marketing.


Awards sell books. Hurrah! Mission accomplished, right?

Well, not quite. This is only a small part of the business side of awards, the side that often goes unconsidered in the rush to discuss shortlists and winners and diversity and voting blocks and self-publishing eligibility and all of the other topics that more typically make up the conversation surrounding awards.

Right now, with the 30th anniversary of the Arthur C. Clarke Award just around the corner in 2016, we're very keen to explore and develop the actual business thinking behind awards to make sure we keep growing in the right direction.

In the meantime, comments are open, and I'm especially interested to hear your own thoughts and ideas on whether an award win (or its canny price discount) has ever influenced you to purchase a particular book and, of course, whether you then went on to actually read it...



[Editor's note: Tom's agreed to come back and answer pretty much anything about anything, either in the comments or in a future blog post. Consider this an AMA with the director of a major genre award.]

Tom Hunter is the Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Learn more about the prize at www.clarkeaward.com, admire the 2015 shortlist here, and hassle him on Twitter at @clarkeaward.
http://www.pornokitsch.com/2015/04/tom-hunter-on-do-genre-awards-actually-sell-books.html#more

In October, Tin House Books will publish The New and Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliot.


From the author of The Wilds, which Publishers Weekly called "a brilliant combination of emotion and grime, wit and horror," comes a debut novel that is part dystopian satire, part Southern Gothic tall tale: a disturbing yet hilarious romp through a surreal New South where newfangled medical technologies change the structure of the human brain and genetically modified feral animals ravage the blighted landscape.

Down on his luck and still pining for his ex-wife, South Carolina taxidermist Romie Futch spends his evenings drunkenly surfing the Internet before passing out on his couch. In a last-ditch attempt to pay his mortgage, he replies to an ad and becomes a research subject in an experiment conducted by the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia. After "scientists" download hifalutin humanities disciplines into their brains, Romie and his fellow guinea pigs start debating the works of Foucault and hashing out the intricacies of postmodern subjectivity. The enhanced taxidermist, who once aspired to be an artist, returns to his hometown ready to revolutionize his work and revive his failed marriage. As Romie tracks down specimens for his elaborate animatronic taxidermy dioramas, he develops an Ahab-caliber obsession with bagging "Hogzilla," a thousand-pound feral hog that has been terrorizing Hampton County. Cruising hog-hunting websites, he learns that this lab-spawned monster possesses peculiar traits. Pulled into an absurd and murky underworld of biotech operatives, FDA agents, and environmental activists, Romie becomes entangled in the enigma of Hogzilla's origins.

Exploring the interplay between nature and culture, biology and technology, reality and art, The New and Improved Romie Futch probes the mysteries of memory and consciousness, offering a darkly comic yet heartfelt take on the contemporary human predicament.


A ovo se već procenjuje kao odličan materijal za ekranizaciju:


First, we feared them. Then we fought them. Now they might be our only hope.

Sixteen-year-old Lyric Walker's life is forever changed when she witnesses the arrival of 30,000 Alpha, a five-nation race of ocean-dwelling warriors, on her beach in Coney Island. The world's initial wonder and awe over the Alpha quickly turns ugly and paranoid and violent, and Lyric's small town transforms into a military zone with humans on one side and Alpha on the other. When Lyric is recruited to help the crown prince, a boy named Fathom, assimilate, she begins to fall for him. But their love is a dangerous one, and there are forces on both sides working to keep them apart. Only, what if the Alpha are not actually the enemy? What if they are in fact humanity's best chance for survival? Because the real enemy is coming. And it's more terrifying than anything the world has ever seen.

Action, suspense, and romance whirlpool dangerously in this cinematic saga!

When news of Alastair Reynolds' latest contract broke into headlines I was filled with such immense feeling of satisfaction but not for the reasons you might initially imagine. Sure, the contract was for cool 1 million and it was for ten books but I was not only happy for the fact that I'll have new books to read for the foreseeable future. In this instance more important than the books themselves was the fact that Alastair's work was truly appreciated by both his publisher and the public. When it comes to my heroes it often happens that one or the other is missing so the author ends up being in that dreaded "underrated" category. But no such worries for Alastair. By all accounts the entire "Poseidon's Children" trilogy has been a huge success. It is filled with innovative storytelling, life-affirming plots and now with "Poseidon's Wake" it finally comes to a close.

Similarly to its predecessors "Poseidon's Wake" is a standalone novel thematically connected to previous installments "Blue Remembered Earth and" "On the Steel Breeze". However, a note to those encountering "Poseidon's Children" for the first time: "Poseidon's Wake" relies heavily on many events that happened before and while it is certainly possible to understand everything, you'll enjoy the story at much greater depth if you read everything in order in which it was published. In "Poseidon's Wake" we once again meet members of Akinya family as their generations rush by us. Similarly as before, through their eyes we, as readers, are in a unique position to explore the world that surrounds them. It's a great literary device and the pace of change in society is obvious. It's such a treat to have such a clear and omnipresent view. This time the story unfolds through two strands that follow Kanu Akinya and Goma Akinya at they go through their paces. One of them occurs on Mars where an interesting evolution involving a rogue AI civilisation is taking place and while other unfolds on Crucible, a planet situated near Sixty-One Virginis and colonized by humans where one can meet Geoffrey's intelligent elephants known as Tantors as well as see ''The Mandala", a strange alien artefact in the sky surrounded by the mysterious and notoriously erratic Watchmakers. When a message arrives from Gliese 163, a distant unexplored system, there's a mention of Eunice Akinya. In a leap of faith two Crucible starships that can achieve half a speed of light are dispatched to discover the truth.

In a typically Reynolds' fashion this is a story full of intriguing scientific concepts, technological marvels and complex biological systems. "Poseidon's Wake" is a purest example of Reynolds I've learned to enjoy and love over all those years. Though the lives of his characters he's actually exploring the human condition - what makes as tick - and, as always, he does it in such a superb and thought provoking fashion. In my opinion, "Poseidon's Children" is his finest moment yet and "Poseidon's Wake" is a glorious conclusion of the trilogy. A wonderful book and best that British SF has to offer at the moment.

http://upcoming4.me/book-news/review-poseidons-wake-by-alastair-reynolds

Nije da me je Oblast otkrovenja nešto naročito oduševila, ali mi je žao što Laguna nije objavila više ništa što je Rejnolds napisao. Delovalo mi je da on može mnogo bolje, a i svemir izgrađen u toj knjizi mi je bio solidno interesantan.

     

Da, da, Touch je sve ono što su oduševljeni rivjuisti najavljivali. 


Claire North je šortlistovana za ovogodišnju Arthur C. Clarke nagradu sa romanom The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August, i pri tadašnjem površnom guglanju učinilo mi se da je to prvenac. Ipak, nije, pošto je Claire North jedan od pseudonima Catherine Webb, dakle, iskusne autorke sa pozamašnim opusom, a to objašnjava i visok stepen zanatske perfekcije u ovom romanu, to što se tiče sadržaja i jezika jednako.

Za sve nas koji (krajnje pristrasno  ) gotivimo film Fallen, sam koncept je zaista impresivan i veoma podatan za sve vrste eksploatacije: bestelesni entitet prelazi iz hosta u host putem najprostijeg dodira. Koncept u zadnje vreme kao da doživljava izvesni preporod, pošto su ga skoro veoma uspešno iskoristili Wesley Chu u svom serijalu Lives of Tao i David Mitchell u svom najnovijem romanu The Bone Clock, a zanimljivo je da je i u oba ta korištenja potpuno izvađen iz domena horora. Claire North sledi isti taj model, uspevajući pri tom da i minimizira fantastični aspekt, tako da koncept u njenim rukama vešto izbegava sve dimenzije natprirodnog i nezemaljskog jednako.

Iako se ne bavi odviše onim "kako" i "zašto" odgovorima, Touch nudi dovoljno informacije o samim akterima da se koncept poprilično racionalizuje, pa tako saznajemo da je glavni protagonista Kepler saznao za svoju neobičnu moć tek u momentu sopstvene smrti, kad je uspeo da zgrabi za nogu pljačkaša koji ga je brutalno ubio. Nakon toga, Kepler je vekovima prelazio iz jednog domaćina u drugi, usavršavajući pri tom sopstvenu veštinu i skupljajući saznanja o sebi sličnoj sorti.

Iz načina na koji North prezentuje koncept, ne može se zaključiti da li je fenomen sam po sebi selektivan. Naprotiv, North sračunato ostavlja mogućnost da moguće i nije, pošto se svi primeri koje nudi svode na maltene istu formulu: u pitanju je brutalno nasilna smrt, tokom koje žrtve nekako uspevaju da dotaknu golu kožu svog ubice. Iako to ne potencira, North ipak ostavlja mogućnost da se to može bukvalno svakome deseiti, jer njeni bestelesni entiteti ne poseduju ama baš nikakvu posebnost koja bi ih ma na koji način izdvojila od ostatka populacije. To otvara prilično smele i interesantne mogućnosti, pa se nadam da će se North vratiti modelu u daljim romanima.

Isto kao i Mitchell i Chu, North stavlja naglasak na neizbežna trvenja po pitanju društvene hijerarhije tih bestelesnih entiteta, u velikoj meri bazirajući svoj triler na odnose koje Kepler ima ne samo sa sebi sličnom sortom, nego i sa domaćinima čija tela koristi, ponekad i uz njihovu saglasnost. Po tom pitanju, North kao da je i pronicljivija i temeljitija od pomenutih, pa se roman lako čita i kao studija stanja čovekovog duha u najortodoksnijem mogućem značenju: šta bi to mogao hteti neko ko može biti bukvalno bilo ko, od Merlin Monro pa do Predsednika US, od filozofa preko vojskovođe pa sve no nuklearnog fizičara? Čemu bi to mogaoda stremi onaj ko ima bukvalno sve što poželi, tu uključujući i samu besmrtnost? Čime to ispunjavaju časove dokolice ljudi koji žive besmrtne živote bez ikakvih obaveza i odgovornosti?

North sve to radi u okviru veoma inteligentno osmišljenog trilera u kom ubica nema mogućnost ni da zaštiti vlasništvo nad sopstvenim telom od žrtve koju progoni. Toj vrlo delikatnoj i teško predočljivoj vezi North prilazi iz ugla sličnog onome iz kog je i Anne Rice transformisala do tada prilično trivijalan model vampira, secirajući ga iz aspekta alijenacije i snažne homoseksualne alegorije, analizirajući suštinu intimnosti.



Vrlo impresivan roman, predočen u veoma zahtevnoj formi vešto kontrolisanog haosa. 5/5

ehm, Glow.


Da, dobar roman, pa čak i više od toga, ali Beauman je sad već postao toliko nesmiljeno ambiciozan da postaje muka živa za čitanje... ne kažem da tu postoji silan raskorak između ambicije i izvedbe, jer ne postoji, u smislu da Beauman uspeva da postigne sve što je sebi zacrtao, ali to postizanje dolazi uz neki tako vidljiv napor koji strašno utiče na čitanje, bar meni. Kao kad slušate opersku divu kako iznosi ariju na samoj granici svojih kapaciteta i odjednom više nekako i ne uživate u muzici, nego samo čekate da se to već jednom završi, pre no što joj pukne glas. Isto tako i Beauman gravira prozu rečenicama koje su tako brižljivo sročene, tako maestralno sračunate, tako krcate svim mogućim značenjima kojima reči mogu da se opterete, pa još i da pri tom ostanu nesmiljeno elegantne.Čovek prosto poželi da se Bauman malko opusti i vrati dobrom osećaju zezancije koji je tako provejavao kroz njegov prethodni roman, i da već jednom prestane da se tako bespoštedno uvek iznova i be prestanka dokazuje - da, skapirali smo već odavno, jesi, genijalan si i fenomenalan, i daj se sad brate više malo opusti! 


Naravno, ovome se ne može dati manje od 4/5, ali bilo bi mi draže i da može, samo da je bar malko manje grčevito napisano, pošto je zaplet stvarno odličan. 

Quote from: neomedjeni on 23-04-2015, 12:59:35
Nije da me je Oblast otkrovenja nešto naročito oduševila, ali mi je žao što Laguna nije objavila više ništa što je Rejnolds napisao. Delovalo mi je da on može mnogo bolje, a i svemir izgrađen u toj knjizi mi je bio solidno interesantan.

Ja zapravo ništa njegovog nisam čitala, donekle i zato što mi ne prijaju baš spejs opera serijali, a donekle što nikako da naiđem na neki relativno kratak a ujedno i potpuno zaokružen... ali Posejdon zaista kupi hvale sa svih strana, pa se nakanjujem da overim.

Quote from: PTY on 13-04-2015, 09:06:51
I, najzad, svi gudizi okupljeni u jednoj knjizi:



Dust jacket by J. K. Potter



More than twenty-five years ago, Lucius Shepard introduced us to a remarkable fictional world, a world separated from our own "by the thinnest margin of possibility." There, in the mythical Carbonales Valley, Shepard found the setting for "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," the classic account of an artist—Meric Cattanay—and his decades long effort to paint—and kill—a dormant, not quite dead dragon measuring 6,000 feet from end to end. The story was nominated for multiple awards and is now recognized as one of its author's signature accomplishments.

Over the years, Shepard has revisited this world in a number of brilliant, independent narratives that have illuminated the Dragon's story from a variety of perspectives. This loosely connected series reached a dramatic crossroads in the astonishing novella, "The Taborin Scale". The Dragon Griaule now gathers all of these hard to find stories into a single generous volume. The capstone of the book—and a particular treat for Shepard fans—is "The Skull," a new 40,000 word novel that advances the story in unexpected ways, connecting the ongoing saga of an ancient and fabulous beast with the political realities of Central America in the 21st century. Augmented by a group of engaging, highly informative story notes, The Dragon Griaule is an indispensable volume, the work of a master stylist with a powerful—and always unpredictable—imagination.

Limited: 300 signed numbered copies, bound in leather
Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition

Table of Contents
◦ The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule
◦ The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter
◦ The Father of Stones
◦ Liar's House
◦ The Taborin Scale
◦ The Skull
◦ Story Notes

From Publishers Weekly:
"These six stories explore ground far from the high fantasy with which dragons are frequently associated. Fans of Shepard's unusual and often powerful Griaule tales will be delighted to have them all in one place."

From SFRevu:
"The stories may be enjoyed as pure fantasy or as political metaphors to suit the individual reader. Either way, they are the creation of a master storyteller and present a fascinating world different from the usual fantasy world of dragons."

From Tor.com:
"It just goes to show that there's more food for thought in each of these stories than you'll find in most full length novels. Each of them really deserves a review as long as this one, making The Dragon Griaule simply a brilliant collection. Subterranean Press has to be commended for collecting them all in one volume, because they're hard to track down individually but work together so incredibly well. Highly recommended."

From Strange Horizons:
"'The Skull' ends one strain of the Griaule narratives, and leaves an infinity more open for further exploration. It ends at a certain moment of happiness and heroism after many long journeys through sorrow, terror, and ordinary human failure. It dreams itself toward light. As does each story in the book, it makes art out of fantasy and pain... The stories together here show that the last sentence of 'The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule' was the truest one. Regardless of the forces determining our fates and telling our tales, we all live our happy endings in advance."

From SF Site:
"For many readers, several of these stories will be already familiar, three of them were Hugo nominees and widely anthologized. For new readers, rest assured that The Dragon Griaule contains stories that will alternately entrance, amuse, perplex, shock, enlighten, confound, and compel you to keep reading. It's a journey of altered lives in an altered landscape, where the fantastic and the real mingle in the lives of people who are never quite sure where their desires end and the dragon's desires begin. That's left for the reader to ponder, and in that way, the dragon Griaule remains as alive as ever."

From San Francisco Book Review:
"For fantasy lovers, this is the event of the year!"

From SF Crowsnest:
"This collection brings together six short stories and novellas about this enormous dragon, giving different perspectives on his life and influence... 'The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule' tells the story of Meric Cattanay, a man who in 1853 proposes to kill the great dragon by painting an enormous mural on its side and thus slowly poisoning him with the toxic compounds in the paint. In 'The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter', we get a glimpse of the inner workings of the dragon as we journey with Catherine inside his vast body. 'The Father Of Stones' takes us to the nearby town of Port Chantay, where a man accused of murder is pleading innocence because it was the dragon's malevolent influence that caused him to commit the atrocious act. 'Liar's House' is Hota's tale of the beautiful woman he met on the dragon's back and their unusual relationship. 'The Taborin Scale' is the story of George and Sylvia, mysteriously transported to another time at the whim of the dragon Griaule, but for what purpose they do not know. Finally, 'The Skull' brings us to a modern-day story set in a deeply political South America, where a young woman is leading a cult obsessed with the large dragon skull hidden in the jungle."

https://subterraneanpress.com/store/product_detail/the_dragon_griaule

Detalj -



To jest -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Weaveworldjap.jpg

Odlican je J. K. Potter btw...

ha! zanimljivo...


ne mogu da sada brzim guglanjem provalim celu priču iza originala, ali čini mi se da ovako kompletna sa zmajem ima daleko više smisla, dok to parče kao da ga baš i nema odviše... mislim, taj koncept sa djevom i krilatim zmajolikim gušterom može da znači toliko toga, da mi ne znači mnogo, skoro pa ništa.

ta-daaam!!

In October, Tor will release A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe. Robots, clones, and a literary mystery set 100 years in the future? Yes, please!



A Borrowed Man: a new science fiction novel, from Gene Wolf, the celebrated author of the Book of the New Sun series.

It is perhaps a hundred years in the future, our civilization is gone, and another is in place in North America, but it retains many familiar things and structures. Although the population is now small, there is advanced technology, there are robots, and there are clones.

E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person. He is a clone who lives on a third-tier shelf in a public library, and his personality is an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human.

A wealthy patron, Colette Coldbrook, takes him from the library because he is the surviving personality of the author of Murder on Mars. A physical copy of that book was in the possession of her murdered father, and it contains an important secret, the key to immense family wealth. It is lost, and Colette is afraid of the police. She borrows Smithe to help her find the book and to find out what the secret is. And then the plot gets complicated.

Samo jedan bezumni fanovski post.


Da mu sve po spisku, što ga niko ne prevodi?!!!!!! 

Pa, možda je i bolje tako, nego da ga prevedu aljkavo... danas se u žanrovske prevode ulaže samo goli minimum, a to može da (nekako) podnese samo krajnje nezahtevna proza.

Nego, još jedna obavezna stavka na 'za overiti' listi:



Justina Robson is one of those one-of-a-kind authors that defy easy classification. Her "Quantum Gravity" certainly looked like run of the mill action science fiction if you judged it solely by the covers but once started digging deep you would probably be surprised by what you would find - complexity, philosophy and all around strangeness. Robson's first standalone novel in years, "The Glorious Angels" doesn't hide away behind its cover art. The synopsis states it clearly and instantly promises "a thrilling mix of science, magic and sexual politics". "The Glorious Angels" delivers all this and plenty more. It is Justina Robson coming at its readers with all guns blazing.

For a book that mostly about ideas, "The Glorious Angels" sports a suitably impressive setting. The story is set on a matriarchy world ruled by mind-linked empresses. There's magic that shapes the world and is literary connected their their fickle moods. The power is spread across 8 cities and as the story open we're in Glimshard, second city of the Golden Empire and Westernmost Outpost of Civilisation. As Tralane, an engineer, is working when she overhears that Karoo has been seen. A strange creature that threatens to bring the war. That is just the beginning for her as the story unfolds through the eyes of many different very effectively used points of view we learn that Glimshard is not immune to political manipulations, backstabbings and social disorder. Amongst all this an archaeological site slowly enters the picture and brings about the chance of finding a long forgotten technology that has the power to usurp everything.

I'm intentionally obtuse about the plot as I don't want to spoil the story but if there's one advice I can give to all new readers it is that you should read "The Glorious Angels" slowly. There's an insane amount of characters, information and philosophy that just begs to be explored in details. As such, "The Glorious Angels" is one of those books that deserves a re-read and I hope to do one soon. I won't pretend that I understood everything the first time around and I've read few paragraphs more than once but that's the beauty of Robson's writing. She never looks down on the reader. Best of all, "The Glorious Angels" is a book about women - one which plays with tropes but sets them on a level playing field, which is exactly what we're all fighting for. I waited for something this intelligent for a long time and I certainly wasn't disappointed. Having previously mentioned that this was a standalone, the ending leaves plenty of room for a sequel or two so it'll be interesting seeing whether something will happen in the future. All in all - a tremendously deep read! One I would recommended to all veteran readers of the genre fiction.