129,864,880! to samo do nedelje...

[PTY]

evo nam i majskih gudiza:




We're still waiting for the final Temeraire book. But meanwhile, here's a brand new story, drawing from folk tales, about a cold wizard known as the Dragon. He protects the people of a small village from the evils in the wood, but in return he demands one girl come and serve him every 10 years.



The first book by Stephenson since 2011's Reamde... and it sounds like a strange one. The world is ending, and the human race makes a desperate effort to get some survivors off the planet. Five thousand years later, the descendants of humanity are divided into seven different races, all of which decide to pay a visit to the old homeworld.




Barker's back! And he's telling a story of two of his most famous creations: occult detective Harry D'Amour and Pinhead.




A prequel to Okorafor's Who Fears Death, this book follows a genetic experiment named Phoenix, an "accelerated woman" who looks like an adult despite being only two years old. Until the boy that Phoenix has a crush on commits suicide, and she starts to glimpse the truth about her world.



David and Merrill are trying to keep their marriage together, but the cards are stacked against them. A handsome real estate developer named Steele is making advances on Merrill, and when their entire town (minus David) gets removed from time and space to another dimension entirely, Steele may have an unfair advantage in the battle for Merrill's affections.



Bacigalupi's first adult novel since his award-sweeping The Wind-Up Girl, this book takes place in a terrible future where water is scarce and Phoenix and Las Vegas are battling for control over what's left of the Colorado River. Angel Velasquez is an elite "water knife," who's on the trail of a fantastic new water source... but the cost may be too high.

[PTY]

Dakle, Perfidia! 

Ta ogromna, masivna romančuga prepuna najčistijeg destilata maestrove imaginacije i njegove opsesije najbrutalnijim i najdivljijim aspektima čovekove psihe sad već udara temelje njegovom masterpisu u kom sve one aspekte u kojima briljira dovodi do perfekcije!

Maestro koji nikada nije imao bog zna kakvu želju da ponudi simpatetične protagoniste sada ulazi u ekstreme u kojima ne nalazi za shodno da ponudi protagonistu sa barem donekle iskupljujućim osobinama.

A njegov stil, koji ionako varira od perioda u period i od serijala do serijala, sad je također ekstremno beskompromisan, bliži onom iz Underworld USA negoli onom iz The L.A. Quartet, grozničav i britak i brutalan i unikatan i lako prepoznatljiv.

Ovo je samo prva knjiga iz najavljenog novog serijala o LA Kvartetu, izapravo je prikvel koji datira radnju u svega nekoliko dana decembra 1941, sa težištem u napadu na Perl Harbor. Dadli Smit je tu okosnica radnje i koncepta jednako, i bez obzira koliko mi Dadlija već dobro poznavali, ovaj Dadli uspeva da bude svejedno nov, energičan na opijumu i benzedrinu, čovek velike vizije i njoj srazmerne bespoštedne brutalnosti, ljubavnik Beti Dejvis i dirigent kriminalnog sveta koji od LA sa lakoćom pravi društvenu i moralnu noćnu moru.

Perfidia dovodi do savršenstva balans koji joj nudi svež teren prikvela sa dubokom kros-referencijalnošću ostavljenom od strane LA Kvarteta. Taman kad ste pomislili da je o tome sve već rečeno u četiri ogromna toma, dolazi ovaj gejzir potpuno novih, bizarnih i sasvim morbidnih korupcija kroz seks, eugeniku, zatvaranje nedužnih Japanaca, pljačku njihove imovine, ritualna ubistva, ucene, političke manipulacije, svakorazne defamacije, psihopatizaciju emotivno labilnih, destrukciju duševno stabilnih, korupciju patriotskih osećanja, revamp rasističkih svetonazora i apsolutnu degradaciju svih bazičnih ljudskih vrednosti odjednom.

Niko, ali niko osim Ellroya ne bi mogao to da ovako kristalno predoči. Niko osim Ellroya ne bi mogao da napiše romančugu od 700 strana o svega dvadeset i dva decembarska dana 1941.

Šta više reći? Ne znam, stvarno: Ellroy mi sad već dođe ko član obitelji. 5/5

[PTY]

Seveneves

I've been incredibly excited about "Seveneves" even before I knew what it is called or what it is about. During one of the "REAMDE" promotional interviews Neal Stephenson mentioned that the book he is writing at the moment will be a hard science fiction one and that was enough for me. In my mind I was already reading something akin to "Anathem", one of my all time favourite books and the book I would probably choose as the one I would take to a desert island with me. "Anathem" has everything. It's is full of science, philosophy, innovative concepts. It is also incredibly dense - up to a point where it has it own invented language - and benefits from multiple re-reads. Compared to it, its successor "REAMDE" was an easy walk in a part - a whole enjoyable action movie which you could enjoy without using too much of your brain. So, yes, perhaps I expecting too much from "Seveneves" but still, even when fully aware of my completely unreasonable wishes it was slightly disappointing when I stated reading it. The end outcome wasn't half bad but before I go too far, here's what "Seveneves" is about.

It is a novel that opens with one of the most spectacular and bombastic statements in contemporary science fiction:

"The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason."

With the moon suddenly gone, everyone's instant reaction is bafflement closely followed by panic. As the days pass by it soon become evident that nothing particularly bad is going to happen to the Earth, that is until the scientist which resembles Neil deGrasse Tyson in everything but a name steps up to the plate and quickly reveals that due to a phenomenon dubbed as "Hard Rain" in mere two years the whole of the Earth's surface will be rendered inhabitable. What follows is a frantic race to put as much material and people as possible into orbit. All the industrial potential and production are stream into this one final effort. The future habitat is quickly built around the ISS. But everything's not rosy. The astronauts' selection process is heavily compromised and the politician rear their ugly heads all the time threatening to derail the whole effort. As the Hard Rain comes right on time and Earth goes quiet, the drama moves to space. The ISS is now a amalgam of many elements and in its micro-climate many factions are already appearing - a veritable class system - but still everything slowly ticks on. This fragile social equilibrium is suddenly completely torn apart by the arrival of one person I hoped we left behind on Earth. Sadly, in a all too predictable fashion and in a move completely untypical for Stephenson this person does appear out of nowhere and goes on to skew the whole story in a direction about which I didn't care too much about. This first part of "Seveneves" takes up over 600 pages and for most of its parts reads like budget version of Stephen Baxter who explored similar matters in much greater depths in his "Flood/Arc" duology. To be honest, I must admit that I haven't enjoyed this first bit a lot. At times I was frustrated by the lack of depth especially when you consider such rich and intriguing premise. Worst of all, there's no trace of that bonkers humour that Stephenson often uses and there's lots of bad sex.



But luckily, just at the moment when I though that everything will end up rather bad for me, Stephenson takes the story into the far future and delivers the last third of the book in a fashion that completely blew my mind. Poetic, scientific and beautiful written these last 200 pages are some of the finest stuff he has ever written. During these pages his imagination is off the scale and while the big reveal is (once again) predictable enough, the finale blew my mind. In hindsight it feels like those 650 pages were an overwritten introduction for the last 200. However, even here, when he's at his best, it almost feels like Stephenson doesn't really want his readers to leave completely satisfied. Story ends up abruptly leaving everything open to interpretation. Yes, I know.

To conclude, "Seveneves" is a strange book that will polarise the readers. The premise is great and there are bits of it that I absolutely loved and will remember fondly (last third) but at the heart of it is miles away from my favourite works such as "Anathem" or "Baroque Cycle". I think I would enjoy it so much better if it was written as a much longer duology or even a trilogy. In this shape and form it is a rather quaint hodge podge of many great elements that ultimately fail to deliver on its premise. But then again, don't dwell too much on my words - this is still Stephenson and even on his bad day he's better than 99,9% of other authors.

[PTY]

U zadnje vreme kao da je mala poplava istoka u žanru, i ima tu zaista jako finih priloga. evo jedan rivju o Zen Cho.

Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho






In Zen Cho's "The House of Aunts," a newcomer to a small town falls in love with a taciturn loner at their new high school. As their friendship deepens, strange details begin to accumulate around the mysterious paramour. Finally, they turn out to be a vampire, turned as a teenager, and compelled to live the life of a normal kid by their large, close-knit vampire clan.

There's probably an interesting discussion to be had about how, in the short three-years-and-change since "The House of Aunts"'s publication, we've gotten past our need to be outraged over Twilight so that we can more fully devote ourselves to being outraged over Fifty Shades of Grey. Nevertheless, even in 2015, Cho's reference point is as obvious as her games with the Twilight premise are delightful. For one thing, in her telling of the story, the vampire is the girl. For another, the vampire is the story's protagonist. For a third, the vampire isn't a vampire, but a pontianak, a creature out of Malaysian folklore who is said to rip out the intestines of its victims. And for a fourth and most important difference, while "The House of Aunts" is a love story, it is very definite about the kind of love that it considers most important, and most nurturing. When teenage vampire Ah Lee's large clan of vampire aunts decide to hunt down and eat her paramour Ridzual (for, it must be said, thoroughly justified reasons), Ah Lee acts like a proper YA heroine and stands up for her love ("'Who ask you to eat my schoolmate?' she said shrilly. 'How'm I suppose to go back to school now? So lose face!'" [p. 113]). But then she sends the boy away, because "I need to talk to my family" (p. 114).

The most refreshing and powerful statement made by "The House of Aunts" is its reminder that, for young people in particular, the bonds of family can be much more important than the object of a weeks-old infatuation. Though Ah Lee rebels against her aunts and craves relationships outside their sometimes stifling group, she also depends on their no-nonsense attitude and uncompromising support. Ah Lee's romance with Ridzual is sweetly and tenderly drawn, and the reader can't help but hope that they'll make things work. But the genius of "The House of Aunts," and its true focus, is in how it paints the bond between Ah Lee and her aunts as something that would quite obviously drive any teenage girl out of her mind with frustration, but which is simultaneously the most nurturing, loving environment any child could hope for.

She sat down on the sofa in the living room and wept for half an hour.

"Girl, what's the matter?" said Ji Ee.

"What's happening?" said Ah Chor.

"Hao ah," said Ah Ma. "Crying!"

"Crying?" said Ah Chor. "Ah Lee is crying?"

"You're crying, is it?" said Sa Ee Poh.

The diagnosis bounced from aunt to aunt, each aunt repeating it to another for certainty.

"So old already still crying!" said Ah Chor.

"Nobody has died. Your stomach is not empty. What is there to cry about?" said Sa Ee Poh.

"Ah girl, don't cry lah, ah girl." said Ji Ee. (p. 102)

The story ends with Ah Lee and Ridzual getting over their difficulties, but the purpose of their reconciliation is less to end on a note of romance, and more to finally reveal to the reader how Ah Lee became a vampire, and how her aunts supported her even in the face of mistakes and public shame. The story's conclusion—"With six aunts behind you, you can be anything" (p. 125)—leaves very little question which love story we should be focusing on.

"The House of Aunts" is not the only story in Cho's debut collection, Spirits Abroad (which collects ten stories, three original to this volume), to take a familiar piece of Western pop culture and transform it not only by making its setting or characters Malaysian, but by inverting its assumptions about gender and relationships. "The Mystery of the Suet Stain" reimagines Holmes and Watson as Sham and Belinda, Malaysian students in Cambridge. Here, Holmes's aloofness is partially the result of Sham's being a lesbian, and thus left out of the games of heterosexual matchmaking rife within the close-knit Malaysian community. Watson's affability, meanwhile, becomes something much less benign when he's recast as a beautiful girl who doesn't know how to turn away her insistent, demanding suitors—one of whom may be a demon whom only Sham can get rid of. "One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland," meanwhile, is a familiar story of fairies turning up in an English boarding school, but the students in this case are recent arrivals from Asia, who are annoyed at being asked to deal with this incursion of alien folklore.

It would be a disservice, however, to sum up Spirits Abroad—the co-winner, along with Stephanie Feldman's The Angel of Losses, of last year's Crawford Award for debut fantasy—as a pastiche of Western popular culture. All three stories discussed are vibrant pieces of work in their own right, whether or not you can spot the reference (as noted already, Twilight's moment of zeitgeist is nearly over, and yet "The House of Aunts" is as moving and funny today as it was when I first read it three years ago, and will probably long outlive its reference point). In other stories in the collection, Cho draws more purely on Malaysian folklore and on its intersections with modern life, with equally vivid results, and it is the presence of that cultural influence that rings most powerfully in all the works here. What ties the collection together, and makes it a unique and important work of modern fantasy, is its focus on culture and community. Whether they are living in their ancestral home or venturing far away from it—whether they are human or fantastical—the characters in these stories are shaped, guided, and rooted in their culture, their history, and their family, and it is those ties that remain paramount throughout their adventures.

Divided into three parts—"Here," which contains stories set in Malaysia; "There," whose stories are about Malaysian characters in the UK; and "Elsewhere," about worlds that are futuristic, fantastic, or both—Spirits Abroad is characterized by Cho's wry humor and her ability to sum up a character, a situation, or a mood in a few well-chosen words. A character's parents embrace her "with sportsmanlike enthusiasm" (p. 13), a young community organizer is "a long, bony piece of irony" (p. 41). That ability to say so much with just a few words is a crucial tool in Cho's efforts to convey how her characters and situations are shaped by the history and community that surround them. In "The First Witch of Damansara," the atheism of the heroine's late grandmother is hushed up, "less out of a concern that [Nai Nai] would be outed as a witch, than because of the stale leftover fear that she would be considered a Communist" (p. 15). Even an outsider to Malaysia's history can't help but pick up on the wealth of cultural and political nuances in that sentence—the way that atheism and Communism are juxtaposed, the fact that fear of being tarred as a Communist is "leftover."

"The First Witch of Damansara" initially seems like a story about a clash of cultures—its heroine, Vivian, lives in the UK, shocks her parents with her revealing clothing, and is the only member of her family without magical powers, to the disgust of her more traditional younger sister. With obvious symbolism, she spends the story debating whether she will be married to her British fiancé wearing a Western wedding dress (whose white color is symbolic of death in many Asian cultures) or in a bright red cheongsam. But if the story's premise leads us to expect a crisis, and a forced choice between the two cultures paralleling the choice of marriage apparel, its conclusion is that there is no choice at all. No matter what clothes she wears, Vivian can't be anything but the product of the culture and family she was raised in. Far from being disconnected from her roots, it is she who is able to lay the unquiet spirit of her grandmother to rest, to ensure that she is given the funeral rites that would have made her happy, and to make peace within her family.

Despite the presence of stories that riff on Western culture, Spirits Abroad isn't interested in cosseting or handholding Western readers. Malaysian and Chinese terms are dropped into the narrative with little or no explanation (and, in keeping with the manifesto of publisher Fixi Novo with which the book opens, are not italicized), and the nuances of the communities the stories are set in—Malaysian villages, space colonies, and student dorms alike—are treated as the norm, not an alien puzzle to be worked out. A particularly strong example of this is "The First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia," in which the organizers of the titular congress discover that among their delegates are representatives of orang bunian, invisible spirits out of Malaysian folklore, who complain: "Don't we deserve the chance to fight for our rights? Nobody ever did a survey of our opinions. Nobody wants to know what we think. We are being marginalized!" (p. 51). The beauty of the story, however, is in conveying how the orang bunian's marginalization is part of the complex tapestry of ethnicities, religions, and interests in Malaysia—as soon as the spirit delegate makes their presence known, a debate springs up over whether they are Malaysian or Chinese, Muslim or Buddhist, and thus to which group they belong, or have the right to claim belonging to.

There's a wealth of history and politics in stories like "The First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia" that is almost impossible for an outsider to parse (for example, and as noted by Cho in a recent interview with Sofia Samatar, a complicating aspect of her own ethnicity is the fact that she is not just Malaysian, but Malaysian-Chinese; it's a nuance whose full import foreign readers will have trouble grasping, and yet its presence can be clearly sensed in several of the stories in the collection). But Cho's characters are so immersed in their settings that getting to know them inevitably results in learning those settings. All of her characters, be they home or abroad, are steeped in a sense of community, of belonging in a particular place, and of taking that sense of place with you when you leave home. That feeling of belonging is something that can shift and change, which sometimes incorporates loss and social anxiety. The final story in the collection, "The Four Generations of Chang E," is an allegory of immigration and transformation, in which four generations of women make their way from the Earth to the Moon, defying the traditions of their own culture and prejudices of outsiders to make new lives for themselves, until finally the last of them realizes that "Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home" (p. 284). But for every character in this collection, some ties to the past and to their community still exist. Just as Ah Lee needs her aunts more than she needs her boyfriend, the characters in the other stories in Spirits Abroad need their bedrock of familiar culture, even if they've chosen to leave home or to rebel.

It is from this tension between rebellion and community that most of the stories in Spirits Abroad draw their humor. To put it another way, Cho writes in a romantic mode (she has also written works of mimetic romance, such as the novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo), but with a decidedly matter-of-fact sensibility. No matter how fantastical the events of her stories—or how romantic their proceedings—her characters are standing on a solid foundation of good sense, which reminds them that love is great, but what about getting good grades? So the narrator of "The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote" may be a magical creature seeking the permission of the forest to dig a hole, but what he's really after is a business arrangement, and he's befuddled and wrongfooted when love comes into the picture. "Prudence and the Dragon" begins with a dose of pure surrealism:

The buses in London turned into giant cats—tigers and leopards and jaguars with hollow bodies in which passengers sat. You could still use your Oyster card on them, but bus usage dropped: the seats were soft and pink and sucked at you in a disturbingly organic way when you sat down, and the buses were given to stopping in the middle of the road to quarrel with one another. (p. 204-5)

But the story quickly becomes a domestic drama, with the titular dragon setting his sights on mousy, oblivious medical student Prudence as the maiden whom he plans to whisk off to another dimension, in the meantime appearing perfectly happy to wait on her hand and foot.

When I first read "The House of Aunts" three years ago I was stunned by its inventiveness, its vivid depiction of its setting and culture, and the deep feeling that underpinned its central relationship between Ah Lee and her aunts. I marked Cho as an author to watch, and Spirits Abroad cements my feeling that she is one of the most exciting voices in genre writing right now. Her wry and incisive portraits of Malaysian folklore and culture are fascinating to an outsider like myself, but what makes her remarkable as a genre writer is the light, assured touch of her fantastic worldbuilding, and the humor she leavens it with. An excellent collection in its own right, Spirits Abroad is also hopefully a promise of even greater things to come.


Copyright © 2015 Abigail Nussbaum

[PTY]

A new planet. A new battle. Same war.

After barely surviving his last tour on Mars, Master Sergeant Michael Venn finds himself back on earth in enforced isolation. Through a dangerous series of operations he returns to Mars to further his investigation into the Drifters–ancient artifacts suddenly reawakened on the red planet.

But another front in the war leads his team to make the difficult journey to Saturn's moon, Titan. Here, in the cauldron of war, hides new truths about the Drifters, the origin of life in our solar system and the plans of the supposedly benevolent Gurus, who have been "sponsoring" and supporting humanity in their fight against outside invaders.

Killing Titan is the second book in the epic interstellar War Dogs trilogy from master of science fiction, Greg Bear.

[PTY]

super naslovnica:


Take a terrifying journey with literary masters of suspense, including Peter Straub, Kim Newman, and Caitlín R. Kiernan, visiting a place where the other is somehow one of us. These electrifying tales redefine monsters from mere things that go bump in the night to inexplicable, deadly reflections of our day-to-day lives. Whether it's a seemingly devoted teacher, an obsessive devotee of swans, or a diner full of evil creatures simply seeking oblivion, the monstrous is always there—and much closer than it appears.



1."A Natural History of Autumn" by Jeffrey Ford
2."Ashputtle" by Peter Straub
3."Giants of the Earth" by Dale Bailey
4."The Beginning of the Year Without Summer" by Caitlín R. Kiernan
5."A Wish From a Bone" by Gemma Files
6."The Last, Clean, Bright Summer" by Livia Llewellyn
7."The Totals" by Adam-Troy Castro
8."The Chill Clutch of the Unseen" by Kim Newman
9."Down Among the Dead Men" by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
10."Catching Flies" by Carole Johnstone
11."Our Turn Too Will One Day Come" by Brian Hodge
12."Grindstone" by Stephen Graham Jones
13."Doll Hands" by Adam L. G. Nevill
14."How I Met the Ghoul" by Sofia Samatar
15."Jenny Come to Play" by Terry Dowling
16."Miss Ill-Kept Runt" by Glen Hirshberg
17."Chasing Sunset" by A.C. Wise
18."The Monster Makers" by Steve Rasnic Tem
19."Piano Man" by Christopher Fowler
20."Corpsemouth" by John Langan (original to the anthology)

[PTY]

REVIEW SUMMARY: An early contender for Best of 2015.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Baby in hand, the Vagrant must brave the dangers of the blasted lands to deliver a magical sword to the Shining City.

MY REVIEW
PROS: Imaginative setting, compelling characters, storytelling through actions and gestures, beautiful writing, frightening demons, and a powerful message.
CONS: Some readers might not appreciate Newman's stark writing style.
BOTTOM LINE: The Vagrant is a worthy read announcing a great new fantasy author.

Coming off the high of reading Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings, a silkpunk fantasy masterpiece, I assumed it would be some time before I read a work of fiction of the same caliber. You know what happens when you assume...After reading a series of glowing reviews of The Vagrant by Peter Newman I sent a request to Harper Voyager for a review copy. After reading a couple more extremely positive reviews I got tired of waiting and decided to just go ahead and order a copy. The review copy arrived first but after reading The Vagrant I can confidently say: I regret nothing! I'll just give one away to a deserving friend — after all this book deserves as wide an audience as possible. I declared The Grace of Kings an early contender for Best of 2015 and The Vagrant serves as stiff competition.

The premise of The Vagrant is simple enough. Accompanied by a baby and a goat, a nameless mute must cross demon-infested wastelands to deliver a magical sword to the Shining City, last bastion of hope. The mute is hunted by multiple factions and it is difficult to distinguish friend from foe in the ruins of a world tainted by evil.

That's it. It's simple but sometimes there's beauty in simplicity and beneath the grit and grime of The Vagrant there is no shortage of beauty. It's part fantasy and part science fiction. There are demons and knights but the demons enhance their followers with necrotech and the knights ride floating castles and caterpillar tanks. All of the shiny technology of the past has fallen to rust and disuse in the wake of the demonic incursion. The taint of the demons brings mutation and famine. The Vagrant has a sort of The Road meets Mad Max meets Children of Men vibe.


"She points to the fence where it bends low, forming half of a barbed smile. The gap is spanned by a living bridge; guards who could not stem the greed-tide are spitted together, forming a carpet."

It wouldn't feel appropriate to classify The Vagrant as grimdark fantasy. The elements of the subgenre are all present: the setting is dystopian, life is harsh and brief, the bad guys are bad and the good guys are few and far between. Newman's demons and the change they affect on the world and its inhabitants remind me of the forces of Chaos from Warhammer 40,000 — the very property that inspired the term grimdark. The Vagrant is bleak, depressive, and violent and yet...

And yet through a combination of beautiful writing and skillful characterization Newman reveals The Vagrant to be so much more. Newman's crisp writing and imaginative descriptions beg to be adapted into a graphic novel. And how do you compellingly portray a mute, a baby, and a goat? Carefully and subtly. Voiceless, the actions and interactions of the three characters still manage to speak volumes. The Vagrant's relationship with the baby, expressed through gestures rather than words, is tender and poignant. The Vagrant's relationship with the goat is frequently adversarial and comical. Other characters revolve around these three and their dialogue helps sustain the plot and fill in details. Harm and the Hammer that Walks are two further examples of Newman's excellent characterization, proving that survival isn't enough.

What really separates The Vagrant from most grimdark fantasy is that might does not (necessarily) make right. In grimdark fiction I've read plenty of cynical, disillusioned, morally ambiguous antiheroes that do whatever it takes to succeed. I've also read plenty of principled white knights in more traditional fantasy that embrace a higher code. That breed of protagonists doesn't last long in a grimdark world (i.e. Eddard Stark). From the very start of the novel the Vagrant struggles with right and wrong. Given the burden of magical sword and baby the Vagrant seeks the path of least resistance on the journey north to the Shining City.


"Harm laughs until throats clear by the door, like guns cocking, ready to fire."

The Vagrant doesn't engage in questionable pursuits but he doesn't exactly rush to defend the weak and helpless either. It's the baby (and later Harm) that perform as the Vagrant's moral compass, acting as living avatars of his conscience. At first my own world weariness rebelled at the Vagrant allowing an infant to dictate his course of action. As the Vagrant developed, truly earning the designation of hero, my beliefs developed with him and by the end I understood. Survival isn't enough and at the end of the world kindness can be even more powerful than violence.

The Vagrant's enemies are numerous. As I mentioned, Newman's demons are reminiscent Warhammer 40,000's legions of Chaos and I consider this a big plus. Like most things in the dystopian world of The Vagrant, the demons have titles rather than names: the Usurper, the First, the Demagogue, the Overlord, the Uncivil, the Knights of Jade and Ash. They would each make for great end level Boss Battles were The Vagrant to be made into a video game. These demons sprang forth from the Breach eight years prior to the opening of the book and in the time since they have established a foothold in the material world. These demons have their own flaws and motivations, each warps the world around it in its own image. Our hero's journey north takes him around and reluctantly through the domains of these demons, bringing to mind Dante's Inferno as the Vagrant experiences new circles of hell along the way.

The Vagrant surpassed all my expectations and I expect many great things to come from Peter Newman.  Jaded fantasy readers should take this journey — by the end you might find a new perspective.

[PTY]

Tomorrow and Tomorrow


Thomas Sweterlitsch

Fascinantan debi-roman, ingeniozno zamišljen i veoma impresivno izveden, jedan od najilustrativnijih primera lucidnosti  savremenog SF futurizma.

Jedna od prvih opaski na roman je bila "Blade Runner with Google Glasses" i to u principu veoma vešto izdvaja samu srž koncepta kojeg roman nudi.

Čak štaviše, moglo bi se reći da se koncept izTomorrow and Tomorrow može posmatrati kao neka vrst prikvela Neuromanceru, neka vrst one famozne 'karike koja nedostaje' između naše sadašnjice i distopičnog koncepta kiberpanka.

Thomas Sweterlitsch besprekorno barata ekstrapolacijom budućnosti iz ove tako specifične post-9/11 sadašnjosti, u kojoj najradikalnije i najsuštinskije društvene i političke promene formiraju nove pejzaže bukvalno preko noći, drastično menjajući logične pravce tehnološkog razvoja, stavjlajući ga u neke potpuno nenamenske službe koje menjaju svet u treptaju oka. 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow kreće premisom da je Pitsburg sravnjen sa zemljom u iznenadnom terorističkom nuklearnom napadu. Žrtve Pitsurga nisu mogle biti ni sahranjene, one su naprosto pretvorene u prah koji je ostao da leži u metarskom talogu na radioaktivnom zemljištu koje na satelitskim snimcima izgleda kao prazna očna duplja na licu zemlje. 

Politička svest zemlje se promenila preko noći: jalove trzavice obaju impotetnih političkih partija odbačene su u sekundi, i to u korist jedne žene čija je vizija saniranja posledica bila svima ekstremno prihvatljiva. Predsednica Mičam otud ne samo da uvodi smrtnu kaznu, nego je i televizuje u sopstvenoj koreografiji, u kojoj dominira kao nekrunisana kraljica i vrhovni stepen Zakona i Prava, dok strebrnom olovkom potpisuje smrtne presude.

A za sanaciju tragedije Pitsburga, zemlja uključuje i sinhronizuje sve svoje resurse po pitanju skladištenja digitalnih podataka: svaki video i audio feed svih stanovnika Pitsburga se restaurira i skladišti na način koji omogućava kreiranje virtuelnog sveta sa kojim je moguća kompjuterska interakcija. Svaki telefonski poziv, svaki video klip sa mobilnih telefona, svaki snimac CC kamera na gradskim puktovima, svaki satelitski snimak koji je zahvatio Pitsburg u danima neposredno pre eksplozije pohranjen je na servere gde je kritična masa podataka eventualno kreirala trodimenzionalni virtuelni svet, savršenu digitalnu rekreaciju u koju su ljudi mogli da pristupe kroz Adware interfejs implantiran u lobanje, i tako prisustvuju poslednim danima i satima svojih bližnjih.

John Dominic Blaxton je bio jedan od arhivara te baze podataka, sa zadatkom da taj rastući virtuelni pejzaž mapira za što lakšu laičku upotrebu: svim nepoznatim ljudima je trebalo saznati imena, svim neznanim zbivanjima je trebalo otkriti uzrok, a sve to pažljivom rekonstrukcijom sporednih digitalnih podataka. Svoje retko slobodno vreme, Dominik provodi u društvu svoje trudne pokojne žene, u njenim poslednjim časovima života, dok je obilazila izloge prodavnica, sekund pre eksplozije.

A onda Dominik otkrije da neko manipuliše bazom podataka, brišući i svrhovito menjajući već odavno mapirane segmente. 

Prosto je neverovatna lakoća sa kojom Thomas Sweterlitsch kreira taj distopični svet na gotovo isključivo posrednoj informaciji. U isto vreme, prosto je neverovatno kako mu polazi sa rukom da kroz konstrukciju distopije pokaže zapravo neiscrpnu zalihu iskrenog ljudskog optimizma i isto tako nepokolebljivo duboku mogućnost bolje budućnosti.

Ovaj zaista maestralno napisan triler stvorio je pravu jagmu po pitanju otkupa filmskih prava još dok je bio u rukopisu. Na kraju ga je kupio Sony, Noah Oppenheim će adaptirati scenario a Film 360 i Mark Gordon Company će ga producirati. U ogromnoj meri, sinopsis zaista može da ponudi onaj tako estetski privlačan noar šmek koji je Blade Runner imao, tako da je ovo još jedna od ekranizacija koju sa velikim nestrpljenjem očekujem.
5/5

[PTY]

Required Reading: 30 of the Best Horror Books

[džin tonik]

do kafke se vec skoro gromoglasno nasmijao, pa me malo pomirio s izborom, ali ubrzo opet king, straub, lovecraft. jest' da je king bestselling, no o razlozima ne bih.

[PTY]

Why Writing Dates Older Science Fiction Rather Than Science

By James Wallace Harris

If you live long enough you can watch science fiction evolve. Most fans automatically assume that it's the advancement of science that spoils older science fiction, but I disagree. "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny is downright silly when it comes to science, but I still love the hell out of that story. It's my contention that writing dates older science fiction, and not the science.



I just finished reading The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, a sophisticated 21st century science fiction novel from China. Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker called Cixin "China's Arthur C. Clarke." I've read others who have given Cixin that tag too. Clarke wrote some exciting science fiction back in the 20th century, but The Three-Body Problem storytelling dwarfs anything Clarke wrote. Clarke wasn't much of a writer, and no stylist at all. His characters were chess pieces used to fictionally illustrate his scientific prophecies.  Isaac Asimov wasn't much better. Heinlein had some writing chops, decent enough in the 1950s, but his later works devolved into solipsistic characters all chatting amongst themselves.

The prose of The Three-Body Problem is refined in ways older science fiction writers never imagined. One way to understand why, is to read another essay by Joshua Rothman, "A Better Way to Think About the Genre Debate." Rothman uses an idea by the critic Northrop Frye to explain the evolution of fiction over time. Frye believed four genres exist: novel, romance, anatomy and confession. Most science fiction and fantasies are romances. Back in the 19th century before the term science fiction existed, science fiction was called scientific romances. What we call literary, Frye calls novel. Satire, social commentary, philosophy is what goes into anatomy. Confession is autobiographical. The best fiction combines three or four of Frye's genres. The best of 1950s science fiction combined romance and anatomy. The better 21st century science fiction writers combine novel, romance and anatomy. Ulysses by James Joyce is considered a novel that combines all four forms.

I'm in a 1950s science fiction reading group and we're discovering that most of the books now considered classics of the genre are rather poorly written. Many, are becoming almost unreadable.  But that writing was light-years beyond the  science fiction written in the 1920s and 1930s. E. E. "Doc" Smith is painful to read today. I'm worried that my favorite SF books from the 1950s and 1960s will cause young readers today to cringe at its creakiness.

Part of the clunky factor of older science fiction was the poor writing standards of that era. SF editors of the time were not very discerning, and most SF writers wrote quickly to pay bills. Much of the stuff being published in the 1950s came from 1930s and 1940s pulps, and most of the original SF written in the 1950s was slapped together for cheap paperback publishers.

Genre SF tended to focus on the fantastic, the adventure, and were all romance in Frye's terminology. The trouble is, the fantasies of one generation eventually fail for future generations. To last, a book needs elements of the novel and anatomy by Frye's definitions.  Modern readers will find E. E. "Doc" Smith's romances silly today. They were pure romance, crudely written. His books might still work for people who enjoy a comic book level of fictional reality, but not for anyone who enjoys the richness of modern fantastic literature.

Goodreads has a nice listing of Best Science Fiction of the 21st Century. At the top of the list is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Cline's exciting and fun story is still not a literary masterpiece by snooty New York literary types, but it is better written and told than most 20th century science fiction. It's not brilliant like Nineteen Eighty-Four, but then George Orwell wasn't a genre novelist. Nor does Cline attempt a distinctive style like Samuel R. Delany, J. G. Ballard or Ursula K. Le Guin began doing for SF back in the 1960s. Cline just uses all the good writing practices that modern writers use today. Cline's novel is fun and speaks to a 21st century audience that remembers the 1980s. I grew up reading Heinlein and Bradbury, writers shaped by their personal experiences of the 1930s and 1940s. Since science fiction tends to be about the future, younger writers are both more savvy about the future, and better trained as writers. They have decades of better novels to study, and they probably graduated from  writer workshops like Clarion, or even attend MFA programs.

The exciting aspects of The Three-Body Problem still involve science fictional concepts that have been around since the 19th century, but with new 21st century twists. Just being able to integrate computer networks, the world wide web and computer games into a story gives 21st century science fiction a huge advantage over 20th century science fiction.  But I don't think that's why Cixin novel is better. His plot is elegantly complex. His characters, although not great by modern literary standards, are far more engaging than what we encountered in most 20th century science fiction. But most of all, he knows how to weave far more information into his fiction without doing infodumps. Older writers often stopped their story to just narrate information they wanted their readers to know. Newer writers know how to paint the background while keeping the story going.

Certainly the Ex Machina robot Ava beats the hell out of Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet in both looks and AI mind power. But if you watch the old movie today it creaks. Ex Machina deals with the complexity of artificial intelligence so adroitly that it's narrative creates a thrilling fictional mystery that even people who have no interest in AI can engage. That was also true for The Imitation Game. Good modern writers can take even the most abstract subject and make it into a compelling story.

It's surprising how quickly old science fiction develops a patina of quaintness.  And for any theme within science fiction, we can see evolutionary development over time. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell from 1996 is far more sophisticated at exploring religion and first contact than 1958's A Case of Conscience by James Blish. More than that, her story is told with far more skill. I expect the next science fiction writer to take a swing at the subject will supplant the other two for a couple decades. And that's the nature of writing science fiction. We've been rewriting the old science fiction ideas since H. G. Wells. New writers have to top old writers. If they don't, readers will just keep reading the old favorites. Sure science advances, but writing seems to be advancing faster. Otherwise, how could we keep telling alien invasion stories over and over?

Sometimes an old book is just as good or better than a modern equivalent exploring the same theme. Station Eleven is beautiful written, but it doesn't have the insight into after the apocalypse that Earth Abides revealed to readers in 1949. Both are great novels. And here's the case for young people to read older novels. Not everything from the past suffers literary decay. Earth Abides can still take on a recent heavy-weight like The Road by Cormac McCarthy. George R. Stewart wasn't writing from inside the SF genre. And many of the powerful science fiction books that survive from that era turn out to be written by non-genre writers.  Two other examples are On the Beach by Neville Shute and Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. Fifty years from now, future readers will probably be reading The Time Travel's Wife by Auddrey Niffenneggar rather than any time travel stories from Asimov's Science Fiction or Analog.

I believe most of the old classic science fiction from the 20th century that's still in print is because of nostalgic rereading. Baby boomers and millennials push their favorite books onto their children and grand children, and keep them in print. Very few great science fiction novels from mid-20th century remain relevant today. A story like Earth Abides by George R. Stewart still works because a world-wide plague that kills off 99.99% of the population can still happen. But 1950s interplanetary adventures and galactic empires just seem silly today, like a Buck Rodgers serial did to me in the 1960s.

Post Hubble Space Telescope astronomy has made the cosmos light up in IMAX Technicolor so old science fiction seems like old black and white movies. Yet, that's not the reason why those old novels are becoming forgotten. It's the writing. Not the science. I'm not sure any of the nine novels selected by the Library of America as the best of 1950s science fiction will survive. My friend Mike claims The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester is just as fresh today as it was in the 1950s. That's because of Bester's skill at writing. In the last few years I've reread A Case of Conscience, The Long Tomorrow, Double Star, The Space Merchants and More Than Human, I tried to read Who? and The Big Time. I'm sorry, but these books just don't stack up to what I'm reading today.



One of the challenges facing older science fiction fans reading modern science fiction is the trend for literary writers to invade our genre. Literary novels are slower in pace and more wordy, so fans of older action oriented pulp fiction can find the newer stories plodding. But I encourage them to try and adapt. One reason why Flowers for Algernon is still loved and read today is because Daniel Keyes was a good writer and introducing literary techniques to the genre fifty years ago.

Every decade or two I'll reread my favorite science fiction books I grew up reading. Sometimes I find a nostalgic glow of rediscovery and sometimes I find a scary sensation of surprised disbelief that I ever loved this story. Because the words in the books don't change I have to worry that it's me that's gone through some kind of cynical transformation. As teenagers we find books that are easy and exciting to read. We don't have much life experience or critical wisdom. Most of us at that age read whatever we stumble upon. We can bond and imprint on books that are terrible examples of writing. Then as we grow older, and read widely, we get exposed to better writing and writers. We may love our old raggedy stories, but eventually they become toys we need to put away.

[PTY]

Uz lansiranje nestrpljivo iščekivanog nastavka jednog zaista odličnog romana, Chris Beckett dao par veoma interesantnih razmišljanja:








Fiction, the Future, and Responsibility

Science fiction is usually, at least nominally, about the future. It's not the real future of course, it's at best hypothetical one, and often not even a possible one. But generally speaking, the story takes place at a time which is ahead of the one we're currently living in, and therefore can be read, at least at some level, as a map of our direction of travel.

That being so, what responsibilities does that place upon us as science fiction writers? Three questions come up for me. Firstly, to what extent is it okay to write about a future that we know will never happen? Secondly, how do we write about future environmental catastrophe without either encouraging fatalism, or raising false hopes? Thirdly, what are the downsides of projecting our past or present into the future? I'll discuss these one by one.

Impossible futures
The basis of the 'Mundane' movement in science fiction is that it's not particularly healthy to build our imaginary futures on impossible premises. As Geoff Ryman puts it:

Being a Mundane boils down to avoiding old tropes and sticking more closely to what science calls facts. We believe that for most of us, the future is here on Earth...

I don't believe in starships. At least not the starships that turn up so regularly in Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc. The speed of the universe is c. Go faster than 'c' and something catastrophic happens: mass becomes infinite. We have no idea what that means. It's a mathematician's way of saying something can't happen.

Yet mass-market SF still dreams of faster-than-light travel, through such tropes as warp drives. The Physics of Star Trek by Laurence M Krauss calculates that warp drives would consume energy equivalent to whole galaxies. This is his way of saying something can't happen without alienating the Star Trek fans who bought the book.

If there are wormholes or portals I see no way that something can travel through them without being converted into energy or crushed by gravitational forces. This is Geoff's way of saying the starship gets wrecked.



On this argument stories involving widespread interstellar travel, and certainly the very large number involving galactic empires and wars, do not describe a real future, but are simply fantasy, fantasy which, Ryman has suggested, is based on a rather adolescent desire to escape from the world we're actually in.

Does this matter? Well, my Eden books describe a planet that's outside the galactic disc (and could therefore only possibly be reached by FTL travel) so I have a kind of vested interest here, but I would defend my decision to set my story there in two ways. Firstly, it seems reasonable to assume that there is life on other planets. That's real, that's part of the world, and that being so, I think it's legitimate to want to visit them in our imaginations, given that we probably can never visit them in fact. Secondly, the way the story is set up does not offer Eden as the future of our own civilization, but rather as a kind of thought experiment about an isolated community, which has to recap much of our own history all over again. Others in more objective positions will be better placed to judge.

But I do share some of Ryman's disquiet. I feel uneasy about the fact that the SF shelves in bookshops are so dominated by space fantasies. There must be a downside to constantly reimagining, over and over and over, a future that will never happen, rather than thinking about futures that might actually occur. And I think it's this that gives SF its widespread reputation among non-SF readers of being, dare I say it, somewhat escapist and immature.

Given that all the evidence suggests that human beings will not be able to escape from the limitations of Earth, should we not be thinking rather more about our future here?

Grim darkness versus cosy apocalypse
Thoughts like these have led me to feel that I'd like to write a novel at some point about a real threat that is facing us, the threat of catastrophic global warming. We're in the middle of a glorious reckless bonfire of fossil fuels that took millions of years to lay down, and the evidence seems to be fairly conclusive that, if we don't douse that bonfire down, there are going to be some very nasty consequences for our descendants.

But how to write it? If I depict an entirely grim future why would anyone want to read it, and where would be the story? The story would already have happened, and this would just be a long way of saying "the end."

But suppose I set the book in a world degraded by climate change and add some hope. In spite of everything, perhaps, a group of people are building a new community and finding ways to adjust to the changed circumstances. Will this not give the message that actually we don't really need to worry about climate change because people will cope somehow and it may even be kind of fun? Brian Aldiss coined the phrase cosy catastrophe to describe this latter kind of danger. I remember back in the 1980s I wrote to Doris Lessing (whose work, incidentally, I hugely admire), to suggest that she should be more careful about depicting new communities arising from the ashes of a nuclear holocaust.

But you may notice that I haven't written my climate change novel. I haven't yet figured out how to resolve this dilemma.

It'll always be the same
A lot of science fiction, even if set far in the future, is based on the premise that things will be essentially the same. There will be empires, there will be tyrannies, there will be wars over resources. However technologically advanced, we humans will fight for territory and dominance like a bunch of turbocharged chimpanzees.

I met a German SF writer recently, Karsten Kruschel, who grew up in the old East Germany. He told me that under Communist rule it was forbidden to write stories set in a future where socialism had not triumphed. Stifling and oppressive as such a rule is, you can see a crazy sort of logic in it. Marxism claims that Socialism and then Communism are inevitable, and that this is simply the law of history. The depiction of any other kind of future, therefore, would have called this principle into question.

Leaving aside the strange closed world of the GDR, the more general point stands. If we believe that social progress is possible, that history has a forward motion –if not towards Communism, then towards greater justice, say, or more personal freedom, or gender equality– are we not undermining that progress if we depict futures which are just as brutal, unjustice or unfree as the present? Are we not calling into question the hope on which progress depends? Some critics argued that Dark Eden, with its depiction of a society increasingly dominated by men, was guilty of suggesting that patriarchy would always triumph in the end. It wasn't my intended message (see my comments above about Eden as a thought experiment rather than a depiction of our future), but again I must leave others to judge.

Certainly there is a challenge here to science fiction writers who believe in social progress: if you really do believe in it, shouldn't you depict it in your imagined futures? But this raises difficulties too, difficulties which are the mirror image of those raised by catastrophe stories. Utopias are dull settings for stories. They too are extended ways of writing "the end."

[PTY]

May sees the publication of the new English edition of Philippe Claudel's seminal novel "Grey Souls". Originally published in 2005 as "Les Âmes Grises", upon its publication "Grey Souls" was both a critical and commercial success and it even won the prestigious Prix Renaudot. In hindsight it was a crucial novel for Claudel as it set the stage for many works that followed in its wake, most notably "The Investigation" and "Monsieur Linh and His Child". Similarly to these "Grey Souls" deals a metaphysical aspects of an investigation and the consequences of living an ordinary life during the horrific war.

"Grey Souls" revolves around a murder of a young girl which was committed in 1917 but only solved two decades later. The story is set in a small French town situated near the Western Front, in fact the battles are fought so close that the sounds and smells of death are palpable in the streets. One winter morning, a ten year old daughter of an innkeeper is found strangled in a canal. In the chaos of war, blood boils fast and soon enough, two men, deserters, are accused and quickly executed. Witnessing this impromptu sentencing was our narrator who, after being deeply shocked by the injustice and the brutality of the event, has never been able to escape its influence. Now, 20 years in the future, our narrator is a policemen who is slowly trying to piece together the story of what truly happened to that poor girl.

"Grey Souls" has deservedly been a tremendous success and is firmly one of the Claudel's most enduring works. The contrast between the conflict in which countless died and the killing of a single young and innocent girl is a frightening thing to experience and certainly leaves a lasting impression. Claudel always knew how to stir up intense, vivid emotions in his readers (just remember "Perfums") and "Grey Souls" is no exception. It's just beautiful in that subtle, thought provoking fashion.

In short, "Grey Souls" is a welcome addition to the bibliography of one of the finest contemporary European authors at the moment and finds him at the height of his power.




With the publication of All That Outer Space Allows at the end of April, the Apollo Quartet is now finally complete. And this last instalment is a little bit different to the preceding three volumes - Adrift on the Sea of Rains, The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself and Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above. For a start, All That Outer Space Allows is a novel, not a novella. Albeit only a short novel, just shy of 45,000 words.

When I decided Adrift on the Sea of Rains would be the first of a quartet about the Apollo space programme, I knew the final book's title would be All That Outer Space Allows and it would be about a woman who wrote science fiction and was married to an Apollo astronaut. I remember explaining as much to a friend at the 2012 Eastercon, the day after launching Adrift on the Sea of Rains. Of course, before I could actually start writing that fourth book, I needed to write and publish books two and three. And who knew what might change in the interim...

As it happens, not that much. All That Outer Space Allows remains broadly true to my initial vision of three years ago. But it's certainly a much more complicated, and longer, book than I'd envisaged. It wasn't enough, I'd decided, that Ginny Eckhardt, the wife of (invented) Apollo astronaut Walden J Eckhardt, wrote science fiction. No, I also had to include one of her stories in the novel - and I had to have that story both be a reflection of her life up to the point she wrote it, and then reflect back on her life afterwards. And all this while documenting her life as a housewife. In Houston. During the 1960s. With an astronaut husband.

None of the books of the Apollo Quartet have been easy to write, and the amount of research I've had to do has often horrified even myself. For All That Outer Space Allows, however, it was much, much harder. The Apollo space programme is well-documented, and there are thousand of books on the topic, some even written by the astronauts themselves. There is also a lot of technical documentation on missions to Mars - although perhaps not as I described it in The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself. And even the Mercury 13 have been the subject of several books, including a pair of autobiographies by Jerry Cobb, the lead figure in Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above. But there are remarkably few books about the Apollo programme from the point of view of the astronauts' wives. In fact, I found only two: The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel, published only in 2013; and The Moon is Not Enough, by Mary Irwin, wife of Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin. I'd made the research a feature of the first three books of the Apollo Quartet, but for this final novel of the series it looked like I'd have to do a lot of reading around the subject...

Now that the quartet is finished, I'm looking forward to putting away the two piles of research books on the desk beside my laptop - not to mention the one on the floor next to the desk. While All That Outer Space Allows has been the hardest book of the four to write because so much research was required, Ginny Eckhardt was the protagonist I most enjoyed putting myself into the head of. If that makes sense. Peterson from book one and Elliott from book two were both defined by their actions, and Jerry Cobb in book three was a real person whose character was based on her own words in her autobiographies... but Ginny was entirely invented. Yet she had to remain true to her time, her nationality and her gender. I hope I've managed to pull it off. It was certainly a challenge trying to do so. And that, I suppose, is what made her so much fun to write. And writing a 1960s science fiction story as Ginny was a lot of fun too.

I've just had the first book of a space opera trilogy published by Tickety Boo Press, A Prospect of War, so I'll be thinking about widescreen commercial space opera for at least the next eighteen months - blowing shit up and turning tropes on their head, that sort of thing. On the other hand, the Apollo Quartet sits in a space in the genre that I certainly think is worth exploring further. Someone described the quartet as "art house hard science fiction", and I think it's a fair label. The idea of bringing literary fiction, or art house cinema, sensibilities to hard sf provides ample opportunity to do interesting things. I've proven to my own satisfaction - and, I hope, other people's - it's a space in which I can produce good work. So it would be a shame to abandon it. But I'm looking forward to a short holiday writing the sort of science fiction I can just make up as I go along...

[PTY]

     David Walton je čudna zverka što se pisanja tiče, njegovi afiniteti su poprilično prosvetiteljski pa mu otud i proza bude više didaktična nego što bi i on sam to verovatno hteo, s obzirom na palpičnost njegovih zapleta. U Superposition, Walton pokušava da koncepte kvantne fizike prozno prenese u običnu svakodnvicu, i u tome uspeva taman koliko to sami rečeni zakoni dopuštaju.



Rečima Waltonovog protagoniste, "svi su zbunjeni zakonima kvantne fizike, bez obzira koliko dugo ih proučavali; ljudi lako savladaju tehnički žargon i donekle lako savladaju matematiku iza konceapta, ali ih i dalje ne razumeju u potpunosti, zato jer se oni naprosto ne povinuju logici". 



Naravno, protagonista se time referiše na kvantni paradoks istovremenog postojanja čestice na dva različita mesta, i prenosi ga doslovno na stvarni svet, jer, na kraju krajeva, stvarni svet jeste sazdan od istog gradivnog materijala. Ali ipak, na kraju se sve svodi na to kako to Walton zapravo izvodi u prozi, a utisak po tom pitanju podosta varira, to bukvalno iz poglavlja u poglavlje. Sam zaplet je prilično standardan a i karakterizacija je tu negde, i mada postoji nekoliko zaista svetlih momenata u romanu, celokupan dojam je poprilično osrednjački, kad se sve zbroji i oduzme. Ti svetli momenti će svakako impresionirati sajfaj gikove, ali van njih, knjiga je ipak ostala pomalo... kratka. Sve u svemu, solidno, ali svakako bliže trojci nego četvorci. 3/5




ali zato Then Man with the Compound Eyes... ohhhh.    Zaista odlično štivo.





U pitanju je istinski egzotična fantastika, ispričana na kranje ekstravagantan ali ujedno i fenomenalno suptilan način za koji naprosto od prve rečenice osetite da je drugačiji, ali to u najlepšem smislu te reči. 

Wu Ming-Yi barata rečima na način koji je istovremeno ekstremno neobičan i zapanjujuće blizak, ostavljajući onaj tako neuhvatljiv i teško opisiv dojam da nam je najistinskiji ejlijen upravo naš bližnji – čovek od kog nas razdvaja samo boja kože ili kontinent ili ponekad skoro nepremostiva barijera jezika.

Na neki krajnje frapantan način, Wu Ming-Yi zapravo savršeno ilustruje na šta je to Gibson mislio kada je rekao da je naša budućnost već tu, samo je krajnje nepravilno raspoređena: Wu Ming-Yi to proširuje i na prošlost i sadašnjost jednako, terajući vas da se osetite zaista kao stranci na stranoj paneti, iako pri tom ne govori ni o čemu što zapravo i sami nismo doživeli ili proživeli, samo na drugačiji način. Doduše, ponekad i radikalno drugačiji način, iako se sve svodi na jednu te istu svakodnevnu muku čovečjeg življenja.
     
Vrlo poetična proza, dirljiva ali bez patetike i veoma ekološki svesna ali bez onog meni tako iritantnog propovednog skeletona u svetonazoru, proza topla i humana i krajnje ilustrativna po pitanju sve većeg kineskog uticaja na savremeni žanrovski pejzaž. 5/5

[PTY]

The Letter Between Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke That Sparked the Greatest SciFi Film Ever Made (1964)

Origin stories are all the rage these days given the ubiquity of superhero films and television series. But for all their smash-em-up spectacle and breakneck pacing, they generally feel overstuffed and disposable. As with the Age of Ultron, there is an age, every summer, of some Marvel or DC hero or other. Or all of them at once, at this point, in a perpetual onslaught. On the other hand, we still have the quietly ominous, thoughtful science fiction film, the offspring of Nicolas Roeg and Andrei Tarkovsky, in movies like Ex Machina. These come and go, some better than others, but also always with us. Different as these two types of films can be, in style and tone, neither would likely look and feel the way they do without Stanley Kubrick's intensely introspective and profoundly epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.



The origin story of this incredible 1968 film begins on March 31, 1964 when Kubrick wrote the letter below to Arthur C. Clarke, proposing that the two collaborate on "the proverbial 'really good' science fiction film." "I had been a great admirer of your books for quite a time," writes Kubrick, and gives Clarke three "broad areas" of interest, "naturally assuming great plot and character." Naturally.

"Clarke's response," writes BFI, "was immediately enthusiastic, expressing a mutual admiration." Kubrick, Clarke told their mutual friend Roger Caras, "is obviously an astonishing man." In his response to the director himself, Clarke wrote on April 8, ""For my part, I am absolutely dying to see Dr. Strangelove; Lolita is one of the few films I have seen twice – the first time to enjoy it, the second time to see how it was done." The two met in New York and talked for hours, and from Clarke's short story "The Sentinel of Eternity" was born perhaps the best "really good" science fiction film ever made.






Clarke would compare the differences between the story and the film to those between an acorn and an oak tree, according to Italian Kubrick site 2001Italia. After that meeting, the two would spend almost four years writing the screenplay together and envisioning the harrowing voyage to Jupiter that ends so tragically—and strangely—for the two astronauts left to experience it. It's a collaborative success Kubrick clearly foresaw when he approached Clarke, but in his letter, above, with transcript below—courtesy of Letters of Note—he plays it cool, using the pretext of a telescope Clarke owned to slip in discussion about the film project. We are almost led to believe," writes 2001Italia, "that the movie was an excuse" to discuss the gadget. But of course we know better.


Dear Mr Clarke:

It's a very interesting coincidence that our mutual friend Caras mentioned you in a conversation we were having about a Questar telescope. I had been a great admirer of your books for quite a time and had always wanted to discuss with you the possibility of doing the proverbial "really good" science-fiction movie.

My main interest lies along these broad areas, naturally assuming great plot and character:
1.The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
2.The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on Earth in the near future.
3.A space probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars.


Roger [Caras ]tells me you are planning to come to New York this summer. Do you have an inflexible schedule? If not, would you consider coming sooner with a view to a meeting, the purpose of which would be to determine whether an idea might exist or arise which could sufficiently interest both of us enough to want to collaborate on a screenplay?

Incidentally, "Sky & Telescope" advertise a number of scopes. If one has the room for a medium size scope on a pedestal, say the size of a camera tripod, is there any particular model in a class by itself, as the Questar is for small portable scopes?

Best regards,

Kubrick pursued his projects very deliberately and passionately, motivated by great personal interest. Though his films can feel detached and cold, and he himself seems like a very aloof character, the opposite was true, according to those who knew him best. Below, see a short video from The University of the Arts London's Stanley Kubrick Archive profiling the way Kubrick went about choosing his films, best summed up by Jan Harlon, Kubrick's brother-in-law and producer: "No love, no quality, and in Stanley's case, no love, no film."


http://youtu.be/Lx49KEJxUF0

[PTY]

"Marked" definitely got noticed but we all know that looks are nothing when it comes to books. Luckily, Sue Tingey's debut is more than smoke and mirrors. This, occasionally bonkers, and exciting descent into hell tells the story of Lucinda De Salle (known to everyone as Lucky), an ordinary, if unloved, girl who has a strange power - she can see ghosts. This instantly marks her as something of an outcast so all through her life her best friend is Kayla, a ghost girl who has been her constant companion even since she can remember. It all changes when she's been called to her former school by the new headmistress. Three pupils have carelessly played with an Ouija board in the attic and summoned something from the great beyond. Lucky is instantly suspicious. The last time she's been to this same attic she has ended up expelled but alarm bells have really started ringing when Kayla bluntly refused to come. This had the potential to end up bad. And it was. She finds a dark man expecting her - an assassin by the man of Henri de Dent (French for tooth) who is after Kayla. The Underlands want her back. So begins Lucky's quest filled with peril, danger and lots of fun.

After this rather bleak opening, "Marked" tones down a bit and is rather handsomely easy to read and that is why I found it so pleasurable. It's simply not a standard urban fantasy fare, filled with broken hearts, downcast glances and gloomy characters despite notionally having all the familiar elements. If anything "Marked" more closely resembles John Connolly's "Samuel Johnson" series that a book with a black feather on its cover. Sue Tingey's debut is such great fun and a delight to read so I certainly hope there's much more to come in the future. I know I would love to read more and luckily this is marked as a first instalment in The Soulseer Chronicles. Let's hope that editor doesn't lose this review as well:)

[PTY]

Siem Sigerius is a man of countless talents. Over the course of this book we see him as nothing less than an extraordinary mathematician, a judo champion, a university professor, director of the University of Enschede and to top it all, the minister of education. He is also enjoying a beautiful family life with his wife and two stepdaughters. He even likes his stepdaughter Joni's boyfriend Aaron and despite him being a truly intimidating presence the two strike an unlikely friendship, even starting to practice Judo together. However, behind the illusion of charmed life, Siem has a dark secret. His son from previous marriage is in prison serving time for murder and few people know about it. Now his son is about to be released and on the eve of this event his life unstoppable starts to unravel. This final collapse also coincides with the massive explosion at a fireworks factory and similarly to its disintegration, Siem's whole existence is unraveling in fragments. First he recognizes Joni's picture on one of the pornographic websites he frequents and as his son appears he's quick to blackmail him.


In "Bonita Avenue" Peter Buwalda has created a sprawling family drama which despite its relatively long length (it is over 500 pages long) flows like a thriller. It is wonderfully written and while I'm not sure whether this is due to an excellent translation or the beauty of the original text, i found the use of metaphors and descriptions so brilliant that I started marking some of them down. In Netherlands the book received an unprecedented critical acclaim and sold over 300.000 copies. It subsequently went on to win two literary prizes while being nominated for two more and I can definitely see why it impressed both the critics and readers so much. It is true that at certain points Buwalda does lose himself a bit in the sheer amount of details and elements but quickly enough he steadies his hand and as the family finally completed its descend into madness, I was profoundly shocked by the dark finale. An impressive chronicle of one family's downfall.







The press release that came with Al Robertson's debut novel "Crashing Heaven" is an impressive statement that clearly showcases how much the publisher is behind this book. It is always impressive when William Gibson, Alastair Reynold, Richard K. Morgan and even Neal Stephenson are mentioned in a single breath and the six figure sum always catches attention.

Admittedly you'll be disappointed if you expect it to be an amalgam of their works in any shape or form because "Crashing Heaven" simply isn't what's promised on paper. It would be simply an impossible feat to achieve it but Al Robertson touched all of these authors in a small way. There's plenty of imaginative spirit in Robertson's writing and subtle nods to his contemporaries for "Crashing Heaven" to pull it off handsomely and that's an achievement in itself."Crashing Heaven" is a bleak, hard science fiction tale set in a future where the Earth is left behind and the humanity has moved to a Station, an asteroid made habitable by sentient consciousness of the Pantheon. Even in space the conflict is still raging and as it eventually folds, Jack Forster and his sidekick Hugo Fist return to the station after a war against a group of rogue AIs called The Totality, only to be accused of treachery. In the middle of the conflict Jack surrendered to the enemy and everyone on Station knows it. Jack was an AI killer, primed for violence and combat. It was a traumatizing experience but despite what really happened, he's been the lucky one here. He has survived while his other friends have died. Determined to discover what actually happened, Jack is set to enter another war, one which threatens to destroy both him and Hugo. However, stakes depending upon the outcome of his struggle are much higher than he ever imagined. Even humanity's future is uncertain. For Jack the time is running out as soon Hugo is set to take over his body so there's not much hope left. Hugo Fist is a strange creation, a virtual entity designed to help Jack fight a war and is a great character in itself. Their internal dialog is such a treat. Similarly, Station as a living, vibrant space is depicted superbly. Robertson manages to capture claustrophobic and chaotic existence of one such place. Existence made bearable only by the application on augmented reality called the Weave - a popular mean of escape from reality.

Still, the synopsis itself doesn't do justice to "Crashing Heaven" because on the surface of it, it presents Al Robertson's debut novel as a set of instantly recognizable SF tropes which includes everything from messy post-apocalyptic aftermath, humanity's migration to space, rogue AIs and everyone's existence balancing on an knife's edge. "Crashing Heaven" is better than the sum of its parts. It's an all-encompassing landscape upon which the story unfolds and at times I was even slightly overcome by too much of everything. And yet, as I've mentioned before, the whole thing somehow works together. "Crashing Heaven" is a completely insane book and for what is worth I believe that publishers were right to believe so firmly in its success. Jam packed with innovative ideas and fresh approaches to storytelling, "Crashing Heaven" could just be the one book that everyone will talk about in 2015. I certainly hope so.

[PTY]

It would be interesting seeing the expression on John Hornor Jacobs' agent's face when Jacobs described the idea behind The Incorruptibles. The thing is that this book is such a mash up of just about everything that on the surface of it, it can only be one of two things: the work of a genius or a complete madman. But that's why I'm not the agent or an editor. Decent agents and editors know how to spot great piece of work and it is obvious from the opening page that in The Incorruptibles Jacobs managed to pull it off. The whole novel is much more than sum of its parts and somehow it simply works brilliantly.

So how to describe it? In short, The Incorruptibles is made with healthy lashings of western and fantasy with a dose of steampunk and a pinch of Roman history. It is a librarian's nightmare. The story takes place in an Empire, a place not unlike our own world but always being just a little bit of piste. It is a troubled country, forever on the brink of a total war and its unexplored stretches are filled with everything from bandits to aggressive elf-like natives who recall Native Americans. In between all this a boat is travelling upriver. Upon it there are a governor with his sons and daughters and a hefty band of mercenaries who are all thrown together by circumstances. Out of these Fisk and Shoe are definitely an exception to the rule. Keeping each other backs, they worried about what's suddenly occurring in front of their eyes.

Interestingly enough, for such an accomplished setting, The Incorruptibles is a deeply personal book and I suspect this is exactly the reason why it works so well. If Jacobs has decided to go full scale from the word go I think readers would be simply overwhelmed by its vast scope while in this scenario you, as a reader, are slowly eased into the story. It's an act of sheer genius because rather than dwell on the setting I've actually cared about the characters and the events that were happening to them must more than I cared about what's around them.

To conclude, on paper The Incorruptibles shouldn't really work but somehow John Hornor Jacobs has beaten the odds and produced wildly innovative and highly readable story which, I think, should be nominated for quite a few awards next year. It is unlike anything else out there at the moment and I think many will be surprised by its unflinching ambition and often, beautifully poetic language.

[PTY]

Ransom Riggs has revealed the cover of the third book in his Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series, Library of Souls, and it's gorgeous!




Time is running out for the Peculiar Children. With a dangerous madman on the loose and their beloved Miss Peregrine still in danger, Jacob Portman and Emma Bloom are forced to stage the most daring of rescue missions. They'll travel through a war-torn landscape, meet new allies, and face greater dangers than ever. . . . Will Jacob come into his own as the hero his fellow Peculiars know him to be? This action-packed adventure features more than 50 all-new Peculiar photographs.

[PTY]

Jared u svom fazonu.


Dune at 50: Recommendations for the Dune-loving Non-SF Reader




Dune is a rarity. Frank Herbert's masterpiece is a science fiction book that everyone has read, including our non-science-fiction-reading friends and family. Yet unlike other SF classics that have made it into the mainstream, Dune still retains its inherent and undeniable science-fictionness. 1984 and Brave New World get upgrades to literary fiction. Frankenstein, Dracula and The Lord of the Rings sit as classics. Narnia would rather hide in the children's section.

But Dune? Dune is inescapably, ineffably science fictional, the very quintessence of those things that make SF look SFfy: faster-than-light rocketships, space-messiahs, intergalactic imperial princesses, laser death rays, city-sized alien monsters, inexplicable mental powers and planet-trembling battles.

This year, with Dune's 50th anniversary, now's the time to remind readers that their experience with science fiction needn't start and end with Dune. That, if they enjoyed the mind-blowing, worm-riding, storm-bringing, planet-hopping experience of Frank Herbert's vision, there are other books out there for them as well.

So with no further ado, here are some books to recommend to those who dabbled in Dune at some point in the last half-century and might be receptive to something a bit like it.


5 Books to Recommend to Folks that Have Read Dune and Need More SF in their life

Lagoon - Nnedi Okorafor (2014) - Structurally, not all that Dune-like: near-future, not far-future and Earth-bound, not intergalactic. And about 1/8th the size. But Lagoon still packs in all the emotive power. Okorafor's latest has a shape-shifting aliens landing, peacefully, in Nigeria. Like Dune, Lagoon breaks the barriers and the shifts tropes of the SF 'standard' with much-appreciate new perspective. Similarly, Lagoon is about change and progress, but also ritual and mythology, how the past informs the future, and how terrified humanity can be of new voices.  Lagoon is also gloriously ecologically-focused, one of Dune's dominant themes.

A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers (2014-5) - Because, you know, I haven't recommended this for, like, aaaaages. But Chambers' Kickstarted-and-now-professionally-published novel was one of the highlights of 2014, so I'm going to keep flogging it wherever I can. Like Dune, A Long Way is a big, meandering, intergalactic epic, but also one that keeps the focus tight, and the story character-driven. Although I guess both books are generally optimistic, A Long Way is a much happier, less ponderous read. Its joyous cast of space-faring wormhole-borers will put a smile on your face (Dune? Less smiley.)

Saga - Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (2012+) - A comic, yes, but also a title that has the size and the imagination of Dune. A war-torn, sprawling future with nooks and crannies, politics and prophesies, mythology and science, religion and technology - all in a tantilizingly vast universe. Given Staples' role in creating and visualising the universe, it is worth noting how much of a debt Dune owes to John Schoenherr, who illustrated the original Analog stories of Dune, and later the covers. (Sam Weber's gorgeous illustrations for the new Folio edition are reminiscent of Schoenherr's as well, and all the better for it.)


Embassytown - China Miéville (2012) - A world at the end of the universe, complete with rare trade goods vital to the rest of humanity. Plus, random monster. Plus plus, the importance of FTL to travel and economics and politics. Plus plus plus, language, and colonialism, and rebellion, and prophesies, and belief, mass delusion and the relationship with the natural world and and and and... But, of course, through Miéville's pen, and not Herbert's, so everything is slightly twisted, slightly Weird and oh-so-very haunting.

The Compass Rose - Ursula Le Guin (1982) - Another one that, like the Miéville, you can smuggle past your more literary, Dune-having-read friends. The Compass Rose is actually a collection of short stories, but most are science fiction, and all are elegant, poignant and strangely beautiful. "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" is a strangely heart-breaking look into an alien (kinda) culture. "The New Atlantis" is a strangely poetic look at an ecological apocalypse. And the tinkering with psychology - and cold reason - of "SQ" is oddly similar to the outlook of the Bene Gesserit.

While I'm at it... 9 more


Jack Glass - Adam Roberts (2013) - Super-smart hard SF that's all about the ethical implications of FTL travel and creepy governments and all that.

Leviathan Wakes - James S.A. Corey (2011) - Less-smart, but still plenty hard. A big ol' spaceshippy space opera, with various political, criminal and alien-contact subplots. Fun, slightly ridiculous, and on a truly grand scale.

Blue Remembered Earth - Alastair Reynolds (2012) - Another strong heir to Herbert's themes, including the various ways humanity will evolve in time, and our connection to our natural environment. Includes a great deal of planet-hopping, and descriptions of life in those environments.

Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie (2013) - Big spaceships, remote planets, evil emperors, themes of colonialism, identity and duty. Although Ancilliary Justice steals headlines because of its progressive gender politics, structurally and thematically, it is about as old school as you get. A nice combination.

War Stories (2014), We See a Different Frontier (2013), Conflicts (2010) and Further Conflicts (2011) - I like anthologies, and they make for good recommending. I mean, statistically speaking, there's probably something in there the recipient will like, right? And in the case of these four books, they're all solidly constructed around intriguing - and Dune-related - core themes.

And, finally, 1 book to recommend to those who haven't read Dune

Dune - Frank Herbert (1965)

[PTY]

"In the Beginning Was the Sea", debut novel by Colombian novelist Tomas Gonzales was originally published in 1983 under the title "Primero estaba el mar". The story goes that Gonzales wrote his novel while working as a barman in Bogota nightclub and that its owner published it. Straight from the start it was a huge success because it transpired that, similarly to another great Colombian writer, Gonzales was able to evoke the most powerful emotions just by using words. Therefore it was with great anticipation that I awaited this latest Pushkin Press translation and "In the Beginning Was the Sea" didn't disappoint even though it wasn't exactly what I expected it to be. In Frank Wynne's wonderful translation Gonzales' horrific version of life on a remote island came to life impeccably.

Based on a true story, "In the Beginning Was the Sea" follows the lives of J. and Elena, young intellectuals who decide to leave behind their ordinary lives filled with parties to try something new. Moving to a remote island, J. and Elena have an idea to lead self-sufficient and naturalistic existence. They're so smitten by this Utopian idea that they enter the whole project completely unprepared. Only a few days in, the doubts set in and each day reveals new troubles. Soon the idea of paradise reveals itself for what it really is. Just a vapor dream.

It is at this point that Gonzales' writing skill comes to the front as their very lives are slowly unraveled up to a point when their ingrained experiences are all but gone. In a brilliantly executed turn of events, J. and Elena themselves are becoming one with nature and quickly forgetting all the values learned while being part of the civilization. They're effectively reverting and behaving like savages.

I absolutely loved beautifully sparse descriptions which somehow always show more than they really tell but "In the Beginning Was the Sea" is as good as it is because Gonzales manages perfectly capture the idea of isolation that surrounds our couple. The island serves both as an instrument and as means of pushing the point across and as I turned more and more pages the sense of dread and looming catastrophe was palpable. With a masterful eye for detail, Gonzales teases the reader with what coming only to move away again and again. And the pages go on... This symphony of dread will repeat many times over the course of the book and while I wasn't overtly sympathetic with any of the characters, I needed to go with the flow despite suspecting how it will all end.

"In the Beginning Was the Sea" is a fascinatingly dark character study. It is an unflinching, and pitch perfect trip into the dark heart of Colombia and hippy culture in general. It is above all a powerful debut and it'll be interesting finding out where Tomas Gonzales next.

Not to forget: I never get tired of saying how stunning Pushkin Press publications are and "In the Beginning Was the Sea" is not different. With their famous French flaps and beautiful illustration by Robert Frank Hunter, it is a thing of beauty.

[neomedjeni]

Jared u svom fazonu.


Dune at 50: Recommendations for the Dune-loving Non-SF Reader

Uh, ukusi i sve to, ali izgleda da zaista nije lako naći delo za preporučiti nekome ko želi nešto poput Dine. Saga ima sjajan početak, odnosno prva dva ili tri trejda, ali se nakon toga pretvara u veoma veoma dosadan strip. A Leviathan Wakes... pa, daleko je i od tog fazona i od te kategorije.

No, od ovog ostalog gotovo ništa nisam čitao, pa je moguće da čovek znatno bliže meti. Imaću spisak na umu, u svakom slučaju.

[PTY]

Pa, veoma je blizu meti sa Jack Glass, Lagoon i Embassytown, a oni koji su čitali Ancillary Justice izgleda isto tako misle, jer se svima dopada worldbuilding, i zbog obilja i zbog pedanterije. A Leviathan Wakes je po izlasku također dobijao slične ocene, samo što mene to nije baš zgrabilo, bar ne dovoljno da roman dovršim.

[neomedjeni]

Hvala, upamtiću. 


Hm, budući da sam ga pročitao do kraja, Buđenje nemani me je mnogo više podseća na neku drugorazrednu zamenu za Hiperion ili možda Brinovo Uzdizanje, nego na Dinu. Solidno, ali ništa o čemu bih pisao kući ili kako se to već kaže. A nastavak je čak i prilično slabiji.


Zapravo, ovih dana se očekuje da Laguna objavi završnu knjigu trilogije, baš me zanima hoće li uspeti da popravi utisak koji je ostavio bledi drugi deo.

[PTY]

Looking at the sheer volume of crime books published each month you would be excused if you thought that nothing new could possible be said in a genre that's been going for so long. And yet, while the nature of the crimes that occur and the mechanism of a subsequent investigation into it almost always follows the same set of rules, it is the characters that always surprise me the most. No genre has the capability to pinpoint the human condition so precisely as crime does and one of the best contemporary authors with a panache for writing gripping and engaging characters is Stuart Neville. His latest book "Those we Left Behind" is a first novel in a series featuring DCI Selena Flanagan who might be familiar to you. It is a bona fide psychological thriller that instantly feels like it might become this summer's runaway hit.


"Those we Left Behind" revolves around Ciaran Devine, a 19 year old man who leaves the prison after serving a seven year sentence for murdering his foster father. When it happened it was a case that shook the nation. Ciaran confessed to murder and Serena Flanagan, then a Detective Sergeant, was the person who took the confession after gaining Ciaran's trust. During his imprisonment he always fondly remembered the kindness she showed him and now that Ciaran's having troubles to re-integrate into society, DCI Flanagan is approached by his probation officer Paula Cunningham. DCI Flanagan instantly notices that there's much more to the case than it was initially obvious.

Despite not being obviously so from the start, "Those we Left Behind" is a fiendishly complex tale to pull off. There's more than a few strands happened both concurrently and seven years ago. The troubled relationship between Ciaran and his older brother Thomas towards whom he constantly gravitates throughout the book is done especially well but it is DCI Selena Flanagan who makes the story so appealing and tragic. She incredibly human. As the story open she just returns to work after suffering thought the most human ordeal of them all - a breast cancer, a surgery, and its impact on the family life.


"Those we Left Behind" is one of the finest books I've read this year. It is an intricately plotted tale that works so well because it manages to perfectly capture all the necessary nuances of one such horrific situation while being clever enough to let most of its violent elements to happen out of the reader's sight.

[PTY]

monumental, uproarious, and exuberant novel about the search—for love, truth, and the meaning of Life With The Internet.
 
The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world's most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. The mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh behind the digital veil, tracing the rise of Tetration, which started in the earliest days of the Internet by revolutionizing the search engine before venturing into smartphones, computers, and the surveillance of American citizens. Principal takes Josh on a mind-bending world tour from Palo Alto to Dubai and beyond, initiating him into the secret pretext of the autobiography project and the life-or-death stakes that surround its publication.
 
Insider tech exposé, leaked memoir-in-progress, international thriller, family drama, sex comedy, and biblical allegory, Book of Numbers renders the full range of modern experience both online and off. Embodying the Internet in its language, it finds the humanity underlying the virtual.
 
Featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction, Book of Numbers is an epic of the digital age, a triumph of a new generation of writers, and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

Please note that Book of Numbers uses a special pagination system inspired by binary notation: the part number precedes the page number, and is separated from it by a decimal point.





Now that the Expanse series is becoming a TV show on Syfy, it's the perfect time to get caught up. This fifth novel in the series follows James Holden and his crew trying to survive a cataclysm that's causing ships to disappear mysteriously, in the wake of a land rush that's seen humans spreading out across the galaxy.



A thousand worlds have opened, and the greatest land rush in human history has begun. As wave after wave of colonists leave, the power structures of the old solar system begin to buckle.


Ships are disappearing without a trace. Private armies are being secretly formed. The sole remaining protomolecule sample is stolen. Terrorist attacks previously considered impossible bring the inner planets to their knees. The sins of the past are returning to exact a terrible price.


And as a new human order is struggling to be born in blood and fire, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante must struggle to survive and get back to the only home they have left.


The Expanse (soon to be a major Syfy Channel television series)

Leviathan Wakes
Caliban's War
Abaddon's Gate
Cibola Burn
Nemesis Games


The Expanse Short Fiction
The Butcher of Anderson Station
Gods of Risk
The Churn

[PTY]

gikovi u svom elementu :



PULP-O-MIZER


dakle, napravite sami svoj palp kover!

[PTY]

Edited by Richard Thomas
Foreword by Chuck Wendig

Cover art by Daniele Serra
Interior illustrations by Luke Spooner

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Wilderness by Letitia Trent
Monster Season by Joshua Blair
Cat Calls by Rebecca Jones-Howe
Ceremony of the White Dog by Kevin Catalano
The Armadillo by Heather Foster
The Manuscript by Usman T. Malik
Single Lens Reflection by Jason Metz
The Mother by Nathan Beauchamp
Everything in Its Place by Adam Peterson
When We Taste of Death by Damien Angelica Walters
Figure Eight by Brendan Detzner
My Mother's Condition by Faith Gardner
Fragile Magic by Alex Kane
The Eye Liars by Sarah Read
Searching for Gloria by W. P. Johnson
And All Night Long We Have Not Stirred by Barbara Duffey
Dull Boy by David James Keaton
Brujeria for Beginners by Marytza Rubio
Heirloom by Kenneth Cain
The Owl and the Cigarette by Amanda Gowin
Desert Ghosts by Mark Jaskowski
Blood Price by Axel Taiari






What if something is out there? This is a haunting supernatural thriller for fans of Let the Right One In, The Passage and Salem's Lot. "I was enthralled form the very first page...the words seems to sparkle on the page." (Karl Ove Knausgaard). In the summer of 1978 a young boy disappears without trace from a summer cabin in the woods. His mother claims that he was abducted by a giant. The boy is never found. The previous year, over in a Swedish National Park, a wildlife photographer takes a strange picture from his small airplane, of a bear running over the marshes. On its back sits a creature, which the photographer claims is something extraordinary. Twenty-five years later, and back in Laponia, Susso runs a much-maligned web page, one dedicated to searching for creatures whose existence have not yet been proven: the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot. But Susso has her own obsession, one inherited from her grandfather, the well-known wildlife photographer. When an old woman claims that a small creature has been standing outside her house, observing her and her five year old grandson for hours, Susso picks up her camera and leaves for what will become a terrifying adventure into the unknown...




In a story that shoots back and forth between a glamorous 1990 Hong Kong and a straitened 1998 London, Adam Wyatt and his wife Eva run a small café near Southwark Market. They bicker a lot, Adam drinks, and visits to their autistic son Justin tend to go awry. But underneath Adam's drinking are secrets from their previous life in Hong Kong, when he worked for the Independent Commission Against Corruption and got in with some very dubious local society types; one of whom includes "Call me Jimmy" Yao Sau-Lan, "a big nasty man, in a big nasty suit," whose father just happened to kill Eva's grandfather. When Jimmy's widow and sons come calling, Adam knows she's in trouble.





STEP INTO THE FOLD.
IT'S PERFECTLY SAFE.

The folks in Mike Erikson's small New England town would say he's just your average, everyday guy. And that's exactly how Mike likes it. Sure, the life he's chosen isn't much of a challenge to someone with his unique gifts, but he's content with his quiet and peaceful existence. 

That is, until an old friend presents him with an irresistible mystery, one that Mike is uniquely qualified to solve: far out in the California desert, a team of DARPA scientists has invented a device they affectionately call the Albuquerque Door. Using a cryptic computer equation and magnetic fields to "fold" dimensions, it shrinks distances so that a traveler can travel hundreds of feet with a single step.

The invention promises to make mankind's dreams of teleportation a reality. And, the scientists insist, traveling through the Door is completely safe.

Yet evidence is mounting that this miraculous machine isn't quite what it seems—and that its creators are harboring a dangerous secret. 

As his investigations draw him deeper into the puzzle, Mike begins to fear there's only one answer that makes sense. And if he's right, it may only be a matter of time before the project destroys...everything. 

A cunningly inventive mystery featuring a hero worthy of Sherlock Holmes and a terrifying final twist you'll never see coming, The Fold is that rarest of things: a genuinely page-turning science-fiction thriller. Step inside its pages and learn why author Peter Clines has already won legions of loyal fans.






"We speak of a mother's love, but we forget her power. Power over life. Power to give and to withhold.' Generations after the breakup of the human family of Eden, the Johnfolk emphasise knowledge and innovation, the Davidfolk tradition and cohesion. But both have built hierarchical societies sustained by violence and dominated by men - and both claim to be the favoured children of a long-dead woman from Earth that all Eden knows as Gela, the mother of them all. When Starlight Brooking meets a handsome and powerful man from across Worldpool, she believes he will offer an outlet for her ambition and energy. But she has no idea that she will be a stand-in for Gela herself, and wear Gela's ring on her own finger. And she has no idea of the enemies she will make, no inkling that a time will come when she, like John Redlantern, will choose to kill..."





Ollie and Moritz are best friends, but they can never meet. Ollie has a life-threatening allergy to electricity, and Moritz's weak heart requires a pacemaker. If they ever did meet, they could both die. Living as recluses from society, the boys develop a fierce bond through letters that become a lifeline during dark times-as Ollie loses his only friend, Liz, to the normalcy of high school and Moritz deals with a bully set on destroying him. But when Moritz reveals the key to their shared, sinister past that began years ago in a mysterious German laboratory, their friendship faces a test neither one of them expected.
Narrated in letter form by Ollie and Moritz-two extraordinary new voices-this story of impossible friendship and hope under strange circumstances blends elements of science fiction with coming of age themes, in a humorous, dark, and ultimately inspiring tale is completely unforgettable.




Brad Thor meets Avatar in this timely thriller for the drone age as award-winning author Christopher Golden spins the troubles of today into the apocalypse of tomorrow.
 
After political upheaval, economic collapse, and environmental disaster, the world has become a hotspot, boiling over into chaos of near apocalyptic proportions. In this perpetual state of emergency, all that separates order from anarchy is the military might of a United States determined to keep peace among nations waging a free-for-all battle for survival and supremacy.
 
But a conflict unlike any before demands an equally unprecedented fighting force on its front lines. Enter the Remote Infantry Corps: robot soldiers deployed in war zones around the world, controlled by human operators thousands of miles from the action. PFC Danny Kelso is one of these "Tin Men," stationed with his fellow platoon members at a subterranean base in Germany, steering their cybernetic avatars through combat in the civil-war-ravaged streets of Syria. Immune to injury and death, this brave new breed of American warrior has a battlefield edge that's all but unstoppable—until a flesh-and-blood enemy targets the Tin Men's high-tech advantage in a dangerously game-changing counter strike.
 
When anarchists unleash a massive electromagnetic pulse, short-circuiting the world's technology, Kelso and his comrades-in-arms find themselves trapped—their minds tethered within their robot bodies and, for the first time, their lives at risk.
 
Now, with rocket-wielding "Bot Killers" gunning for them, and desperate members of the unit threatening to go rogue, it's the worst possible time for the Tin Men to face their most crucial mission. But an economic summit is under terrorist attack, the U.S. president is running for his life, and the men and women of the 1st Remote Infantry Division must take the fight to the next level—if they want to be the last combatants standing, not the first of their kind to fall forever.
 
Advance praise for Tin Men
 
"Tin Men is the literary equivalent of a muscle car: stylish and fast-paced, with a hopped-up engine of a plot. Christopher Golden starts things off at tire-burning speed and never lets up. It's a great ride—definitely as much fun as we can ever hope to have while the world falls to ruin around us."—Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan and The Ruins
 
"A chilling tale of a world that could be, Tin Men is a vicious beast—Starship Troopers meets Generation Kill—that left my nerves fried and my brain craving another fix."—Pierce Brown, author of Golden Son
 
"When the human soul thrums inside machines of war, the ultimate weapon is born. Golden crafts a unique combination of Terminator and Saving Private Ryan."—Scott Sigler, author of Alive

"As military robots proliferate, we have all wondered whether the wealthy will use them to dominate those with fewer resources. Fascinating and thrilling, Tin Men imagines a future in which the playing field is suddenly and violently leveled. When the stakes are life or death, will the soldiers behind the robots still have what it takes to survive?"—Daniel H. Wilson, author of Robopocalypse
 
"This evocative tale of the possible and the probable takes a wild walk on the perilous side. Along the way, we get a top-of-the-line lesson in what may actually be in store for us one day. You're going to love this thrilling, taut drama."—Steve Berry, author of The Lincoln Myth

[PTY]

The End of All Things #1: The Life of the Mind: The End of All Things
A down-on-his-luck Colonial Union starship pilot finds himself pressed into serving a harsh master-in a mission against the CU. But his kidnappers may have underestimated his knowledge of the ship that they have, quite literally, bound him to piloting. Part One of the four parts of The End of All Things, John Scalzi's conclusion to the Old Man's War tale that began with The Human Division.





"Dazzling...[a] quirky, raucous, and bewitching family saga." --Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants

Simon Watson, a young librarian, lives alone in a house that is slowly crumbling toward the Long Island Sound. His parents are long dead. His mother, a circus mermaid who made her living by holding her breath, drowned in the very water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, ran off six years ago and now reads tarot cards for a traveling carnival.

One June day, an old book arrives on Simon's doorstep, sent by an antiquarian bookseller who purchased it on speculation. Fragile and water damaged, the book is a log from the owner of a traveling carnival in the 1700s, who reports strange and magical things, including the drowning death of a circus mermaid. Since then, generations of "mermaids" in Simon's family have drowned--always on July 24, which is only weeks away.

As his friend Alice looks on with alarm, Simon becomes increasingly worried about his sister. Could there be a curse on Simon's family? What does it have to do with the book, and can he get to the heart of the mystery in time to save Enola?

In the tradition of Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, The Book of Speculation--with two-color illustrations by the author--is Erika Swyler's moving debut novel about the power of books, family, and magic.






Chicago wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden is used to mysterious clients with long hair and legs up to here. But when it turns out the long hair covers every square inch of his latest client's body, and the legs contribute to a nine-foot height, even the redoubtable detective realizes he's treading new ground. Strength of a River in His Shoulders is one of the legendary forest people, a Bigfoot, and he has a problem that only Harry can solve. His son Irwin is a scion, the child of a supernatural creature and a human. He's a good kid, but the extraordinary strength of his magical aura has a way of attracting trouble.

In the three novellas that make up ''Working For Bigfoot,'' collected together for the first time here, readers encounter Dresden at different points in his storied career, and in Irwin's life. As a middle-schooler, in ''B is For Bigfoot,'' Irwin attracts the unwelcome attention of a pair of bullying brothers who are more than they seem, and when Harry steps in, it turns out they have a mystical guardian of their own. At a fancy private high school in ''I Was a Teenage Bigfoot,'' Harry is called in when Irwin grows ill for the first time, and it's not just a case of mono. Finally, Irwin is all grown up and has a grown-up's typical problems as a freshman in college in ''Bigfoot on Campus,'' or would have if typical included vampires.

New York Times bestseller Jim Butcher explores the responsibilities of fatherhood and the difficulties of growing up with the elements Dresden Files fans crave--detection, adventure, humor, and magic.




Contemporary fantasy meets true crime when schools of ancient sorcery go up against the art of the long con in this stunningly entertaining debut fantasy novel.

Mike Wood is satisfied just being a guy with broad shoulders at a decidedly unprestigious Catholic school in Manhattan. But on the dirty streets of New York City he's an everyman with a moral code who is unafraid of violence. And when Mike is unwittingly recruited into a secret cell of magicians by a fellow student, Mike's role as a steadfast soldier begins. These magicians don't use ritualized rote to work their magic, they use willpower in their clandestine war with the establishment: The Assholes.

[PTY]

     
Dakle, najzad sam stigla da overim The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu, prevod Ken Liu) i iskreno sumnjam da će mi ostatak godine doneti išta provokativnije i fascinantnije. Koliko znam, roman je dospeo u uži krug za John W. Campbell, Prometheus i Locus nagrade, i čvrsto verujem da niti jedan od romana u tim nominacijama može ovo da nadmaši. Pročitala sam gotovo tri četvrtine tih nominacija, i koliko god da su me neki istinski oduševili (Peripheral, Lock In, Afterparty i The Martian, na primer) u odmeravanju snaga sa ovim romanom imaju šanse taman koliko i čajni keksići naspram švarcvald torte.

Najpre idu silne hvale za prevod, jer Ken Liu je ovde iskazao veštinu koja skoro pa nadmašuje onu u sopstvenoj mu prozi, ako je tako nešto uopšte moguće. Jer ovako suptilno prevesti glomazan roman koji po stilu i sadržaju jednako zasigurno nije u skladu sa Kenovim afinitietima, pa to je vrhunac ne samo talenta nego i fascinantnog osećaja za finese u proznoj komunikaciji. Naime, The Three-Body problem je sve ono što Kenova proza nije – tvrdi SF u najmodernijoj varijanti, ali ispripovedan u srdačnim tropima tako svojstvenim anglosaksonskom Zlatnom dobu: taj amalgam je čak i za ljubitelje obaju korpusa toliko egzotičan, da ostavlja dojam maltene novog žanrovskog izraza, kao da ste zatekli Bredberija da obrađuje Eganove kvantne i astrofizičke koncepte. Kombinacija je do te mere iskrena i instinktivna da mestimično operiše i kroz onu tako neizbežnu i podrazumevajuću veniru didaktičnosti, čija je konkretna impresivnost ovde ravna, recimo, stimpank imidžu Mac-Pro laptopa napravljenog 1689te. Taj neuzdrmano autentičan koncept spajanja žanrovskog retro imidža sa hiper modernim sadržajem stvara celinu koja na skoro šokantan način saopštava ono što smatrate da su stare ideje, ali su sad gotovo neprepoznatljive u tom svom novom ruhu.

Povrh sve te žanrovske ingenioznosti, stiže vas potresna priča o sasvim autentičnim ideološkim užasima, koji su tokom istorije imali daleko veći uticaj na čoveka nego svi izmaštani fenomeni zajedno, ma kako bili hororični u svojoj suštini.

A pošto iskreno sumnjam da će Cixin Liu ikada zainteresovati ikojeg domaćeg žanrovskog izdavača, računam da je tu i svaka šteta od spojlera zaista minimalna, pa se otud i možemo posvetiti detaljnije ovom remek-delu.

Roman kreće sa ideološkim čistkama za vreme Kulturne Revolucije, tamo negde početkom šezdesetih: Ye Wenjie je prisiljena da gleda "suđenje" svom ocu astrofizičaru, izvođeno od strane komunističkog podmlatka, to uglavnom četrnaestogodišnjih studenata njenog oca, koji ga optužuju da promoviše ajnštajnovske ideje zapadnih imeprijalista sa svrhom da zatre kinesku kulturu i identitet. U atmosferi opšte histerije čak se i njena majka okreće protiv svog supruga, i Ye bespomoćno gleda kako joj pobesneli tinejdžeri kamenuju oca do smrti. Kao žigosano potomstvo osvedočeno reakcionarnog oca, Ye dobija kaznu prinudnog rada u jednoj od provincija u unutrašnjosti zemlje. Igrom slučaja, biva dodeljena  ekipi koja gradi temelje za Red Coast bazu, tajni vladin projekat radio-teleskopije, veoma sličan SETI Arecibo projektu. Naime, vođe partije su zabrinute da će bilo kakva komunikacija sa vanzemaljskom inteligencijom biti obavljena isključivo od strane prozapadnjačke idologije, pa se otud i trude da joj pariraju sopstvenom tehnologijom, tek da i komunistička istina prodre u kosmos. (da, znam kako to zvuči ovako destilovano, ali način na koji vam Cixin Liu to objasni dosegnuće do same koštane srži, i bićete beskrajno zahvalni što niste živeli u tim konkreno "zanimljivim vremenima", u tom konkretno delu sveta, jer pored ovog dela istorije, Crveni Kmeri će vam ličiti skoro pa na humaniste.) Tokom godina, Ye sve više postaje priznata i cenjena, i zbog svog znanja astrofizike i zbog svoje sposobnosti da instnktivno napreduje na polju čiste inžinjerije. I kad nakon mnogo godina jedna ET poruka nazad dosegne Red Coast monitore, Ye među prvima prepoznaje i dešifruje poruku.


Drugi narativni tok je u sadašnjosti i bavi se naizgled bezrazložnim samoubistvima cenjenih naučnika, to pogotovo astrofizičara, koji za sobom ostavljaju najbizarnije moguće samoubilačke poruke o krahu fizike kao nauke. Dimenzije te katastrofe u naučnom svetu prisiljavaju kineske naučnike i policiju da usko sarađuje sa nekadašnjim ideološkim neprijateljima, i tokom te saradnje na videlo izlazi specifična video igra pod nazivom The Three-Body Problem, u kojoj se od igrača zahteva da prežive pod ekstremno zahtevnim okolnostima sveta pod uticajem triju različitih sunaca. Taj Trisolaris model civilizacije očekuje od igrača da racionalizuju i ako je moguće matematički predvide eratične elipse triju sunaca i planete koja se nalazi u dosegu njihovih gravitacionih polja, planete čija je civilizacija povrgavana čestim katastrofama koje ujedno označavaju i prelaske u nivoima same igre. Glavni protagonista tog narativnog toka je naučnik i nano-inžinjer Wang Miao, i njegovo učešće u MMO uskoro povezuje sve niti trilera koji je startovao upravo sa Ye i Red Coast eksperimentom.

Naravno, u pitanju je prvi deo trilogije, ali ipak, narativni ark u ovom romanu je tako fascinantno zaokružen da time savršeno dokazuje kako zaista nije nužan klifhanger da vas odvede do idućih naslova.

Širina i dubina ovog tako lako prepoznatljivog i često korištenog koncepta je toliko intenzivna da prosto oduzima dah. Motiv Prvog Kontakta je naizgled toliko izraubovan da je retko ko mogao da prepostavi ovoliko imaginativno obilje, i to bez nekih naročitih alteracija same konvencije. Jedna od značajki modela je ta što je apsolutno nepredvidiv – u ovom romanu bukvalno nema niti jedne jedine strane na kojoj ste mogli da sa sigurnošću prepostavite šta će vam doneti iduća. Sama struktura trilera je besprekorna a manipulacija doziranja informacije skoro pa savršena. Svi redom protagonist su neverovatno životni i lako (i trajno) pamtljivi u svojim specifičnostima, što je za mene gotovo kulturni šok sam po sebi, jer ja zaista imam silnih problema u pamćenju egzotičnih imena koje ne prati dovoljno fizičkog identiteta.


Drugi kulturni šok sleduje u percepciji humanosti kao takve, u Cixinovom sagledavanju istorijskih užasa u nekoj tako vremenski zahtevnoj dimeniziji da se zbog toga slobodno može nazvati i kosmičkom: ne kažem da su zbog toga oni iole prihvatljiviji, nego naprosto mi sami tu postajemo malo tolerantniji, jednom kad nas se natera da ih sagledavamo van kratkotrajne perspektive jednog kratkotrajnog i po svemu krajnje beznačajnog života.

Tor kao izdavač sve više postaje ključan po pitanju infuzije zdrave egzotike u SF, i tu mu se zaista mora odati priznanje. Cixin Liu je vodeći SF pisac u Kini, a sama Kina postaje sve veće i sve uticajnije žanrovsko tržište i u proznom delu žanra, pošto je onaj filmski to odavno potvrdio. Ta specifična kombinacija egzotične obrade poznatih žanrovskih tropa izgleda da je najimpresivnija upravo u AI i ET domenima, i taj fenomen sve više postiže dimezije pravog pravcatog preporoda u kom žanrovske moralne dileme prevazilaze ne samo kulturne nego i rasne i nacionalne granice. Taj veoma lepo koreografisan susret severnoameričkog i dalekoistočnog žanra sve više liči na drevni kulturni susret Rima i Grčke, gde nekadašnje žanrovske filozofske i tehnološke dileme postaju sve manje suvoparne a sve više psihodelične, na način na koji je nekada Zlatno doba bilo luksuzno i raskalašeno. A uz to ide i optimizam kakvog je u žanru sve manje ovih zadnjih distopičnih nam decenija.

Odličan roman, odlično napisan i odlično preveden, i svakako odličan uvod u jednu od najimpresivnijih SF trilogija ikada.

[PTY]

eh, samo da ispravim jednu brzopletu netačnost iz gornjeg posta: ušla je ova knjiga i na Hugo i na Nebula listu, samo je to meni svojedobno promaklo...

[PTY]

Milan Kundera is a changed man. This is obvious from the way "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", or "Immortality" are different from "Slowness" and "Ignorance". Over the years he has grown weary and rather pessimistic. Humour is sadly often missing from his writing but "The Festival of Insignificance", his latest slim volume that can be easily finished over the course of a single sitting, goes a long way to rectify it. In it he attacks the most serious problems with a cheeky refusal to be serious and the results are often laugh out loud.

On the surface story is rather simple and charts the relationship between four elderly friends through a series of disjointed stories that explore the very essence of human condition and the unlikeliest body part, the navel. These episodes are not straightforward but are instead a heady mix of philosophy and history that requires a re-read to be fully appreciated. In Kundera's mind aesthetic is much more important that a self-contained plot and in a way "The Festival of Insignificance" acts like a summary of all his work so far. There are recognizable elements from all across his career and this short novel is both an epilogue and an overview. In short, it is simply Kundera that I love - almost unbearably intelligent author who is by far too clever to let it show.

"The Festival of Insignificance" is a subdued read that will be truly enjoyed only by his constant readers. I suspect the rest will simply be a bit confused but that's the part of the joke.



There was a public outcry when David Lagercrantz was announced as an author of "The Girl in the Spider's Web", fourth part in the monumental "Millennium" series by Stieg Larsson. This was mostly due to the fact that he's best known as the co-author of "I am Zlatan", autobiography of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, one of today's biggest and most outspoken football stars. Surely, this Lagencrantz doesn't deserve to follow in the Larsson's footsteps? Well, if you scratch under the surface some other facts come to light. Lagencrantz was a notable crime reporter as well and over the 80s and 90s he covered some of the major crimes in Sweden, most notably the Amsele murders, a brutal massacre that happened in 1988 when a whole family was killed over a stolen bicycle. Also, Lagencrantz is a great author. He wrote a rather splendid biography of Goran Kropp, a Swedish equivalent to Ranulph Fiennes and "Fall of Man in Wilmslow" a fictionalized account of Alan Turing's final days.

"Fall of Man in Wilmslow" opens up with events known from history. On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing in found dead at his home in Wilmslow. The story goes that he killed himself with a poisoned apple as a direct result of government's persecution on homosexuals. Detective Constable Leonard Corell is assigned to a case but he instantly feels there's something more about the situation than it's initially apparent. He notices the chemicals and the similarities between the crime scene and the Snow White. Coroner quickly declares the case the suicide but that's not the ending for Correll. He becomes obsessed with Turing's tragic fate and as he digs deeper through his papers, it is increasingly obvious that everything surrounding him is veiled in secrecy. There's even some rumours about him being a target of Soviet spies' blackmail due to his sexuality. Correll's chase leads him to Cambridge where it finally all clicks together. But as the Turing's role in the war becomes clearer so Correll's life comes into more and more peril. He's become a liability. It is a cat and mouse chase whose ending you'll have to discover for yourself.

"Fall of Man in Wilmslow" is an atmospheric Cold War spy thriller which plays wonderfully with paranoia that was so fertile in that era and those horrific social circumstances that spelled the end of one of the finest minds in human history. It's a fascinating and well researched piece of speculative history that makes much more sense than, say, the version of Turing provided by "The Imitation Game". More importantly, it is a successful first step of MacLehose Press' rehabilitation of David Lagercrantz as a serious writer.





When visiting Hamburg there's every chance that you'll encounter someone who came to a city after reading one of Jan Fabel's books. Currently it's still not huge as it could be but in Hamburg Fabel is quite a great thing. Two of the books have been adapted into quite successful movies and Craig Russell was the first and only non-German person to have been awarded the highly prestigious Polizeistern (Police Star) by the Polizei Hamburg. There's every chance that in the future Fabel will do for Hamburg what Montalbano or Wallander have done for Sicily and Sweden. I've always enjoyed Fabel books and while they're far cry from Sicilian sun-drenched adventures of Montalbano, Jan Fabel's cases are extremely intense affairs. The latest instalment, "The Ghosts of Altona" is no different though it opens with some rather unique elements.

The story opens up with quotes from William Shakespeare and Bram Stoker and is followed by explanation of near-death experience. In the first few chapters there's a Zombie and a Frankenstein. It's a rather a bizarre was to open up a crime novel but everything becomes clear soon enough. As you would expect, Jan Fabel, Head of the Polizei Hamburg's Murder Commission is no stranger to death. As the second decade of his career is coming to a close, he's finds that he's increasingly in an introspective mood. As he's recounting his past, a body of Monika Krone, a woman who went missing some fifteen years ago, has been found. Monika has been a part of the Hamburg's Gothic clique - a crowd of people obsessed with all things macabre. Fabel reopens a case as he sees it rather personally but soon enough things turn rather messy one of the most notorious criminals, a dangerous serial rapist escapes from a high-security prison. As the bodies start piling up, Fabel quickly realises that he has found his match.

"The Ghosts of Altona" is probably the finest Fabel novel so far. Craig Russell has managed to create something rather unique, a story that relies on a rather peculiar subculture, one that owes its existence to horror and which naturally harks on death. I was instantly hooked and I've had an awfully hard time letting go of the book once I've started it. As always, in Russell's writing Hamburg comes to life. If you've ever visited it, you'll remember that it is an incredibly vibrant place but one which, like all the big cities, comes with a dark note to it, especially after the clock strikes midnight. Russell has been tapping this rich seam for a while now and if "The Ghosts of Altona" is anything to go by, he's only just starting. An incredibly addicting book.

[PTY]

Jared rivjuiše redom listu užih nominacija za David Gemmell Legend Awards:



Pretend, just for a moment, that you have attained your most deep-seated desire. Not the simple, sensible one you tell your friends about, but the dream that's so close to your heart that even as a child you hesitated to speak it out loud.

Thus begins Traitor's Blade (2014), and the opening lines do an excellent job of capturing the novel's overall tone. These wistful, deliberately florid lines are clearly a set-up for a joke - and, indeed, by the end of the first page, the romantic vision is shattered by a crude interruption. But there's also something genuine in these lines - the speaker might be overwrought and a tiny bit snide, but there's a truth at the core. A real dream, hiding behind sarcasm.

And thus goes Traitor's Blade - a novel that cloaks itself in satire, but has a firmly romantic heart. It is a tricky balance: not everyone can have their tongue in their cheek and their heart on their sleeve, but Traitor's Blade accomplishes it with surprising skill. Not unlike, of course, The Three Musketeers, which clearly inspired this novel in many ways. Dumas' novel is perhaps better known for its romantic side - the swordplay and the sacrifice. But unlike, say, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers is a deeply, wonderfully snarky book, one that very rarely takes itself (or its protagonists) seriously.


D'Artagnan is, well, dumb - and meets his friends due to a combination of hot-headed pride and ridiculous circumstance. The musketeers are vain, rude and deceitful; before they fight for their King and Queen, they brawl to escape bar bills and most of their 'combat' is merely abusing their own servants. They are undoubtedly brave, but Dumas also points out the ludicrousness of their lives. They are heroes, yes, but they're also anti-social, ill-fitting, emotionally-damaged disasters. De Castell follows in this vein, and Traitor's Blade is all the better for it.

The 'musketeers 'in de Castell's novel are Kest, Brasti and Falcio. They are three of the remaining Greatcoats, an organisation of travelling magistrates, investigators and heroes-on-call that was founded by the King... and then died when said monarch was overthrown. Life's tough for a fallen hero, and the kingdom's new rulers, the Dukes, haven't made it any easier. The Greatcoats make for excellent scapegoats for all that goes wrong, and our protagonists are having a tough time making ends meet.

To add further complexity, all three are still bound by oaths to their dead King. Falcio, our primary protagonist, has sworn to find the King's 'Charoites' ('jewels' -  and if you don't figure it out before Falcio does, I'm very disappointed in you). That geas, plus, his unceasing commitment to the King's Laws (honor, fair play, rights for peasants, etc. etc) means that he can never just get on with the business of surviving - instead, he keeps trying to save the day, throwing himself headlong into danger over and over again.

To further the comparison to The Three Musketeers, Traitor's Blade is a fairly peripatetic novel. We begin with a political scheme, one that's rapidly derailed by murder (with our heroes being framed, of course). Then we're on the road as hired guards for a caravan. Then we're bodyguarding a noblewoman. Then we're rescuing another noblewoman. Then we're in a war. Then we're... etc. Falcio is either the luckiest or unluckiest of men. Sure, he's constantly fighting for his life, but, despite being swatted hither and yon like a low fantasy tennis ball, his overarching quest always seems to progress. That is to say: this is a book that relies very heavily on circumstance and convenience. Even if Falcio, Brasti and Kest aren't planning for their future, the author is.

Fortunately, Traitor's Blade is also extremely fond of swashbuckling distractions. Whenever there's a moment where the reader might stop to think that "wait, that doesn't make any sense at all...", someone attacks. Hold up, how did that magic spell work? GUARDSMEN ATTACK. If this is all being recounted to a scribe, does that mean that... PIKES! And, wait, why is it so important that you join this particular caravan? I CHALLENGE YOU TO A SERIES OF DUELS. Is an absolute monarchy really better than some sort of devolved feudalis... BAREHANDED DEATHBRAWL. Just one second, nothing in this city makes sens...NINJA AMBUSH! And wait, if you knew that all along, why didn't you just stop this earli... CAVALRY CHARGE! Etc, etc. If there's a moral to Traitor's Blade - both for its characters and the construction of the book itself - it is simply 'fortune favors the bold'. There's nothing that can't be solved, explained away or simply ignored by drawing your sword and rushing straight ahead.

It certainly helps that the combat is very good - a combination of the oft-cited Dumas and, well, pick a video game of choice. Falcio has a stack of tricks and tactics, everything from shooting swords to berserker mayhem. No fight ever repeats itself, as there's a whole inventory of bizarre items up the Greatcoat's (armored, alchemically-enhanced, secret-pocket-laden) sleeves. Indeed, some of the fights are perhaps a little too video game: the overly-contrived duels are very capital-c-Cool, but also Contrived.

Traitor's BladeBut this - the meandering adventures, the hand-wavey explanations, the Bloodborne combats - is only half the story. That's the fun part: the icing, the isn't-it-neat, the over the topness that lends itself to satire. Traitor's Blade is good, perhaps even very good, because, despite adorning itself in the Greatcoat of 'dumb fun', it has a body of smart, even powerful, storytelling.

Perhaps where that's most obvious is with what we don't see. We don't learn all the other Greatcoats' geases (geasi? geese?!), we don't see Kest's ultimate duel, we don't learn the history of Falcio and Brasti, we don't learn how Falcio and Kest duelled in the past, we don't know what happened to Kest as a child, we don't learn what the other Greatcoats are up to, etc. etc. - all of this is there, alluded to, and clearly relevant, but de Castell wisely withholds extraneous exposition in favour of keeping the plot moving and the mysteries intact. Moreover, much of the exposition we do get isn't 'plot-focused' as much as it is character-building: the origins of Falcio's anger - and his loyalty to the King. It doesn't matter how things happened, or even why, as long we care about the people involved. And, from the few, deadly serious, glimpses of Falcio's past, the reader very quickly understands the personal stakes involved.

The result? A book that's silly - occasionally overly so - but also surprisingly, wonderfully earnest. Falcio, Kest and Brasti are awash in goofiness, dirt and grime, the humor, crudeness and banality of day to day reality, but... they are also capable of transcendent moments of heroism. Traitor's Blade provides swashbuckling fan service, and has fun along the way, but it also packs a sneaky emotional punch as well. Dumas would be proud.

But enough of that - we've got special DGLA criteria, so let's go through them...

Is it fantastic? Yes. Although it is worth noting that Traitor's Blade has a particularly hand-wavey (and not entirely consistent) approach to magic. It is a thing that occasionally appears to move the plot forward, and despite it being a demonstrable fact of the setting, there are also indications that not everyone believes in it.

Is it entertaining? Yes. Very. Again, a lot of the set-piece action scenes are transparently contrived, but they're also immensely good fun. This is a book that slashes and parries with great glee, and never stops moving. It reads quickly and feels a lot shorter than it is, which is a very good sign.

Is it immersive? Maybe. I'm not giving full points here, as the world-building is probably the book's weakest link - and not helped by the fact that much of it is delivered by 'As you know, Bob' dialogue between the three Greatcoats. Similarly, the commitment to cool stuff happening often leads to locations that are often more flamboyant than believable.

Is it emotionally engaging? Yes. And surprisingly so. Traitor's Blade really does kick off like silly fun, but Falcio's backstory is interwoven in a such a way that there's real character depth behind the swashbuckling. The moments of earnestness feel all the more powerful for it.

Is it embarrassing? Mostly no. There's one particularly awful misstep, featuring a magical sex-nun - of all the video game tropes to pick up, shag-to-heal is possibly the worst. And, spoilers, of course she fulls in wuv. There's also a dead wife, and, although a hoary (fridge-y, even) trope, I don't think it is badly deployed - her death provides one of the book's rare moments of grim-faced seriousness, and it isn't exploitative. Many of the book's other female characters start as archetypes - naive young women, manipulative crones and damsels in distress amongst them - but all of them have full stories and, more importantly, agency. Traitor's Blade is occasionally laddish, but never, with the one exception above, problematic.

Is it different? Hmm. I think there's something to be said about drawing on the Dumas tradition rather than the Tolkien one. And Traitor's Blade does 'dirty' - and occasionally even horrific - without being wholly gritty. And there's something interesting about the integration of influences - and not just Dumas. Genre fiction has spent a few generations using words to capture vistas and set-pieces that are clearly cinematically inspired. Traitor's Blade is more about hyper-kineticism and meandering plot structure of modern video games instead. But as to a single point of difference? As much as I liked this book, there's nothing strikingly innovative to point to.

Overall? A very good debut, fun and well-crafted - and an auspicious start to this year's reading. If the other four debuts are to this standard, I'd be very pleased (and impressed).

[PTY]

From David Wong, author of John Dies in the End comes Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, out in October.

Here's the synopsis:

In a prosperous yet gruesomely violent near-future, superhero vigilantes battle thugs whose heads are full of supervillain fantasies. The peace is kept by a team of smooth, well-dressed negotiators called The Men in Fancy Suits. Meanwhile a young girl is caught in the middle, and thinks the whole thing is ridiculous.

Zoey, a recent college graduate with a worthless degree, makes a reluctant trip into the city after hearing that her estranged con artist father had died in a mysterious yet spectacular way. There she finds that her scumbag dad had actually, in the final years of his life, put his amazing talent for hustling to good use: He was one of the founding members of the Fancy Suits, and died in the course of his duties.

Zoey is quickly entangled in the city's surreal mob war when she is taken hostage by a particularly crazy villain who imagines himself to be a Dr. Doom-level mastermind. The villain is demanding information about Zoe's father when she is rescued by The Fancy Suits. She reluctantly joins their cause and help finish what her old man started, tapping into her innate talent for bullshit that she inherited from her hated father. And along the way, she might just have to learn how to trust people again.

[PTY]

U mnogim aspektima, ovo je roman zbog kog se Stiven King grize od muke što ga nije napisao, onomad kad je pisao Under the Dome. Odnosno, grizao bi se, da ga je briga. Ali nije, naravno, jer odavno više nije važno šta je Stiven King zapravo napisao, to se sve ionako jednako prodaje, bilo dobro ili loše.


Srećom, Skillingsteadu je važno, otud je ovo zaista dobro ispričana priča.











Bilo bi stvarno truba otkriti išta od ovog delikatnog zapleta, pa zato umesto sinopsisa evo samo nekoliko slobodnijih asocijacija:
naravno, najpre Under the Dome, ali samo oni dobri delovi, a dalje, Dark City, Deja Vu, Source Code, Looper, Groundhog Day, The Matrix... ako ste ljubitelj ovih filmova, e onda je i ovo pravi roman za vas.   

[PTY]

za sve kojima se dopao BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP, evo dobre vesti:



"Before I Go To Sleep" was such an unique book. It came completely out of the blue and made S.J. Watson's name as an off-beat author who can instantly grip the hearts of his readers. A successful Hollywood movie starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth followed and sealed the deal. "Before I Go To Sleep" deservedly became an international bestseller and won quite a few rewards. S.J. Watson is now back in the limelight with his new psychological thriller called "Second Life". Brilliant cover art clearly shows what to expect. In a similar way that "Before I Go To Sleep" did, "Second Life" is a about duality but told in a slightly different way which might not appeal to everyone.

"Second Life" follows the story of Julia, a woman who live an ordinary and slightly boring life with her husband and son. Everything changes when her sister Kate is brutally murdered. This is a new that shatters her life to bits. Kate and her have always been very close despite the fact that Kate has been living in Paris for a little while now. To make matters even complicated, Kate's son is being raised by Julia for reasons to complicated to explain now. Julia is disappointed by police's investigation and little by little decided to take matters into her own hand. After the discussion with Julia's flatmate Anna, she starts by exploring her sister's effect only to discover the other side of her life - a world of online dating and sex. As Julia digs more and more, her own life starts spiralling out of control and yet, she can't give - for her own and her sister's sake she must know what really happened.

"Before I Go To Sleep" was such an unique book. It came completely out of the blue and made S.J. Watson's name as an off-beat author who can instantly grip the hearts of his readers. A successful Hollywood movie starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth followed and sealed the deal. "Before I Go To Sleep" deservedly became an international bestseller and won quite a few rewards. S.J. Watson is now back in the limelight with his new psychological thriller called "Second Life". Brilliant cover art clearly shows what to expect. In a similar way that "Before I Go To Sleep" did, "Second Life" is a about duality but told in a slightly different way which might not appeal to everyone.

"Second Life" follows the story of Julia, a woman who live an ordinary and slightly boring life with her husband and son. Everything changes when her sister Kate is brutally murdered. This is a new that shatters her life to bits. Kate and her have always been very close despite the fact that Kate has been living in Paris for a little while now. To make matters even complicated, Kate's son is being raised by Julia for reasons to complicated to explain now. Julia is disappointed by police's investigation and little by little decided to take matters into her own hand. After the discussion with Julia's flatmate Anna, she starts by exploring her sister's effect only to discover the other side of her life - a world of online dating and sex. As Julia digs more and more, her own life starts spiralling out of control and yet, she can't give - for her own and her sister's sake she must know what really happened.

[PTY]

Elem, dakle, nakon malog izleta u YA domen, Baćigalupi se vratio odraslima. I to se vratio na velika vrata, sa angažovanom eko-distopijom koja kao da je po meri pisana upravo za Miću Milovanovića i Zorana Živkovića.

Najozbiljnije to kažem, Baćigalupi je mogao komotno da im i posvetu napiše. 

E sad, Mići ide cela postavka i angažman: očigledno je da Baćigalupi nudi neku vrst strogo kontrolisanog eksperimenta na pozornici američkog jugozapada, nešto kao 'oblik stvari koje dolaze'. Reč je o ultra bliskom futurizmu ratovanja vodom za vodu, a glavne pozornice su Teksas, Nevada i Kalifornija.

Globalno zagrevanje i suša stvorile su uslove u kojima je voda najvrednija sirovina, a samo posedovanje vode izjednačeno je sa apsolutnim bogatstvom. Onako kako danas izbeglice iz Meksika plaćaju 'kojote' da ih ilegalno prebace preko granice, tako u ovom futurizmu Teksas i Arizona gleda da se dokopa Kalifornije: ilegalno, i uz ogromnu cenu. A onaj ko poseduje prava na vodu, taj jednim jedinim potezom pera može da ubije ceo grad: Baćigalupi nudi poslednje hropce Feniksa, kao očigledan model sudbine koja čeka i ostale gradove.

Deo koji kao da je stvoren za Miću je ujedno i kičma samog romana – ko to zapravo može (ili sme) da poseduje 'prava na vodu'. Civilizovana Evropa stremi da prava na vodu počivaju na državi a ne na pojedincu, korporaciji ili teritoriji. Ali na kraju se sve ipak svodi na isto, jer država – to su ljudi. A to dalje u prevodu znači političari i njihove klike, a to opet dalje znači da negde, nekako bude tu i nekakav pojedinac čija je reč poslednja.

Glavna postavka počiva na razlici između senior i junior prava na vodu (to je deo koji će Mića naprosto da obožava) pri čemu se do sada pohlepno stremilo ka pravima na vodene mase, dok će distopija pohlepu usmeriti na sama seniorna prava, dakle na prava samog izvora. Onaj ko ima to pravo, pa, taj lično odlučuje koji grad će da živi a koji da umre. A način na koji se taj proces odvija veoma podseća na scenario Čajnatauna, od Polanskog.

Deo za Živkovića je onaj žanrovske prirode. Da kojim slučajem pročita ovaj Baćigalupijev roman, ZŽ bi radosno uskliknuo "ha! Nisam li ja vama još onomad rekao da je sf mrtav"?  Jer, istini za volju, ovaj roman je SF roman taman onoliko koliko je Gravity SF film. Ni manje ni više. Futurizam u ovom romanu da se proceniti samo odokativno, i optimista tu može da pronađe budućnost koja nam preti za nekih 20-30 godina, dok će pesimista da tvrdi kako se to zbiva upravo sada, zapravo je već počelo juče. (Lično poznajem najmanje petoro ljudi koji trenutna politička zbivanja tumače sa deset puta više fantastičnom teorijom zavere, tako da ova konkretno ekstrapolacija i nije bog zna kako impresivna.)

I tako ispada da je meni lično od ovog Baćigalupijevog romana preostao samo triler. Da ne grešim dušu, prilično je zanimljiv i veoma dobro zanatski odrađen ali...  nekako mi dođe ko oni veštački zaslađivači: štagod benefita od njih dobiješ po pitanju kaloričnosti, garant imaju neki sajdefekt koji će ti sve to zdravstveno naplatiti, otud mi i jeste najdraži dobri stari braon šećer.

A sve i ako priznajem da ovde ipak ima malko subjektivnosti po pitanju (prevelikih?) očekivanja, finalna procena mi je prilično mlaka. Onako, fino se čita, ali nije baš da ga uramim onako kako se Baćigalupijev prvenac mogao uramiti... 

[Mica Milovanovic]

Pročitaćemo...

[PTY]

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor will be out in September from Tor.com and here's the synopsis and cover.



Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.
Knowledge comes at a cost, one that Binti is willing to pay, but her journey will not be easy. The world she seeks to enter has long warred with the Meduse, an alien race that has become the stuff of nightmares. Oomza University has wronged the Meduse, and Binti's stellar travel will bring her within their deadly reach.
If Binti hopes to survive the legacy of a war not of her making, she will need both the the gifts of her people and the wisdom enshrined within the University, itself – but first she has to make it there, alive.

[PTY]

Considering the tremendous success of John Ajvide Lindqvist's "Let Me In", it is something of a wonder that we're not seeing more Scandinavian supernatural thrillers on our bulging bookshelves filled with translated titles. Thinking about it, there's only been a handful of such tiles published in recent history, coming from either from those reliable stalwarts of foreign fiction Pushkin Press and MacLehose, and they've all been invariably great. Seems like those cold Scandinavian nights offer plenty to inspire authors willing to step away from the standard Scandinavian crime literature, especially those willing to explore darker and stranger recesses of human condition as imbued by myth and tradition. Stefan Spjut's atmospheric "Stallo" is a welcome addition to this sadly understated sub-genre and it is instantly an appealing read.

Nothing sets the tone for what follows better than this opening:

"The worm glued to the tarmac is as long as a snake. No, longer. It reaches all the way to the grass verge beside the main door. The boy's eyes follow the slimy ribbon and notice that it stretches across the ditch and curls into the belly of a grey animal. Its eyes are black glass and one paw has stiffened in a wave."



The story continues to revolve around the strange and unexplained phenomena. Ever since a boy disappeared in the woods back in 1978, him mother has claimed that he was abducted by a giant. Of course, no one believed her even when it transpired that a year ago, a wildlife photographer captured another similarly bizarre phenomena on film.

Back in present day, Susso Myren is updating her web page. She's one of those conspiracy theorists who believe in all sorts of dodgy stories including the Yeti and the Big Foot. His father, the wildlife photographer who 25 years before took that bizarre photo, has instilled in her a deep love for photography so when an old woman recount a tale of a strange creature that observers her house for hours on end, Susso sees an opportunity for a story of a lifetime. Armed with a camera, her ex-boyfriend Torbjörn and her mother Gudrun she embarks on an adventure far stranger and perilous than could have possible imagined.

The quote from Karl Ove Knausgård, which graces the cover page, is a good indication about what sort of a book "Stallo" is. Despite its magical and supernatural elements, it is a glacially slow tale that unfolds in layers and is best enjoyed when read slowly. This is my first encounter with Stefan Spjut's writing so I don't know whether this is due to the excellence of translation or just plain old good storytelling, but I found "Stallo" to be beautifully written with plenty of depth that keeps you guessing even when you think you've understood it all. As is often the case with Scandinavian literature, "Stallo" positively destroys the boundaries between genres and is a book that isn't limited by mere limitations of any particular genre. It's serious enough to be enjoyed by those looking for something more mainstream while strange enough to attract those looking for intelligent fantasy fare. "Stallo" is a menacing, atmospheric book that will occupy your thoughts for days. More of the same, please.

[PTY]

A secret Russian mind research laboratory in Podol'sk erupts, annihilating thousands and leaving a monstrous, one-mile deep crater in its wake.

Beau Walker, parapsychologist and reluctant empath, is coerced into joining a research team, code-named SHIVA, to investigate the enigmatic event.

Walker must fight his way past political and military deceptions and a host of deadly adversaries to unlock the riddle of the SHIVA syndrome.
Will he have the physical, emotional, and spiritual strength to defy the dangers he faces...or will they destroy him before he can come to a new, challenging understanding of the nature of reality?




In Chocky, pioneering science-fiction master John Wyndham confronts an enigma as strange as anything found in his classic works The Day of the Triffids or The Chrysalids—the mind of a child.

It's not terribly unusual for a boy to have an imaginary friend, but Matthew's parents have to agree that his—nicknamed Chocky—is anything but ordinary. Why, Chocky demands to know, are there twenty-four hours in a day? Why are there two sexes? Why can't Matthew solve his math homework using a logical system like binary code? When the questions Chocky asks become too advanced and, frankly, too odd for teachers to answer, Matthew's  parents start to wonder if Chocky might be something far stranger than a figment of their son's imagination.

Chocky, the last novel Wyndham published during his life, is a playful investigation of what being human is all about, delving into such matters as child-rearing, marriage, learning, artistic inspiration—and ending with a surprising and impassioned plea for better human stewardship of the earth.




Gene Mapper by Taiyo Fujii

In a future where reality has been augmented and biology itself has been hacked, the world's food supply is genetically modified, superior, and vulnerable. When gene mapper Hayashida discovers that his custom rice plant has experienced a dysgenic collapse, he suspects sabotage. Hayashida travels Asia to find himself in Ho Chi Minh City with hired-gun hacker Kitamura at his side—and in mortal danger—as he pushes ever nearer to the heart of the mystery.

[PTY]

... julski gudizi:



jessss....






From Nebula and Hugo Award-nominated Carolyn Ives Gilman comes Dark Orbit, a compelling novel featuring alien contact, mystery, and murder.

Reports of a strange, new habitable planet have reached the Twenty Planets of human civilization. When a team of scientists is assembled to investigate this world, exoethnologist Sara Callicot is recruited to keep an eye on an unstable crewmate. Thora was once a member of the interplanetary elite, but since her prophetic delusions helped mobilize a revolt on Orem, she's been banished to the farthest reaches of space, because of the risk that her very presence could revive unrest.

Upon arrival, the team finds an extraordinary crystalline planet, laden with dark matter. Then a crew member is murdered and Thora mysteriously disappears. Thought to be uninhabited, the planet is in fact home to a blind, sentient species whose members navigate their world with a bizarre vocabulary and extrasensory perceptions.

Lost in the deep crevasses of the planet among these people, Thora must battle her demons and learn to comprehend the native inhabitants in order to find her crewmates and warn them of an impending danger. But her most difficult task may lie in persuading the crew that some powers lie beyond the boundaries of science.


I za kraj, malko zezancije:

Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all?

Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, the truth behind the Cold War, and the truth behind the Watergate cover-up. What if our nation's worst president was actually a pivotal figure caught in a desperate struggle between ordinary life and horrors from another reality? What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest?

In Crooked, Nixon finally reveals the secret history of modern American politics as only Austin Grossman could reimagine it. Combining Lovecraftian suspense, international intrigue, Russian honey traps, and a presidential marriage whose secrets and battles of attrition were their own heroic saga, Grossman's novel is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller.

[PTY]

Ehhh... na žalost, nestavak Edena je znatno slabiji... zapravo, do te mere slabiji da čovek ne može a da se ne upita čemu zapravo služi. 

Dosta originalnih značajki je naprasno nestalo – tu ponajpre jezik, koji je ovde naprasno postao ne samo korektan, nego i sa zavidnim originalno-zemaljskim vokabularom... Teško za prihvatiti, ako se ima u vidu da roman govori o znatno kasnijem periodu od onog u prethodnom romanu. Ne znam kako to Beckett smatra da evolucija jezika zapravo funkcioniše, ali ovo je veoma, veoma neubedljivo.

dalje, sam zaplet je poprilično trivijalan, otud i predvidiv, a otud i nekako mlak čak i kad barata sa relativno uverljivim dramskim scenama i elementima. A sam kraj je zaista razočaravajuće banalan u svojoj naivnosti, iako ga čovek već od pola romana željno iščekuje.

Sve u svemu, slabo i dosta razočaravajuće. Iz poluotvorenog kraja da se naslututi kako se Beckett malko zanosi mišlju serijala, ali što se mene tiče, slabe su šanse da ću u tome da ga pratim. Sa naknadnom pameti, moj celokupni utisak o Edenu bi bio daleko bolji da sam ostala samo na prvom romanu.

[PTY]

I eto sad, ja stvarno nisam bogznakakav fan Barkera, ali ovaj roman se dugo najavljivao, dugo iščekivao, i pratilo ga je stvarno puno pehova i odlaganja i kojekakvih zavrzlama, a plus je i najavljivan kao neka vrst finalnosti, ili barem nekog zaokruženja, jer ipak su tu u pitanju dva kultna karaktera: Hari i Pinhead. Sve u svemu, to je moralo biti markirano bar za obaveznu overu, ako već ne i čitanje.

A kako je krenuo, isprva je izgledalo da će ipak biti sam ono prvo. Barker je otvorio skasku upravo sa Harijem, i otud je taj deo nekako bio u skladu sa mojim minimalnim očekivanjima: dakle, morbidno i groteskno, i perverzno naravno, sa tu i tamo malko onog Barkeru svojstvenog humora između Harija i ekipe, ali ipak pomalo sterilno i, eto, da se i to kaže, na momente i ne baš preterano zanimljivo.  I kad je u skasku upao Pinhead (ovog puta svojevoljno, a ne zbog kocke) nije bilo baš velikog pomaka na bolje, i nekako sam bila sklona da još jednom preispitam vredi li sve to uopšte čitanja... ali onda se Barker dohvatio Pakla, i sve dvoumice su nestale.








Naravno, taj dualitet izraza je ostao prisutan tokom celog romana: kao da su ga pisala dva različita čoveka. Ali lako se uvidi da to zapravo veoma dobro funkcioniše, jer ovde je ipak Pinhead glavni, nema tu sumnje, a priča je njegova i on u njoj briljira. I upravo u tim delovima sam Barker jeste na svom vrhu, otud je Pakao prezentovan zaista vrhunskim jezikom (mislim vrhunskim za Barkera, naravno), vizuelno briljantan i magično zastrašujući, krcat impresivnim bizarnostima koje se zaista pamte. U tim delovima o Paklu, Barker apsolutno jeste nadmašio sebe.

E sad, meni je tu ipak ostao problem sa onim Harijevim delom, jer šta da se radi, jednom kad čovek preraste taj nivo, nikako mu ne može vratiti davnašnju čaroliju... no svejedno, dajhard fanovi će sve to zajedno obožavati, i to do koske. Tim pre što roman ipak nije sve ono što se najavljivalo, dakle ipak tu nije u pitanju neka vrst konačnog obračuna između Harija i Pinheada... ali reći bilo šta više od toga bi zaista bio spojler.

Ukratko - Barker is back! 

[PTY]

The Essential Cyberpunk Reading List

[PTY]

"If Stephen Hawking and Stephen King wrote a novel together, you'd get The Flicker Men. Brilliant, disturbing, and beautifully told." -Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of the Wool series

A quantum physicist shocks the world with a startling experiment, igniting a struggle between science and theology, free will and fate, and antagonizing forces not known to exist

Eric Argus is a washout. His prodigious early work clouded his reputation and strained his sanity. But an old friend gives him another chance, an opportunity to step back into the light.

With three months to produce new research, Eric replicates the paradoxical double-slit experiment to see for himself the mysterious dual nature of light and matter. A simple but unprecedented inference blooms into a staggering discovery about human consciousness and the structure of the universe.

His findings are celebrated and condemned in equal measure. But no one can predict where the truth will lead. And as Eric seeks to understand the unfolding revelations, he must evade shadowy pursuers who believe he knows entirely too much already.



In R. J. Pineiro's The Fall, a sci-fi thriller, a man jumps from the upper-most reaches of the atmosphere and vanishes, ending up on an alternate Earth where he died five years earlier.


Jack Taylor has always been an adrenaline junkie. As a federal contractor, he does dangerous jobs for the government that fall out of the realm of the SEALS and the Marines. And this next job is right up his alley. Jack has been assigned to test an orbital jump and if it works, the United States government will have a new strategy against enemy countries.

Despite Jack's soaring career, his personal life is in shambles. He and his wife Angela are both workaholics and are on the verge of getting a divorce. But the night before his jump, Jack and Angela begin to rekindle their romance and their relationship holds promise for repair. Then comes the day of Jack's big jump. He doesn't burn up like some predicted--instead, he hits the speed of sound and disappears.

Jack wakes up in an alternate universe. One where he died during a mission five years earlier and where Angela is still madly in love with him. But in this world, his boss, Pete, has turned to the dark side, is working against him, and the government is now on his tail. Jack must return to his own world but the only way for him to do that is to perform another orbital jump. This time is more difficult though--no one wants to see him go.

Jack's adrenaline is contagious--The Fall will keep readers on the edges of their seats, waiting to find out what crazy stunt Jack will perform next and to learn the fate of this charming, daredevil hero.



Zack Lightman has spent his life dreaming. Dreaming that the real world could be a little more like the countless science-fiction books, movies, and videogames he's spent his life consuming. Dreaming that one day, some fantastic, world-altering event will shatter the monotony of his humdrum existence and whisk him off on some grand space-faring adventure.
 
But hey, there's nothing wrong with a little escapism, right? After all, Zack tells himself, he knows the difference between fantasy and reality. He knows that here in the real world, aimless teenage gamers with anger issues don't get chosen to save the universe.
 
And then he sees the flying saucer.
 
Even stranger, the alien ship he's staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every night, a hugely popular online flight simulator called Armada—in which gamers just happen to be protecting the earth from alien invaders. 
 
No, Zack hasn't lost his mind. As impossible as it seems, what he's seeing is all too real. And his skills—as well as those of millions of gamers across the world—are going to be needed to save the earth from what's about to befall it.
 
It's Zack's chance, at last, to play the hero. But even through the terror and exhilaration, he can't help thinking back to all those science-fiction stories he grew up with, and wondering: Doesn't something about this scenario seem a little...familiar?
 
At once gleefully embracing and brilliantly subverting science-fiction conventions as only Ernest Cline could, Armada is a rollicking, surprising thriller, a classic coming of age adventure, and an alien invasion tale like nothing you've ever read before—one whose every page is infused with the pop-culture savvy that has helped make Ready Player One a phenomenon.

[PTY]

Cyberpunk Sunday! Listen to a Radio Dramatization of William Gibson's NEUROMANCER





https://youtu.be/9liJ3xlJcaQ?list=PLx2Joe_0hvnNhA4L1tOT5ZCaFcxQdu4tK

[PTY]

Stiglo!!!   



REVIEW SUMMARY: Robinson raises profound ethical, biological, and astrophysical questions about the potential for humans to survive interstellar travel and colonize other worlds.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: It's been over two centuries since Earth launched a generation ship bound for Tau Ceti; the generation that arrives there, though, encounters challenges that threaten the entire point of the mission.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Detailed discussions of practical issues with generation starships (i.e. decomposition, corrosion, devolution); superb handling of varying narrative voices; believable plot twists.
CONS:  Some sections were a little too detailed and distracted the reader from the main narrative.
BOTTOM LINE: You've read novels about generation ships and human colonization, but you've never read one quite like this.

Aurora is the first of Robinson's books that I've read, and now it certainly won't be the last. I started the novel knowing that it had something to do with space travel on a generation ship, and the search for other habitable planets, but I never expected such an in-depth, detailed, and downright vast exploration of the implications of human space travel and relocation.

Some of you, I assume, will think about Battlestar Galactica, The Martian Chronicles, Severance, and the like while reading Aurora, and rightly so, since stories of humans setting out to find a new home run throughout American sci-fi. What makes Aurora stand out, though, is just how far Robinson takes the narrative: dropping us into the generation ship as it approaches Tau Ceti, following the small group of settlers who test out the chosen moon, then returning with the ship and its remaining passengers (in stasis) to Earth, and finally following the surviving passengers as they set foot on a planet they've never seen but nonetheless call "home."

Most of the story is told from the perspective of Freya, daughter of one of the ship's engineers and friend to many in the diverse biomes (around 2,000 people at the time of the story). We gradually learn that the ship left Earth a couple of hundred years before and is in deceleration in anticipation of entering the Tau Ceti system. Freya's mother, Devi, has been almost single-handedly keeping the ship together for years in preparation for arrival at the destination, but dies before she can witness the outcome. Freya, due to her extensive travels throughout the ship and her many acquaintances, becomes a kind of de-facto Devi, caring for the spiritual/emotional needs of the passengers, rather than the technology on the ship.

In the years before she died, however, Devi helped coax the ship into a form of consciousness, until the ship takes over part of the novel as narrator, trying out jokes and colloquialisms, like a toddler learning how to speak. Devi had insisted that the ship create a running narrative of events both on-board and on whichever planet the passengers settled. And thus it is through the ship's "eyes" that we witness the growing unrest among the passengers as the ship enters the Tau Ceti system.

Robinson asks us to consider fundamental ethical issues associated with this kind of travel, in which the passengers who arrive at the destination had no say in the entire colonization plan. Those who chose to leave Earth and settle another planet never came close to witnessing the event, and knew that from the beginning; those who do arrive, though, never chose to leave Earth in the first place. On the one hand, you can argue that this is really a metaphor for human life itself, since none of us can choose his/her destiny. On the other hand, isn't it troublesome that one group of people can influence the lives of a completely different generation, leaving them with the profound problems of settling an Earth-like planet with no first-hand knowledge of Earth itself?

Part of what makes Aurora so successful is Robinson's ability to make interstellar travel several centuries from now seem absolutely plausible. His video on the science behind the novel, in fact, focuses on the real physical and mathematical problems that arise when considering this kind of journey. Robinson also invites us to think about the people living on a generation ship as guinea pigs in a complex evolutionary experiment, where each generation develops new genetic mutations and an increasingly narrow "worldview," since the ship's outer hull marks the boundaries of their existence. With no outside contact, these several generations, and the ship too, begin to deteriorate.

A further, and more dangerous, problem, involves the conditions on the potentially habitable planets and moons toward which the generation ship is moving. If a planet is "alive," Robinson explains, then it will harbor various forms of life most likely deadly to any humans who encounter it. If the planet is "dead," though, humans are in just as much trouble because terraforming would take centuries; in the meantime, settlers would have to exchange their one bubble (the ship) for a different bubble (a biome on the planet). One of the main factors driving the ship's occupants in their decision to return to Earth is the realization that Earth may really be the only home humans could ever really inhabit.

And while we follow the remaining passengers as they head back toward Earth, we also learn that a small group of humans decided to remain in the Tau Ceti system  in hopes of settling on a habitable planet. Thus, Robinson leaves us with the tantalizing thought that humans have actually achieved a momentous goal- leaving the solar system to explore and live amongst the stars.

I won't spoil the ending for you, but I will say that I never expected Robinson to take the passengers (and us readers) back to Earth, but he does just that. And interestingly enough, the Earth is still intact, populated, and in no immediate danger, even though it has experienced massive coastal erosion and other problems during the centuries that the ship was in space. We're never really sure why the ship was built and launched in the first place, other than the fact that humans had developed the necessary technology to do it.

Despite the many pages of detailed analysis of ship deterioration, biome problems, and other issues, Aurora is a remarkable story about the potential limits of space exploration and colonization. After all, we've seen the destruction and chaos caused by colonization within our own species on a single planet; if humans can't understand one another because of cultural differences, how could we hope to interact peacefully and rationally with other species on other worlds? How would we even recognize other forms of life? Robinson makes us think about these profound questions, and we're better for it.

[PTY]

nekoliko predloga za omiljene SF detektivce/krimice...




Actually the whole KOP series by Warren Hammond, but if I have to pick one to recommend I think the first in the series is the best.

This is a gritty, hard-boiled detective story set on the alien world of Lagarto, a planet teeming with humidity and lizards. Hammond's world-building is top-notch, as far as I'm concerned. The sense of place you get from this story is as well realized as the characters living in it. Juno, the protagonist at the center of this detective story, may seem a bit cliche at first but in fact is wonderfully nuanced.

Hammond plots a thrilling mystery here, and paces the book with the perfect blend of action and thoughtful detective work.

And if I can pick a second to throw into this Mind Meld mix, then (very) honorable mention must go to Patrick Weekes and his awesome fantasy caper, The Palace Job.

It does this book a bit of a disservice to call it a fantasy Ocean's 11, because it's so wildly imaginative and chock-full of inventive, interesting characters. Read it, and the new sequel, you'll be glad you did. Between this and Hammond's KOP, I think you'll have your mystery/detective/caper itch covered for the rest of the summer.
(Jason M. Hough)



I love detective/mystery novels, and could probably come up with a dozen favorites. I'll settle on talking about Jo Walton's Farthing and its sequels, known collectively as the Small Change trilogy. On surface, this is a classic country-house cozy murder mystery. All of the elements are here: the group of social intimates come together for a weekend party, the everyone-is-a-suspect, the outsider detective.

My library system files each book in the trilogy in a different section: the first in mystery, the second in general fiction, the third in SF. It could draw fans from the readers of any of those genres. The speculative element is key, but integrated so smoothly that it is terrifyingly easy to read this as straight mystery. Farthing is set in post-WWII England, but it's a very different world than the one we know. Walton has created a world in which Hitler's march on Europe went unchecked. A group of politicians known as the Farthing Set brokered an agreement with Germany that allowed England to remain autonomous. The US, under President Lindbergh, is increasingly isolationist, and has closed its doors to Jews. Europe's Jews live with yellow stars and ration books and ghettos and camps. England's Jewish population is free, but faces strong prejudice. This alternate history is the only SF aspect of the book, which otherwise reads as political mystery and social commentary on the British class system, justice, anti-Semitism, and homophobia.

The treatment of the Jewish characters in this system of casual ingrained bigotry was absolutely gutting. The author really managed to make me feel that things could have as easily gone this way as the way they did. Walton is an excellent writer; her style feels breezy and effortless in a way that takes an enormous amount of work to achieve. The main characters feel real, and the split narrative (alternated first and third person chapters, divided between our detective and a guest at the party) works in a way that such things often do not.

There's a bit of a "to be continued" ending, not often found in this type of book, but the main arc that begins in this one ties up nicely by the end of the third. It works as a mystery, as a commentary on the mysteries written in the real post-war era, and as an alternate history. Like the best alternate histories, Walton shows how terrifyingly easy it might have been for history to have taken a different course.
(Sarah Pinsker)




Things I love: unique settings, cyberpunk, detectives, and wise-cracking.

Things George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails gets right: all of the above!

When reaching for a detective story, it's always the sleuth's voice that draws me in and keeps me turning pages. I like my detectives quick-witted and cynical and, if I'm being honest, more than a little unlucky. While Marid Audran is definitely silver tongued and a touch hapless, he's not cynical — and I love him anyway. He's a hustler with a heart of gold, and flows through his gritty, hand-to-mouth life with peace and determination.

Marid inhabits the cyberpunk world of Budayeen, a slum on the edges of an opulent Middle Eastern city. Through his eyes we witness a wide cast of characters, and one of the real pleasures of this book is how accepting Marid is of all he meets. In his world, personalities are changed by swapping out cartridges called moddies and skills are enhanced by add-ons called daddies. Marid himself isn't wired up, but he accepts that his friends and acquaintances are and doesn't blink an eye as they transition fluidly from one gender or personality to the next.

Marid's skills as a private eye are put to the test when a killer comes to the Budayeen using moddies that mimic the personalities of famous killers. When the killer starts picking off his friends, Marid's struggle really begins, dragging him into a wider world of intrigue.

For such a quick-paced novel, When Gravity Fails packs in a lot of complex ideas about identity, drug use, and the place of religion in a world where changing who you are is as easy as changing your shoes.
(Megan E. O'Keefe)





To Say Nothing of the Dog was the first Connie Willis book I read. Like several of her other books, including Doomsday Book and Blackout/All Clear, it features the time traveling historians of future Oxford.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a page-turner comic science fiction mystery romance that gently explores the capabilities and conventions of all those genres. It begins with a mystery of pathetic simplicity – a hunt for an item of kitsch, the "bishop's bird stump," among the ruins of the bombed Coventry Cathedral during the Second World War, but that mystery turns out to be only one thread of a knot.

Historian Ned Henry has made so many time-travel "drops" searching for the bishop's bird stump that he is showing symptoms of "time-lag." But his well-deserved rest will have to wait, as he is sent to Victorian England to cope with an emergency: another historian has inadvertently brought something to the future and created a dangerous paradox. There are mysteries within mysteries, and Ned and his fellow historian Verity Kindle make a great detective team.

The book begins with the dedication, "To Robert A. Heinlein, Who, in Have Space Suit – Will Travel, first introduced me to Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog." There are references throughout to other novels, including one of my other favorite mysteries, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers.

To Say Nothing of the Dog won both the Hugo and Locus awards in 1999 and was nominated for the Nebula.

At Worldcon in London in 2014, I kept trying to see Connie Willis on panels or in readings and, much like her hapless time travelers, kept arriving just a bit too late, after the rooms had reached capacity. I never did see her, but my partner bought me a signed first edition of To Say Nothing of the Dog in the dealers' room, and it has pride of place on my shelf.
(Kate Heartfield)

[PTY]

A.I., Poetry, and the Generational Divide: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson

For three decades now, Kim Stanley Robinson has been mapping the future of humanity through science fiction. His novels are as much densely-packed thought experiments—what would it really take to terraform a planet? What solutions will humanity have to find to deal with what we're doing to the one we're living on now?—as they are thrilling adventures. His latest, Aurora, shows us what would really happen to an isolated habitat of humans on a generations-long mission to a new star (spoiler alert: we'd still act a lot like humans on Earth).

We recently talked with Stan about his novels' twisted timelines, the likelihood of people living on Mars, and what he has in store for Manhattan in his next book.





You've said that the planet Aurora, the destination of the generation ship, is a hat tip to Asimov's The Naked Sun, and some characters (Devi especially), seem mined from the same vein as his gifted, clever protagonists. How much are you consciously in dialog with Golden Age writers?

Not very much, if by Golden Age you mean the 1940s.  I've enjoyed Asimov, and love Sturgeon and Simak, but I only ever read a little Heinlein, and the rest of that era I read in a rush 40 years ago, when it already felt old-fashioned. The generation of the '50s means more to me: Dick, Pangborn, Knight, Pohl, Bester, Miller, Vance, Merrill and the rest of that crowd; they were all very smart and fun. Then the New Wave writers were my special heroes, and the ones I learned the most from. I still think they were SF's high point: Le Guin, Delany, Zelazny, Wolfe, Disch, Russ, the Strugatskis and Lem, and the rest of that group. 

In general, I think that anyone writing SF now is somehow in dialog with the SF that came before. And there is a lot of great reading to be had in the genre.


One of your narrators is a ship's A.I. that seems to have achieved consciousness, but no one particularly seems to notice. Assuming A.I. is possible, is this how you think it will play out: computers just getting better at emulating consciousness until the Turing Test is moot?

Maybe. I don't know much about A.I., and I don't think anyone does, because the terms are fuzzy. What we have now is artificial and in some ways intelligent, in that computations are made very quickly, but these procedures have little relationship to how humans think, so the words involved in our descriptions of the procedures are deceptive. However, as we do get faster computers talking back to us, the illusion of a consciousness engaged with us will get stronger, and the Turing Test and the Winograd Schema (which calls for a general knowledge applied to particular questions in a way humans can do easily) may become bars that A.I. can clear. Maybe these are still low bars, I'm not sure. However, I'm more interested in these questions than ever before, I can say that. 


As the A.I. matures, it seems to develop more and more of a sense of humor, especially puns and wordplay. (There are some real groaners.) Even in the rather bleak sections, there's a thread of humor. How important do you think humor is to consciousness, or is this just a quirk of the ship's personality?

I don't know.  Again, consciousness is a tricky, vague term, so a sense of humor (which strikes me as a more precise [one], somehow) may or may not be important to consciousness. It might just be a quirk of the ship A.I., trying to do a narrator's sentence-making. If it's much like me (and it could be), the humor might usually be by accident.



2312 and Aurora seem to occupy the same timeline, with the latter occurring hundreds of years later—there's a quick reference to a city on tracks on Mercury and the Saturnine miners. Do you have an internal timeline of events, or do you think of your books as pure standalones?

I think of them as standalones, definitely. I have timelines for each novel, but they aren't the same from book to book. I do lift various ideas from earlier books of mine, if it seems like they will add to the new books. It's fun to refer to the city Terminator on Mercury, and Pauline the A.I., and a few other recurrent ideas, but it's more important to create a new and different history for each novel, leading back to whatever present I'm writing from.



Aurora takes a dim view of the generation ship, and is much more downbeat than 2312 about the limits of our technology and biology. In 2312, we have settlements all over the solar system, and it seems the logical extension is to shoot for the stars; Aurora is, in effect, an argument against the generation ship, and what it would take to reach them. Mars One is currently looking at candidates for their mission in 2025, and many are questioning the wisdom of such an undertaking. An argumentative question would be: why do you think even Mars or Mercury would be in our reach?

Well, we have reached Mars and Mercury robotically, and they are nearby, relative to the stars. They have surfaces like the moon, which we have landed people on.  The problems seem solvable, so setting up scientific stations on both these planets, and many more moons in our solar system, seems like something we can do.

The stars, however, are different.  If you reduce the distance from the sun to the Earth (one AU) to a meter, then Tau Ceti would, by the same reduction, be 800 kilometers away. And Tau Ceti is one of the closest stars. So there is such a quantitative difference there that it becomes a qualitative difference.  Put simply: the stars are too far away for us, but our solar system is not. That's the case that 2312 and Aurora are making, and I think it's a pretty solid case.  I'd be happy to debate it with anybody.

It should be said that Mars One is a fantasy, because although going to Mars and Mercury is probably possible, we're not ready yet. We haven't practiced enough yet. We could do it if we invested in a civilizational effort, which would take a few decades of concerted effort by a really big group of organizations. 

Oliver Morton has made the very persuasive point that we're mainly interested in Mars because it feels like the hardest thing we could do at our current moment of technology: it's the challenge goal, like getting to the North and South Poles was in the 19th century. So we keep talking about it, without being fundamentally interested in Mars per se. If and when we reach Mars with humans, we will be precisely as interested in it as we were in the moon after we reached it, or in the South Pole. There are people now living at the South Pole! Amazing! But are you amazed? No. We are most interested in the projects that are just beyond our reach.


The colonists onboard the generation ship have inherited an unstable environment from their ancestors, one that has put their very lives at risk. Is there a correlation here to your interest in environmentalism?

Sure. We too live in a closed biological life support system. It's a trillion times bigger than a starship, and so it's much more robust than a starship, but there are 7 billion of us, too, using new technologies that wreak ecological damage. So it's an unconstrained experiment, and we need to think about it as an ecology we have to coax along and care for as we do for our bodies, because in effect the Earth is our body. So the starship novel is a great space to talk about that.


One aspect of the "generation ship" that is often glossed over is the generational aspect—that there will be friction between parents and children, and their children, and theirs. Did you consider the conflict between generations as you were building this society?

Yes, to an extent. The thing that struck me most was the difference between the people who chose to go, meaning the first generation, and then all the generations that followed, who did not make that choice, who would know there is a planet back in the solar system that most people are living on, while they are stuck in a few rooms and need to make everything go right, which means population control and various other constraints that, when added up, could seem like a quite fascistic totalitarian state. Even if fully democratic, the situation itself would be totalitarian. Realizing that, the generational divide might become quite stark.


Poetry is a fairly important component in The Years of Rice and Salt, and pops up in Aurora in the kitchen table couplets between Badim and his friends, and a few other notable places. Who are your favorite poets?

My favorite living poets are Gary Snyder and W.S. Merwin. Looking back at the canon, I love many poets, but here want to mention the somewhat neglected William Bronk; and Kenneth Rexroth, whose Sierra poetry I collected into a book published by New Directions; and the amazing Emily Dickinson, a recent discovery for me.   


You've mentioned elsewhere that you tried something in this book that you've never seen in SF before. Without giving it away, has anyone else picked up on it yet? Has that been gratifying or disappointing?

It's been mentioned with circumspection by a couple of reviewers, which pleased me greatly. I should add that the basic concept is not mine, but rather a commonplace of rocketry, but I think my application of it constitutes a new science fiction story. I think one reviewer recommended reading the sequence twice, as being physics as poetry, while another noted that the passage's narrator was an A.I., not much of a stretch for Robinson.


Can you talk about what you are working on now? How do you select which of a myriad of ideas you are going to actually turn into a novel?

Actually I only have a few ideas, but since it takes me a year or two to write a book, by the time I've finished one, the list of ideas seems about as long as ever. These days, I compile that list and give it to my editor, Tim Holman, and he helps me make the call concerning which one to try next. So, next up I'm going to write a novel set in a [partially submerged] Manhattan much like the one that my characters briefly visit in 2312. At first I felt intimidated to write about New York, being a Californian; it was worse than Mars or Ming China or the Paleolithic for me. But I've been visiting the city and have realized again that it's so stupendous (like Asimov's Trantor!) that no one can know it all, and it has lots of room for an outsider's perspective.  Especially after it's dunked waist-deep in water.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/a-i-poetry-and-the-generational-divide-a-conversation-with-kim-stanley-robinson/