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Mind Meld: Best of 2008

SF Signal asks, “Q: What were the best genre-related books, movies and/or shows you consumed in 2008?” Their panel of experts include Mary Robinette Kowal, Ted Kosmatka, John Picacio, Paul McAuley, Marc Gascoigne, and Bob Eggelton.

Very happy to see several Pyr books get a mention: Fast Forward 2, Brasyl, River of Gods (even though it wasn’t a 2008 book) and even the forthcoming Age of Misrule trilogy.

And of course, in the film category, I’m always happy to see The Dark Knight get mentioned.

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Sandy Collora’s Hunter Prey

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I have a soft spot for commercial director and filmmaker Sandy Collora‘s short and very professional fan film, Batman: Dead End. And you know I am always excited about indicators that SF filmmaking is becoming more affordable, thus leading to more of every kind of SF film. So I was excited to see this piece on io9.com interviewing Sandy about his new feature-length original film, Hunter Prey. Apparently the film — about “a crew of special forces commandos who must recapture an alien prisoner that has escaped after the military transport ship carrying it crashes on a desolate and hostile planet” — has even attracted the attention of Guillermo Del Toro. So hopefully this will lead to more and bigger things from a director who says that science fiction has the power to make you think about “things like war, politics and current events, by presenting them in situations cinematically from a uniquely different perspective. That’s one of the great things about Science Fiction; You can tell the audience something in a very unique way by using the guise of a futuristic world or society that can reflect our own.”

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Buy Books Like Life Depended On It! (Maybe Not Yours, But Someone’s.)

So, if you haven’t heard the news, or seen Andrew Wheeler’s rundown, yesterday was publishing’s “Black Wednesday,” with layoffs and changes at Random House, Thomas Nelson, Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, others. Prompting in part this good advice from John Scalzi:

Buy some damn books.

Fortunately, this advice is well-timed: Books are inexpensive yet valued objects, which means that they make lovely gifts for whatever holiday festivities you subscribe to this time of year. Now is a fine time to introduce friends and loved ones to some of your favorite authors — and in doing so, you’re boosting that author’s sales, which will make his or her publisher marginally less liable to dump their shivering ass onto the street. You’re giving a gift a loved one will appreciate, you’re doing your favorite authors a favor, and you’re doing your part to keep editors and publishers from hurling themselves out of high-rise windows. Truly, everybody wins.

So, go: Make this a bookish holiday season. You know you want to anyway. I, my fellow authors and a grateful publishing industry thank you in advance for your cooperation, and for your seasonal purchases.

Amen.

For our part, my wife and I have decided to give everyone books and bookstore gift cards this Xmas. It has the added bonus of making our shopping really quick and easy too.

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Fast Forward 2: Catching the Zeitgeist

Paul Raven, of Futurismic, reviews Fast Forward 2,proclaiming it, “an excellent anthology.” He reviews each story individually, in order of its Futurismic-relevance, concluding:

 …if you wanted a good argument for buying anthologies of original short science fiction stories – or even a good defence against those who claim the form is ossified and irrelevant – Fast Forward 2 has your back. The economics of sf magazine publishing may be in question, but the quality of fiction available is riding as high as it has ever been. Sincerely recommended.

However, I’m always thrilled when a reviewer takes the time to consider the cover art, so it’s his summation of John Picacio’s artwork that I really want to call out here:

 …a real Zeitgeist catch. Below is strife, carnage, religious angst; thrusting upwards is bionic monkey-man, his chains broken asunder, transcending mundane squabbles for the promise of space and rationalism (bubble chamber tracks?). The religious discord is heightened by the DNA motif, explicitly repeated in the exhaust blast of robomonkey… if you wanted to encapsulate the hope for a triumph (or at least secession) of a rational worldview, I think you’d struggle to make a more arresting and vivid image in the process.

Nice when someone gets it.


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Is There a Silver SFnal Lining to the Recession?

Been talking about the economy as relates to SF with Mark Chadbourn, whose Age of Misrule trilogy we’ll be publishing in a few months. He kindly lets me repost his thoughts here:

My joint major at university was economics, and the upshot of that is I’m always out-of-cycle with everyone else. I’m worrying six months ahead of an economic downturn when everyone else is smiling, and I’m smiling when everyone else is miserable, which sometimes doesn’t win friends.

It seems we’re on a cusp now: a couple of months to see if the measures all Governments are introducing actually start getting people spending (which is the key in any recession – if people save everything goes into a downward spiral). But in six months we should be seeing the very early stages of an up-tick. Any company which weathers the next six months should be in a good position.

Somewhere I’ve got a talk I occasionally give about how genre is the marker for great social and political events. One of the strands is how SF/F/Crime always does *exceptionally* well in economically difficult times – if you plot it out on a graph, it becomes very clear. But just think with SF in the thirties and seventies. Horror, incidentally, does well in boom-times.

If I was on the stock market, I’d be advising investors to put their cash in SF/F for the next few years because, as you’re finding, it’s going to do really well. It would be good if someone could pitch this theory to the major chains, because if they got behind it, everyone would benefit (and it would become self-fulfilling).

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Fast Forward 2: Best of the Year

In the just-released December issue of Locus, Gardner Dozois breaks down 2008’s best sf anthologies in his column, “Gardnerspace”.

“This has been an almost unprecedented year for the number of first-rate original SF anthologies published, at least since the heyday of Orbit, New Dimensions, and Universe in the ’70’s. …I’d have to say that the three strongest original SF anthologies of the year were Lou Anders’ Fast Forward 2,Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse 2, and Strahan’s The Starry Rift…. Of these, I think I’d give a very slight edge to Fast Forward 2.“

Meanwhile, at Strange Horizons, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro writes:

“Fast Forward 2 proves itself that rare beast among anthologies of the imagination: one whose content actually provides a materialization of its own theoretical blueprint.”

Lots of nice things said about each of the individual stories. And (I must add) a very well-written review too, with paragraphs like:

“Catherine Drew” by Paul Cornell is wildly inventive. Its Hero, Hamilton, speaks in a way (“‘You’ve got a problem, Miss Drewe,’ he said”) that captures the essence of this alternate-history spy thriller in a British Empire-dominated future. The plot, propelled not so much by a single McGuffin as by a combustible gas of intelligent deceptions and counter-deceptions, makes as much sense as it needs to:

‘Is that the mission, sir?’
‘No. We’ve created and are ready to plant chaotic information of an unbreakable nature strongly suggesting that this has already happened…’ (p. 22)

The alternate history milieu expertly justifies not only the background but the feel of the world that Cornell creates, yet is never so startling as to prove distracting from Hamilton’s exploits. Shaken, not stirred? More like vacuum-decompressed.

And then, in a final summation about the purpose of SF:

“What it should do, above all else, is tell stories well, so well that they cannot be disregarded, so well that they cannot but be taken seriously. Fortunately for us, Fast Forward 2 arrives with gifts that do just that. May it be followed by plenty of equally riveting and well-produced sequels.”

What a nice start to my Monday.

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Unicorns: Have they been mylittleponied into blunt four-color rainbows?

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Every time James Enge pontificates about fantasy fiction, I am fascinated. Here, on the new Black Gate Group Blog, he pontificates about unicorns:

…unicorns have been used and imagined and reimagined so much that their emotional halo has been mylittleponied into blunt four-color rainbows. They’re overfamiliar. …In a way, this is inevitable. Any symbol, if it penetrates deeply into a culture, attracts parody and appropriation—it’s one way you can start to actually see the thing again, as opposed to scanning past it and saying, “Yeah, I know what that is.” …But it seems as if the poppification of the unicorn has gone beyond this, banalizing the image so that it is almost impossible to use it in a semi-serious context, even in fantasy where, one would think, an occasional unicorn might find an unspoiled field to roam in. Can the unicorn be saved? Or is the image just used up and does it need to lie fallow for a century or two before it’s usable again?

Now, “mylittleponied into blunt four-color rainbows” is just priceless.

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