Nick Gevers weighs in on Ian McDonald’s forthcoming Brasyl
“McDonald conveys quite brilliantly the prodigious energy and fecundity of Brazil as it is and could be. …Brasyl is a feast of fine prose, an able political novel, and an intriguing experiment in cross-temporal storytelling and implication. …it is without doubt one of the major SF books of 2007.”
One of the Major SF Books of 2007 Read More »
Very pleased to announce that Pyr is now listed on SFWA’s list of qualifying novel venues.
Rich, over at SF Signal, posts his review of Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real,
He calls the book, “A great blend of science fiction and fantasy! Imaginative characters, while based on previous fantasy archetypes – have their own unique aspects and personalities. Quickly pulls you in, and picks up speed from there.”
Finally, what’s not to love about this? “All the guns, grenades, mystical vortexes, motor cycle chases, and dragons are great. They move the story along and I for one really enjoy ‘action sequences’. Most of all they serve as a vehicle to move the characters along and grow them for the reader, and lay the ground work for some hopefully very interesting and exciting sequels.”
Works by me.
Guns, Grenades, and Dragons, Oh My! Read More »
Tomas L. Martin reviews Joel Shepherd’s Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel
Crowsnest.
Tomas nails what I love about these books when he says, “It is this extremely nuanced political spectrum that truly brings Breakaway to life. That and the explosions. The superb set pieces featuring SWAT teams against extremists are matched in excitement by the battles on the floors of government. The debates between Callay’s representatives are as exciting as the running gun battles in its streets.”
My initial reaction was to smile when Tomas talks about “the age-old question of how an artificial human would feel,” since I think of age-old as referring to something with a timeless, centuries-old history to it and A.I. isn’t that old of a concept, but then, SF has been dealing with this question for over a century now, and I suspect we can find corollaries in ancient myths as well, and certainly a certain work by Mary Shelley applies to… so I guess it is a age-old question after all. Fortunately, the consensus is that Joel Shepherd puts a new spin on it. And an exciting one at that.
The Age-Old Question of Artificial Life Read More »
Over at SciFi.com’s Sci Fi Weekly, Paul Di Filippo gives an A to Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky: Entire and the Rose: Book 1.
old-fashioned heroism; and strong emotional hooks.”
Paul goes on to compare Kay’s work to the “planetary romances” of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edward Hamilton, with a shout out to recent works in this vein like Chris Roberson’s Paragaea.
But, he says, Kay is also “working in the Big Dumb Object territory exemplified by such past masters as Larry Niven, Bob Shaw, Greg Bear, Paul McAuley and, more recently, Karl Schroeder,” with the unusual cosmology of her invented world, the Entire.
And finally, he applauds her prose when he says, “Kenyon exhibits a clever narrative structural bent as well…. the mark of a fine writer.”
He ends with a comparison to Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers books. So, like, what are you waiting for?
The Universe Next Door Read More »
Although I’m still waiting on my own copies (suspense = killing me), I see that Amazon is now listing both Joel Shepherd’s Breakaway
Meanwhile, if I may be forgiven for the reminder/plug, Publishers Weekly said of Breakaway,
“Beneath the glitz of snazzy weaponry, unstoppable heroes and byzantine political machinations is a very real struggle about the nature of humanity and trust.” While, in their starred review of Bright of the Sky, they said, “Kenyon’s deft prose, high-stakes suspense and skilled, thorough world building will have readers anxious for the next installment.”
I’m really, really anxious to see this one in the flesh (see above aside about suspense), as we used a silver treatment on the title we’ve not used before, eye-catching and appropriate to a mysterious river that factors in Kay’s story.
Breaking Out the Bright Read More »
Adam Balm is back with another SF book review for Aint It Cool News, this time with a very astute review round-up that includes his thoughts on Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real
After a review of the novelization of Spider-man 3, Adam proclaims Keeping It Real, ” a novel that … tears apart all genre conventions and mixes them together into something new. …In a male-dominated industry, this is a novel written by someone channeling their inner teenage girl, writing for teenage girls.”
Then he goes on to suggest that Justina may be carving out new territory in a direction necessary for the very health and survival of the genre. As he writes:
“Last month I spoke about SF needing to change or die. In an essay by Kristine Kathryne Rusch that appeared in Asimov‘s last year ‘In [2003], SF counted for 7 percent of all adult fiction books sold. In 2001, SF counted for 8 percent. The literary trend spirals downward while the media trend goes up. Half the new television dramas introduced in 2005 were science fiction, fantasy, or had a fantastic element. Most of the movies in the top twenty for the past five years have been SF. Nearly all of the games published have been SF.’ The print SF world has been falling behind for decades. It can expand to reach out to this new audience, or it can continue to be incestuous and cannibalistic. Right now the only entry point for new readers is media tie-ins. But Keeping it Real may turn out to be one example of the change that SF may want to embark on. Because this isn’t SF for SF readers. This is SF for a generation raised on anime, manga, and MMORPGs. This is SF for the Wii gamer. “
A discussion of Orson Scott Card’s Space Boy follows. Then, turning his attention to Gradisil, Adam invokes the connection to the Ansari X-Prize as he says:
“This wasn’t the top-down space travel we were promised in 2001. This is bottom up. This is tweakers and hackers seeing how far they can push technology by themselves. This is the future that Gradisil explores. Modeled after Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy of greek tragedies, it’s a multi-generational saga of man’s colonization of the high frontier of low-earth-orbit. It’s epic SF in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy or Allen Steele’s Coyote trilogy, although it feels like it could have been written in the days of Heinlein. And perhaps most profoundly, it’s a story about two Americas:
The America that WAS (reflected in the rustic frontiersmen of the uplands) and the America that IS (reflected in the ambitious and expansionist US that launches a war to gain dominance of the new frontier.)”
Adam goes on to say that our Adam’s book isn’t engaged in “trying to writing about something new, it’s trying to write new about something,” and then concludes:
“There’s an old saying about good science fiction: Pick one. You can have good science or you can have good fiction. You have your Hal Clements, your Poul Andersons and Gregory Benfords whose science are unassailable but whose dialog and characterization are barely above Star Wars fan fiction; and then you have your Ursula Le Guinns, your Samuel R. Delanys, your J.G. Ballards and Brian Aldisses who are as interested in science as The Prisoner was interested in the criminal justice system. In choosing between good science or fiction, Adam Roberts works incredibly hard to reach the former, but he achieves the latter effortlessly.”
Sci-Wii & A Tale of Two Americas Read More »
The trade paperback edition of John Meaney’s brilliant novel, Context: Book II of the Nulapeiron Sequence,
online, and should be showing up in bookstores everywhere soon.
As B&N’s Explorations wrote: “Science fiction fans looking for the next big genre classic need look no further than the Nulapeiron Sequence, a highly cerebral sci-fi trilogy by British author John Meaney that has been (deservedly) compared to Frank Herbert’s epic masterwork Dune. Meaney’s Nulapeiron Sequence (Paradox, Context and the forthcoming Resolution) is a landmark work for multiple reasons: unparalleled world building, the world of Nulapeiron is one of the most vividly described and utterly unique realms ever imagined in the history of science fiction; plot density, like Nulapeiron’s multi-leveled society, the story of Tom Corcorigan has innumerable layers; dozens of secondary themes and subplots; and above all else, readability: fans of hard science fiction will not be able to put this sweeping and thought-provoking saga down.”
Meanwhile, Neth Space has reviewed another Meaney title, Bone Song, not available in the states yet, but kicking up waves overseas. “Bone Song is a genre-bending blend of dark/urban fantasy and hardboiled crime enshrouded in noir. Think Dirty Harry in a city created by the bastard love-child of Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville – it’s close, but still a disservice to Meaney’s creation.” I think this one is going to blow people away over here too when it comes, but then, I’ve thought John was a genius for a long time.
Putting Things in Context Read More »
SciFiDimensions has just posted a virtual panel discussion on The Future of Manned Spaceflight. Moderated John C. Snider asks noted panelists Geoffrey A. Landis (science fiction author and actual NASA scientiset), M.M. Buckner (novelist and winner of the 2006 PKD award) and our own Adam Roberts (author of Gradisil
Please read the whole discussion, but here’s a clip from Adam Roberts to whet your appetite:
“The problem isn’t that space exploration isn’t a noble, or a necessary, human aim. It clearly is. The problem is that enormous boondoggle governmental programs to put people into space are exactly the wrong way to advance that aim. What we need is a genuinely popular and ground-up move into space, not a top down one; something that taps into the groundswell of popular fascination with space travel. The technologies NASA are using to put people into space can be thought of this way: at the time of Apollo it cost as much to put a man in orbit as that man’s weight in gold. Chemical propulsion is the same technology, and the costs haven’t come down very far. Now, the USA would never have come about if it had cost that much to ship colonists over from Europe. There needs to be serious investigation of: cheaper models of space elevators; next-generation high altitude zeppelins as launch pads; re-jigged and less polluting Spaceship Orion nuclear-propulsion projects, boosting spaceplanes with electromagnetic effects from the earth’s magnetosphere; and anything else that people can think of.”
The Future of Manned Spaceflight Read More »
Ian McDonald’s forthcoming Brasyl
Brasyl
Ian McDonald. Pyr, $25 (480p) ISBN 978-1-59102-543-6
British author McDonald’s outstanding SF novel channels the vitality of South America’s largest country into an edgy, post-cyberpunk free-for-all. McDonald sets up three separate characters in different eras—a cynical contemporary reality-TV producer, a near-future bisexual entrepreneur and a tormented 18th-century Jesuit agent. He then slams them together with the revelation that their worlds are strands of an immense quantum multiverse, and each of them is threatened by the Order, a vast conspiracy devoted to maintaining the status quo until the end of time. As McDonald weaves together the separate narrative threads, each character must choose between isolation or cooperation, and also between accepting things as they are or taking desperate action to make changes possible. River of Gods (2004), set in near-future India, established McDonald as a leading writer of intelligent, multicultural SF, and here he captures Latin America’s mingled despair and hope. Chaotic, heartbreaking and joyous, this must-read teeters on the edge of melodrama, but somehow keeps its precarious balance. (May)
PW Gives a Starred Review for Brasyl! Read More »