What a Difference a Year Makes
Tobias Buckell has uploaded an interview he conducted with Joel Shepherd last year. Still good reading, if a bit of water has passed under the bridge since then.
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3 Pyr Titles @ the Library Journal
The Library Journal reviews three more Pyr titles, all recommended:
Kenyon, Kay. Bright of the Sky.
“Reminiscent of the groundbreaking novels of Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose 
Farmer, and Dan Simmons, her latest volume belongs in most libraries.”
Roberts, Adam. Gradisil.
“A picture of a possible future … that is both chillingly possible and dryly tongue-in-cheek. Fans of sf sagas will appreciate the attention to detail and engaging characters.”
Robson, Justina. Keeping It Real.
“…skillfully builds a seamless connection between sf and fantasy in this fast-paced series opener featuring a strong, action-oriented heroine and a unique world setting.” They go on to recommend the book to fans of both “contemporary culture” and “mature YA.”
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Keeping It Real Keeps Pyr Balanced
Patrick of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist offers his thoughts on Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real,
“This is a fun, entertaining and action-packed novel. There’s a lot of humor, and the pace is at times fast and furious. I was using Keeping it Real as my “commute” book, and I was always disappointed when I realized that my stop was next. Indeed, I found myself turning those pages, always eager to see what would happen next.”
Patrick also offers his thoughts on what KIR has to say about our line. He feels its inclusion in the list “demonstrates just how diversified Pyr’s stable of writers and novels will ultimately be. Once again, it’s evident that their desire to publish works that are different from what’s being released by the powerhouses continues to fuel Pyr’s passion for both science fiction and fantasy. And although they made a name for themselves with thought-provoking books by authors such as Ian McDonald, Sean Williams, David Louis Edelman and many others, by publishing novels such as Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself and Justina Robson’s Keeping it Real they show that Pyr is not averse to release more humorous and entertaining books.
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Out of Africa
Alan Dean Foster, who as near as I can tell only uses his house in
Arizona to store books because he never stops globe-trotting, sends along these pictures from a recent trip to West-Central Africa (Jan 19th to Feb 20th). The picture on the left is of buyers at the Gorom-Gorom market. Alan explains, “Gorom-Gorom is the northernmost real town in Burkina Faso, up in the frontier where Burkina meets Mali and Niger.”
Also pictured, a hunting spider shot in Lope National Park, Gabon, which Alan says was six inches across. Touareg women photographed in their camp at Darkoye, “their group having just come over from Niger,” a mud-brick mosque at Bani, and a forest elephant, from Langouie Camp near Langouie Bai (in Gabon) “famous from Michael Bey’s (National Geographic) megatransect of central Africa. 
“Forest elephants are smaller than their Eastern and Southern relatives, have rounder ears, and…different toe arrangements.”
As Alan says, “another interesting part of the planet.”
What’s a Macguffin?
Tom Easton of Analog‘s Reference Library column is frustrated that Alan Dean Foster doesn’t reveal the maguffin of Sagramanda
Easton’s solution – to skip ahead to the end of the book. My mother does this – and sometimes my wife – but it drives me nuts. My own advice: read faster! The end will come sooner that way.
Meanwhile, for those not-in-the-know, a macguffin is a plot device that is used in film and other narrative (particularly mysteries and thrillers) to advance a story but whose nature doesn’t really matter. The term is usually credited to director Alfred Hitchcock, though it may have been coinced by his friend, screenwriter Angus MacPhail.
In a 1966 interview, Hitchcock described the macguffin’s purpose thusly (via Wikipedia):
“It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh that’s a McGuffin.’ The first one asks ‘What’s a McGuffin?’ ‘Well’ the other man says, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers ‘Well, then that’s no McGuffin!’ So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.”
Update: Neth Space also weighs in with a review of Sagramanda: “Sagramanda becomes a character all its own as we see a microcosm of India – the poor, desperately poor, the rich, the tourist, the huge population, the filth, the decadence, and the contrast of old and new – through the eyes the hunters and hunted. The portrayal of India is fascinating – especially for someone like me who has never been there. As I said about John Burdett in relation to Bangkok 8, I don’t know if Foster gets it right, but it feels like he does…. It’s a fascinating portrayal of near-future India with an average techno-thriller plot holding it together.”
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Keeping It Real @ Borders
Beginning tomorrow, 3/6, and running fourteen days through 3/19, Justina Robson’s magnificent sci-fantasy novel Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity, Book 1)
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India’s National Newspaper on the River
Ian McDonald just emailed me to point out this review of River of Gods
couldn’t be happier. Ian’s been hailed so much already we’re almost jaded, but this one comes from The Hindu – India’s National Newspaper Online! In this article, “India in the Future,” Pradeep Sebastian begins by admitting that he passed up RoG on numerous occasions, assuming it was “one more lightweight take on India by a foreigner.”
But when he did pick it up, he quickly concluded that RoG was much more:
“Foreign writers have successfully used India as a backdrop for mysteries and thrillers: Barbara Cleverly’s period mysteries (The Palace Tiger), Paul Mann’s thrillers (The Ganja Coast) and one-off thrillers such as Leslie Forbes’ Bombay Ice and Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram. River of Gods surpasses all of them easily to become not just the definitive thriller set in India but the most richly imaginative thriller about India.”
Sebastian concludes that RoG is “a compellingly realised future India.” As the Times of India previously said, “Not bad for a firang who has oodles of imagination and chutzpah.”
(And I was just kidding about being jaded – keep those good reviews coming!)
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Crowing About Pyr
Tomas L. Martin has posted two reviews in the recent edition of SF Crowsnest.
Of Justina Robson’s brilliant near-future thriller, Mappa Mundi,
to say:
“Mappa Mundi is an excellent second novel, with great characterisation and an intriguing plot idea. It’s certainly worth reading and Justina Robson is an extremely promising writer but I felt this book strayed a bit too far in its extrapolation to function as a great thriller. As it is, it’s simply a good book.”
Not arguing with a good review – just feel compelled to add that I love the “straying.” For me, the book starts off like any Michael Crichton thriller, but goes in the opposite direction. So much of his work – as well as the Hollywood treatment of SFnal tropes – is about putting genies back in the bottle, while we science fiction types know that that is rarely possible…
Meanwhile, Tomas’s thoughts on my own Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge
“There are some excellent stories here. In his introduction, Anders mentions that he aspires to produce a similar collection to that of Damon Knight’s prestigious Orbit series that was so influential in its twenty-one volumes. This is heady competition to put onto a new publication but happily it isn’t too difficult to see Fast Forward becoming a similarly established name in original SF anthology history…. Fast Forward 1 has more than enough original and exciting new stories to make it important reading and worthy of more than a couple more editions to follow. Lou Anders has done a good job with this first volume and I hope he continues producing original anthologies if they are as good as this one.”
Adam Roberts Interviewd on SFRevu
Gradisil
Adam is a great interview – in fact, he first came to my attention some years ago when he was being interviewed about his novel, On. I was impressed enough with his thoughts that I knew I wanted to work with him and invited him into my anthology, Live Without a Net
People love SF and Fantasy—on screen. And I think this has changed the logic of the genre. The most culturally ubiquitous SF has been visual SF, and almost always worked through by a ‘visual spectacularism’ predicated upon special effects, the creation of visually impressive alternate worlds, the realisation of events and beings liable to amaze. In part because of this, I think, SF has become less centrally a ‘literature of ideas’ and become much more to do with images: I’m talking about both conventional poetic or literary images, but more strikingly potent visual imagery that penetrates culture more generally. It is in the nature of images that they cannot be parsed, explicated and rationalised in the way ‘ideas’ can. Accordingly there is something oblique about the workings of the best SF of the later century; something allusive and affective that can be difficult exactly to pin down. My favourite SF films are not necessarily the most mind-expanding, but they are the most beautiful: 2001.
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Is it a Wiki World Yet?
William L. Hosch, the Britannica mathematics and computer sciences editor, uses Paul Di Filippo’s “Wikiworld,” one of the stories in Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge,
“So is Wikipedia on its way to becoming Isaac Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica (or for younger readers, Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) or will it be abandoned as Web 3.0 arrives? (Frankly, a shared conundrum for all general reference works, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, is how to evolve in the coming world of Web 3.0 interactivity.) Maybe reading is obsolete and experts are old-fashioned and elitist. Then again, maybe we haven’t quite reached the world of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron. At least that’s what I take from reading Larry Sanger, the ex-cofounder of Wikipedia, who has begun extolling the virtues of expert opinion over popular consensus.”
Interesting discussion follows.
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