Daughter of the Empire

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Tomas L. Martin has reviewed Theodore Judson’s The Martian General’s Daughterfor SFCrowsnest with the intriguing description that it is “worthy sequel in spirit to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”Which it is, as the book serves, as he says, as a”a strong, dynamic analysis of what happens when a nation grows too far and collapses under the pressure of its ambition.” And there is a large part of the narrative that is a retelling of the history of Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodius (who will be somewhat familiar to fans of the film Gladiator,yes), only that all this history is seen through the person of Justa, the daughter of the title. To me, her voice and her personal story are more powerful than the history she witnesses, which while it has a lot to say about the fall of empire (and, I believe, our own recent efforts at empire-building), is a vehicle for a very personal look at family. My two cents.

Update: Ah, and here comes a review on Neth Space that is the third one to use that word “compelling”when referring to Justa. They echo a little of what I’m talking about when they say, “The story gains new dimensions as it moves forward – becoming as much the story of Justa as the general. We slowly learn bits and pieces of Justa’s past as she relates the story of her father. As an empire decays, we feel that Justa thrives and grows. In the end, we have three stories in one – the death of empire, the biography of a great general, and the growth a young woman.”

Update 4/17/08: Jeff Vandermeer opines at Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog that, “this slim but satisfying novel is often willfully didactic in the way it treats political/military issues–but it works because of the context. These are the issues the characters are dealing with, this is the way they would talk about them. It’s rare that a book will make you think and make you feel in quite this particular way.”

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Infoquake: Science Fiction’s John Grisham

There’s a new review of David Louis Edelman’s Infoquakeup on Grasping for the Wind, which proclaims “What John Grisham has done with the legal thriller, Edelman has done with business.” They describe Infoquake as “an adventure filled narrative,” and conclude, “Infoquake is well-written and well-cadenced. The climax is fulfilling and exciting, yet it is only a speech, and a marketing one at that. Edelman has so well woven the elements of his plot together that Natch’s simple speech has a much power and excitement to it as another science fiction story’s destruction of a spaceship or a fantasy’s evil overlord dying hideously at the hands of a hero. That takes skill to write, and Edelman has it in spades. I highly recommend this novel.”

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The Politics of SF

Interesting piece in The Guardian by Damien G. Walter called “The Politics of sci-fi” on the Hugos, the struggle for “literary respectability,” Michael Chabon as “the secret weapon of a genre that has always craved mainstream acclaim. Very soon we will reveal his origins as a genetically engineered Super Writer, bred to infiltrate mainstream literature with high-quality genre fiction. The Margaret Atwood droid may have violated its core programming by denying its science fiction roots, but we have high hopes that Chabon will perform better.”

Mention of Brasyland Ian McDonald (along with Charles Stross) as “among the hardest of hard science fiction authors.” And a nice acknowledgments of Michael Moorcock’s upcoming Grand Master award, with a nod to his overall importance to the field.

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The Latest from David Louis Edelman

David Louis Edelman’s latest newsletter, too funny & informative not to repurpose as a Pyr blog entry:

All

There’s a convergence of astral forces in the air… a locus of spiritual energies… a crossroads in the galaxy where Ebb and Flow meet. The buzzer has sounded, it’s a tie game, and the universe has gone into quantum harmonic electro-mega overtime.

What’s causing all this? Why, it’s the imminent release of MultiReal and the re-release of Infoquake, of course! We’re a scant few months away from what I am now officially labeling the Summer of Jump 225. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as the Summer of Love, but these things take time to build.

Very, very soon I’ll have new websites, new reviews, new appearances, and the like to report. But in the meantime, here’s all the David Louis Edelman writing news that’s fit to, uh, type.

  • John W. Campbell Nomination for Best New Writer.
    Yes, it happened! Thanks to all your efforts, I’m now a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in science fiction and fantasy. The other nominees: Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jon Armstrong, and David Anthony Durham. The winner is voted by Worldcon members and will be announced (along with the rest of the Hugo awards) this August at the Denver Worldcon. (You’ll be pleased to know that my editor, Lou Anders, is up for a Hugo this year as well.)
  • MultiReal Chapters 1-5 Available Online in the Pyr Sampler.
    My publisher, Pyr, has released a 326-page sampler of its upcoming titles. Included in the sampler are the first five chapters of MultiReal, available for the first time anywhere. Download the whole sampler from Pyr (Adobe Acrobat 3.5 MB file) and then head over to my blog to tell me what you think of it.
  • My Story “Mathralon” Now Available.
    My first, and so far only, completed science fiction short story has been published and is now available in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2. It’s called “Mathralon,” and it’s a story about economically oppressed space miners told without plot, characters, or dialogue from a Greek chorus point of view. The UK Guardian singled “Mathralon” out as one of the standouts in the collection, calling it “a deliberately dry, unconventionally narrated account of the mining of a rare mineral, a story on a galactic scale which only serves to show what very small worlds we inhabit.” Intrigued, you say? Go thou forth and order the anthology on Amazon. Solaris was kind enough to allow me to publish “Mathralon” for free on my website as well. You can read the entire story here and read an introduction on my blog as well.
  • Robert Sawyer Praises MultiReal.
    Rob Sawyer, author of too many acclaimed novels to list here (including this year’s Hugo nominee for Best Novel, Rollback), has given an advance blurb for MultiReal. Here’s what Rob has to say: “Just when we thought cyberpunk was dead, David Louis Edelman bursts on the scene with defibrillator paddles and shouts, ‘Clear!’ If there’s any web more tangled than the World Wide one, it’s the Byzantine networks of high finance; Edelman intermeshes them in a complex, compelling series. This DOES compute!”
  • My Introduction to Titus Alone Now Available.
    Overlook Press has just reissued Mervyn Peake’s 1959 novel Titus Alone, the third in the classic Gormenghast Trilogy. Gracing the opening pages is a new introduction by Yours Truly. The gist of it? Despite what you may have heard, Mervyn Peake’s last novel is not the product of a deteriorating mind, but a vibrant counterpoint to the first two books in the series. Go order Titus Alone on Amazon. Overlook Press has also graciously allowed me to post the introduction in full on my blog.
  • I’m on Wikipedia.
    The gods of communal knowledge have seen fit to provide me with my own Wikipedia page, which makes me happy out of all proportion to the actual achievement itself. I actually had Wikipedia pages before, twice, both of which were almost instantly taken down by the Powers That Wiki. So you might want to see the page before someone decides I’m not important enough to merit it.
  • MultiReal and Infoquake Available for Pre-Order.
    Just in case you weren’t already aware, you can pre-order MultiReal and Infoquake on Amazon, among other places.

Coming very, very soon: brand spankin’ new redesigned websites for me as well as for Infoquake and MultiReal.

Towards Perfection,
David Louis Edelman
www.davidlouisedelman.com

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Starlog on Killswitch: Tight and Crackling!

Starlog on Killswitch:

“Shepherd continues to improve with each installment. Readers who have been wanting a far more intense story will find themselves amply rewarded as Shepherd puts his remarkable heroine through her paces. As with the previous novels, there are shifts between a great many characters also vying for attention, but the writing here is tight and crackling and turns the entire trilogy into an excellent adventure, with the spotlight clearly on Cassandra.”

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Brasyl works for Brazilians!

Jacques Barcia has posted a review of Brasylat Human 2.0. “McDonald was able to capture, with amazing precision, th Brazilian spirit. And he did this without clichés, without hullabaloos, but with critical observations regarding the importance Brazilian people gives to beauty, soccer and TV. Besides, geographically everything is right and linguistically, it is better than most foreigners trying the language of Camões.”

The conclusion: Despite a great deal of Portuguese mispellngs, Brasyl is “A hell of an accomplishment for a gringo, definitely Brasyl is a book Brazilians must read.”

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The 2008 Pyr Sampler eBook

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We’ve just made a 326-page sample book we printed to give out at conventions available as a free PDF-format ebook. It contains sizable excerpts from 7 of our 2008 titles and is online for download here from both the catalog and forthcoming book pages. If you are viewing this on the pyrsf.com (as opposed to the pyrsf.blogspot.com page), click “catalog” and “forthcoming” in the menu bar on your left, or you’ll get a window in a window, and who knows where it will end.

Excerpts are from Joe Abercrombie’s Before They Are Hanged, Kay Kenyon’s A World Too Near, Theodore Judson’s The Martian General’s Daughter, Robert Silverberg’s Son of Man, David Louis Edelman’s MultiReal, and Mike Resnick’s Stalking the Unicorn and Stalking the Dragon.

Happy Reading!

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Pyr Honored with Four Major Award Nominations

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 24, 2008

CONTACT: Jill Maxick

800-853-7545, jmaxick@prometheusbooks.com

Pyr Honored with Four Major Award Nominations

Pyr Gets Two Hugo® Nominations plus Two Authors up for

John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award!

Amherst, NY—Pyr, the highly acclaimed science fiction and fantasy imprint of Prometheus Books, is proud to announce that its Editorial Director, Lou Anders, and three of its authors have been nominated for highly esteemed awards in science fiction:

  • Lou Anders for Best Professional Editor, Long Form Hugo® Award
  • Ian McDonald’s Brasyl for Best Novel Hugo® Award
  • Joe Abercrombie (The Blade Itself) for John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award
  • David Louis Edelman (Infoquake) for John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award

The Hugo® Award is the leading award for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy. For the second year in a row, Pyr Editorial Director Lou Anders has been nominated for the Hugo® for Best Professional Editor, Long Form in recognition of his ability to produce a high-quality and intelligent line of science fiction and fantasy titles. Anders says, “I am personally very honored to be nominated for a second year in a row… but when one honors an editor, what they are really doing is sending along an endorsement of that editor’s tastes, so I am over the moon to see a book from Pyr in the ‘Best Novel’ category and two Pyr authors on the Campbell list.”

USA Today called Ian McDonald’s Brasyl—up for the Hugo® for Best Novel—“the most rewarding science fiction in recent memory.” McDonald, hailed by Asimov’s Science Fiction as “one of the most interesting and accomplished science fiction writers of this latter-day era, indeed maybe the most interesting and accomplished,” comments on this nomination: “As they say, the honor is simply being nominated. I’m thrilled to have been nominated for Brasyl (even if, as umpteen Brazilians have told, my spelling is terrible!) —but what’s especially exciting is that it’s a double whammy: for me, and for Lou Anders as editor (and a real old school hands-on editor) as creative director of Pyr. This, I hope, is the first of many for the ballsiest imprint in SF.”

The John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award is given to the best new writer whose first work of science fiction or fantasy appearing in a professional publication was published in the previous two years. Nominee Joe Abercrombie’s best-selling fantasy debut The Blade Itself: The First Law: Book One has earned him much praise and the designation by Locus as “a rough-and-tumble, bold new voice in the heroic fantasy ranks.” With the same dark wit that colors his novels, Abercrombie says, “I’m delighted to have been nominated, especially at a time when there are so many great new authors coming out. My Uruk Hai hit squad are already on their way to Wisconsin to ‘dramatically reduce’ the chance of a Scott Lynch victory. They may well stop by David Anthony Durham’s house on the way back …”

David Louis Edelman is also up for the John W. Campbell Award: “I’m beyond thrilled to be nominated for the Campbell Award. It’s an honor to even be mentioned in the same sentence as the other esteemed nominees. I feel especially honored considering I only had one eligible published work, Infoquake, during the 2006-2007 time period.” SFF World called Infoquake “A stunning debut novel by a lucid, precise, and talented new voice…This may be THE science fiction book of the year.”

Prometheus Books and Pyr congratulate Lou Anders, Ian McDonald, Joe Abercrombie and David Louis Edelman for their outstanding work. We are proud to be associated with such talent and quality.

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Brasyl Wins the BSFA award

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The British Science Fiction Association Awards were given out at this weekend’s Eastercon in London. I’m very happy to hear that Ian McDonald’s Brasylwas the winner in the novel category. Congratulations to Ian and to his editor at Gollancz, that man of impeccable tastes, the wonderful Simon Spanton!

(Ian also took the 2005 BSFA for River of Gods,and the 2006 short fiction award for “The Djinn’s Wife,” set in the world of River. Look for a collection of these future-India short stories, Cyberabad Days, in early ’09.)

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