Brasyl

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.

Pyr Honored with Four Major Award Nominations Read More »

2008 Hugo Awards Nominations List

The 66th World Science Fiction Convention has made public the 2008 Hugo Nomination List. And I am delighted to report that, counting the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer, Pyr has no less than four people on the ballot!

In the Best Novel category – Ian McDonald’s Brasyl(published by Gollancz in the UK)

In the category of Best Professional Editor, Long Form – Yours Truly

And up for the John W. Campbell, both Joe Abercrombie (who I share with Gollancz) and David Louis Edelman.

I also have to extend my congratulations to three artists who have graced Pyr covers, Bob Eggleton, Stephan Martiniere, and John Picacio. And to our author Mike Resnick, for his Hugo nomination in the short story category for “Distant Replay” (published in Asimov’s April/Nay 2007 issue).

A huge congratulations to all the nominees across the board!

2008 Hugo Awards Nominations List Read More »

On Books: The Multiverse

Norman Sprinrad’s latest On Books column for the April/May edition of Asimov’s, “The Multiverse“, is a direct response to a piece by Bruno Maddox appearing in Discovery Magazine,Blinded by Science: Fictional Reality,” in which Maddox hauls out the tired old argument that in helping to build the present, science fiction is now obsolete. The article actually appeared back in July, 2007, and Norman’s response was composed then (and kindly forwarded to me at the time, which is how it ends up quoted in the forward to Sideways In Crime),but Asimov’s has taken their time getting around to publishing it.

In the meantime, the SF is Dead nonsense has cropped up again, in io9.com’s “5 Reasons to Stop Reading Science Fiction.” To be fair, io9 isn’t so much making this claim, as aggregating five other sources who complain about the problems of writing SF in the SFnal world we inhabit now, the mainstream colonization of SF tropes, the intrusion of fantasy, the graying of fandom, and the disappearance of mass-market distribution.

But to them, and to Maddox, Spinrad offers this brilliant, elegant, and ultimate rebuttal:

Picture the sincere writer of serious science fiction—someone really trying to do the job—as standing in the bow of a boat in a moment we might call the present. The boat is human history and all scientific knowledge available in that moment, and the waters that the boat is sailing through is the ocean of time. The science fiction writer is riding the vessel of all that knowledge, and his or her mission is to peer ahead from that vantage into the fog-bank of the future ahead of the boat utilizing all the knowledge upon which he or she stands, “stands on the shoulders of giants,” as this sort of thing is often put.

Thus, while the accumulation of scientific and other forms of knowledge as well as the profusion of technological innovation may be accelerating as the boat sails forward through the sea of time, no matter how fast it goes, no matter how much cargo is accumulating in the hold, the science fiction writer is always standing in the bow of the boat looking forward.

That is why it is impossible for science, technology, evolution, or history to render science fiction obsolete. There are all too many ways that a civilization can end up destroying science fiction as a commercially viable literature or even as a visionary mode of thought, but the necessary visionary function performed by science fiction in a progressively evolving civilization can never be rendered obsolete. If nothing is performing that visionary function, it is the civilization in question that in the end renders itself obsolete, as has happened many times in world history.

That, in an of itself, is enough to make me kiss Norman’s feet. But he goes on from there, in a response to Jim Gunn’s assertion that Neuromancerwas the last work of science fiction to introduce a truly “big idea.”

As counterpoint, Norman offers too big ideas that have emerged recently, the “Singularity” and what may “prove also to be its dialectic antithesis” – the Multiverse. He then makes a case that the notion of the Multiverse has moved from a literary construct to the frontline thinking in quantum phyisics, and in so doing, should be moving to the forefront of science fictional concern as well.

…quantum physics is now telling us is that the Multiverse is the ultimate reality, and not merely a literary construct. That a multiplicity of separate universes or realities must exist because of quantum indeterminacy.

…It is science which has fed science fiction an enormous morsel to attempt to chew on this time, and not the other way around. The Multiverse, it would appear, is not merely subjective perception, but the way things really are, the way our selves really are, our alternate selves, the truth of all existence on a quantum level.

To deal with this fictionally with anything like rigor, let alone convey it to the reader on an experiential and emotional level, is one daunting and even frightening task. But it is also a rich vein of thematic and speculative material only beginning to be mined on that level.

And then he goes on to look at three books that are mining it on just the level he describes.

One of them is Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real,the first in her Quantum Gravity series, which Norman describes as, “Fantasy written as if it were science fiction. Like alternate-history fiction.” He ties her book into multiple worlds theory when he says:

But whether Robson consciously intended to declare it or not when she titled the novel, keeping it real is just what Keeping It Real does, the “it” being that this Multiverse is literarily science fiction, not fantasy. Each of these alternate realities has its own more or less rigorous physical laws, call what’s going on magic or not.

Justina and I corresponded about this article recently, and she graciously grants permission for me to share her response here:

In case you wondered, the thing that he’s talking about actually always was the point of the QG series, and I thought at the beginning I’d get to lay it out much sooner, but I’ve got 3 books down and still no sign of Quantum Bob (“But, Professor, how do these shattered worlds fit together?” “As you know, Bob, the nature of reality is the infinity -1 range of the external and internal worlds…”)…

The reason for the fantastical nature of the few realities experienced in QG is down to the explosion of the internal into the external. The Quantum Bomb rendered, briefly, the distinction between internal (individual consciousness/mass consciousness) and external (physical, transphysical, temporal) irrelevant. In fact, that was more a revelation than an action as they probably always were interconnected to a much higher degree than contemporary views of reality (like the Dawkins’ view) would ever countenance.

Which takes her a lot closer to what Norman is talking about when he talks about the need to convey the Multiverse to the reader “on an experiential and emotional level,” something he says that Kathleen Goonan’s In War Timesbegins to do when it uses the metaphors of jazz to portray shifting realities in her novel of alternate 1940s worlds. Norman says:

Kathleen Ann Goonan can’t overtly broach that concept in In War Times, since this is a period piece the maintenance of whose grounding in this wartime and early post-wartime past is absolutely essential for the novel to work. But she herself, writing in the present, does seem to comprehend it at least up to a point, and sidles up to it, using the progressive jazz of the period as an extended musical metaphor for the physics and metaphysics of the Multiverse.

Which brings us to Ian McDonald’s Brasyl, which Norman says is able to take that last step and which confirms Ian McDonald as:

…one of the most interesting and accomplished science fiction writers of this latter-day era. Indeed, maybe the most interesting and accomplished, and certainly the most culturally and musically sophisticated—the Frank Herbert, William Gibson, or arguably even Thomas Pynchon of the early twenty-first century, if only the early twenty-first century would allow such a writer to reach that kind of eminence.

Norman asks if it is even possible to “use language to actually create the virtual experience of multiversal reality in the human mind,” and, in examining Brasyl, he concludes that:

Ian McDonald actually does it. He succeeds in putting a human face on, putting a human consciousness within, the naked quantum Multiverse, the infinite multiplicity of universes branching out fractally from every moment of time, with the infinity of her alternate selves exfoliating within it, and delivering the experience to the reader.

The result, he says, is “A science fictional dialectic… for what other mode of literature can even begin to approach such material?” and also “the opening act of the science fiction of the twenty-first century.”

Thank you, Norman, for reminding us that far from being dead, science fiction may only just getting started. For what are the few decades behind us in the face of a literal infinite array of possibility.

On Books: The Multiverse Read More »

Editors’ Choice – The Official SF Site Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2007

SFSite has released their Editors’ Choice – The Official SF Site Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2007, and Ian McDonald’s Brasyltops the list at number one. They say, “Wrap your head around this book if you want to see what truly ingenious science fiction can look like.”

Meanwhile, Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Skymade their “The Near Misses and Honourable Mentions.”

Editors’ Choice – The Official SF Site Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2007 Read More »

3 Pyr Books on the Best of the Best

Visions of Paradise aggregated the “Best of the Year” mentions from some twenty sources, including SF Site, Fantasy Magazine, Bookgasm, SFF World, Fantasy Book Critic, Strange Horizons, Locus Online, Locus Magazine, as well as award nominations for the BSFA, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards. They then listed the books which received the most mentions, to produce a “best of the best” list. The result – Ian McDonald’s Brasylis the clear leader with 16 out of 20 mentions! Here is the full list, which also includes Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself with seven mentions and Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Skywith five.

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Richard Morgan — Best Literature Picks of 2007

Over on Green Man Review, Richard Morgan posts his Best Literature Picks of 2007, where he asks, “What was 2007 good for, literarily speaking?” and looks at literature, poems, graphic novels, even one videogame, that make an “elevated grade.” Of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl,he says, “lush, sweeping in scope, studded with technological gems and as brightly sparkling as the cityscapes two thirds of the book take place in, this is a worthy follow up to Macdonald’s award winning River of Gods;Brasyl comes on at you with the rapid percussive beat of carnaval, and like the itch of samba in your hips, will not be denied.”

Richard Morgan — Best Literature Picks of 2007 Read More »

Can You Handle Another Best of the Year List?

SFSite has posted their “Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2007: Readers’ Choice” and I’m delighted to see Joe Abercrombie’s Before They Are Hangedat number five (here for the UK edition, as our edition was just released this month and hasn’t found its way into all venues yet), as well as, not surprisingly, Ian McDonald’s Brasylat number three.

Of the latter, they say, “McDonald masterfully explores some key sfnal concepts and pivotal alternative science. Wrap your head around this book if you want to see what truly ingenious science fiction can look like.”

Can You Handle Another Best of the Year List? Read More »

Locus Online: 2007 SF/F/H Books on Year’s Best Lists

Locus Online has tabulated the science fiction, fantasy and horror books that have appeared on various year’s best lists, inluding Amazon.com, Publishers Weekly, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, Library Journal, Salon.com, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times, as well as genre publications SF Site, Bookgasm, Fantasy Magazine, and Strange Horizons. Also tabulated are Jeff VanderMeer and Claude Lalumière’s essays for Locus Online. The present the 12 most cited works, and I’m very proud to see both Ian McDonald’s Brasyl(appearing on five lists) and Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky(3 lists). Of course, if they’d included the recent American Library Association’s Reading List Awards, then those numbers would have been 6 and 4!

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