Brasyl

SciFi To Die For

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Rick Kleffel offers his enthusiastic preview/review of Ian McDonald’s forthcoming Brasylover on his site, The Agony Column. As he says:

“McDonald is clearly one of our premiere science fiction writers and he’s pretty much staking out the multi-cultural SF niche as his. And even if Brasyl is a bit shorter and more easily grokable than River of Gods, have no fear that it delivers the same sort of combination knockout punch, stunning the reader with the ferocity of the writing and the strangeness of both the culture and the future, and in this case, the past, that McDonald imagines. Line up for it, and plan on seeing it on some genre fiction ballots. You’ll be asked to vote for it, so you might as well experience it sooner rather than later. Come to think of it, the same is true of the future.”

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Glimpses of Future Fiction

Rick Klaw has written a very complimentary review of Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge in print and online at the Austin Chronicle. Rick praises the “dazzling John Picacio cover” and calls Ken MacLeod’s “Jesus Christ, Reanimator” “possibly the best short-story title of the decade.” He concludes:

“In his introduction, Anders states that his goal is to emulate previous groundbreaking science-fiction-anthology series, most notably Fredrick Pohl’s Star SF (six volumes from 1953 to 1959) and Damon Knight’s Orbit (21 volumes, 1966-1980). If successive volumes equal the quality of this excellent debut, Fast Foward will go a long way in achieving Anders’ hope and might even inspire a new generation.”

Meanwhile, Locus Online has posted Gary K. Wolfe’s review of Ian McDonald’s forthcoming Brasyl online. I’ve quoted from this review before, so I’ll sample my favorite bit here:

“A few years ago, in an academic book titled Brazilian Science Fiction, M. Elizabeth Ginway employed a term invented by the Brazilian critic Roberto de Sousa Causo to describe an emerging tradition of high-tech postcolonial SF then emerging in Brazil. ‘Tupinipunk,’ an amalgam of cyberpunk and the name of an indigenous tribe, was characterized by ‘iconoclasm, sensuality, mysticism, politicization, humanism, and a Third World perspective’. With his very enjoyable Brasyl, McDonald may have given us the first tupinipunk novel to appear from outside the borders of Brazil itself.”

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Science Fiction Gets with the Times

Author James Lovegrove reviews several science fiction novels, including Ian McDonald’s forthcoming Brasyl, in a February 10th article in the Financial Times entitled “They Walk Among Us.”

Lovegrove says, “Contrary to received opinion, science fiction’s preoccupation has always been the here and now. Its far-flung planets and future timelines are merely a way to analyse the contemporary. In this respect, it is the most politically engaged of all literary genres. Motifs that may appear trashy to the uninitiated – space exploration, extraterrestrials, futuristic technology – can in fact be surprisingly sophisticated tools for dissecting and examining the world as it is.”

He then goes on to note, as others have done, a recent trend emerging in modern science fiction, an alteration in the way SF realizes “the urge to address state-of-the-world concerns.” As Lovegrove says, “The emptiness of space, coupled with the fragility of our increasingly fevered home planet, has led these writers to aim their telescopes directly at life on Earth. The genre is still intrigued by notions of otherness. This manifests now, though, not through tales of bug-eyed monsters from beyond, but by measured scrutiny of ‘aliens’ closer to home. Science fiction is written predominantly by white, western males. For them, the alien may be found beyond borders, across continents. The Other is someone with a different language, skin colour, even gender.”

Lovegrove then discusses Geoff Ryman’s Air, Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel, Richard Morgan’s Black Man (published in the US as “Thirteen”), and finally McDonald’s work, of which he says it’s literary structure is: “an immense, marvellous beast whose shape comes slowly, majestically into focus, constructed out of a welter of thematic elements such as quantum computing, multiverse theory, and the clash between science and religion.”

All in all, a very interesting article about the new globally-focused, non-US-centric science fiction.

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The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

I’m very pleased to announce that B&N.com has just picked three titles for inclusion in their Editor’s Choice Top Ten SF&F Novels of 2006 list, prompting our publicity department to issue the following press release:

For Immediate Release

January 3, 200

“The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread Story of the Year”
Several Year-End “Bests”Cap 2006 for SF&F Imprint
Including Barnes & Noble’s SF&F Book of the Year!

Amherst, NY — Barnes & Noble online today posted their Editor’s Choice lists for the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2006. Three books by Pyr, an imprint of Prometheus Books, are in this Top Ten Novels of 2006 list, including the top spot!

The Barnes & Noble Science Fiction/Fantasy Book of the Year, Editor’s Choice, is Infoquake by David Louis Edelman—a debut that ingeniously mixes business with pleasure, or as B&N puts it, “equal parts corporate thriller, technophilic cautionary tale and breathtakingly visionary science fiction adventure.”

The other two Pyr books included in this best of the year list are The Crooked Letter by Sean Williams at number four (“prepare to be blown away,” they write) and Resolution, the conclusion to John Meaney’s three-book Nulapeiron Sequence, at number six.

The UK bookseller Waterstone’s also included two Pyr titles on their list of Top Ten SF for 2006: Crossover by Joel Shepherd and Paragaea by Chris Roberson.

Publishing blog Bookgasm posted a Best 5 Sci-Fi Books of 2006 list in which three of the best five books were from Pyr. River of Godsby Ian McDonald topped their list at number one, while Infoquake by David Louis Edelman and Crossover (both first novels) tied for fifth.

According to the science fiction and fantasy reviewer for Bookgasm,

“The biggest story of the year…is Pyr’s rise to prominence as a high-quality sci-fi imprint. Pyr has managed to round up a stable of authors and titles that represents the cutting edge of sci-fi and backs it up with promotion and marketing that pretty much outdoes the other imprints out there. Bravo, Pyr. Here’s hoping for an even greater 2007.”

The imprint will certainly do its best to make 2007 even greater than 2006:

In February, Pyr will launch a new hard science fiction anthology series, Fast Forward 1, dedicated to presenting the vanguard of the genre and charting the undiscovered country that is the future. In March, Pyr will publish Keeping It Real, the first of Justina Robson’s Quantum Gravity titles that are being hailed as her “breakout” books—the most entertaining, fun, and commercial of her novels to date. Promotion for Keeping it Real includes a special music track by The No Shows (www.thenoshows.com)—the hottest rock band of 2021.

In May, it’s “Bladerunner in the tropics” with Brasyl by Ian McDonald, the writer the Washington Post said is “becoming one of the best sf novelists of our time.” McDonald moves from India (River of Gods) to past, present, and future Brazil, with all its color, passion, and shifting realities, in a novel that is part SF, part history, part mystery, and entirely enthralling.

Pyr has already begun developing a reputation for publishing “smart” science fiction. But in September 2007, Pyr gets fantastic with its first straight-up commercial epic fantasy novel: The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. This book will lead Pyr’s Fall-Winter 07-08 season and be launched at Book Expo America in June 2007.

In other 2006 year-end awards, the blog Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist called Pyr “a breath of fresh air in both the fantasy and science fiction genres” and gave the imprint the creatively named and gratefully accepted “Best Thing Since Sliced Bread Award.”

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Sitting Down with Ian McDonald: The Christian Bale of SF

Ian McDonald is interviewed on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, in a long, indepth piece that’s one of the best interviews I’ve read in some weeks. Ian talks about both River of Gods and the forthcoming Brasyl, as well as a host of other subjects. I highly recommend reading the whole interview, but here are some highlights for me:

On Brasyl:

It’s definitely not RoG2: that was one thing I wanted above all to avoid, but I think you’ll find it as rich, deep, dazzling and strange. India is in yer face. The culture slaps you the moment you step out of the airport (in fact, as the plane was touching down). Brazil creeps up on you, shakes its ass, gets you to buy it a drink and the next morning you wake up with your passport gone, your wallet lifted and one kidney replaces with a row of sutures. Peter Robb’s magisterial ‘A Death in Brazil’ carries the line ‘Brazil is one of the world’s greatest and strangest countries’, and it’s only a year after being there that the full understanding of that arrives. It is like nowhere else –certainly not in South America, in the same way that India is like nowhere else. And it’s history is more or less completely unknown in the rest of the West.

On his favorite novel from the Pyr catalog:

David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake. So fresh and good I shamelessly stole an idea from it: the whole premise of a future corporate thriller. I remember Lou Anders pitching this one at the Pyr panel at Worldcon in Glasgow and thinking, of course! It’s so bloody obvious! That’s a genius idea. It sent me back to an old novel by James Clavell called ‘Noble House’ about corporate intrigue in an old Anglo-Chinese trading company (it got made into a pretty dire TV miniseries), so that’s in the mix at the back of my head. Buy Infoquake, read it (I think The Steg already has). Give him the Philip K Dick award.

On growing the readership for SF:

I’m with Gollancz editor Simon Spanton when he talks about the ‘lapsed Catholic’ audience on this, those who once read SF but dropped away, because it wasn’t doing it for the, because they want more than juvenile lots and characters, because they want worlds and people and situations they can believe in, because media SF has so successfully colonised the low and fertile floodplain that it’s all people think of when they hear the words Science Fiction. This was a brief blog-bubble between myself, Paul McAuley, Lou Anders, Charlie Stross and Paul Cornell as a counterblast to the ‘back-to-basics’ movement advocating a return to Golden Age style space adventure. My position on this is well known: of course there’s always going to be a need for space-fic –what the general public think of and call ‘sci-fi’, and it may draw readers in at the bottom end, but it sure won’t hold them. ‘Mediaesque’ sci-fi may, in that sense, ‘save’ science-fiction, but it sure will lobotomise it. And there are a lot of general readers out there who will buy and enjoy science-fiction if they can convince themselves it’s not that geeky stuff…

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Brasyl: Think BLADERUNNER in the Tropics

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Presented for your viewing pleasure: the front cover of multiple-award winning author Ian McDonald’s much-anticipated next novel, Brasyl. As it was with River of Gods, artwork is once again courtesy of Hugo-nominated artist Stephan Martiniere, with design by Jacqueline Cooke. (Right click to enlarge.)

Billed as Bladerunner in the tropics, , Brasyl will do for Brazil what River of Gods does for India. Speaking in the August 2006 issue of Locus, Ian says, “My book Brasyl is set in present-day Brazil (or what seems like it), in Sao Paulo 2032, and in 1732 Brazil just before the Jesuits were expelled. It revolves around the way quantum computing opens up multiple parallel universes… and, of course, a whole lot more besides.” Brasyl will be published May, 2007.

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