Reviews

Green Goodness

Cat Eldridge has a few thoughts about Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge over on The Green Man Review:

“So what’s good here? A story by Kage Baker (‘Plotters and Shooters’) is set in her Company universe but which is not a Company story, but a space opera in the form of a look at war in space above and beyond. Or how about a witty look at the future of wikis? ‘Wikiworld’ by Paul Di Filippo takes the ideas of Cory Doctorow one step further by showing what would happen in a society run on gifts, wikis, fast and lose consensus, and running code. The Something-Dreaming Game’ by Elizabeth Bear is a gem of a great story as is Gene Wolfe’s ‘The Hour of the Sheep’. Most everything is superb here… Overall I think Anders has done an exemplary job of putting together first rate anthology.”

Nor is her comment that Pyr is “certainly one of the hottest new genre publishers we’ve seen over the past few decades” unappreciated.

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Infinite Goodness

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Fantastic Reviews has just posted their thoughts on John Meaney’s To Hold Infinity, beginning with some nice words for the Pyr imprint itself. Aaron Hughes calls the novel, “an example of everything Pyr Books is getting right. In only two years, Pyr has become one of the most reliable publishers of high-quality science fiction in the market. Editor Lou Anders consistently produces well-packaged books of real literary merit that are also very entertaining. While it has published plenty of excellent original work, a key to Pyr’s success has been obtaining reprint rights to outstanding British and Australian authors who have been neglected in the U.S.”

They give a little background on the novel – which is a completely stand-alone tale set in the same universe as Meaney’s Nulapeiron Sequence but earlier in the history of that universe, and which was a 1998 British Science Fiction Association Award nominee for Best Novel. Aaron nails the future era of To Hold Infinity as being “not quite post-singularity science fiction, but at least near-singularity,” before concluding that the novel is “an absorbing story peopled with well-developed characters and loaded with interesting speculation about the future. Fans of the Nulapeiron books should not miss it, and I strongly recommend it to new readers as a great introduction to John Meaney.”

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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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Fast Review of Fast Forward

The February 11th issue of the The San Deigo Union-Tribune has a brief but enthusiastic mention of Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge at the tail end of a review roundup called “Thomas Becket would be right at home.”:

“More than a score of stories by favorite writers like Justina Robson, Kage Baker and Gene Wolfe. Oh, and don’t start on the lovely Rudy-Ruckerian “WkiWorld” by Paul Di Filippo unless you want to have your head spin several times to giggles and joy.’

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A Bevy of Reviews

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Just back from Boskone to find a flurry of Pyr reviews in the in-box.

The Eternal Night is quite taken with the galactic yarn-spinning of Mike Resnick’s Starship: Pirate:

“Resnick does have a very definite style…If you like your sf to be space opera, if you like your sf gadgets to just work without needing an explanation of how, and if you don’t need to worry about the vast interstellar distances getting in the way of telling the tale – then Resnick is an author you should read.”

Then Ryun Patterson of Bookgasm finds John Meaney’s To Hold Infinity to be a “snapshot of a stunningly well-realized future that grabs hold and doesn’t let go…Meaney’s prose is tight and descriptive, and he avoids many of the pitfalls involved in getting ideas out of his head and into readers’. I’m no scientist, but the technology involved – though far-flung from today’s tech – never becomes so inexplicable that it might as well be magic, with a basis in networking and computer science. …a rather stunning book of ideas and imagination.” Despite liking the inside, Ryun is less than pleased with our cover and (to my amusement) offers this alternative.

The Cultural Gutter isn’t quite sure what to make of Chris Roberson’s
Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, which may stray too close to its pulp roots for their taste, though they note, “I give the book high marks for not compromising on its convictions. Chris Roberson clearly set out to tell an adventure story – a planetary romance, as the subtitle of the book would have it – and he always delivers.” Thanks also for the love they give to this blog!

And finally, I can’t tell you how happy I am to report that Publishers Weekly has given Kay Kenyon’s forthcoming Bright of the Sky a starred review! And here it is, complete with star:

“ At the start of this riveting launch of a new far-future SF series from Kenyon (Tropic of Creation), a disastrous mishap during interstellar space travel catapults pilot Titus Quinn with his wife, Johanna Arlis, and nine-year-old daughter, Sydney, into a parallel universe called the Entire. Titus makes it back to this dimension, his hair turned white, his memory gone, his family presumed dead and his reputation ruined with the corporation that employed him. The corporation (in search of radical space travel methods) sends Titus (in search of Johanna and Sydney) back through the space-time warp. There, he gradually, painfully regains knowledge of its rulers, the cruel, alien Tarig; its subordinate, Chinese-inspired humanoid population, the Chalin; and his daughter’s enslavement. Titus’s transformative odyssey to reclaim Sydney reveals a Tarig plan whose ramifications will be felt far beyond his immediate family. Kenyon’s deft prose, high-stakes suspense and skilled, thorough world building will have readers anxious for the next installment.”

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A Love-Hate Letter to American SF?

The February 12th issue of Publishers Weekly on Adam Robert’s Gradisil, coming in March in trade paperback from Pyr:

“Written like a love-hate letter to American SF, Roberts’s latest is a multigenerational saga of space colonization and betrayal. Centered on the life of Gradisil Gyeroffy, it covers the early years of plucky (and/or wealthy) Uplanders, individuals who take up residence in low Earth orbit, through their transforming war with America and Gradi’s sacrifices to weld them into a nation. The forward-looking, freedom-oriented space colonists stand in contrast to their tradition-bound, systems-wedded opponents. Roberts (The Snow) suggests that popular access to space is just a technological improvement away, though the government as represented by the USUF (aka the U.S. Upland Force), rather than rugged individuals, would (and should) lead the way…. Rewarding the patient reader are some witty asides of social changes (like going from one to three to 14 popes) and an unsparing portrait of a social revolution and its costs to the revolutionaries.”

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Dann the Man

Kilian Melloy reviews Jack Dann’s The Man Who Melted for the Edge, Boston. Speaking about the novel, Kilian says: “Dann has packed so many surprises into his novel that by the end, the reader feels whole new colors on the spectrum of motive and emotion have been revealed…. This complex, mutli-layered novel engages you twice: first, searingly, as you read it and then, later and more profoundly, as you replay its subtle warnings and prognostications. …Dann’s novel requires that you look, then look again, to appreciate everything he’s put into its creation.”

Meanwhile, be sure to check out this interview with Jack Dann which Kilian conducted as well. In Jack Dann’s words, ” In The Man Who Melted, I was investigating in depth the very nature of amnesia. I must admit that this was a delving into self, as I’ve had my own experience with amnesia, with its effects, and so this novel was my way of working out some of my deepest feelings and fears.”

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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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A Forward Looking Booklist

Booklist has reviewed Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge:

“An anthology inspired by its editor’s declaration that ‘science fiction is a tool for making sense of a changing world’ contains quite a range of stories, from Elizabeth Bear’s ‘The Something-Dreaming Game,’ in which children play a fainting game (basically autoerotic asphyxiation), and one girl communicates with the possibly last member of an alien species, to Tony Ballantyne’s ‘Aristotle OS,’ in which a journalist with computer problems upgrades from the familiar, platonic OSs to Aristotle; the different systems operate on the theories of the philosophers referenced, causing some very interesting problems when the journalist connects to the Internet with its wealth of contradictory information. Ken MacLeod’s ‘Jesus Christ, Reanimator’ is an interesting take on the second coming, replete with fascinating rationalizations by both scientific and Christian establishments, none of which wants to take Jesus on faith. Louise Marley tells a time-travel story about a particular performance instruction, p dolce, in the music of Brahms. Other contributions by familiar and new names fill out a worthy menu of engrossing forays into wildly, creatively varied futures.” –Regina Schroeder

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New Reviews for Old

SFSignal gives Mike Resnick’s short story collection, New Dreams for Old, four stars – and here they are:

They call the book, “An above-average collection of stories featuring many award winners and nominees,” and go on to say that “Simply put, Resnick writes ‘people’ stories that carry quite an emotional impact. Instead of far-flung, hard science fiction that deals with impersonal concepts, these stories are endearingly personal. Resnick writes from the heart and with heart thus making an instant connection with the reader.”

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