(1) Here are three science fiction and fantasy birthdays to celebrate on September 25.
Born 1951: Mark Hamill
Born 1930: Shel Silverstein
Born 1952: Christopher Reeve
(2) Plans are afoot to launch a San Juan in 2017 NASFiC bid at DeepSouthCon, which will be held next weekend. Source: committee member Warren Buff, who is working on the facilities. The website is mostly private at the moment.
(3) “NASA to Announce Mars Mystery Solved” on September 28, promises the press release.
NASA will detail a major science finding from the agency’s ongoing exploration of Mars during a news briefing at 11:30 a.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 28 at the James Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The event will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
Taking part in the news conference will be Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters; Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters; graduate student Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta; Mary Beth Wilhelm of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California and the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
I don’t see Mark Watney’s name in there anywhere…
(4) On April 7, 2016, LASFS will welcome Hugo, Nebula, and Aurora winning author Robert J. Sawyer who will read from his new novel, Quantum Night. The book will be published by Ace Books on March 1. Kudos to President Matthew B. Tepper for lining up the engagement.
(5) Today in History
September 25, 1959 Hammer Films’ take on The Mummy premieres in England.
(6) The Nerdist alerts fans to updates in German artist Dirk Löchel’s online poster featuring hundreds of science fictional star ships ranging from Star Trek to Mass Effect.
A high-res version can be downloaded from the artist’s Deviant Art site, where he also discusses the updates in detail including such frequently asked questions as…
Q: Why isn’t the Death Star/CSO Carrier/V’Ger/other large ship on the chart?
A: For reasons of image quality and chart organisation, only ships between a minimum of 100 meters and 24000 meters are applicable for this chart, sorry. Arbitrary? Yes! But I had to draw the line somewhere.
Q: And where’s TARDIS?
A: It’s both too large and too small for the chart.
(7) J. C. Carlton in “How To Create Your Own Monsters” appeals for people to sympathize with Vox Day, linking to a long list of insulting things people have said about Vox over the years. Because, Carlton thinks, what Vox has orchestrated with the Hugo Awards is all their fault.
The puppy kickers had every opportunity to put a hand out and create some sort of consensus with Larry and the rest of the Sad Puppies. They could have listened to what the puppies were saying and taken a more even handed stance. Above all they could have avoided the fiasco of no awarding the Hugo Awards. Instead they treated the puppies with abuse and disparagement, conducting yet another campaign of destruction. But they aren’t hitting Vox the Count working against them. All they have managed to do is create yet more Counts and hasten their own destruction.
(8) Al Harron explains why he is now a former contributor to The Cimmerian blog in “Matters of Importance” on A Wilderness of Peace.
[Leo Grin on The Cimmerian] “The Cimmerian Blog has been defunct for half a decade, but now that one of our former bloggers has been exposed as an SJW, we feel impelled to rise from our slumber to declare that we stand 100% against SJWs and their travelling freakshow of interlocking fetishes and predatory abuses.
As a now-confirmed SJW, Barbara Barrett is hereby EXPELLED from this blog. We have struck her prose from every post, and her face from every picture. Let her name be unheard and unspoken among us, erased from the memory of our august fellowship, for all time. So let it be written. So let it be done.“
Barbara Barrett is a friend, a colleague, and an erudite scholar. I wrote to Leo stating, in no uncertain terms, that if anyone on The Cimmerian was to be expelled, their prose struck, their faces scored out, their very names unheard and unspoken, for the “crime” of criticism, then they must do exactly the same to me.
I campaign for Scottish independence. I took great pride in our movement’s peaceful, positive message in the face of immense opposition. That opposition had the might of the entire UK Establishment at its back, seeking to crush anything that could threaten their dominion over these isles and their resources. Everyone in the movement has a story about being intimidated, being abused, being threatened. My mother has been physically assaulted three times in the past few years. The car was trashed, the windshield cracked, property vandalised and stolen. Grown men and women have screamed obscenities in my face, my mother’s, the children in my family. I have been called every name under the sun: “Nazi,” “Fascist,” “Taliban,” “Racist,” “Scum,” “Evil.” I do not need to have my name associated with the likes of Vox Day.
Yet I put up with the intimidation and abuse and threats, because some things are worth the struggle. Some things are that important. And frankly, I had spent too long being silent on the matters of Gamergate and Rabid Puppies, because I didn’t feel it was my place. I didn’t want to stick my neck out. But after three years campaigning for independence and facing down all the power of Westminster, I find myself completely unafraid and resolutely unphased by the schisms of fandoms – and it makes choosing sides a lot easier. What fear, what power, could they hold over me, given what I have just experienced?
So, to remove any doubt: I advocate the cause of social justice. I denounce the activities of Vox Day and his supporters. And I publicly express my support, unequivocally and without reservation, for my friend and fellow Robert E. Howard scholar, Barbara Barrett.
(9) Steve Davidson has posted “The 1941 Retro Hugo Awards (Part 7 Novels)” at Amazing Stories.
Final Blackout is generally considered both a golden age classic and perhaps the best story Hubbard turned out. Typewriter In the Sky is an early example of alternate realities and the “author as god” concept.
Absent the reading I still need to do, I think the stand-outs in this list are Slan, Gray Lensman and If This Goes On… (though I’ve only read that in the fix-up Revolt in 2100).
(10) Bravo to Lauowolf for the impromptu filk “Filers of London”
I saw a Filer with a Kindle in his hand
Walking through the West End in the rain.
He was looking for a place called the Odeon Leicester Square.
Gonna go see The Martian on screen.
Aaoooooo!
Filers of London!
Aaoooooo! (Repeat)If you see him reading on a train,
Better not ask its name.
Little old lady downloaded a jillion ebooks in shame.
Filers of London again.
Asoooooo!
Filers of London!
Aaoooooo! (Repeat)He’s bleary-eyed alright, cause he’s blogging all the night.
And lately he’s been reading in the shower.
Better stay away from him
Or he’ll list some more books, Jim
But look at that tbr tower!
Asoooooo!
Filers of London!
Aaoooooo! (Repeat)
(11) First a Hugo rocket, now a LEGO astronaut – see what’s floating in the window now at the International Space Station.
(12) The cast of Agent Carter promote the show with some Hayley Atwell and Dominic Cooper pranks.
https://twitter.com/HayleyAtwell/status/647176917196496896
https://twitter.com/HayleyAtwell/status/647204721241944064
(13) At Fast Company — “Take A Long Look At The Amazing Nic Cages/Tim Burton Superman That Almost Was”. (They say that like missing it was a bad thing…)
It’s a plot worthy of a comic book. In some alternative universe, Nicolas Cage might have have been Superman.
Back in the ’90s, Warner Bros had greenlit Superman Lives, a moodier take on the Man of Steel mythos to be produced by Jon Peters, directed by Tim Burton, and starring Cage, then hot off an Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas. The team caught the fascination of the comic zeitgeist, until an unfortunately-timed shot of a droopy-eyed Cage in superhero garb leaked and fan support soured. Two years, three scriptwriters, and a slew of concept art and costume tests later, the project was dead.
(14) J. W. Ocker, curator of OddThingsIveSeen.com, knows the harvest season is at hand, and that File 770 believes in “All Bradbury all the time.” Check out “Strange Stuff From My Study, Episode 4: Ray Bradbury’s Halloween Decorations”.
For this fourth episode of Strange Stuff From My Study, I dig into my collection to show you a pair of extremely special and extremely relevant-to-the-season items: Halloween decorations that once belonged to the Great Scribe of Halloween himself, Ray Bradbury.
Appropriate for any season is the author’s Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe:
My latest book is Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe, in which I visited every Poe site on the East Coast and across the Atlantic, meeting and talking to those men and women who are upholding the dark poet’s physical legacy. It’s a weird book, but it won the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biography.
(15) And while we’re in this eldritch neighborhood, The Last Witch Hunter trailer looks fairly horrifying.
(16) Did Ridley Scott just pull the rug out from under Neill Blomkamp’s Alien sequel? A September 24 news report says Scott just revealed the title of Prometheus 2 to reporters – and it’s not Prometheus 2.
During an interview with HeyUGuys, the 77-year-old filmmaker – and director of the original ground-breaking ‘Alien’ movie – revealed the rather surprising title.
“Actually, really it’s going to be called Alien: Paradise Lost,” he said. “So Prometheus 2 is not really what it’s going to be… it’s going to be Alien: Paradise Lost.”
Alien: Paradise Lost heads to cinemas on May 30 2017.
(17) A 7-minute video, To Scale: The Solar System, shows how “On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe.”
[Thanks to J.W. Ocker, JJ, Mark-with-no-last-name, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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Has anyone mentioned these? (edited to put in columns like everyone else):
Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
Fledgling by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper
Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente
And I could make a case for
My Real Children by Jo Walton
OK, I’ll play–it’s not ranked. Can’t recall whether there’s a protocol forbidding multiple listings of single writers, so I might have to prune this long list. Several of these books are parts of series I would recommend as single entities, were such a thing allowed. Take the (mostly) first volumes of series for a tacit endorsement of their siblings.
Zeitgeist, Bruce Sterling
Probability Moon, Nancy Kress
The Jazz, Melissa Scott
Light Music, Kathleen Ann Goonan
Explorer, C. J. Cherryh
The Guardian, Joe Haldeman
Bones of the Earth, Michael Swanwick
The Phoenix Exultant, John C. Wright
The Skinner, Neal Asher
The Praxis, Walter Jon Williams
Singularity Sky, Charles Stross
Gridlinked, Neal Asher
Memory, Linda Nagata
Spook Country, William Gibson
Zendegi, Greg Egan
Newton’s Wake: A Space Opera, Ken MacLeod
City of Pearl, Karen Traviss
Sun of Suns: Virga, Book One, Karl Schroeder
In War Times, Kathleen Ann Goonan
Dust, Elizabeth Bear
Matter, Iain M. Banks
The Quiet War, Paul McAuley
The Fourth Wall, Walter Jon Williams
The Collapsium, Wil McCarthy
The Prefect, Alastair Reynolds
Omega, Jack McDevitt
Directive 51, John Barnes
Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey
Slow Apocalypse, John Varley
This Shared Dream, Kathleen Ann Goonan
The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks
Impulse, Steven Gould
Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison
The Red: First Light, Linda Nagata
Evening’s Empires, Paul McAuley
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
The Peripheral, William Gibson
I’m going to take a day or so off from File 770 to see if I can finish some late work. Y’all are just too distracting, both when i’m reading here and when I dive into my to-read queue. 🙂
Noms for 3rd Millenium SF bracket:
Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
Redshirts, John Scalzi
Martian, The, Andy Weir
All you need is kill, Hiroshi Sakurazaka (YA?). Not sure who translated. Also, I mean the novel, not the manga.
Forty signs of Rain, KSR.
American Gods, Neil Gaiman (Nominated for SF awards…)
I read a lot of SF, but it turns out I read a lot of old SF. I only just recently read the Ancillary books, and am now eagerly awaiting the new one and remembering why I mostly read old books 🙂
Outies, J. R. Pournelle
Blindsight
Ancillary Justice
+1 Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro. All Ishiguro’s books are SF. Stevens in Remains of the Day is a shape-shifting alien from Arcturus-B with amnesia, and therefore the novel is really about emmigrants’ loss of their homeland; the painter, Ono, in An Artist of the Floating World has been plucked from an alternate reality where he was known as “The Butcher of California,” which turns the book into a SF thriller, in which American agents hunt him down and negotiate his extradition, desguised as the parents of his daughter’s suitor; When We Were Orphans is about an android repairing his neural net. So I for one, was thankful when Ishiguro brought the SF out of the subtext and made it plain in Never Let Me Go.
+1 Blindsight, Peter Watts
+1 Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
+1 The Lifecycle of Software Objects , Ted Chiang
Chasm City, Alastair Reynolds, really stood out from the rest of the Revelation Space series.
The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack, by Mark Leyner. I’m reading it now, and it seems more fantasy then SF, but it is more science fictional than several books being nominated, so…
Okay, lemme think.
Remnant Population, Elizabeth Moon
Antarctica, Kim Stanley Robinson
Feed, Mira Grant
Hammered, Elizabeth Bear
Passages, Connie Willis
(though why not other Willis books, just wondering?
Doomsday Book?)
Arctic Rising, Tobias Buckell
Ancillary Justice, Anne Leckie
The Companions,, Sherry Tepper
The Lost Steersman, Rosemary Kirstein
There may be more, if I keep thinking.
What infuriates me is that there’s potentially a good story about ordinary people doing extraordinary things under all that bloat, but Willis had to put in extraneous characters and show how much research she did* about WWII in the UK. Did the encounter with Turing advance the plot any? Or the tour of the dummy invasion fleet? Or everyone running around in circles looking for each other?
When I run a publishing house all manuscripts will be returned with instructions to cut 1/3 – or in this case 2/3.
*I’m aware of the errors pointed out by people better acquainted with London geography than I am.
Bracket nominations (damn, you lot have already nominated most of my favorites!)
Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker
Impact Parameter by Geoffrey A. Landis (Hm. Do short stories count?)
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven, Edward M. Lerner
Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett, Steven Baxter
@Mark Dennehy +1 your favorites, at some point there’ll be a cutoff and more votes = better chances.
Side note, I’d love to see someone EPH everyone’s first five listed and compare it versus just totaling up the top five nominations.
@Lauowolf Remnant Population is 1996, 21’st century only
oh poo.
I thought I’d looked it up
Ah, reprinted 2003.
Sniff, I love that book.
(But at least now it won’t get roughed up in the brackets.)
It is a very enjoyable book, I agree. There’s always my nomination, The Speed of Dark.
I don’t know anything about Al Harron except that he appears to be someone whose articulate enthusiasm for the late Robert E. Howard’s work has inadvertently plopped him into what is yet another tiresome VD stinkpile. For which Mr. Harron has my sincere sympathy. As well as my applause for the excellent statement he has made!
And I know nothing about J.C. Carlton except that he comes across in his statements as exactly the sort of person who VD attracts. ‘Nuff said.
@Lauowolf:
Doomsday Book was 1992. Willis hasn’t had a ton of 21st century novels.
@Lin McAllister:
Bloat is a good word for it. I thought Blackout/All Clear would have made a pretty good single book. 2/3 cut sounds about right.
+1 Blindsight, Peter Watts
+1 Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
+1 Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge (I was so sad when, after reading this novel, I went to look for other novels by her and learned there weren’t any.)
+1 Thirteen/Black Man, Richard Morgan
Abbadon’s Gate, James S.A. Corey
Railsea, China Mieville (arguably fantasy, I suppose)
I posted my quickie list of 21st Century SF in the other thread.
Three cheers!
Seriously, I have ranted numerous times about book bloat and yearn for the days when editors would toss a manusrcipt across a desk to the author with the instruction to cut 200 pages(as Stephen Donaldson has said has happened to him).
I loved Dumas’ Three Musketeers and also The Man in the Iron Mask, but I never finished The Count of Monte Cristo–probably because I don’t like revenge fantasies. I’m not against revenge, but I get disengaged from stories (and political movements, platforms, and rhetoric) that are focused on it.
I react to revenge plots and revenge-focused characters as storyline and character arc that are focused on standing still and looking backward, rather than moving forward and pursuing goals, and I tend to lose interest and drift away.
As a bit of a non-sequitur, there’s also a fun and elegant Arturo Perez-Reverte thriller called The Club Dumas.
Why?
(I will be writing the first draft of my review tomorrow)
@Laura Resnick Your research materials list led to me spending $105 on amazon.
I’ll +1 Tepper’s The Fresco with the caveat that I loved it but I don’t actually think it’s a great book. (it was, however, tailor-made to appeal to RedWombat, age…whatever I was at the time.) I suspect it will be destroyed in the brackets and even suspect it deserves it, but damnit, I enjoyed the hell out of it.
From the other direction, Blindsight is very good and deserved to be liked more than I liked it. It is like one of those tiresome people whom one respects enormously and would nevertheless hate to be stuck in an elevator with.
@RedWombat Blindsight is very good and deserved to be liked more than I liked it.
I am not at all sure that’s that’s true; I found Blindsight a throwing book. Even if you find the … narrative conveyance, let’s say, convincing, that doesn’t mean it’s a likable book. Words like “bleak” and “depressing” seem to get attached a lot even by people who admire it.
Another vote for Oryx and Crake. Atwood writes great SF whether she wants to or not…
Re. Length of books: Depends on the author to me. Some authors are good at plots, not so good at filler, and I’d rather they kept their writing tight and focused. Others simply write so beautifully that I’m happy to keep reading more, even if it is filler. Or write such entertaining dialog that I’m happy to have their characters digressing at length (Zelazny, Bujold).
When I go back and read some old SF, I’m sometimes appalled at the terseness. It’s like, half the story seems to be missing a lot of the time.
That said, I do admit that a dislike for the endless epic is one reason I don’t read much high fantasy. And I’m glad the disease is much rarer in SF.
Still, To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is probably my all-time favorite Willis, was published in the 20th c., and I did really love Blackout/All Clear, even though I admit it might have benefited from some trimming. So I’m sticking with it.
Dawn Incognito on September 26, 2015 at 8:53 pm said:
@Lauowolf:
(though why not other Willis books, just wondering?
Doomsday Book?)
Doomsday Book was 1992. Willis hasn’t had a ton of 21st century novels.
Another reprint.
I clearly need to be more careful in double-checking dates.
OTOH it’s not as if Doomsday is easier emotionally than Passage.
@ Iphinome:
My work is done here. 🙂
I’d nominate anything by Greg Egan, love his explorations of the alternate physics, quantum mechanics, how thought works, really everything he writes.
Also, The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein. Excellent book about how the scientific mindset works.
@ Xtifr:
I think this terseness is true of quite a lot of older fiction. I’ve picked up many 20th century novels, up through books written in the 1970s, and felt like whole parts of the story seemed to be missing.It’s not a consistent issue, but it’s prevalent enough that I think it does make a lot of older books not-very-interesting to me today.
Minor quibble. They described the Sad Puppies as “older” writers. But the SP1-3 ringleaders are new writers, Brad Torgersen and Larry Correia, who were each respectively Campbell Award (best new sf/f writer) nominees only 3-4 years ago (2012 and 2011), and who are each younger (sometimes by 20+ years) than many of the writers who publicly argued against their claims and accusations, including GRRM, Gerrold, Scalzi, Willis, Kowal, Stross, Flint, Castro, Jemisin, Hines (older than LC, though not BT), Cadigan, Wollheim (editor), etc., etc.
Puppying isn’t age-related, and it’s definitely not related to being “older.”
Oh glurbgutz!! I posted my nominations in the wrong thread. So here they are in the correct place.
Balance of Trade, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, (2009)
Hammerfall, CJ Cherryh, (2001)
Passage, Connie Willis (2001)
Alien Taste, Wen Spencer, (2001)
Remnant Population, Elizabeth Moon, (2003)
The Martian, Andy Weir, (2013?)
Darwin’s Radio, Greg Bear (2002?)
Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey, (2011)
Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold, (2002)
Kiln People, David Brin, (2002)
Fledgling, Octavia Butler (2005)
Ancillary Justice, Anne Leckie (2012)
Laura Resnick sed:
But Laura, he forgot to use your Amazon link so you won’t get commission!
I’m a he now? Does it come with a pay raise?
Tintinaus: Pamela Dean had the request that she cut a book by 2/3. So it happens still. (She did it. Book was not published. Boo. But also beside the point.)
Books. SF. This century.
Wilson – Spin (I have more intellectual appreciation than emotional, but it’s worthy.
E. Bear – All the Windwracked Stars (I’ll accept Carnival if I must.)
McDonald – The Outback Stars
Gardner – Ascending
Buckell – Ragamuffin
Moriarty – Spin Control
Willis – Passage (call it an anti-vote for Blackout/All Clear?)
Hopkinson – Midnight robber.
Did somebody say nominations?
Stephenson: Anathem. Because it’s got a solid ripping yarn hidden in there somewhere, because I like books that address linguistic issues, and because of that one line about the protractor.
Matthew Stover: Star Wars: New Jedi Order: Traitor. It very nearly literally blew my mind in high school to see someone actually applying morality beyond basic Manichean duality to the Star Wars ‘verse. This is one of the few (non-Zahn) bits of the pre-Disney Star Wars Expanded Universe that’s actually worth remembering fondly, imnsho.
Cory Doctorow: Little Brother. For being intriguing enough that I’ve been using linux pretty much ever since, and for helping me codify my unease at the surveillance state.
Timothy Zahn: Night Train to Rigel hits many of the same high notes that 1999’s Icarus Hunt hit, with some improved variation in worldbuilding at the cost of that wonderfully self-contained twist ending. If it’s blatant reprint-ness didn’t disqualify it, I’d probably nominate the 2004 omnibus edition of his Cobra trilogy instead, but the chronologically valid entries in the series don’t stand on their own as well.
C. J. Cherryh: Explorer rounds out my favorite section of the Foreigner series with a resounding climax, just a touch of action, and a dramatic resolution that consists of ‘sit down and talk things out, dammit,’ which I always appreciate when it’s well done. To hell with my own compunctions about books standing on their own, this one’s good enough even as it depends on its precursors so heavily.
Lois McMaster Bujold: Cryoburn shows us the Vorkosiverse at it’s best, with new worldbuilding based on a straight ‘if-this-goes-on’ extrapolation from a particular life-altering invention. Medical cryonics serves the same role here that artificial wombs served for Ethan of Athos, Falling Free, and Cetaganda, with similar good effect.
Douglas Adams: The Salmon of Doubt is, of course, Adams’ only eligible work, and is therefore a bit of a gimme for a nomination. The incomplete germs of the next Dirk Gently story make for quite an interesting start; I still want to know how the rhinoceros’ nasal cavity ends up interacting with the half-cat.
John Scalzi: Redshirts appeals to the metatextual silliness that Monty Python and Doug Adams primed me to look for in all things. Ensign Wesley Crusher’s audiobook narration just helped push it over the line for me.
“Wildbow“: Worm is a bit outside the normal ‘novel’ format, but it’s definitely a single overarching work of at least novel length; it’s a web-original superhero fiction, and it explores (in between the full range of healing factors and telepaths-with-drawbacks and the like) just how ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ would be likely to actually apply in a world that’s not as 4-color-cheerful as the superhero worlds in various comic books. Its landing page over at parahumans dot wordpress dot net has been promising a re-edited ebook version for a couple years now, but counting November of 2013, when its last epilogue chapter was published, puts it solidly inside the date limit.
Let’s see, what else… a bunch of fantasy stuff, a couple books that I can’t judge fairly yet because I only picked ’em up this month so they’re still all ‘new-car-smell,’ more fantasy, some alt-history that may as well be fantasy, and a whole bunch of cookie-cutter tripe that I’ll keep gobbling up as long as they keep dishing it out, but going by the reasonably high standards of ‘buy it in hardback ’cause I can’t stand to wait for the paperback,’ or if I’ve already bought it, ‘pre-order the next one as soon as the bookstore opens tomorrow morning’, that’ll pretty much cover ’em.
What are we doing? Listing good books to read?
I’m living in the past, too. I recently reviewed a young adult book from 2013 on my site that I’ll recommend. Pick up “Every Day” by David Levithan. It’s highly creative, and it turned out to be gripping, too.
No argument with any of that. But the aliens were the most alien I’ve read in a very long time, which gets points from me.
Oddly enough, I think the reason the book worked for me was because I dismissed the narrator immediately as a whiny self-absorbed little shit. That meant that all the bleak “oh, woe, consciousness is a burden on the brain!” stuff didn’t make much of a dent, because it didn’t come across as real, it came across as whiny narrator whining about a thing I personally got over the second or third time I took psychedelics in college. For his next trick, I expected a grandiose flourish about how none of us know if the colors we see are the same as colors other people see.
I disliked him intensely, but it also made the book less depressing because I thought his philosophical maunderings weren’t worth worrying about, get back to the neat aliens, please.
Sorry Iphinome, I’m on my phone and tend to miss(and sometimes re-miss) typing errors.
@lela e buis: mostly we’re partaking in the kult of Kyra, boss of the Bracket.
See https://file770.com/?p=25153&cpage=3#comment-347937 for details.
My nominations, ordered according to publication date:
S.L. Viehl: Stardoc, 2000
Catherine Asaro: The Quantum Rose, 2000
Nalo Hopkinson: Midnight Robber, 2000
Lois McMaster Bujold: Diplomatic Immunity, 2002
Margaret Atwood: Oryx & Crake, 2002
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife, 2003
Simon R. Green: Deathstalker Legacy, 2003
Max Barry: Jennifer Government, 2003
David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas, 2004
Ian McDonald: River of Gods, 2004
Linnea Sinclair: Gabriel’s Ghost, 2005
J.D. Robb: Survivor in Death, 2005
Elizabeth Bear: Carnival, 2006
Ann Aguirre: Grimspace, 2007
Tobias Buckell: Ragamuffin, 2007
Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 2007
Jay Lake: Mainspring, 2007
Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games, 2008
Kage Baker: The Empress of Mars, 2009
Meljean Brook: The Iron Duke, 2010
Rob Thurman: Chimera, 2010
Gini Koch: Touched by an Alien, 2010
James S.A. Corey: Leviathan Wakes, 2011
Sharon Lynn Fisher: Ghost Planet, 2012
Jenna Bennett: Fortune’s Hero, 2012
Hugh Howey: Wool, 2012
Brenda Cooper: The Creative Fire, 2012
Ann Leckie: Ancillary Justice, 2013
Karen Lord: The Best of All Possible Worlds, 2013
Rachel Bach: Heaven’s Queen, 2014
M.R. Carey: The Girl with All the Gifts, 2014
Jennifer Marie Brissett, Elysium, 2014
John Scalzi: Lock-In, 2014
Ooh, +1 for
Balance of Trade
Alien Taste
Bearing in mind that the list I gave Kyra is the “trying to cover everyone’s best”, this is my personal best list:
The Quantum Rose, Catherine Asaro
Fortune’s Pawn (I meant to put this one on the list instead of Heaven’s Queen, which is book 2), Rachel Bach
The Empress of Mars, Kage Baker
The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks
Kiln People, David Brin
Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold
A Darkling Sea, James L. Cambias
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
A Calculated Life, Anne Charnock
The Lifecycle of Software Objects (collection), Ted Chiang
Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey
Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
Eifelheim, Michael F. Flynn
Rosemary & Rue, Seanan McGuire
The Native Star, M.K. Hobson
God’s War, Kameron Hurley
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
Learning the World, Ken MacLeod
The Disestablishment of Paradise, Phillip Mann
Love Minus Eighty, Will McIntosh
Embassytown, China Miéville
The Red: First Light, Linda Nagata
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North
The Disappeared, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Calculating God, Robert J. Sawyer
Lock In, John Scalzi
Anathem, Neal Stephenson
Accelerando, Charles Stross
Dream Houses (novella), Genevieve Valentine
The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance), Jeff VanderMeer
Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
Blindsight, Peter Watts
The Martian, Andy Weir
Passage, Connie Willis
Burning Paradise, Robert Charles Wilson
Kyra, feel free to decrement everything on the list by -1 and then +1 only the books above, if you wish. Sorry for the trouble.
@Tintinaus Let’s not be too hasty. You can totally call me any pronoun you like if there’s a corresponding 30% pay raise. Any takers? Cash for pronouns.
I know exactly what you mean about being destroyed by the story. I still sometimes dream about the last scene with her, the kid and the boat. I did kind of love it, though, because of the questions it raised and never answered and kept me thinking about death, an afterlife, relationships… Yeah, it sticks with you.
Buwaya: the Puppies… are, however, fairly broad minded over there
<cough… choke… sputter… passes out from laughing hysterically>
Lis Carey: The number of Dumas is three. You are remembering pere and fils, and utterly forgetting grandpere, the Black Count, without whom we don’t have the other two.
Then shalt thou count Dumas to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number of Dumas thou shalt count, and the number of the counting of Dumas shall be three. Four Dumas’ shalt thou not count, neither count thou two Dumas’, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.
Kyra,
I want to add Gabriel’s Ghost, Linnea Sinclair to my nom list.
@ redheadfemme
Thanks for the reminder!
I often wind up reading in public and two people tonight asked me “so, whatcha reading?” Once I got past my reflexive “pfftttphhhttdttt! I’m reading an ebook you’re not supposed to ask about it! WTH?! if I wanted to get into conversations about what I’m reading I’d read a physical book with a cover!” reaction (ahem) I cheerfully said “Oh, The Count of Monte Cristo!”
On the subject of which… (whimper) my TBR list/pile is at the level where if it were physical instead of being 95% ebook-based I’d be in danger of dying in the next earthquake. Why on earth do y’all feel the need to remind me that oh, yeah, I need to reread Count of Monte Cristo despite it being an estimated 30 hours of reading time and I have all these other books and [mutter mutter grumble].
You all are bad influences. I hope you realize that.
JJ, Heaven’s Queen is actually the third book of Rachel Bach’s trilogy, but the whole series is excellent and IMO underrated.
Also glad to see some love for Linnea Sinclair here, since she’s often ignored in SFF spaces.
@Laura Resnick
The Club Dumas is excellent. Approximately 50% of the plot got turned into the movie The Ninth Gate. Quite why they didn’t want the other 50%, which included the Dumas references, I don’t know.
And the Dumas thoughts have just popped a recommendation into my head – The Cardinal’s Blades by Pierre Pevel and sequels. Musketeers, dragons, and daring-do.
Not enough people are nominating Air by Geoff Ryman, a novel I love like few others. So, let me do so here. (I often say I “love” a novel, but I really mean I like it a lot. I only occasionally actually love one. I love The World According to Garp by John Irving, and The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff. Last Summer by Evan Hunter. Dancing Aztecs by Donald Westlake. Most of my real loves are in short fiction. But I’m perfectly happy reading a likes-a-lot.)
While I’m here I’ll cast a vote for Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, too, a likes-a-lot.