a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture
BoingBoing has an early review of Reamde up and it has seriously whet my appetite. Gold farming is the hook but apparently Stephenson is also a bit of a gun nut. Who knew? Exciting!
I’ve pre-ordered my copy from Amazon in save-a-tree format. I actually don’t even own a Kindle but it’s still the best way to read a book, especially one by the Neal. This thing is a thousand pages long.
It’s out on September 20. So basically next Tuesday is a wash for me.
Here’s the list – I’ve read 51 of these. And the #1 and #2 slots are exactly what I’d have picked.
I am glad to see Neil and Neal on the list (though NPR spelled Neal’s name wrongly in one entry). Especially love the fact that The Princess Bride made it on the list!
Inexplicably, A.C. Doyle is missing, which boggles my mind. Not as surprising is the absence of any of the Big B’s (Bear, Baxter, Benford, and Brin) of which the omission of Greg Bear is the most egregious.
I think a top 100 list is less than useful though, what would be better would be a top 20 author list. So, let’s make one! In (first-name) alphabetical order, because a ranking will take more thought:
Well, ok that’s only 19. Some of these are for an entire series, others for a single book, but all of them wrote something that really grabbed me, more so than usual.
I’m sure others’ lists would differ – and certainly would be helpful, so leave yours in comments!
And a special mention for writers who I think are odious people personally, though they certainly write well: Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card.
And I really need to add The Stand to my reading to-do list.
It occurs to me a much harder list would be of short-story authors. A good start woudl be compiling everyone who has ever appeared in the Asimov’s Best Science Fiction series. That’s something for another day…
In the Beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. — The Hitchhiker’ Guide to the Galaxy
This is pretty depressing news – Stargate: Universe seems to have been canceled. They are midway through their second season run and the final ten episodes will air in the spring, they will also modify the plot to wrap up the storyline early (since it was originally scripted for a five year run).
That shows like ST:Voyager get dragged out for years but the great shows like Firefly and SGU get dropped before they’ve had a chance to build a wider following is massively frustrating to me. It’s amazing to me that Galactica was permitted to survive long enough to finish. Sadly, most science fiction (and SGU was no exception) have tried to imitate Galactica’s formula of oversexed characters to try and draw in the mainstream male demographics. I expect the lesson of SGU’s demise, as far as TV producers go, is that there was too much plot and not enough skin. SGU was one of the few shows out there that could credibly be called a successor to Galactica; even Caprica Galactica’s own designated heir already got the axe. The future of American science fiction is dim.
We still have the British franchises, namely Doctor Who, and if the stars align more of Sherlock. And Warehouse 13 seems to have survived the chopping block, though for how long?
Meanwhile, the SyFy rebranding is revealed to have indeed been appropriate. SyFy doesn’t have the patience that Sci-Fi channel did for good science fiction. They just want shows that look like science fiction. It’s just “siffy” now. I’m disgusted, and if I had the option to choose cable channels a-la-carte I’d drop Siffy entirely.
Incidentally, this is an example of why cable should indeed be a-la-carte. Niche channels will regress towards the mean of television norms instead of staying faithful to their niche as long as they are subsidized by general cable premiums. If these niche channels must justify their existence, however, to the niche audience, they will take more risks – and the niche audience will be more willing to pay. Right now I pay about $40 for hundreds of channels; I’d happily pay $50 for just a handful, and Siffy could get a much larger share of my money.
I hope at some point that we can skip able distribution entirely and see a future where TV shows are marketed directly to Netflix and Hulu plus.
At any rate, the long drought of American science fiction has begun.
As it happens, I’m in the midst of preparation for another trip, this one pretty literally the most important one of my lifetime thus far. Since I try to keep my religion and politics off this blog, I don’t have too much more to say about that, or about the whole WisCon fracas (aside from saying that as far as pure science fiction writing ability goes, replacing Elizabeth Moon with Nisi Shawl is a laudable coup indeed).
With deference to Mrs Moon, I ask for a little more forebearance from my readers!
Related, I do not endorse it, but do guiltily admit to finding this hysterical (via Brickmuppet).
UPDATE (unrelated): this is why you should always try to engage another blogger with a post link rather than an email. We are bloggers. We shouldn’t ever have any reason to email each other.
I caught the two-hour series pilot of Caprica on On-Demand a few weeks ago and I have been meaning to comment on it. It’s definitely not a replacement for Galactica, but it clearly wasn’t intended to be. Galactica took an ancient science fiction idea, the question of what makes us human, folded it into religious belief, and created a literal mythos. But Galactica never really asked the question itself – what makes us human? – it showed us the answer as a given. The skin job cylons were presented as human from the start, both the original Earth/Kobol variant and the Colonial variant. The idea that they were still fundamentally machines was never really broached, except as “toaster!” epithets – with the exception of Model One, John. He was the only one to rage at his creators for making him merely human.
spoilers – Continue reading “Caprica’s mirror”
I am racking my brain and memory to no avail – I need to recall the autor and name of the short story set in an alternate history where the Nazis win World War II. The Germans roll over Europe, conquer Britain, win in Russia. The Japanese expand into China and Asia, and the two axis powers swallow the entire globe. Then they turn on each other, and fight World War III, and the Nazis are ultimately (barely) victorious. At this point the Nazis break out the old Holocaust Instruction Manual and turn the resources of the planet towards genetic purification and the glory of the Aryan race. And they succeed. And centuries after World War II, the true Third Reich becomes a pure race indeed on white-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired people. As the centuries pass, the Reich liberalizes, moderates, and eventually becomes a Republic. True learning and democracy again flourish as the homogeneity of the Aryan race – now the entirety of the human race – ensures peace and prosperity and minimal conflict. The horror of the past centuries is increasingly edited out and ultimately forgotten entirely, lost in myth. A new history emerges, one scrubbed clean of any messy reference to wars or races, and after a few generations this new narrative has become set in the collectve stone of human memory.
And one day, a full millenium after the dark prehistory that gave rise to what has now become a human utopia, two students at the University of Tokyo, Hans and Franz (names may be different from my recollection) are eating lunch. Hans turns to Franz and asks him., “do you ever get the feeling we were lied to?”
if you thought that was a cool summary, the original was 10^6 times better. Help me figure out who wrote it! I think I might have read it on one of these, but I’m not sure.
I am mightily inspired by Mark to start reading some sci-fi again. I want to catch up on the big titles of the past decade that I have pretty much missed out on – it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything other than short stories, and even my usual source for those (the annual Best Of collection by Dozois) has dried up.
Here are some of the books on my to-read list (I really should put this info into Goodreads, while I am at it – I see others are also availing themselves of the service, and it strikes me as more useful for looking ahead than trying to enter all the stuff I’ve already read).
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett- seems a good place to get acquainted with the Discworld universe, recommended to me repeatedly, but most recently by Dustin.
The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson – Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. Recommended by pretty much everyone though Mark’s Stephenson-exuberance is a major factor (and Snow Crash is probably in my top ten of all time). The numbering of this series is confusing – each Volume has multiple Books, so its really a 8-part series rather than a 3-part one, but i’ll read it in “trilogy” format.
Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter. I’ve read a smatttering of Baxter’s short-story work before and he’s been involved with various collaborative stuff, so it’s worth checking out his longer solo work. I call him one of the Big Bs of sci-fi along with Bear, Brin, and Benford. If I like it I’ll go for the rest of the Manifold Trilogy
Anathem – also by Stephenson, and from Mark’s initial review (which I only skimmed due to spoilers) seems like it might be better to do first before the Baroque Cycle. This article at Wired also got me interested in the book, too.
The Inheritance Series by Christopher Paolini: Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr. – this actually came to my attention from the movie version of the first book, which was not exactly LOTR quality but had a strange Star Wars feel to it, and I assume much was diluted out from the book to the screen. I havent seen an original take on dragon-human relationships since McCaffrey’s Pern series (which was satisfyingly science fiction, rather than fantasy, for a change).
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon – been on my to-do list for a long time, out of a sense of obligation, like reading Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace – I dunno if I actually want to read this or not, but the mere fact that there’s an entire summer read-a-thon being organized around it makes me want to at least check out the back cover.
I’m gonna try to get these the old-fashioned way – the library 🙂 But I’d really appreciate more recommendations, these sorts of lists are always in flux. What am I missing?
Mark at Kaedrin has been posting detailed science fiction book reviews. I’ve been meaning to link for a while, he is now up to the third installment: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Check it out, very helpful in deciding what to read next (if I can tear myself away from Warcraft). Mark is currently reading Infinite Jest, and tackled the Baroque Cycle and Gravity’s Rainbow a while back too. I am seriously inspired.
Yesterday on sci-fi’s TNG block I caught the ending of Yesterday’s Enterprise, which was then followed by The Offspring. These are two of the best TNG episodes ever. It struck me that TNG as a series remains unmatched even by DS9 in terms of how many truly great episodes there were that really explored the human condition in such powerful ways.
Yesterday’s Enterprise handled Trek nostalgia brilliantly though subtly – the uniforms worn by the Enterprise-C crew were directly taken from the Trek movies from Khan onwards, for example, and the shape of the Enterprise-C was far more evocative of the iconic Enterprise from TOS than the Enterprise-D (I always felt that the Enterprise-D was flat and curvy in exactly the wrong places). But the way the story retconned Tasha Yar’s character was the real lodestone – and the scene with Picard where she argues to be transferred to the doomed ship was perfection, especially Picard’s final almost-refusal resigned-approval. Plus Castillo’s simple statement, “I don’t want you here.” – superb.
The Offspring, meanwhile, is remarkable for how it explores father and daughter love, using emotionless androids, and manages to convey the essence of that relationship in a simple scene where Data and Lal hold hands. This is the fundamental purpose of science fiction – to explore the human condition by using non-humans, and Data is the personification of science fiction itself, making the literary genre a character in its own right. The final scene with Lal and Data, where she tells him she will feel for the both of them, is one that moves me every time. And the scene with Riker in Ten-Forward never fails to make me laugh out loud.
There’s no way around it – I need to get myself a full set of these as soon as possible. Even Firefly can’t match TNG as far as its literary science fiction credentials go – and while I wish the new Trek movie franchise all the best, the Star Wars-ification of Star Trek is not science fiction anymore, but just space opera.
If anyone has a favorite episode of TNG to share, please comment! lets get sentimental.
A giant, a visionary, a prophet has passed.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed away today at the age of 90. It’s impossible for me to express how formative this great man’s writings have been upon my personality, my interests, even my career. Along with Isaac Asimov, who passed away when I was a freshman in college, Sir Arthur was my gateway into science fiction and a lifetime of intellectual curiosity and simple appreciation for the fruits of the mind.
On my recent trip to Colombo, the idea of meeting him crossed my mind, but was rejected immediately as an impossibility. But at least I came close.