You are here: Home / Archives for other people's books

What SF Series Would YOU Reboot, Resurrect, or Reinvigorate??

August 3, 2011 By Chris 3 Comments

SFSignal asked me to join in on a Mind Meld discussion. Always an interesting column. This week’s topic: If you could resurrect, reboot, or reinvigorate a book series or cycle, which one would it be and why?

The short version of my answer is:

The long version of my answer (along with several other excellent answers) is at SFSignal.

… And, yes, somehow I really did manage to misspell Diana Wynne Jones’s name. I think I’ve been working a little too hard and getting a little too little sleep of late!

Filed Under: other people's books, whatever Tagged With: , , , ,

Vernor Vinge is my Mother

July 20, 2011 By Chris 3 Comments

Still underwater over here, as I just got back from Readercon, am preparing a guest post on Dystopias that will run at Night Bazaar this weekend, and need to compress the 800 page manuscript of GHOST SPIN that I just handed in to 650 pages by the end of the week.

Readercon was fantabulocious. Details mostly to follow. But I can say now that the two personal highlights of the convention for me were:

  1. getting to meet Joan Slonczewski, one of my absolute favorite hard SF writers ever.
  2. sitting on a panel where Ellen Kushner asked us to name our personal “literary matriarch” (someone we both emulate and rebel against in our own work) and being able to utter the words: “Vernor Vinge is my mother.”

To be fair, I probably wouldn’t have said it if every single other person on the panel hadn’t listed Ursula K. LeGuin. But still … I didn’t say it for laughs. Not by a long shot. And there’s something there that I’m going to have to think about for a while before I get anywhere near the bottom of it…

… Which leads me to the next piece of news. While rummaging around the internet in preparation for the Night Bazaar Dystopia Post, I discovered that Vinge has a new book coming out this fall. And not just any book, but the long-awaited sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. Do I have to say that I am a much happier person than I was when I woke up this morning?

My rummaging also turned up something else — a truly great SF classic that I’d almost forgotten reading, but that exploded back into life in my memory the moment I was reminded of it. The book is Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves. It has one of the most mind-blowing representations of an alien culture I can ever remember reading, and it’s also one of  those Asimovian science fictional home runs that make you sit back and scratch your head and mutter things like, “How did he manage to write the best novel ever about climate change before anyone had ever even whispered the phrase ‘global warming?’”

Filed Under: other people's books, whatever Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

How to Judge a Book by its Cover in Five Easy Steps

June 3, 2011 By Chris 6 Comments
Recently something (I forget what) started me hunting around for an ebook version of The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. I never found it, but I did stumble on these cover shots of The Space Merchants and an equally mod-looking SF short story collection. 

I actually own this edition of The Space Merchants, which I bought for its awesomely cool cover many years ago — long before I knew that C. M. Kornbluth was destined to move into my soul and take up permanent residence.

I just love these old SF covers. I have stacks of those teeny weeny 1960s-era paperbacks at home, picked up at used book stores and library book sales. There’s an AmStud Ph.D thesis in golden age SF cover art, no doubt about it. But me, I just like looking at the pretty pictures….

Meanwhile, I never did find that ebook of The Space Merchants I was looking for. So if anyone knows of a legitimate, non-pirated electronic version, please tell me about it. My old paperback is too dry and brittle to read by now, and I hate the current Tor cover. As many others have pointed out before me, Pohl’s name is write large on the new cover, with Kornbluth’s name in teensy weensy print below, as if they are ashamed to admit he had anything to do with the thing. I understand the marketing rationale; readers are often gun shy about buying collaborations, and the book will doubtless sell better if they can be tricked into buying it as a Frederik Pohl solo novel. But Frederik Pohl has had a long life and many widely read novels. And Cyril Kornbluth’s traumatic World War II service and (probably closely related) early death are one of the great tragedies of science fiction. So it’s awfully hard for those of us who love him to be happy about a cover that doesn’t celebrate his legacy as enthusiastically as it should.

I’ve always felt a special connection to Kornbluth for a very personal reason. He saw front-line infantry action in worst weeks of the Battle of the Bulge — just like my best and favorite high school teacher. Jim Russell didn’t spend as much time telling us about Jefferson or the Federalist Papers as the AP American History course planners probably thought he should. And he spent an awful lot of time telling us about the up-close-and-ugly side of war that most adults don’t think children are tough enough to hear about. But his war stories taught me more about life (the thin line between bravery and cowardice) and politics (the even thinner line between democracy and dictatorship) than I ever learned from any book. And every time I read anything by Cyril Kornbluth, I hear Jim Russell’s voice again: terminally shocked, desperately idealistic, and deathly weary of all human nonsense.

One of those men was the best teacher I ever had — and the other is one of the best science fiction writers I’ve ever read. If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting C.M.Kornbluth, here’s a good article about him in Strange Horizons, with references to his work. A few of his truly great books are happily back in print now. And one of the great things about the age of the internet is that fans don’t have to rely on chance encounters in used bookstores to track down his wonderful out of print titles in their original pulp-ish glory. So go forth and be amazed!

 

Filed Under: other people's books, whatever

Have You Read Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor?

May 19, 2011 By Chris 13 Comments

Well, this review has been long-delayed by circumstance, but now it’s time for me to put up or shut up. Nebula Awards Weekend starts in two days, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death has earned a well-deserved place on the final ballot. Who Fears Death got plenty of critical attention when it came out last year, including a Lambda Award nomination and a starred Publisher’s Weekly Review. But now that I’ve finally gotten around to reading it, I’m mostly surprised it didn’t get more attention. My only explanation is that this book straddles two genres, fantasy and literary fiction — and genre-bending books often have a difficult time of it.

Let me hasten to say, however, that Who Fears Death is not a ‘literary’ novel in any way that will be off-putting to typical fantasy readers. Okorafor is an award-winning YA writer, and even when she’s writing for adults her work has all the earmarks of the best YA writing: crisp sentences, vivid imagery, and the kind of narrative drive that only comes when a writer has the discipline to put story before style in every single sentence.

Some of the descriptions of the book (for instance on Amazon) also may have given readers pause. This is a novel that deals frankly with the on-the-ground reality of genocide, and there are passages that make for very tough reading. But Okorafor’s characters are complex, resourceful, determined individuals rather than helpless victims. This, combined with a truly inspired use of humor, makes it possible to enjoy and even laugh at a story centered on events that most people flinch away from reading about in the newspapers.

The only fault I can find with the book, if it can really be called a fault, is that the writing is uneven. Though again — not in the usual way. Most of the time when people say a book is uneven, they are trying to find a nice way of saying that parts of it stink. But there is not a single bad page in Who Fears Death. It’s just that as a reader I found myself veering between thinking ‘This is a well-written and original fantasy novel that takes on incredibly difficult issues and fully rises to the challenge” and thinking “This is Ursula LeGuin/Michael Chabon/Orhan Pamuk-level Honest-to-God Great Literature.”

It seems churlish to call this kind of “unevenness” a problem, but still … there is something disorienting about it. Okorafor carries you along through page after page of clean, surefooted, well-crafted prose: consummately professional stuff with that extra spark that tells you you’re in the presence of a genuinely talented writer writing straight from the heart about things that really matter to her. And then, with no warning whatsoever, she’ll produce passages of such seismic, subterranean power that they just … shatter you.

Maybe she’s doing it on purpose. I wouldn’t put it past her. Great writers are sneaky that way. And I have a strong suspicion that when we look back on the early decades of this century Nnedi Okorafor is going to be one of the new arrivals in our genre whose work has the intellectual scope, the emotional intensity, and the staying power to qualify as Great with a capital G.

A lot of people have compared Who Fears Death to the work of Octavia Butler and Ursula K. LeGuin. Both comparisons are apt: there are echoes of both writers in Okorafor’s sharply humorous critique of  gender roles and her condemnation of the ways in which societies steer young males toward violence. But the writer Okorafor actually reminds me of the most is Geoff Ryman. I mentioned in an earlier post on this blog that Ryman and Okorafor embody my ideal of using fantasy to speak difficult truths about our world. But they also have other things in common. They both write with blazing honesty and childlike earnestness, in a style that at times appears simple or even rough. There is something about the line-by-line feel of their writing that both pulls you in and keeps you constantly a little off-balance. And that off-balance quality carries through to their plots as well: they shift between the sublime and the trivial, the grownup and the childish, the masculine and the feminine, in ways that defy easy categorization. At bottom, I’ve dithered over this post for as long as I have partly because I had the same feeling when I turned the last page of Who Fears Death that I had the first time I read Geoff Ryman’s Was. I’m not sure I understand this book. I’m not sure I understand the Deep Magic that Okorafor is working here — let alone how she works it. And I honestly doubt I’d understand it if I read the book a hundred times.

What I do understand is that Okorafor is doing things most writers are too timid, too genre-bound, or too jaded to even attempt. So, regardless of whether she wins the Nebula this weekend or not … you really, really, really need to read Who Fears Death. Give it time. Give it your whole attention. Give it a chance to work its rough and unsettling magic on you. You owe it to yourself. Because this is one of those rare books that has the power to change the way you see the world.

Filed Under: other people's books

Have You Read Justina Robson’s NATURAL HISTORY?

April 28, 2011 By Chris 10 Comments

Justina Robson’s Natural History begins with a sentient ship hurtling through the void at .265 of light, and it only speeds up from there. When Forged deep space explorer Voyager Lonestar Isol slams into the debris field of an unknown ship on her way to Barnard’s Star, she opens a Pandora’s Box of alien technology that soon sets Earth’s Unevolved humans at odds with their Forged ‘descendants’ in a page-turner of a book that resists easy categories.

Robson has always been one of a vanishingly small list of writers that I can confidently recommend both to serious hard SF fans and serious readers of literary fiction. Because, basically, she plays both those games — and she plays them about as well as anyone in the business. Though I hadn’t read Natural History when it first came out in 2004, I had read other books of Robson’s, including the loose sequel Living Next Door to the God of Love. So I knew a couple of things going into this read:

  1. Robson is one of the most brilliantly original hard SF writers in the business.
  2. She doles out massive overdoses of classic Sense of Wonder in a gorgeously fluid style that reads more like literary fiction than “Skiffy.”
  3. She doesn’t just handwave about the impact of technology on the human heart and soul — she pens vivid and unforgettable characters who will leave your preconceptions about the outer limits of human evolution in tatters.

Natural History delivers all that and more. It has enough dazzling visions of future technology to be balm to the soul for those of us who thrill to diagrams of starship drive systems the way that fantasy readers thrill to Tolkienesque maps-with-square-corners. It has original and intriguing science ideas, including a take on sentient spaceships as compelling as any I’ve ever encountered. It articulates a vision of life in virtual reality that is as intellectually and emotionally nuanced as any I’ve come across in three decades of reading hard SF. And Robson’s Forged — a pseudo-species of genetically-engineered human-machine hybrids — are the kind of emotionally resonant SF idea that has the power to reshape your core beliefs about the interface between humans and technology.

Here’s a taste of the kind of prose Robson delivers when she’s on her game. In one of my favorite passages of the book, a Forged character named Corvax is attacked by the infamous space pirate Xing Xianshi, a woman who really knows how to make an entrance:

Xing, a metre and a half of fine-boned Unevolved human, wore her customary fighting gear of nothing save a tattoo of her own genome written across her body. Her face was hidden by a respiratory mask and the heavier lines of Tek-metal which radiated down across her shoulders and back, and wove in dragon curves to her toes. Corvax heard the metal click faintly as she dismounted her ‘pony’ and drifted idly towards him. She waved a hand at his console array. It promptly vanished and he heard his own systems move into power-low mode. She’d had an upgrade somewhere else; he wondered who’d done it, even as she started talking.

“I hear you had a visitor.”

“She’s gone.” Corvax didn’t like lengthy and knowing conversations that hedged the point, but Xing enjoyed all the relish of her power.

“I would like to see your scan of the Voyager’s new engine.” Or maybe she was getting old too.

“I’m surprised you didn’t take it already.” He found himself inching away from her as she approached and her eyes became visible through the lensing of her mask.

“Our AI specialist was lost recently,” she said, and reached up to undo the long black pigtail of her hair. It unwound itself immediately — every strand a fibre-optic sensor line — and lifted in a dark nimbus, flowing this way and that as if in water as it glanced around her, feeding her Tek with information about the environment so she could draw conclusions about what Corvax had just been doing. “So I am reduced to asking this favour.”

What can I say? It doesn’t get better than that. SF fans should read Natural History to remember why they fell in love with science fiction in the first place. And SF writers should read Natural History with a pen in their hands, because Robson does everything SF is supposed to do … and then does a whole bunch of stuff that most writers in the business don’t even know SF can do.

PS – How good is Robson? So good that she once actually made me violate one of my top ten rules of the road for science fiction reading: Never read a book whose main character is a singer in a rock band. (I’ll have more to say elsewhere about ‘SF-ian Book Death and the Rock Band Character Kiss of Doom’ … you better believe I will.)

 

Filed Under: other people's books Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts