Books: October 2005 Archives
PH-UK has a nice interview with M. John Harrison, whom I can't ever remember reading an interview with before.
New Scientists poll of The World's Best Space Sci-Fi Ever is all over the SF Blogosphere.
I have to comment because it is just ridiculous.
Like many of these polls, the recent releases are overrated by vast porportions. Yes I love Firefly, yes I loved Serenity, but to say that Serenity is the best Scence Fiction film ever, is just rubbish. Better than rest of the top ten...The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars: A New Hope, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Dune, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Forbidden Planet, Return of the Jedi and Revenge of the Sith?? I don't think so. Well, Dune maybe, but those other films are classics and Serenity is not yet. It's just this months release.
The book list is equally uninspired. Not a mention of Gibson or Stephenson. Maybe that's just the New Scientist readership?
The TV show list I'll let off, it's reasonable.
Perhaps we need to arrange the definitive blog meme best SF list to get some sense.
Everyone cheer, Interzone gets a mainstream press mention for its 200th issue.
"...the fantastical short story can genuinely be said to thrive in its pages."
Well, I've finally finished reading Jonathan Strange... It's taken me a long time because it's a big book and I was only reading about a chapter a day (or less).
What did I think?
In my quest to find some apocalyptic SF to read I realised that I had already read a couple. These are the ones that I can remember.
- The Wild Shore - Kim Stanley Robinson. Probably the weakest of the Orange County trilogy but still worth a read. Also not sure it qualifies because only the US gets destroyed.
- I Am Legend - Richard Matheson. Brilliant, scary, scary book.
I've seen far more apocalyptic films. Not sure why, maybe because Hollywood keeps churning them out? :-)
I don't know why (perhaps it's the encroaching flu pandemic) but I have an urge to read apocalyptic, end of the word science fiction.
Can anyone recommend any?
My (very) short list so far consists of:
Day Of The Triffids
War Of The Worlds
The Drowned World
Yesterday the Telegraph had an article about, and extracts from, How To Survive A Robot Uprising (It was released in the UK a couple of weeks ago). It's highly entertaining. The website has extracts too including my favourite, filed under How To Survive Hand-To-Hand Combat...
DON’T BOTHER WITH KARATE
Unless you can punch through sheet metal.
And it's selling for £3.99 on Amazon. Bargain.
For anyone who's ever submitted a story to F&SF here's the good news...
Yes, all the stories get read
...and here's the bad news...
and yes most of them reveal themselves as awful within the first couple sentences or pages.
The SF Site has an Interview with Gwyneth Jones.
I think her Bold As Love series is quite brilliant, unfortunately I didn't enjoy Bold As Love as much as I wanted to and it put me off reading the others. Looking back on it now though it feels very original.
John@SFSignal has written about the website What Should I Read Next which uses the tried and trusted "other people liked this so you might" method of suggesting new things to read.
I tried it with Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. The results were interesting, Vernor Vinger being the only SF writer on the list. Trying a similar search on StoryCode produced a completely different set of results and more to my liking. StoryCode use a more complex coding algorithm than just what other people bought, and for me at least it seems more accurate. I also checked Amazon to see what it said. Amazon UK suggests the entire Gibson back catalogue and one Bruce Sterling book! Whilst Amazon US suggests similar but with a dash of Neal Stephenson and Richard Morgan. Ho ho.
The problem with these services is that it depends entirely on the amount of data they have. More statistics should equal a better recommendation. In which case Amazon should be the most accurate, which it probably is, but it is also clearly the least varied.
Following on smartly in the Bookers publicity wake comes The Blookers (via the BBC), an award for books that started off as blogs. The chair of the jury is Cory Doctorow, who once again gets a picture on the BBC website and a link to his website....that's how you sell books these days! Of course the awards themselves appear to be part of the grand marketing scheme of Lulu, the publish on demand er... publisher. So presumably the winner will be a book published by Lulu?! (BTW Lulu's SF&F section now has 1140 books. Blimey.)
Via SciFi.uk.com here's a list of condensed SF novels, some of which are funny, some of which are rubbish.
My free, uncorrected proof copy of The Brief History Of The Dead arrived yesterday. Nice cover, all Cloud Atlas style. It sounds quite intriguing, a bit slipstreamy. Also it's refreshingly thin (yes I'm still reading Jonathan Strange). What amazed me was they had hand written the address label. Crazy. Do they realise what happens when you offer free stuff on the web?!
I may read it next or one after next.
Note to self I must install Media Manager to keep track of this stuff on the site.
Via Online SciFi UK Review here's a site with lot's of out-of-copyright (or similar) books Authorama. In other words, free ones.
It's the usual suspects of Frankenstein and War of the Worlds, so you probably have them anyway.
It sounds like Gwyneth Jones doesn' like The Time Travellers Wife!
From Bold As Love "Definitely won't be voting for The Time Traveller's Wife, one of those "really cool blokes can't be housetrained" novels."
Personally I enjoyed it.
Her blog is still wonderfully poetic.
