Books: April 2006 Archives
The official site has not been updated yet, but I got it from Notes From Coode Street and Locus Online that Geoff Ryman has won this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award for gis novel air. That's the double along with the BSFA award.
Locus has put interview excerpts with Justina Robson and Elizabeth Bear online.
I haven't read any Elizabeth Bear but they sound my kind of thing, "“There's a lot in those books that's intentionally a tour of the last 30 years of science fiction: a cyberpunk thread, a military history thread, a singularity thread."
[Via SF Signal]
The Philip K. Dick Award winner is...
WAR SURF by M. M. Buckner (Ace Books)
...with a special citation was given to:
NATURAL HISTORY by Justina Robson (Bantam Spectra)
Hmmm. What's a special citation? Runner up?
And the winners of the BSFA awards are...
Best Novel of 2005: Air, by Geoff Ryman (Gollancz)
Best Short Fiction: 'Magic for Beginners' by Kelly Link
Best Artwork: Cover of Interzone #200 -- Pawel Lewandowski
Non-Fiction Award: Soundings: Reviews 1992-1996 -- Gary K Wolfe (Beccon Publications)
Which seems right to me. Congratulations everyone.
Anyone who's read recent Jon Courtenay Grimwood fiction will know to expect some crime aspect to his fiction, however 9 Tail Fox is a crime novel , albeit with a SF concept at its core. The blurb doesn't even mention Science Fiction so perhaps this is an attempt to break out of the SF genre?
The writing is great, the characters perfectly realised and the city, San Francisco, is described wonderfully, you get a real sense of place and feel. The plot is quite simple on the surface and complicated underneath, clues dropped here and there. I have to say I had completely failed to work out what was going on when the ending revealed all. Maybe that's just my inexperience with crime novels?
At the end, all though I enjoyed it, I felt a little disappointed that it wasn't more SF. Overall I prefer Pashazade. But if you want a cool, stylish crime novel with an SF twist then you probably won't find any better.
Via The Slush God, Fantasy and Science Fiction's stories on the Hugo Ballot are now online.
They are the amazingly wonderful "Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link and two I haven't yet read "The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi and "Two Hearts" by Peter S. Beagle.
The full programme for Alt-Fiction is online now, and I just bought a ticket!
It's on Saturday 6th May, in Derby (that's in the middle of England if you don't live in the UK). It includes three parallel tracks and includes authors such as Richard Morgan, James Lovegrove and Justina Robson in a combination of workshops, discussions, readings and Q&A sessions. Check out the full schedule.
The full-length one, not the back from the dead runcible ansible infinite matrix one.
I loved The Brief History of the Dead, so did SCI FI Weekly, they gave it an A+.
Via The Mumpsimus Publishers Weekly has an article Too Geeky for Its Own Good? which summarises the response to Dave Itzkoff's NYT column. A nice piece. I like all this controversy and argument about SF.
Aha, Asimov's Science Fiction has all of their Hugo nominees online, not just Ian McDonald.
[Via Emerald City]
(But that's what happens when you blog in order of feeds read)
Can't remember if I've blogge dthis before, so I'll do it again anyway, The Little Goddess by Ian McDonald is online. Read it.
Keith Brooke talks about John Christopher's Tripods trilogy on infinity plus.
I remember these books from the BBC TV series, although I read the books after. Great stuff.
I heard a lot of hype around Ted Chiang's short stories, a handful produced over a few years and everyone saying they were brilliant. Therefore I had high expectations. I'm glad to say that it didn't let me down.
