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GMRC Review: A for Anything by Damon Knight
Guest Blogger and WWEnd Member, Charles Dee Mitchell, has contributed a great many book reviews to WWEnd including his blog series Philip K. Dickathon and The Horror! The Horror! He can also be found on his own blog www.potatoweather.blogspot.com. This is Dee’s seventh GMRC review to feature in our blog.
Since January, I have read a novel a month by one of the winners of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, given by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. I thought I was about time to read a novel by the man himself. (Knight won the award in 1994. He was a founder of the SFWA and the award was named for him after his death in 2002.) Although several of the Grand Masters I have read I have been reading for the first time this year, Knight is perhaps the one I knew the least about. I would be hard pressed to name any of his books. Even though I worked around used books for thirty years, I cannot picture any of his covers or remember that he ever merited his own shelf. Somewhere along the way I picked up the fact that he wrote the short story “To Serve Man,” which became a classic Twilight Zone episode. (Don’t get on that ship! The book… the book… it’s a cookbook!) And so I picked up A for Anything with no expectations.
Perhaps I should not have read his first novel, although I am inclined to start at the first with an author. But I have to say this is the most peculiar book I have read in some time, and not in a particularly good way. Here’s what happens in the first three chapters.
The Hobbit Trailer #2
“If Baggins loses we eats it whole.” Yes, we do, Precious.
UPDATE: More clips!
You only *think* you’ve read all the SF Masterworks.
The other day I stumbled upon a SF Masterworks cover that I had not seen before and I thought I aught to see what new ones had come out since our last update. Lo and behold, I found 12 new ones! That brings our list up to 114, not counting any reprints in the new un-numbered series.
I often wonder why these seem to come out with no fanfare but I’ve gotten used to the idea that the publisher, Gollancz (Orion Books), doesn’t really care about promoting this series. Seriously, go to their web site and see if you can find any info on it. I can’t find anything at all – not even a simple list of titles in the series. There was a Masterworks page at one time but it didn’t survive their site re-design a few years ago. Wikipedia to the rescue!
If anyone from Gollancz is listening, I’d like very much to get more official information on this series, please.
Review: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
This review originally appeared on my blog Tethyan Books.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Published: Black Swan, 1996
Series: There is a sequel, Children of God
Awards Won: 1997 BSFA, 1998 Clarke
Awards Nominated: 1997 Campbell
One kind-of spoiler follows, which is revealed at the beginning of the first chapter.
The Book:
“When the first alien society was discovered, it was not the government of any country that sent the first expedition. Instead, the first to react was the Society of Jesus, a religious order with a long history in the exploration and study of newly discovered foreign lands. The Jesuits quickly and privately mobilized a group of eight friends and experts to make the dangerous journey to a new world.
They went not to proselytize, but to learn and to meet God’s other children. They went with the best of intentions. When the next public expedition finally arrived, they found only one of the original expedition still alive.
Emilio Sandoz—severely injured in body, mind, and soul—was unable to give any explanation for the squalor in which he was found. How could such an well-meaning expedition have gone so horribly wrong?” ~Allie (with some phrases taken from the prologue)
Proof That Voldemort Lives
The Miami Herald is reporting that the mom-porn novel 50 Shades of Grey is now outselling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by more than two to one. That is all.
GMRC Review: Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey
Guest Blogger and WWEnd member, valashain, reviews science fiction and fantasy books on his blog Val’s Random Comments which we featured in a previous post: Five SF/F Book Blogs Worth Reading. Val has posted many great reviews to WWEnd and this is his ninth for the GMRC. Be sure to visit his site and let him know you found him here.
As I’ve noted before, the Damon Knight memorial Grand Master Award is seriously short on female authors. Only four out of the twenty-eight winners are women. Since one of my objectives for this year is to read more work written by women I am going to try to read all four for this challenge. I read Forerunner by Andre Norton and The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin earlier this year. Next up is Anne McCaffrey, who was honoured with this award in 2005. Picking a book was a bit of a problem. McCaffrey is best known for her Pern novels, of which I have read exactly one: Dragonflight, published in 1968. I didn’t like it very much. I’m sure it was sensational at the time but forty years on, it seemed like a pretty mediocre novel to me. An Australian friend of mine is a bit better acquainted with McCaffrey’s oeuvre and she suggested I try Dragonsdawn (1988). Chronologically it is the first of the Pern novels (there are a few shorter pieces in the same era or even set before the novel) but McCaffrey wrote it some twenty years after Dragonflight. I must say, the fact that she had a bunch of novels under her belt by this time shows in the writing.
After a long journey though interstellar space, three ships full of colonists arrive in the Rukbat system where they intend to colonize the third planet. When they bought into the expedition, they knew it would be a one way trip. The ships are nearly out of fuel, they will be cannibalized to provide the colony with materials. Pern, as the third planet is referred to, is a remote place, far away from the busy shipping lanes of the galaxy and has only been surveyed briefly. The planet has developed its own ecology but is without sentient life. There is every possibility to create an utopian society, away from the wars and conflicts of the more densely populated regions of space. The colony is developing rapidly with only minor squabbles along the way when the colonists become aware of a major threat to their existence. Threadfall. Their rapidly declining technological resources will not be enough to save them. Other, more radical options will have to be considered.
Where to Find DRM-Free eBooks, and Why It’s Worth the Effort
A couple of weeks back, Rico penned a post saying goodbye to eBook DRM (digital rights management), following Tor Books’ announcement that it had extended its new no-DRM policy worldwide. The common sense arguments against DRM are laid out in that post, but, despite Tor’s decision, the brave new world of DRM-free eBooks isn’t quite here yet. Many authors and smaller publishers are embracing DRM-free books, but the big publishers and the major eBook retailers are still resistant.
This is not surprising, since an important profit-making strategy for large corporations is to restrict competition, and that is exactly what DRM does. It’s well known by this point that DRM does not prevent digital piracy—the argument usually made for it. What it does is prevent book buyers from moving their files across reading platforms. From a publisher perspective, this could increase profits by increasing the chance that some readers will end up re-buying books in the future, if they ever want to switch to a different reader, or somehow lose access to the account their books are attached to. It makes even more sense from the perspective of Amazon and Barnes and Noble, the major book retailers and producers of the two top e-readers. If you’ve already bought a hundred eBooks from Amazon, and you can’t read them on a Nook or a Sony Reader, you will feel locked into continuing to use the Kindle, even if a competing e-reader comes along that you’d like to switch to. And if you stick with the Kindle, you won’t be buying books from Barnes and Noble or any other DRM-restricted e-bookstore.
There are advantages to staying with a particular eBook “ecosystem.” Amazon makes a great e-reader, can sell you just about any eBook that’s available, and is very easy to use. Barnes and Noble can make similar claims. But whichever you choose, you’re pretty much stuck with that company (or whoever buys it out in the future) forever. And, for the moment, the big publishers are determined to “double down” on DRM, as Cory Doctorow describes here. Hatchette Book Group is trying to force its authors to sign contracts requiring them to make sure that any books they publish, even when published through other publishers, contain DRM. An author who has published with Hatchette and Tor, according to Doctorow, has received a letter pressuring the author to ensure that Tor does not remove the DRM from the author’s Tor books. It seems clear that these companies are not going to give up easily.
Java the Cup
Like most WWEnders, I want to go to space. It doesn’t have to be now, which is good, because who can afford the $20 million that it takes today? Some day, however, a journey to low Earth orbit will cost considerably less. When that happens, I want to stay up there for as long as feasible. Because the primary cost of such a trip will be the journey itself, I figure that the length of the trip will matter much less. It costs a lot less to stay there than to get there, after all. That got me to thinking what any red blooded American would think. If we’re going to be up there for days or weeks at a time, how are we going to get a good cup of joe? We have to be ready.
Here’s my plan, so far:
