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Richard Matheson Leaves A Great Legacy
You may or may not know Richard Matheson by name, but it’s likely that you know his work. His 1954 novel, I Am Legend, has been adapted to film three different times, and was the precursor to the earliest zombie films (it was the inspiration for Night of the Living Dead). I Am Legend appears on some of the most prestigious lists that WWEnd covers, including those of the Guardian, NPR and SF Masterworks. Another novel, The Shrinking Man, appears on five such lists, and was also a blockbuster in 1957. His horror novel, Hell House, is one of the top 100 in its field according to Nightmare Magazine, and also made it to the silver screen. Matheson’s psychic thriller, A Stir of Echoes, was adapted to film twice, and his super romantic time-travel novel, Bid Time Return, may be better known to you as that Christopher Reeves/Jane Seymour 1980 classic Somewhere in Time.
Mr. Matheson’s influence was far bigger than just genre fiction. He made his mark on the culture at large, and that is a rare accomplishment.
He died Sunday, at age 87.
WoGF Review: Miserere: An Autumn Tale by Teresa Frohock
Steff S. (MMOGC), is an avid reader with an eclectic taste in books. While just about anything can catch her eye, she has a particular soft spot for fantasy and science fiction, and especially loves space operas and stories with interesting magic systems. Besides reading, she enjoys adventuring in the virtual words of MMORPGs, and first started blogging about games before branching out to contribute her book reviews at The BiblioSanctum with her friends.
Books like Miserere are why I’m glad I make it a personal rule to finish reading all books I start. It’s always tempting to put a title away for something else when the story doesn’t capture me right away, and certainly I had my doubts that this one would be right for me when I first began. But sometimes, a book can be full of surprises.
I ended up loving Miserere. All I needed was some time to get into it, and part of the reason is its pacing. It’s the kind of book that takes its time revealing itself to you, doling out details about its world in a trickle as you read. I was unable to make heads or tails of the story until I understood a bit of the context, that the universe of Miserere is made up of four planes: Heaven, Earth, Woerld, and Hell. Woerld is sort of like the first line of defense against Hell and its demons, as it were; all the religions there work to keep Fallen hordes from breaking through to Earth. It is in Woerld where the book mostly takes place.
Exorcist and man of faith Lucian Negru has been in exile for sixteen years, banished for abandoning his lover Rachael in Hell in exchange for the life of his twin sister, Catarina. Catarina, however, didn’t want to be saved, as she’d sold her soul to the Fallen for the chance to rule Woerld. Lucian was crippled and imprisoned when he refused to go along with her plans, until one day he escapes and endeavors to save Rachael, who has since made it back from Hell, albeit possessed by a demon that is slowly taking over and killing her.
Book Giveaway: Gemsigns by Stephanie Saulter
Thanks to the good people at Jo Fletcher Books we have 5 autographed copies of Stephanie Saulter’s debut book Gemsigns to give away. For your chance to win all you have to do is re-tweet our tweet, share our FB post, or leave a comment below! Do all three and triple your chances. The contest is open to all and will last until next Monday when we’ll draw 5 names from the hat.
Jo Fletcher Books, an imprint of Quercus Publishing, is a specialist science fiction, fantasy and horror imprint in the UK with plans to come stateside. Jo Fletcher’s own personal tastes in fiction have always been wonderfully eclectic and JFB is dedicated to being as broad a church as possible, hopefully publishing something for everyone. WWEnd has the complete JFB catalog in our database so check out the selection on the JFB publisher page.
Gemsigns
by Stephanie Saulter
For years the human race was under attack from a deadly Syndrome, but when a cure was found – in the form of genetically engineered human beings, Gems – the line between survival and ethics was radically altered.
Now the Gems are fighting for their freedom, from the oppression of the companies which created them, and against the Norms, who have always seen them as slaves. The conference at which Dr Eli Walker has been commissioned to present his findings on the Gems is the key to that freedom.
But with the Gemtech companies fighting to keep the Gems enslaved, and the horrifying godgangs determined to rid the earth of these ‘unholy’ creations, the Gems are up against forces that might just be too powerful to oppose.
From the publisher:
Gemsigns is a fast-paced and exciting story, full of engaging, memorable characters. It’s old-fashioned storytelling in that there is a clear sense of what is at stake, who is on which side, and that the threat is huge and horrifying; but it’s unusual and quite modern in that it leaves it up to the reader to decide what they think is the right answer to the central moral question. There are characters you will probably like but not necessarily agree with, and characters you might find appalling, but think are actually in the right. And the ending is a real shocker – almost no one who’s read it sees what’s coming. Will you?
About the Author:
Stephanie Saulter has been a real estate developer, restaurant manager, corporate executive, public policy wonk, management consultant and founder of the Scriptopus interactive website for writing short fiction. She doesn’t have a poor attention span; on the contrary she finds lots of things interesting, and figures you learn more by doing. Few of her jobs would appear to have any relationship to her combined degree in literature and anthropology from MIT, but she would disagree. She’s finally settled down to writing more-or-less full time, which lets her continue to explore lots of different lives without actually having to leave the house. Born in the Caribbean, she now lives in Devon.
For those of you participating in the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge, Mz. Saulter would be an excellent choice for a new author since this is her first book or even to satisfy the 1 random author requirement. I’m looking forward to seeing some reviews for this one. Good luck to all!
Edit: We just added an excerpt for Gensigns so you can get a little taste.
69 Reasons not to Send a Message to Space
The Jamesburg Earth Station, a communications dish just outside Carmel, California, is currently pointing into space. Unlike most such dishes, it isn’t passive:
Instead of listening for ET, like SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), or waiting for ET, like the wonderfully humorous WETI (Wait For Extraterrestrial Intelligence – success to-date is 100%, they note) the METI movement is proactively messaging the universe.
David Brin isn’t so sure this is a good idea:
Let there be no mistake. METI is a very different thing than passively sifting for signals from the outer space. Carl Sagan, one of the greatest SETI supporters and a deep believer in the notion of altruistic alien civilizations, called such a move deeply unwise and immature. (Even Frank Drake, who famously sent the “Arecibo Message” toward the Andromeda Galaxy in 1974, considered “Active Seti to be, at best, a stunt and generally a waste of time.) Sagan — along with early SETI pioneer Philip Morrison — recommended that the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand.
The body of science fiction works seems to support Mr. Brin’s view. A blank search of the WWEnd database’s “alien invasion” subgenre tag (through Booktrackr) netted 69 books. Here’s just a few:
Neil Gaiman’s Last American Book Crawl
Neil Gaiman is about to launch what is billed as his last US signing tour:
I think the OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE tour will be the last actual signing tour I ever do. They’re exhausting, on a level that’s hard to believe. I love meeting people, but the sixth hour of signing, for people who have been standing in a line for seven hours, is no fun for anybody. (The last proper US signing I did, it lasted over 7 hours and I signed for over 1000 people. I’d suspect a lot of the signings on this tour will be like that, or bigger.)
Around the World in 30 Gigs
Project Loon sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel, but it’s already being tested:
Google ran its first public test last weekend, in New Zealand, sending 30 balloons into the sky and offering 60 lucky volunteers 15 minutes of balloon-based Internet access. Smaller, private tests were conducted in California and possibly elsewhere.
The company says that “over time” it intends to set up similar pilots in countries with the same latitude as New Zealand (40th parallel south). It hasn’t provided any timeline for these pilots.
And to think, until now, I only envied those Google Fiber towns…
My God, He’s Full of Stars
Arthur C. Clarke is finally getting a home worthy of his prose:
Though the author of “2001: A Space Odyssey” died in 2008 in Sri Lanka, scientists from NASA today announced plans to send his DNA into orbit around the sun in 2014 aboard the Sunjammer, an astonishing solar-powered spacecraft.
Wired explains the Sunjammer project:
The Sunjammer project is named after science fiction author Arthur C Clarke’s story of the same name. The story centres around a spaceship designer John Merton who develops a vehicle with a large solar sail powered entirely by radiation pressure. These fictional sun-yachts can achieve speeds of 2,000 miles an hour within a day, pushed simply by sunlight.
Find out more about the project here.
Judgment Day is slightly less nigh.
Once again, the social value of science fiction has proven helpful in the real world:
A few weeks ago, the United Nations affirmed Isaac Asimov‘s First Law of Robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being.” Christof Heyns, the U.N. special rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, said as much in a May 29 speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva calling for a moratorium on the development of lethal robots. His argument followed two thoughtful paths, expressing concern that they cannot be as discriminating in their judgments as humans and that their very existence might make war too easy to contemplate. As he summed up the grim prospect of robot soldiers, “War without reflection is mechanical slaughter.”
The aptly named Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has endorsed the Heyns report’s recommendations, namely:
- Put in place a national moratorium on lethal autonomous robotics. (Paragraph 118)
- Declare a commitment to abide by International Humanitarian Law and international human rights law in all activities surrounding robotic weapons and put in place and implement rigorous processes to ensure compliance at all stages of development. This should be done both unilaterally and through multilateral fora. (Paragraph 119)
- Commit to being as transparent as possible about internal weapons review processes, including metrics used to test robotic systems. States should at a minimum provide the international community with transparency regarding the processes they follow (if not the substantive outcomes) and commit to making the reviews as robust as possible. (Paragraph 120)
- Participate in international debate on lethal autonomous robotics and be prepared to exchange best practices with other States, and collaborate with the High Level Panel on lethal autonomous robotics. (Paragraph 121)
All of this comes on the heels of a Department of Defense directive to pause the development of “autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems that could lead to unintended engagements.” The pause, of course, can be unpaused any time the DoD wants. No word on whether any such robots, commonly known as LARS (Lethal Autonomous Robots), will ever be programmed with Asimovian directives.
I wouldn’t hold my breath.
If you’d like glimpse of what happens next, check out Asimov’s vision. Maybe he’ll prove prescient:
Talk about your guilded cages…
Every year, the Freedom to Read Foundation awards several grants from the Judith F. Krug Memorial Fund in order to recognize outstanding work in raising “banned book awareness.” One of this year’s winners was…
The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, in the historic Emelie Building in downtown Indianapolis, was one of seven organizations nationwide to receive this award. It’s the first institution devoted to an individual to receive the grant.
The grant is in response to Corey Michael Dalton’s stunt, which involved living a week in a cell made of books. Here’s how the event was described at the time:
Dalton will find himself, beginning Sept. 30 at noon, living 24 hours a day in a makeshift cell abutting the library’s front window, surrounded on two or three sides by walls made of banned books. The week-long stunt is tied to both Banned Books Week, a national venture celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and to the Vonnegut Library’s efforts to bring attention to a partial ban of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five by a Missouri school district.
We reported on the Vonnegut ban at the time it happened, and again when it was partially rolled back. Like most bans, this one created a lot of energy in support of the banned author. Such is the irony censorship.
Fahrenheit 451 in Less than 3 Minutes
Check out this awesome three minute video that explains Ray Bradbury’s science fiction classic Fahrenheit 451 from Academic Earth. It was created as part of a series of original videos designed to spark intellectual curiosity and start a conversation. If you like this one, you can see the other videos in the series, including one for Atlas Shrugged, on the Academic Earth website.
Our thanks to Jack Collins, one of the creators of the series, for sending us the link. Well done, Sir! I hope we’ll see more of these in the future.
