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WoGF Review: The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord
Wendy B. (nightxade): My brother introduced me to science fiction, fantasy and comics when I was barely out of diapers and LeVar Burton encouraged my love of reading throughout my youth. If my love of reading is the only legacy I can pass forward to my little geeklings, I would be a very happy mom. (If they pick up my love of gaming, writing and their dad’s love of cooking, too, then that would be even better!). Now I happily share my bibliophilia with my fellow bibliophiles at bibliosanctum.blogspot.com.
Editor’s note: This review was submitted in last month and counts for the May review poll.
The Best of All Possible Worlds takes place in a distant future, featuring varied species of humans separated by different planets and genetic developments that result in some differences in appearance and mental abilities. Many of these people are brought together by various tragedies to the planet known as Cygnus Beta. The story takes place shortly after the heinous destruction of Sadira, home to a stoic race of people who pride themselves on mental disciplines that have resulted in a level of telepathic communication and emotional control. These elements define the book as “science fiction,” but in truth, this is a wonderful, quiet little love story. Not that this is merely a romance set in space. The science fiction aspect remains prominent, but it is the interpersonal relationships and sociological studies that are at the story’s heart.
The story is mainly told by Grace Delarua, a 30-something Cygnus Beta native of mixed race, who works with a contingent of Sadiri people seeking to perpetuate their dwindling culture. The author explains that she was inspired by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed a large percentage of females and forced those remaining to relocate and adjust to their new surroundings. On Cygnus Beta, there are several taSadiri societies that the group must visit to determine genetic potential for Sadiri males. Having left Sadira long before, the taSadiri have developed in many different ways, from a society that patterns itself after fantasy lore, to an incestuous mess of classism and many more in between. The goal of Delarua’s group is to maintain Sadiri disciplines and genetics as much as possible through suitable pairings, but as they progress, they find that this is not an easy task.
WoGF Review: Earthblood & Other Stories by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown
Christine Bellerive (cmbellerive) is an omnivorous reader who devours literary and genre fiction alike. When she’s not reading, she’s editing other people’s books — and writing a fantasy novel of her own. Her other interests include stringed instruments and hunting dogs of the American South. She blogs at Strange Quarks.
Editor’s note: This review was submitted on May 30 and counts for May. It just took a few days to get it posted.
I wanted to pick up some 60s sci-fi as part of the Women of Genre Fiction reading challenge; I chose Earthblood somewhat at random. Rosel George Brown (1926-67) published only a couple dozen short stories and a few novels before her career was tragically cut short by illness. This particular novel was a collaboration with Keith Laumer. Creative collaboration, like sex, is a complicated art form, and no two partners do it quite the same, so to sort out exactly how much of the book is Laumer and how much is Brown would be impossible. I won’t try; I’ll just review the book as one complete whole. However, if you skip to the end, the 2012 Baen reprint also includes some of Brown’s short stories! Win.
Roan is the only pure-blooded human being (“Terran”) that anyone on his home planet Tambool has ever met. He arrived on the planet as a frozen embryo, where he was purchased, gestated, and brought up by the alien couple Raff and Bella. He grew up among various alien races, yearning to discover his roots; but centuries ago the Niss laid siege to planet earth and no one has crossed their blockade since. No one’s even sure where earth was, anymore, or if there are any other pure humans left in the universe.
Hell is Adaptations: Cloud Atlas
When British writer David Mitchell published Cloud Atlas, the novel struck the reading public as a daring, multilayered work. It was a critical and commercial success, yet seemed impossible to adapt to the big screen. Yet as the story goes, Nathalie Portman shared her love for the novel with the Wachowskis during the filming of V for Vendetta, and the two siblings determined to do the impossible, and bring the book to the big screen.
Photo from the script meeting.
WoGF Review: Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold
Alex Hammel (ahmmel) is an MSc. student in botany at the University of British Columbia. He started reading Tolkien and Lewis as a young nerd, and became an avid reader of all kinds of speculative fiction as an undergraduate when he discovered that it was more fun than studying. He joined WWEnd to participate in the WoGF challenge, and can often be found in the vicinity of a good beer.
I’m not sure how I managed to overlook the fact that Silver has four arms on the cover, but I did. Falling Free, my WoGF read for May, manages to be an excellent SF adventure without taking any of the usual recourse to space battles, aliens, and colonization.
Having disposed of these devices, Bujold does an excellent job of giving us an engineering-based adventure. Seriously. Almost all of the excitement and suspense in the book comes from the planning, last-minute revision, and execution of engineering projects. This works much better than I’m probably making it sound: I was deeply emotionally invested in Graf’s bid to make a large mirror under difficult conditions.
The engineering focus of the story lends a lot of realism to the setting. In this universe spaceships are made of real parts that can break through wear or misuse and be refitted to do new stuff. Granted, stuff breaks in most space operas, but Bujold accomplishes a certain amount of verismo by making her protagonist an engineer (when was the last time you saw an engineer in an SF story who had tasks aside from pressing buttons and spouting technobabble?) and letting us go through the process of thinking up plausible solutions to technical problems the way real engineers (I suppose) have to. It makes for a very believable universe, even with the presence of soft-SF devices like faster-than-light travel, a brain/computer interface, and ad libidum genetic engineering.
WoGF Review: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Jack Dowden (JDowds) doesn’t review Sci-Fi/Fantasy books on his blog 100 Stories 100 Weeks. Instead, he’s set himself the unbelievably naive task of writing 100 short stories in 100 weeks. The results are often disastrous. He came to WWEnd to talk to people about Sci-Fi/Fantasy books though, and is having a wonderful time doing it!
There’s a certain humor that comes with SF, no matter how much we’d like to deny it. Murder… IN SPACE. Religion… IN SPACE. Nazis… IN SPACE. Like heavy metal music, the genre of SF/F can be inspiring and can ask a lot of questions about what it means to be a human, but there’s also a sense of hilarity to it.
Not so in Kindred. This book is called Science Fiction, but it isn’t filed under SF and even Butler said she thought it more of a “grim fantasy.” The only thing that makes this SF is the time traveling, and the time traveling isn’t ever explained.
Kindred is a simple story, at least in concept. A black woman, MC, living in modern day Los Angeles (by modern, I mean 1976) with her white husband, is sent back in time – against her own will – to the antebellum south, to a plantation where some of her ancestors are located.
In terms of plot and story structure, this novel obeys all the rules. There’s a gradual increase of tension, character arcs, and some clear plot points.
WoGF Review: Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
Nadine Gemeinböck (Linguana) has been reading fantasy for as long as she can remember. She started blogging about books on SFF Book Review in 2012, hoping to keep track of what she read and how she liked it. The book blogging community has since helped her open her literary horizons and thanks to WWEnd, she is currently working her way through NPR’s Top 100. Her blogging resolution is to review more foreign language books and finally take the plunge into a big, swooping space opera.
It is entirely thanks to the book blogging community that I have discovered Nalo Hopkinson. I have spent the last few months actively looking for female SFF writers that I didn’t know yet (thanks again to the WWEnd Women of Genre Fiction Challenge) as well as writers of color, stories about people of color and LBTQ characters. Because, as much as I read, there are very few non-American or non-European writers to be found on my reading lists and I wanted to remedy that. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech also served as an eye-opener and I found it extremely inspiring. There is so much diversity out there and I want to experience it. Nalo Hopkinson and Octavia E. Butler‘s names kept coming up and all of their books sounded so good that there was no reason for me to wait any longer discovering them. Thank You, Internet!
MIDNIGHT ROBBER
by Nalo Hopkinson
Published by: Warner Aspect, 2000
ISBN: 0446675601
Paperback: 336 pages
Standalone
My rating: 8,5/10
First sentence: Oho. Like it starting, oui? Don’t be frightened, sweetness; is for the best.
2013 Hugo Voter Packet
The 2013 Hugo Voters Packet is now available for members of LoneStarCon 3, the 71st annual Worldcon convention. The packet is “an electronic package of nominated works graciously made available to voters by nominees and their publishers.”
From the LoneStarCon website:
The 2013 Hugo Voter Packet is available to Supporting, Attending, Military and Young Adult members of LoneStarCon 3 to help inform them about the works under consideration before voting. The packet will remain available until voting closes on Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 11:59pm CDT.
Members can login here. You will need your name (as recorded in the LoneStarCon 3 membership database) and your unique Hugo PIN to access the Hugo Voter Packet content. PIN reminders will be sent out at regular intervals during the final ballot period. Instructions on how to recover lost or forgotten PINs can be found on the download page.
Not going to attend Worldcon? No problem, you can still get in on the action. You can sign up as a Supporting Member for $60 and get the packet – valued way more than $60 by the way – and you’ll be eligible to vote. That’s a pretty damn good deal and less than you would have to pay for just the novels alone.
Get to reading and get to voting!
WoGF Review: The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy
When Beth Besse (Badseedgirl) is not preparing for the coming zombie apocalypse, or having long, and often bitter arguments with her sister over whether “Night of The Comet” is actually a zombie movie (well of course it is, it even says it in the movie description), she can be found curled up somewhere in her Tennessee home reading SF and Horror of questionable quality. Her guilty pleasure reading almost always involves urban fantasies or Southern Fried Vampires. Her Goal is to be able to someday boast that she has read every title in at least one WWEnd book list. (And finally convince her sister that “Night of the Comet” is a Zombie movie)
In the prologue, we are first introduced to a woman who is running away from San Francisco days after the plague. She is about to have a baby. Alone and scared she starts to “hallucinate” an angel. The woman promises the angel that it can name her child. This child grows up on a farm outside a small farming community led by a man called “Four Star”. This self-appointed leader’s mission is to bring back the United States of America, by any means possible including force. Through his actions, the girl’s mother dies, but before she does she sends the girl to San Francisco to warn the people there that Four Star is coming to invade.
The story starts 16 years after a mysterious plague has wiped out most of the population of the world. Small pockets of humanity survived and created what can only be described as a series of city states where the population survives through production of necessities and through foraging through the pre plague leftovers. Each area of, in this case, California seems to have created its own form of government according to the needs of the people. But what happens when one man decides that he is way is the only way?
Star Trek Into Darkness – Review
“I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh, there has been technical advancement, but how little man himself has changed.”
I’m just going to get the most annoying part of this out of the way: Benedict Cumberbatch plays the role of Khan Noonien Singh. I do not consider this a spoiler, as he is clearly listed as such on IMDb. I find this annoying for two reasons: (1) the cast and crew have been denying that Khan would be any part of this film for over a year, and (2) this character would have been much more interesting if there hadn’t been any “twist” at all. Those involved with The Dark Knight Rises made a similar string of disavowals about Marion Cotillard being the daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul, only to have it “revealed” at the end of the film. While I understand the desire of movie makers to keep some aspects of their upcoming films secret before release in an age of non-stop internet gossip, so many of them have cried wolf that future denials will likely be taken as confirmation.
The World’s End Trailer
Wow, there sure are a lot of good scifi trailers coming out this week. The World’s End is the last part of a “trilogy” from the makers of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I’m pleased to see The Hobbit‘s Martin Freeman in a supporting role.
