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Jim Butcher on Sword & Laser
I’m one of the many fans impatiently waiting for the release of Jim Butcher’s 14th Dresden Files novel, Cold Days. The YouTube genre show “Sword & Laser” recently featured Butcher’s work in an episode, including an extended interview with Butcher himself. He doesn’t spoil much about the new book, but he does tease the “apocalyptic trilogy” he plans to write to close out the series in the near future. Check it out:
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.
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.
Three WWEnd Listed Authors Go Cheap!
A Festival of Death: Scalzi and Wheaton Read from Redshirts
When I first heard of Redshirts I thought it was a clever idea but I was concerned it might be a bit like a Saturday Night Live skit carried too far. The reviews have been pretty good, however, and this video makes it look like a fun read. So who’s read it and what did you think?
Why I Want to See Neuromancer: A Confession
This is a little embarrassing to admit. I didn’t totally understand Neuromancer. It’s a great novel. It garners 4 out of 5 stars by the 300 WWEnders who have read it, which I assume means they grasped it better than I did. Don’t get me wrong, though. I did enjoy reading it (Gibson has a beautifully poetic writing style), but I think I may have read it too quickly. Life in cyberspace, after all, is inherently esoteric. He’s describing techology that didn’t exist yet, so his names for everything are different from we might call them now.
That is why I’m more interested in the upcoming movie than I usually would be. I don’t just want to see a great book recreated on the silver screen….I want to see what the hell it was all about! Recently, it’s been revealed that Mark Wahlberg and Liam Neeson have been tapped to help explain this novel to me.
All Hallow’s Read
Labor Day has come and gone, and you know what that means. Well, here in Texas, it means no more long strings of 100+° days. For the rest of you, it could mean the start of a new school year, locking up your favorite white sweater, and stocking up for Halloween. Normally, I don’t think about that last thing until, oh, around noon on October 31st. This year, however, I’ll be scoping the used book stores about once per week in preparation for All Hallow’s Read, a new tradition that Neil Gaiman suggested so late last year that I wasn’t prepared to do anything about it. Well, this year, I’m going to be ready.
You can’t just give out any book, of course. It has to be scary. Because I want to promote the best in science fiction and fantasy, I also want them to be WWEnd books. After all, I have my standards. So, here’s my strategy: I made a list of the scariest novels in the WWEnd database for this week’s blog entry. Then, I’m taking my smart phone to the local Half Price Books, where I will pull up this very blog entry. See how organized I am? I’m hoping to get dozens of copies of the following books:
This one is a no-brainer. Not only does it appear on virtually every classic SF list (including Classics of SF, Locus, Guardian, and NPR), it has long been held to be the first science fiction novel ever (Brian Aldiss makes the argument in Billion Year Spree). It’s also worth noting that the first science fiction novelist was a woman, making Frankenstein the oldest book on the SF Mistressworks list. The novel is, perhaps, most scary to government officials, as it was variously banned in places like South Africa and (gulp) Texas.
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
It wasn’t the first (or even the third) vampire novel ever written, but it is, of course, the most renowned. The Guardian said that the book "spawned fiction’s most lucrative entertainment industry," but we are more impressed by its literary chops. The critics of the day favorably compared Dracula to Shelly, Emily Bronte and even the great Edgar Allan Poe. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was impressed. Your trick-or-treaters are the best testament to the novel’s greatness, as Dracula is arguably the most popular Halloween costume — ever.
The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndam
Unless you are a fan of the old black and white B movies, you probably associated man-eating plants with Little Shop of Horrors. But before Audrey 2 there were Triffids, horrifying venomous carnivores that began to prey on humans right after a meteor shower renders virtually all humans blind. That’s double the horror! At one point, the seemingly intelligent plants figure out how to herd sightless humans into groups, to, you know, maximize the carnage. The Day of the Triffids is a must read according to the Guardian and David Pringle. It also made the Classics of SF list.
Other novels I might give out include The Midwich Cuckoos (John Wyndam, again), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stephenson, Shadowland by Peter Straub, and anything by Stephen King (including his BFS award winning novel, It) or Clive Barker. For more ideas, check out the Dark Fantasy sub-genre list… and, please, tell us in the comments section what books you are going to give out.
The Illuminated Silmarillion
This is something quite different from our usual science fiction and fantasy news: German art student Benjamin Harff created a hand-illuminated manuscript of The Silmarillion for his exam at the Academy of Arts. In Harff’s own words:
I created the deluxe-Silmarillion for my exam at the Academy of Arts. My first idea was to create illustrations for the Lord of the Rings, but I realized that the films had left a too strong impression upon me, so I could not work free. So I decided to illustrate the Silmarillion. The calligraphy was first planned to be reduced to one single initial for each chapter. So I studied the “History of Middle-Earth”-books as well as the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien and especially his works as an illustrator, which give many indications about his imagination of Middle-Earth that cannot be derived from written words. I also tried to find out what inspired him lyrically and visually and I think you can put that into one word: nature.
It is obvious that Tolkien was also a lover of calligraphy, especially medieval. In the book “J.R.R. Tolkien – Artist and Illustrator” I found a hint about a book concerning calligraphy Tolkien had read. So I bought the same book and worked it through.
That was the point where I had more and more fun in doing medieval calligraphy and finally I had to make a decision: Illustrations OR calligraphy. This was not easy, because I had made very excessive preparations for the oil-paintings, but my time was so short, that I could not do both.
I do not regret my decision, because I have made my exam now and there are still tons of studies and prepared wood-plates waiting for paint. One study in pencil I put along with these words, they show the taking of Arathorn by the Hill-Trolls.
Thanks to Make for the link.
Starship Troopers
Very few science fiction novels have aroused such controversy over the decades as Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. This militaristic epic, winner of the 1960 Hugo Award, has been accused not merely of glorifying military values but of endorsing fascism to the point that one could say that the Terran Federation is analogous to Nazi Germany. An extreme analysis of course, which in our post-modernist world is terribly unfair, but there is no denying that Starship Troopers is indeed a pseudo-Darwinian rationale for an endless inter-species war of all against all. The novel, as it stands accused by many critics, rapidly degenerates into a series of lectures about politics, history and philosophy by way of various mouthpieces; and reverberates “that Heinlein voice.”
Oddly, I still found it compelling and stimulating, taking an interest in its political and moral philosophy rather than being converted to what is advocated in the text. It’s actually quite far from the fascism it is accused of. Anyone who can understand the oath may serve, regardless of their attributes or abilities. There are no wars within the human species, with lots of personal freedom, where almost everyone is reasonably well off and people who despise the government can do so openly and fearlessly.
A student of history will notice that the communal ideology of the alien “Bugs” is virtually identical to Western Cold War understanding of Communism and the Soviet Union. There is a delightful, explicit critique of Marxism as Rico concludes at one point:
“We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total Communism can be when used by a people adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we care about expending ammo.”
Virulent anti-Communist! Undoubtedly right-wing in its politics and unashamedly militaristic but also one of the finest coming-of-age narratives in science fiction. We follow Rico’s rites of passage, making many mistakes along the way, and contrary to a glorifying view of war, avoiding blind heroism. (Don’t ever confuse the book with the movie sharing the same name!)
It is undeniably a significant work in the history of the genre, pioneering an entire sub-genre of military space opera, even if only paradoxical in that many, like Joe Haldeman and Orson Scott Card, have written fiction in conscious opposition to the philosophy espoused in Starship Troopers.
“To the everlasting glory of the infantry…”
SF Mistressworks
One thing that science fiction fans love is a good list of great books. There’s something very satisfying about poring over a list like the SF Masterworks or The Classics of Science Fiction to see which ones we’ve read and which we’ve missed. We get to determine for ourselves if the list creators got it right with their selections and there is endless opportunity to speculate, and argue about, the books we’d have put on the list if only we’d been consulted.
There are some great lists out there for us to choose from and many are covered here on WWEnd for your edification. Each list has its own slant and biases built in and because we often don’t agree with their contents, or we just want to fill a particular niche that’s underserved, we just keep making more.
I’ve been making an effort to read more women authors this last year or so and the first thing I did was go looking for a list. I found many to choose from but ultimately none were quite what I wanted. The answer was to make my own list: Award Winning Books by Woman Authors. Like the name indicates it’s just a simple list of all the winning books by women from the 10 awards we cover here on WWEnd. Of course, that’s a pretty easy list to make. All I had to do was poll the database and post the results. A useful list and good start but I wanted more.
Then along comes this great list called the SF Mistressworks by SF/F writer and blogger Ian Sales on It Doesn’t Have to be Right…. This list is exactly what I was looking for and a great fit for WWEnd. The goal of his list is to highlight great works by women authors that are worthy of the attention given to those books on the SF Masterworks list – which is a bit thin on women authors. Ian turned his list into a meme and it took off across the internets – a clear indication of the quality of the list and of the un-tapped desire for such a list.
Says Ian: "I’ve used my own taste in novels, awards shortlists, recommendations by various folk, and some judicious online research to generate the list." He goes on with this caveat: "I can’t guarantee I’ve picked a writer’s best book, or indeed that any of the books on the list that I’ve not read myself are in any way ‘classic’." Fair enough. As with all lists it’s not perfect but some real effort went into it and the result is pretty impressive. All the usual suspects are in there but there are many authors and titles you’ve probably never heard of too. Plenty of room to branch out and try someone new.
The list of 90 books is restricted to SF works with only one book per author and a cut-off date of 2000. He’s got a 21st Century SF Mistressworks list in the works so don’t get too upset if you don’t find the most recent authors and books in the list. We had about half of these books in our database already and I spent the last week adding the others – not to mention some 30-odd new authors!
Take a look at the list and see how you fare. If you’re a WWEnd member you can use BookTrackr™ to tag the ones you’ve read. What books would you add to it? What books would you replace for your favorite authors?
Many thanks to Ian Sales for the great list.
