Asking the Wrong Questions

AtWQ's sources reporting live from the Clarke ceremony reveal that the winner is... Richard Morgan's Black Man .  As you'll know if you read my Clarke review, I am very, very pleased with this result, and not the least because I wasn't expecting it--all the buzz seemed to be for The Execution Channel or The H-Bomb Girl .   Black Man is an excellent novel and a stepping stone in Morgan's career, and for all the controversy surrounding the Clarke this year (not that the Clarke is ever not surrounded by controversy), I don't think it can be denied that the judges selected an excellent book.  Congratulation to Mr. Morgan and the Clarke jury.

Part two of my Clarke award review is now online. Also, in case you missed the update to the previous post, Adam Roberts's Clarke review is up at Futurismic, and Nic Clarke continues her Clarke series with a review of Matthew de Abaitua's The Red Men . And, of course, the award itself will be announced this evening. UPDATE: Nic's review of The Raw Shark Texts is also up, completing her overview. Way to come in under the wire!

Part one of my review of the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke Award nominees is up at Strange Horizons . The second part will be published on Wednesday, and the award itself will be announced that evening. Over at Torque Control, Niall Harrison has been collecting other reviews of the shortlisted novels, and of particular interest may be two other comprehensive looks at the shortlist-- Adam Roberts's over at his blog (according to Niall a while back, there's also a shortlist review forthcoming from Adam.  UPDATE: and here it is) and Nic Clarke at Eve's Alexandria (currently up to four of the six nominated novels). In other award news, by now you've almost certainly seen the results of the Nebula award. I let my annual short fiction reviews lapse when it came to the Nebula this year, which was partly because I was busy with the Clarke review, but mostly because I was having trouble justifying giving the Nebula--an award whose relevance I've come to have serious...

In honor of Passover, a local movie channel has been airing science fiction movie series, and this evening it was the Alien quadrilogy. I've just finished watching the first two films (I could be watching the third film right now but really, why would I?). It's been ages and ages since I saw either one, so I may be stating the bloody obvious, but I was utterly floored by how unglamorous Sigourney Weaver is in both of them. It's not just that she's conforming to late 70s and mid-80s styles and fashion, though this is also a factor. I can't, for example, remember the last time I saw a female lead with curly hair in a blockbuster film. These days they all have shiny, silky perms--but then, as I've noted in the past, sometimes it seems that Hollywood has only one, very narrow, standard of female beauty. It's not even a question of production values, though the color palette on both films felt drab and washed-out compared to modern standards, to a degree ...

The Sarah Connor Chronicles is now is now officially coming back for a second season. Between this, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse (now with 100% more Amy Acker ), and the new Ron Moore show , next fall looks to be chock-full of SFnal goodness. And all of it on Fox. Go figure. (Link via )

Something to tide you over while I battle the dreaded deadline-Passover combo. Andrew Rilstone has been writing about Doctor Who . As usual, I disagree with most of what he says (though he is dead on about Torchwood 's full title), but love to watch him say it. I and several other more qualified and informed people sound off on the state of the short fiction market on another edition of SF Signal's Mind Meld . Against my better judgment, I am somewhat intrigued by the premise of Ron Moore's new show . Hey, it sounds better than Caprica . Small Beer Press have made John Kessel's collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence available for free under a Creative Commons License. Two of the stories from this collection, including the title piece, made my list of favorites when I made my review of the Sci Fiction archives a few years back, so I'm quite eager to read the rest.

Via Bookslut comes this surprising report : Heroes creator Tim Kring is collaborating with literary critic and novelist Dale Peck on a sci-fi/ alternative-history trilogy that was sold at auction to Crown yesterday for an advance said to be worth a staggering $3 million. I... just don't know what to say about this.

I watched three major SF-related shows this weekend, and I was hoping to get a blog post out of at least one of them, but instead I find myself with very little to say. So, I'm going to smoosh all three reactions into a single catch-all post, and hope that there's something more substantial for me to write about in the pipeline. (That said, I'm anticipating a bit of quiet around these parts during April.) Battlestar Galactica , "He That Believeth in Me" - That was surprisingly enjoyable. The first act plays to the show's greatest strength--cool and intense space battles--and wraps up in one hell of an interesting way which makes one of my favorite characters even more interesting, and might even get me over my dubiousness about the identities of the Cylons revealed in "Crossroads." The rest of the episode is also strong, as the show finally starts paying attention to an issue that should have started cropping up in discussions and conversations i...

There's been a slew of blog posts just recently discussing what makes a good or bad book review, and obliquely touching on the phenomenon of online book reviewing and the question of professionalism, its meaning and existence, in that field. Niall has a roundup at Torque Control , but the most interesting entries to my mind are these two by Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen , which attempt to dissect reviews he considers poorly written to determine just at which points they fail, and this post by Jeff VanderMeer, in which he spells out some guidelines for writing a good review (or rather, for not writing a bad one). In both cases, I can't help but feel that the writers' personal preferences are being restated as objective truths. Larry thinks reviewers shouldn't reference other works when discussing a novel. I often appreciate a review which places a book in its context or provides me with a frame of reference for it. And, as Cheryl Morgan says , most of the prohi...

Strictly speaking, the concept of a television season is obsolete. Between US- and UK-based content producers, cable and network channels, and the belated realization of network executives that the two weeks on/four weeks off model that worked so well for formula television is the kiss of death for serialized shows like Lost and 24 , it's possible to find first-air scripted television pretty much year round. But concentrating strictly on US-based shows (and ignoring Scrubs , which presumably is coming back one of these months, and which I was more or less ready to bid farewell to anyway), right now might be a good time to reflect on the three shows I accumulated this year-- Pushing Daisies , Chuck , and The Sarah Connor Chronicles . Looking back, it strikes me that all three shows have similar strengths and weaknesses--most blatantly, on the latter count, a tendency to sacrifice plot for the sake of character and atmosphere. A few weeks ago, Niall Harrison suggested that The S...

It's Tournament of Books time again. I'm quite fond of this competition, which strikes me as being as sensible a way to award excellence in literature as any other. Plus, with more than a dozen judges each publicly listing the reasons for their selection, one is practically guaranteed good rant fodder. So far, the 2008 tournament hasn't offered anything on the scale of Dale Peck's magnificent refusal-to-judge-while-excoriating-the-entire-Western-literary-scene, but Elizabeth McCracken sure does her best when asked to choose between Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao --which on top of appearing on very nearly every best-of-year list a few months ago recently won the NBCC award for best fiction--and Laura Lippman's mystery novel What the Dead Know . Unsurprisingly, the Díaz carries the day, but amid McCracken's explanation of her reasons for choosing it one finds the following gem: Don’t get me wrong: I like murders in fiction. A lot. And ...

...and some people obsess over genre literary awards. The shortlist for the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke award has been announced (Niall Harrison, one of the Clarke judges, has a comprehensive list of reviews here ): The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod Black Man by Richard Morgan Which just goes to show that you can know and frequently correspond with two of the judges for this award and still have only the faintest hope of guessing the nominees (which is not to say that either of these judges have spoken out of turn--merely that I think I've developed a sense of their taste in books). I'd guessed that both Sarah Hall and Richard Morgan's novels would be nominated, because both have received a great deal of praise in the circles whose tastes the Clarke tends to mirror (not coincidentally, these are the two nominees which I had already bee...

Israeli film critic Yair Raveh links to this clip off the I Am Legend DVD, of the film's original ending. To be honest, though it's obviously better than the tacked on upbeat ending the theatrical version shipped with, I don't think this ending works perfectly either. There would have had to be changes to the body of the film too, which stressed that the transformed humans were still feeling creatures. There are hints of this in the theatrical version, when the zombie male goes to extreme lengths to rescue the woman Smith's character captures for experimentation, but considering that we're talking about flesh-eating zombies who have all but depopulated the Earth, I think a little more effort, and a corresponding emphasis on the Smith character's monstrousness towards the zombies, were necessary to bring this point home. For all I know, though, that's on the DVD too.

My review of Paolo Bacigalupi's collection, Pump Six , appears today in Strange Horizons . This is, I believe, going to be one of those career-making short story collections, and anyone who cares about short-form SF owes it to themselves to track it down. EDIT: several of the stories in Pump Six are available online. Here are "The Tamarisk Hunter," "The People of Sand and Slag," and my two personal favorites, "The Fluted Girl" and "Yellow Card Man."

As some of you may have noticed, I am engaged in a concerted effort to read every single thing Edith Wharton ever wrote (well, every piece of fiction--I draw the line at The Decoration of Houses ). Having early on gone through her most famous works--her two masterpieces, The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth , as well as Ethan Frome , a novella inflicted upon unsuspecting high school students all across the U.S. by people who apparently don't feel that being a teenager is quite depressing enough--I spent a portion of the last year making my way through various short stories, novellas, and lesser known short novels. This year, I've begun my efforts with a work that's somewhere in between the two extremes, fame-wise--Wharton's third-most famous full-length novel, The Custom of the Country . Anyone coming to Wharton's lesser known work having read nothing but Innocence , Mirth , and Frome will be in for a bit of a surprise. If those works concentrated on mor...

2007 is not the first year in which I've seen all of the best picture Oscar nominees, but it is the first year in which I've seen all five nominees in the movie theater, before the ceremony, and because I was genuinely interested and eager to see them (as opposed to picking up the least objectionable DVD available at Blockbusters on a dull weeknight, AKA the only conceivable reason to watch Seabiscuit ). This is a surprisingly strong list of films, or maybe not so surprising given the overall quality of the films produced last year. 2007's award films started trickling into Israeli movie theaters around January, and in the last two months I've seen more films than in the six or maybe even ten months previous, and there are still films ( Once , Sweeney Todd , The Darjeeling Limited ) I haven't gotten around to. Though I'm not in love with all of the nominees--several are, in fact, deeply flawed--this is the first time in a while that I've cared about the O...

I've noticed several people linking to the series now that it's over, and to facilitate this, here is a link post. Introduction The Two DS9s - Did Deep Space Nine only get good in its later seasons? The Menagerie - Alien races on the show Looking for Ron Moore in All the Wrong Places - The obligatory Battlestar Galactica comparison What Does God Need With a Space Station? - Deep Space Nine 's treatment of religion Ode to Kira - Just what it says The Justice Trick - Odo and his troubled relationships with Kira and morality Odds & Ends - A few more comments

Believe it or not, after seven installments there's still stuff left to say about Deep Space Nine . Here are a few topics that didn't grow into full-fledged essays: It's an axiom of television writing that romance, and specifically romantic pursuit, is interesting, but established relationships, and most especially marriages, are boring. Perhaps because it was generally strongest when telling stories about the conventional and the mundane, on Deep Space Nine the reverse was true. Its romantic plotlines were usually obvious and uninspired (and occasionally offensive), but its depictions of long-term romantic relationships were winning and, yes, romantic. Dax and Worf come together in the most insipid of ways, and the fifth season episodes that focus on their courtship are tiresome and in some cases ( "Let He Who is Without Sin" ) borderline unwatchable. Once they marry, however, the writing for their relationship achieves a whole new level. If previously ther...