Asking the Wrong Questions

The credit card bill (if not, just yet, the convention itself) confirms that I am a paid-up member of Anticipation , the 2009 WorldCon. This does not quite mean that I will definitely be in Montréal next August, but that is certainly the plan, finances and life events permitting. Long-time AtWQ readers will perhaps have guessed just what kind of bind this puts me in. It's a little difficult, after all, to decry the degraded , provincial tastes of Hugo voters when you are one of them. Not impossible, obviously, but it would be nice, if and when the time comes to complain loudly about next year's Hugo nominees, to have a list of alternative nominees which I had actually cast my vote for. And since I rarely read stories or books in the year of their publication, I find myself, with less than four months left in the year, somewhat overwhelmed by the wealth of material available. So, my question to you is, what genre stories have you read since January that you think are awar...

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of one fine spring afternoon.  Trahearne had been on this wandering binge for nearly three weeks, and the big man, dressed in rumpled khakis, looked like an old soldier after a long campaign, sipping slow beers to wash the taste of death out of his mouth.  The dog slumped on the stool beside him like a tired little buddy, only raising its head occasionally for a taste of beer from a dirty ashtray set on the bar. These are the opening sentences of The Last Good Kiss , still the finest mystery novel I've ever read, though ultimately it is far less concerned with solving a mystery than with cataloguing the sadnesses and disappointments of its characters' lives in a way that makes your heart ache for them (which is one of the reasons why the ecstatic praise for Kate Atkinson'...

One of the effects of a magazine-and-award-oriented short story culture is that I often remember stories but not their authors. I admired John Kessel's writing, therefore, long before I knew his name. His two publication in SciFiction, "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" and "It's All True," both made my best of SciFiction lists for their respective years , and "The Invisible Empire," which I read in Conjunctions 39 , has lingered in my mind for several years. Once I put the three stories together with a single author, I knew that I had to give his collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (available under Creative Commons License here ), a look. I wasn't disappointed. Baum Plan is an excellent collection, full of smart, playful stories, which cover every genre, sub-genre, and quasi-genre under the speculative fiction umbrella, but the best of the bunch is undoubtedly the novella "Stories for M...

(Part 1 is here ) "of course, vengeance takes me all over the world. I was in Brazil yesterday. They love their soccer." Jane Espenson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer , "Same Time, Same Place" At a panel at the most recent WorldCon, participants Charles Brown, Karen Burnham, Cheryl Morgan, Graham Sleight and Gary Wolfe were each asked to compose a list of 20 works of science fiction published during the last twenty years which they consider essential. Morgan has a write-up here , and Niall Harrison discusses the results some more here , both noting that the only book to merit a mention all five lists was Ian McDonald's River of Gods . Excellent novel though it is, I don't think River of Gods was singled out for this honor simply because of its quality, but because of the change it seemed to herald in SF's attitude towards non-white, non-Western cultures. Set in Varanasi several decades into the future, River of Gods follows nine characters over a period o...

It's a tricky business, following up a successful, critically lauded, and innovative novel. Tricky for the author, of course, but also for the reader who comes back for that author's next effort. Expectations have to be carefully managed. Going in hoping for a repeat of the author's previous novel is a recipe for disaster, even if--especially if--those expectations are met. Innovation, after all, is rarely as thrilling the second time around. On the other hand, expecting too much change can lead to a jaded attitude that dismisses the very things that made that previous novel worth reading. What we want, in the end, is to recapture the pleasure of reading a truly excellent book, right down to the sensation that here is something new and unexpected. When I approach a novel by an author whose previous work has wowed me, I usually find myself hoping for something just like X, but different. A natural progression of the author's skills, themes, and unique characteristics. So...

It's always funny to see what does and does not gain traction online. When I posted my review of the October/November issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction , I expected that responses to it would revolve mostly around the general negativity of my reaction to the issue. Instead, it was my response to the magazine's nonfiction content, and specifically to Lucius Shepard's review of Iron Man , that's got some folks talking. Early yesterday someone on the Night Shade Books bulletin board, where Shepard is a participant, posted a link to the review, sparking a discussion which has, in turn, led to a, shall we say energetic, post by Shepard on The Inferior 4 , the LJ he shares with Elizabeth Hand, Paul Witcover, and Paul Di Fillippo. I seem to have raised Shepard's ire firstly by calling the Iron Man review mean-spirited, which he has taken as a personal insult. I'm frankly puzzled as to how the trip from point A to point B was achieved, but obviously I'...

My review of Karen Joy Fowler's Wit's End ( The Case of the Imaginary Detective in the UK) appears today in Strange Horizons . As you can see on the Strange Horizons main page , this week is borderline-genre, weird fiction week in the reviews department. I'm looking forward to Dan Hartland's take on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , a novel I adored , on Wednesday, and on Friday David McWilliam will take on Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances , which I've been curious about for a while, and hopefully will do a better job than this woeful New York Times review .

Following a similar experiment a couple of years ago, the folks at Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine offered a copy of their most recent issue to anyone willing to blog about it, and, after taking a look at the issue's table of contents, I happily took them up on their offer. With stories by Geoff Ryman, Stephen King, M. Rickert, Robert Reed and several others, this seemed like a not-to-be-missed entry in the magazine's history, and I was looking forward to writing an exuberant piece about some top-notch short fiction. Sadly, the further I got into the October/November issue, the less I found to be excited about. The big names have turned up, to be sure, but only one of them has delivered on the level I'd expected. Last time I wrote about a F&SF giveaway issue, I complained about the magazine's nonfiction content, and specifically its datedness. What was the point, I asked, of reviewing Ian McDonald's River of Gods months after it had been nominated ...

In a word: lovely.  Which encompasses both the experience--I've been in need of some decompression, and it was a chance to spend time with my family and celebrate both my mother's birthday and my brother's discharge from the army--and the setting, for which I need offer no more evidence than the following: On the other hand, dear God is this city expensive.  I've been to many popular tourist destinations in my day, and especially with the Euro so strong at the moment it was clear that this was not going to be a cheap trip, but much as I enjoyed Prague it was hard to escape the impression that this is a city out to bilk tourists for everything they have.  The $3 water bottles (closer to $7 in the real tourist areas), the exorbitant prices at restaurants (which, surprisingly enough, returned to Earth almost as soon as we left the realm of tourist attractions), and most of all, the price of entry to almost every attraction, often completely out of proportion to the breadth...

Just popping my head in to say that I'm going to be vacationing in Prague for the next week--doing my part to make the internet just a little bit deader than it is right now.  As ever, I won't be receiving e-mails, and though I might be able to see comments to the blog I probably won't get around to responding to them before I get back.  Be good.

The summer doldrums are hitting me hard--all the interesting movies have been and gone, for one thing, and there's still nothing to watch on TV. So, have some books. Farthing by Jo Walton - I've resisted Walton's extraordinarily and almost universally liked novel for some time now, having been so singularly unimpressed with previous offering, Tooth and Claw . Tor.com 's policy of releasing selected books from their catalogue under CC licenses, however, inspired me to give Farthing a look and, well, it looks like my first instinct was right. The novel suffers, in fact, from much the same flaws as Tooth and Claw . It has an inventive premise--a Christie-esque country house mystery told in an alternate universe in which Britain made peace with Hitler and, in the late forties, is slipping, much like the rest of the world, into fascism and institutionalized xenophobia--and is for a time energetic and enjoyable, but soon begins to flag and drag, giving the impression of ...