Of the six novels nominated for the Nebula Award, I’ve managed to read four.

The two I haven’t read are Jack McDevitt’s Firebird and China Miéville’s Embassytown, largely because they weren’t available inexpensively. Firebird is the sixth volume in the Alex Benedict series; the third entry, Seeker, won the 2006 award. He’s been on the ballot four times since then; this is McDevitt’s eleventh nomination in this category. This is China Miéville’s third nomination in this category; Embassytown was also nominated for the Clarke Award and is also on the Hugo ballot, as a result of which I expect to read it later this year.

Of the four I’ve read, one, Jo Walton’s Among Others, I read a year and a half ago. I had a lot to say about it back then and I expect I will have more to say about it in the future. I’m not at all neutral about Among Others: it affected me profoundly than any book has in years. This is the one I’m rooting for and the one I’d have voted for (it’s certainly getting my vote for the Hugo).

But that doesn’t mean I can’t say nice things about the other nominated works.

Continue reading this entry

Long overdue, here’s my look at the shortlist for the 2011 Nebula Award for Best Short Story.

Last year my first impression of the short stories on the Nebula ballot was how nasty a lot of them were: stories whose primary effect was an emotional gut-punch. Stories about cruel children, children in hospitals, the dead of 9/11. I had a problem with that: stories under 7,500 words are capable of evincing more emotional responses than that. This year there’s still a measure of children and pain but it doesn’t seem to be as bad. We may not yet be at a point where the path to the Nebula ballot is as follows: step one, produce a child; step two, hurt that child. Tase the amygdala, get on the ballot. But sometimes I wonder.

Continue reading this entry

The Aurora Awards are awards for Canadian science fiction and fantasy that are roughly analogous to the Hugos in that they are voted on by convention members (whereas the Sunburst Awards are juried). The finalists in the English-language categories were announced last Friday; the list includes some friends of ours and many familiar faces. (This will make writing about the nominated works somewhat more of a challenge.)

Finalists in the French-language categories have not yet been announced; nominations only closed last Wednesday. The French-language awards will be handed out next month at Congrès Boréal in Montreal. The English-language awards come later: they’ll be handed out in August, at When Words Collide in Calgary.

Alejandro Polanco Masa, whose map blog La Cartoteca is one of the finest on the subject in any language, has announced the availability of his speculative fiction novel El Viaje de Argos, in which maps play a prominent role. Here’s the description in Spanish:

Desde antiguo un enigmático astro llamado Argos siembra la atmósfera con una substancia muy especial. Sólo un pequeño grupo de sabios sabe cómo recolectar y emplear esa esencia de los cielos que permite la vida eterna. Pero en pleno auge de la Roma imperial, un desastre sacude a la hermandad de sabios. Desperdigados por el mundo y sin los conocimientos necesarios para mantener la inmortalidad, vagarán sin rumbo, condenados al olvido. Hasta que en el siglo XXI, una inquieta historiadora, Irene Abad, descubre un antiguo mapa que, sin saberlo, conduce hasta el peligroso secreto que los Hijos de Argos han perseguido durante dos milenios.

I wish I could say more about this, but I never studied Spanish and can barely navigate Spanish-language websites, much less read novels. El Viaje de Argos is available in ebook form via Amazon and iTunes.

The Hugo nominations were announced this afternoon. Copies of the list of nominees are everywhere: here it is on the Hugo Awards website. A few preliminary thoughts.

Some of my nominations made the final ballot, others didn’t, mostly those that went against the grain. Three out of the five short story nominees, four out of the five novelette nominees, five out of the six novella nominees, and two out of the five novel nominees are also on the Nebula ballot. In all, fourteen pieces of fiction have been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula this year, compared with just nine last year, so there seems to be more consensus this year.

A couple of nominations are quirky. John Scalzi’s April Fool’s story is nominated for best short story, and James Bacon and Chris Garcia are on the ballot for best dramatic presentation, short form for their rather famous performance at last year’s Hugo award ceremony when they won best fanzine. But the Hugo nominations haven’t gone so much silly as meta. David Goldfarb argues that with these nominations and Jo Walton’s best novel nomination for Among Others, “it’s sort of an inward-looking slate.”

We also have some blurring of the categories: one podcast up for best related work rather than best fancast; one TV show (Game of Thrones) up for best dramatic presentation, long form for the entire series instead of being up against three Doctor Who episodes in the best dramatic presentation, Doctor Who short form category.

And it may also be the year of the pseudonym: Seanan McGuire has been nominated four times, twice as Mira Grant, her horror-writing persona; James S. A. Corey, up for best novel for Leviathan Wakes, is the joint pseudonym of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.

Christopher Priest’s screed about the Clarke Awards reminded me that I’d been meaning for some time to read his most recent novel, The Islanders, about which I’d heard the sort of good things that made me think, yeah, baby, this sort of thing is my bag (for one thing, maps play a role).

The Islanders reads as a travel guide, with entries on various islands in the Dream Archipelago, the setting of two of Priest’s previous books (though he says you don’t have to have read them). The Archipelago is a massive collection of thousands of inhabited islands on another world, positioned between two great continents, one north and one south. The mainland nations of the north pass through the Archipelago to the southern continent, the battlefield of their constant wars. The Archipelago is neutral territory, mostly, its inhabitants preoccupied by artistic pursuits.

Continue reading this entry

Of the seven stories on the Nebula ballot for best novelette (7,500 words to 17,500 words), four are by men and three are by women. One was first published in an anthology, two came from the traditional print magazines, and four came from online venues. I note with considerable interest that one of those online venues, Giganotosaurus, managed to land two novelettes on the ballot despite the fact that it isn’t an SFWA qualifying market. Alec has pointed out how few online markets there are for novelettes and novellas: there are plenty of places for a writer to sell their story, so long as that story is less than 5,000 words. Usually this means that the traditional print magazines tend to dominate in the longer categories, along with original anthologies (and in the case of novellas, standalone books). But not this year, not this category.

Continue reading this entry

More information today on a book I’d heard was coming: The Lands of Ice and Fire, a definitive atlas of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy world from A Song of Ice and Fire (A Game of Thrones, et cetera). The publisher: “The centerpiece of this gorgeous collection is guaranteed to be a must-have for any fan: the complete map of the known world, joining the lands of the Seven Kingdoms and the lands across the Narrow Sea for the first time in series history.” Fantasy and roleplaying game cartographer Jon Roberts is working on the project. It won’t be out until October, but you can already pre-order it at Amazon.

Previously: Maps of Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire”; More Maps of Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire”.

I’ve said before that novellas may be my favourite story length (for award purposes, they run from 17,500 to 40,000 words), and other people have said the same thing. I wonder whether that’s because of the inherent virtues of the length, or because there are so few publishing slots for novellas — online magazines generally won’t touch them, and print magazines publish only a few a year; add to that those few published in original anthologies or standalone books — that any published novella, by virtue of being published, must already be of excellent quality. A not-very-good novella, after all, can always be replaced by several better novelettes or short stories.

So it’s no surprise that I enjoyed every single one of the six nominees for the 2011 Nebula Award for best novella. Of the six, four came from the traditional print magazines, one was from a small press anthology, and one was published as a standalone book and serialized in an online magazine. All science fiction rather than fantasy. Four female authors, two male; two authors with stories on the short story ballot as well.

Continue reading this entry

Leah Bobet’s Above (Arthur A. Levine, 2012) is so strong that I have a hard time believing it’s a first novel. Aimed at readers 12 and up, this book is nevertheless mature and subtle in its handling of its theme. It focuses on a group of outcasts — misfits and mutants, superpowered and disabled — who survive in Safe, a community hidden beneath the streets and sewers of Toronto. When that community is invaded, its leader killed and its inhabitants scattered, the young Teller, Matthew, must find a way to survive in the dangerous Above. Bobet’s use of language is impressive. The novel’s voice is authentic, the emotions very real. The hardscrabble, marginal existence of the characters feels utterly and uncomfortably convincing. A beautiful book, but also an unsettling one.

Buy at Amazon: hardcover, Kindle • author’s page • publisher’s page

Christopher Priest has sent the science-fiction-reading portion of the Internet into a tizzy with his screed denouncing the shortlist for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke award, which contains all sorts of spleen-venting invective of the sort that (1) British literari seem to excel at and (2) is kind of fun to read, so long as you’re not the target. Charlie Stross, one of said targets, took things in stride and made a T-shirt. Here are some other reactions: Cheryl Morgan, John Scalzi, Charles Tan, Catherynne Valente, Jeff VanderMeer, Damien Walter; the kerfuffle also made the Guardian and MetaFilter. Many of said reactions occupy an awkward middle ground between agreeing with some (but not all) of Priest’s arguments and discomfort with the attacks Priest made on other writers. (It turns out that there is much unhappiness with the shortlist this year.)

My first thought was that Priest was auditioning to replace Norman Spinrad’s review column in Asimov’s. (That’s an in-joke. Did you do a spit-take? You’re in.) Nasty literary criticism isn’t something many of us are comfortable with (we’re all fen here, right?), but it does have a venerable tradition; the trick is making sure it’s about the work, not the person. (Quick review. “This book sucks” is not a personal attack. “This writer isn’t trying hard enough” is not a personal attack. “This writer smells and his children are retarded” — that’s a personal attack.)

Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising is a rollicking, fast-paced thriller set in a near future where the polar ice caps are all but gone, and a scramble for resources is taking place in the rapidly developing Arctic north. UN airship pilot Anika Duncan is shot down while investigating a suspicious tanker that appears to be carrying radioactive materials; the investigation sets off a chain of events that very quickly put the resourceful Anika on the run, forcing her to rely on a series of colourful characters.

This is not Kim Stanley Robinson’s global warming thriller: chapters end with guns pointed at people. Little space is given to introspective reflection: things just move too fast. Nor does the setting play as strong a role as it might. In fact, for a book that is set almost entirely within Canada, there are hardly any Canadians among the very global cast; but for the climate it could have occurred in any archipelago on the planet, which I found a little disappointing. Still: fun read.

Buy at Amazon: hardcover, Kindle • author’s page • publisher’s page

Ian McDonald has been writing serious works of adult science fiction for many years; the first book of his I read was The Dervish House, and I mean to hunt down his earlier work. But now he’s gone and written a young-adult novel, Planesrunner. It’s the first in the Everness series, which may run seven books, and McDonald has gotten things off to a roaring start.

After British teenager Everett Singh’s physicist father is kidnapped in front of him, he comes into possession of a map of parallel universes, which those who did the kidnapping very much want to retrieve. There are a number of parallel Earths in contact with one another, and ours has just made contact with the rest. To evade capture and rescue his father, Everett jumps into another universe, one filled with coal and airships but not computers like Everett’s tablet. Adventures ensue.

Exciting and tautly paced, with excellent characters (Everett in particular is a wonderful protagonist) and packed with brilliant concepts, Planesrunner reads like a particularly vigorous hybrid of Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Westerfeld’s Leviathan (only it’s not derivative of either in the slightest). A fantastic book.

Buy at Amazon: hardcover, Kindle • Facebook page • Publisher’s page

Fantasy maps have a very specific style that is actually quite limiting. For an example of what would happen if all maps were subject to the same limitations as fantasy maps, have a look at what is described “a map of the United States ‘à la Lord of the Rings’”; it was posted to Reddit and edited there by divers hands. The version above had the gridlines removed and made more “antique.” It does look like the early Middle-earth maps done by Pauline Baynes and Christopher Tolkien. To match the movie maps, you’d have to replace all the text with overdone uncial calligraphy and Tengwar vowel marks, whereas maps in modern fantasy novels would lose the shading on the mountains and have all the text done in Lucida Calligraphy. Via io9.

Robert J. Sawyer’s latest novel, Triggers, comes out next month, but I’ve been reading it in installments during its serialization in Analog. It’s familiar territory if you’ve read previous Sawyer novels, but it nevertheless provided at least one major surprise. It begins in the guise of a fast-paced near-future techno-thriller: a freak incident during a terrorist attack has left a small group of people able to read the memories of one another; since one of the people is the U.S. president, this poses some security risks. After some tension in which the Secret Service tries to figure out who has access to the president’s memories while everyone involved tries to cope with the situation, near the end the scope suddenly broadens and the book veers from spy thriller to Clarkean sense-of-wonder, and assumes the ethical and philosophical mantle that characterizes so much of Sawyer’s work. In hindsight, the book’s concern with empathy for one’s fellow human beings looms large throughout, despite the sometimes workmanlike prose and thriller pace.

Amazon • Author’s page

A Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski is an important work of SF that won the 1987 Campbell award. It’s an impressive work of biological science fiction and a feminist, pacifist novel of interplanetary conflict in which the all-female inhabitants of the water world, Shora, who call themselves the Sharers, engage in acts of nonviolent resistance that would be very familiar to those who’ve read their Gene Sharp, as Slonczewski herself has. It’s also explicitly a response, the author says, to works like Herbert’s Dune and Le Guin’s Word for World Is Forest: a water world instead of a desert, non-violence instead of violence, pacifists remaining pacifists, and prevailing.

The Sharers are “lifeshapers” — masters of bioscience and genetic engineering. This draws the attention of the rulers of the nearby planet, Valedon, who move to exploit their planet and resources. Meanwhile, Sharers from the water world, Shora, visit the nearby world Valedon and take a young male, Spinel, back to learn their ways. Spinel becomes our window into the Sharers’ world, but he is by no means the only viewpoint character. If anything, A Door into Ocean, while vast in scope, is at the same time too limited; the story is a bit too pregnant for all its possibilities. There are multivolume series with less ambition.

See Jo Walton’s post on Tor.com and the author’s study guide.

AbeBooks • Amazon (Kindle) • Publisher

The nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards, voted on and presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, were announced this morning. Like last year, I’ll be blogging about the nominees in the short fiction categories between now and the award ceremony on May 19; this time, it looks like I’ll be able to read all the short fiction nominees without too much trouble, and I may be able to write about most of the novel nominees as well.

I’ve already written about a few of them. Jo Walton’s Among Others is on the ballot; I adore this book and sang its praises when it was released. Because it’s a story about maps, “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” drew my attention when it was published in Clarkesworld last April, and I’m delighted to see that on the ballot as well. And in December I reported on Catherynne M. Valente’s excellent novella, Silently and Very Fast (Kindle).

Which is not to say that there aren’t other great stories on the ballot; I’ll be sharing my thoughts on them shortly.

Update: It’s 2012, but these are the 2011 Nebulas, in that they recognize work published in 2011. I call them by the wrong year roughly half the time. I’ve updated this post.

It occurs to me that how readers use fantasy maps should be another line of inquiry for my science fiction and fantasy maps project. Take, for example, Donald Petersen’s comment on the Boing Boing post about Victoria Johnson’s map essay (posted here last week).

One of the few downsides to reading Game of Thrones for the first time on a 2nd generation Kindle was that it was inconvenient to flip to the map every now and then to reorient myself when the action moved to a new city or battlefield. Like books with lots of footnotes, I think I’ll do most of my map-heavy fantasy book reading on dead trees.

My father experienced the same thing reading A Dance with Dragons on the Kindle. The insight here may not be particularly profound, but it is useful: fantasy maps may be largely illustrative, but they’re also referred to when reading the text. They may be an intrinsic part of the reading process — at least as far as “fat fantasy books with maps” are concerned. (Will electronic versions of said books need to have their text georeferenced, so that you can push a “map” button at any point and be placed at the proper position on the map? I have to admit that that would be kind of cool.)

What do you think? How do you use maps when reading fantasy fiction?

Over on The Awl, Victoria Johnson has an essay about maps of fictional places, which of course is relevant to my interests. Johnson has chosen some very unique and distinctive maps to discuss — Winnie-the-Pooh, The Phantom Toolbooth and The Princess Bride among them — rather than the sort of standard fantasy maps you get in standard fantasy (which, I suppose, aren’t worth discussing unless you like the fantasy world being mapped; certainly not as maps). Via Boing Boing (which sends a link in this direction).

A couple of science fiction and fantasy writing workshops to tell you about: one in Ottawa, the other in Montreal. The one in Ottawa takes place on February 26 on the University of Ottawa campus. It’s a day-long affair led by local authors Derek Künsken, Matt Moore and Hayden Trenholm. It costs $40, with proceeds going toward Can-Con, the local SF convention. Here are the details. I’m going to this one. The one in Montreal, which I can’t attend, takes place on Tuesday evenings from April 3 to May 22. Called Sense of Wonder: Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories, it’s led by Claude Lalumière. It costs $175 (less if you’re a Quebec Writers’ Federation member).

More roundups of the best science fiction and fantasy of 2011 (see previous entry); now we’ve moved past the “what will end up in the year’s best anthologies” phase and entered the “what will people nominate for awards” phase. Author Rachel Swirsky offers her recommendations for the short story, novelette and novella categories, with more presumably to come. Also, the Locus recommended reading list came out yesterday.

If, like me, you often wonder how far out radio signals can be detected before they’re drowned out by cosmic background radiation — for example, you’re working on a science fiction story that depends on being able to detect such signals from other stars — then, like me, you’ll be interested in this Ask MetaFilter thread and the SETI range calculator. Short version: broadcast radio signals fade out pretty fast thanks to the inverse square law, so it’s pretty unlikely that space aliens will be along to demand explanations for our 1950s television programs.

I have not forgotten my Maps in Science Fiction and Fantasy project, though it’s lain fallow for a bit while I juggled other things. Here are a few short stories about maps that I’ve encountered over the past few months.

Continue reading this entry

Analog (3/12) is full of government agents, national security and elusive alien visitors this month. “Mother’s Tattoos,” a short story by Richard A. Lovett, launches from span to a ground-level look at a surveillance society; Kyle Kirkland’s “Upon Their Backs” has a government agent investigate the disappearance of some odd and possibly alien bodies; “The Ediacarian Machine” by Craig DeLancey is a case of an archaeological dig discovering an alien machine in half-billion-year-old rock. That’s in addition to the second part of Robert J. Sawyer’s novel, Triggers, which is full of Secret Service agents. Part two develops the plot some more and explains how people read each other’s memories with some quantum-mechanical jiggery-pokery. Still enjoyable.

Continue reading this entry

Adam Roberts, discussing the ten best-selling books of all time, uses his blog entry about The Hobbit (number four) to note the differences between the “endearing incompetence” of the characters of the first edition (1937) and the second edition, revised to accomodate The Lord of the Rings and in which “everything has to happen for a reason”:

My beef is with the notion that all our bents and faculties have a purpose. In Tolkien’s second version of The Hobbit, it is precisely the haphazardness, the intimations of glorious, human, comic incompetence, that must be sanded, smoothed and filed away. It is no longer enough for Gandalf to turn up on the doorstop of the world’s least likely adventurer merely because that is the sort of thing batty old wizards do. Now he must do so because he has a larger plan.

That larger plan — dealing with Smaug to rid Sauron of an ally in the inevitable war to come — is, of course, spelled out in the appendices to LOTR and in Unfinished Tales. Did Tolkien invent retconning? Thorin and Company do seem to blunder their way through the book, don’t they? Via Andrew Sullivan.

Analog (1-2/12). The January-February double issue includes the first part of Robert J. Sawyer’s new novel, Triggers, a near-future thriller involving an accident that causes people to be able to read the mind of a nearby person — including the U.S. president. It starts slowly and awkwardly but rapidly picks up speed; by the end of the first part I was looking forward to the rest. Two novellas are sequels to earlier work I haven’t seen: “Project Herakles” by Stephen Baxter combines Chinese giants with an attempted coup in 1968 Britain, with all the things I find problematic about alternate history starring real historical figures; Rajnar Vajra’s “Doctor Alien and the Spindles of Infinity” is a pan-galactic romp with interesting aliens, but the resolution is a bit too simple. Sean McMullen is back with another piece of steampunky alternate history: “Ninety Thousand Horses” posits a rocketry project in turn-of-the-century Britain. The short stories were rather frothy and the Probability Zero piece was a fatwa-inducing Feghoot.

Continue reading this entry

Charles Stross keeps scoring hits against the shibboleths of space-based science fiction because he keeps looking at whether they’re viable from an economic standpoint. You’d have thought that interstellar communications would be less costly than interstellar travel (at least I did), that is, that pointing a laser at a nearby star system must be more efficient — i.e., consumes less energy per bit of information sent — than sending that data via a starship. Turns out? Not so much, not by a long shot, when you factor in the cost of bandwidth. It’s the application of Tanenbaum’s law — “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway” — to space. (After all, it wasn’t so long ago that it would have been faster to get a DVD-ROM in the mail than to download four or five gigabtyes.)

A Locus roundtable on the tension between commercial writing and writing for love and/or art.

Original anthology calls for submission: Biblioteca Fantastica seeks stories about “lost, rare, weird, or imaginary books, or any aspect of book history or book culture” (2¢/word, March 31); Blood and Water deals with “conflicts (and their resolutions) arising because of water, food or pollution” (Canadians only, $50-100, March 4); and Tesseracts 16, with its theme of “Parnassus Unbound,” wants stories focusing on “art, music, literature and cultural elements which are integral to the story” (Canadians only, 3¢/word, Feb. 29). I will try to submit to at least one of these.

The BBC’s 1973 radio dramatization of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy is available for download online. Via MetaFilter.

Read Karl Schroeder’s take on the Fermi paradox, which makes my head swim: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature” — the idea being that an advanced civilization will be so efficient as to be undetectable “SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.”

Entry-level science fiction — the sort of stuff that you can read, enjoy and understand without having been immersed in the long history of the genre — is getting some discussion lately. Elizabeth Bear isn’t the only one to argue that SF has become too inwardly focused, as she does in this interview. John Scalzi has repeatedly made the point that he wants to write SF his in-laws can enjoy, and his commercial success seems to bear that out; I’d argue that Robert J. Sawyer works a similar vein. Lev Grossman points to this Locus roundtable discussion on genre accessibility, which you should read if you’re at all interested in this subject.

Online magazines Fantasy and Lightspeed, both edited by John Joseph Adams, are merging into a single publication, going forward as Lightspeed: “each issue of the combined magazine will contain Lightspeed’s four science fiction stories and four fantasy stories from Fantasy. We won’t be reducing the number of stories, or replacing any Lightspeed content with Fantasy content; this will be a true merger.” The combined e-book edition goes for $4, a dollar more than each of the previous magazines’ editions, but now Adams is adding a novella to the e-book versions. It’s a good idea in terms of driving revenues for a magazine that is otherwise freely available online, but $48 a year is more expensive than the electronic editions of Asimov’s or Analog.

I think that more needs to be said about reading science fiction and fantasy short stories. Plenty is said online about the writing of it, simply because there are so many wannabe writers like me out there, with the result that science fiction and fantasy magazines are spoken of more as markets than as sources of good stories to read. And while there are short SF and fantasy reviews out there, more couldn’t hurt. So I think I’ll write frequent but irregular blog entries about the interesting stories I read in the magazines, as I read them. If it encourages me to keep up with my reading, so much the better. Onward.

Continue reading this entry

In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says some sharp things about how modern fantasy, particularly young adult fantasy, makes otherwise dull and dreary mythology potent and appealing to children. Here’s something about Tolkien’s “bright foreground” — the Hobbits and pipe-weed layered over his more abstruse legendarium:

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy. It’s true that his fantasies are uniquely “thought through”: every creature has its own origin story, script, or grammar; nothing is gratuitous. But even more compelling was his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and “The Wind in the Willows” — big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children’s book. The story told by “The Lord of the Rings” is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied.

His comments about Christopher Paolini and Stephenie Meyer are similarly illuminating.