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still waiting for the great leap forwards...

Wednesday, May 26, 2004  

Just saw that some US bookdealer is selling The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1 for $US 111.70. I'm proud of the book, but you'd have to be insane to buy it for that. Especially since you can get it here for $A24.95. Even with postage and handling, you'd be in front.

posted by Jonathan Strahan | 12:29 PM | Discuss
 

Just read Greg Benford's new story, The First Commandment, over at Sci Fiction. It's basically "The Nine Billion Names of God" retold, this time naming all the beasts and the world ends, as opposed to counting all the names of god. It's ok, but not as special and weird as Christopher Rowe's very cool The Volountary State.

posted by Jonathan Strahan | 12:13 PM | Discuss

Tuesday, May 25, 2004  


Phases of the Moon

Though I doubt I'll review it myself, I thought I'd make some comment here about Robert Silverberg's forthcoming career retrospective, Phases of the Moon.

It is, as I've suggested below, big, covering six decades of writing, reprinting 23 stories with extensive notes and such, and all in a handsome 600+ page volume. Should you care? Yes!! Why? Well, Silverberg was just presented the Nebula Grandmaster, and this book is nothing less than a coherent argument for why he deserved the award. It collects everything from competent journeyman work through to the defining classics of his career, his evolution from beginner to consumate professional. Stories like "Born with the Dead", "Enter a Solder: Later, Enter Another", "Sailing to Byzantium", "Good News from the Vatican", "Passengers", and "The Pope of the Chimps" are about as good as science fiction gets. I think the book also has a great benefit over volumes like The Essential Ellison or GRRM: A Rretrospective, which present a warts and all picture of their subject. This book is just the good stuff, the best, as selected by Silverberg. Having met Bob I know he's far too urbane and sophisticated to huckster a book, but this one deserves it. And, just to be crass about it, those of you who love beautiful books can get it in a classy Subterranean Press edition, while poor peons like me can get it later in the year in a more affordable edition from Byron Preiss's ibooks. I think it's pretty close to essential. If you've been reading SF for years, it completes an important part of your bookshelf, and if you're just starting it's a perfect overview. Take note.

posted by Jonathan Strahan | 7:40 PM | Discuss
 

What were once vices are now habits...

The title of this post comes from an old Doobie Brothers lp and it's always struck a chord: the way it refers to the journey from passion overindulged, and then become commonplace, expected rather than enjoyed: vices truly become habits.

The reason I refer to it now is I was perusing my 'to read' stack and felt both a little jaded and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of books. And by volume, I don't so much mean number as length. I've got some books I really want to read, and in a number of cases they're books I am very excited about, but they are long. The new Lucius Shepard collection, Trujillo, sits there looking at me, all 680 pages of it, alongside almost 700 pages of Robert Silverberg collection, Phases of the Moon. I just got the new Susanna Clarke in the mail (two copies for some reason), and it's another 800 pages. I'm waiting on Mieville's Iron Council which also doesn't appear to be small, and there's a bunch of other stuff (I'm even kinda weirdly attracted to the new Stephen Donaldson book which is supposed to be nearly 900 pages long according to the publisher's catalogue).

Now, there was a time when I would have been thrilled. Lots of books, and likely lots of good books, and they're mostly all long so they'll last! Now I just look at them and despair a little. I have so much else to read - couldn't they be a little shorter? Just a little. (sigh).

The thing that has disturbed me the most, though, about my 'to read' stack is that I've come, reluctantly, to accept that if something doesn't get read on the first pass, if I don't read it when it's new, I'm never going to read it. Ever. I wish that wasn't true, but it feels true. I can't picture a time when I'm going to have the opportunity to go back and fill in gaps, read stuff I'd meant to get to. It's forever beyond me.

And for all of that, these are great times. Not only have I been ludicrously lucky, not only getting a dream position at Locus, but then getting to edit or co-edit a bunch of anthologies (five to date, with that many again in the works), but I get most of these books free! If you'd told me that would be happening ten years ago I would have laughed at you or thought I'd won some kind of lottery. And you know what? I did. It doesn't feel like it every day, but when great books pour in for free, when there are more books and magazines than you could hope to read, and when the people you admire most accept you as a colleague, that's a very cool thing. It is, perhaps, better than winning the lottery.

Oh, and for the regular readers out there, yeah: I'm avoiding writing a column. I'm started and I'm going to finish, but I'm in avoidance. Speaking of columns, I've abandoned the new C.J. Cherryh. I really like her work, but after the opening the thought of following Marak Trin Tain across his destroyed world just felt leaden. Now, it's probably a very good book, but I think it's one I'm going to let go through to the keeper. On the other hand, just read Steve Baxter's "PeriAndry's Quest" from Analog, which is a cool story, and really like the Christopher Rowe story from SciFiction. I've also started to peruse Jeff VanderMeer's Secret Life in earnest, and it's a way cool collection. The hoopy Scott Eagle cover should be enough to convince you of this, of course, but the stories are weird and wonderful. You should whip over to Jeff's website or to Golden Gryphon and check it out, and then get thee hence to a bookstore as soon as it hits the shelves. And there's lots more to recommend. More on that soon.

posted by Jonathan Strahan | 7:05 PM | Discuss

Saturday, May 22, 2004  

Narrative strategies

I just finished reading Charlie Stross's next novel, Iron Sunrise, sequel to Hugo nominee Singularity Sky, and I think it's a superior book to its predecessor in most every way. It's interesting, engaging, brings more of the conceptual depth of his short fiction into play at novel length, while still preserving a lot of the fun and action that made the first book enjoyable. He also betrays a hand for young adult fiction - in his handling a plot strand involving a young teenager - that I honestly hadn't particularly expected. I think one day, should he be interested, Stross could write a really terrific YA sf novel.

Now, I finished reading the book last night and, despite talking about it with my boss who told me I didn't need to, I thought I'd take a look at the new C.J. Cherryh novel, Forge of Heaven. Why? Well, she's written 50 or so novels and I must have read 40 of them, and I've really liked them for the most part, so I'm disposed to read her work. It also seemed to me interesting to see any links between the kind of space opera Stross is writing and the kind of space opera Cherryh is writing, nearly 30 years into her career, and there are a couple obvious differences. Cherryh is up to snuff with her technology and science, but she really buries it into the texture of her society, showing little interest in neat ideas and cool gadgets. Instead, she focusses on character and the story that grows out of character. Which is a good thing, in many ways. But...she does do one thing that strikes me as a dubious narrative strategy, despite having used it in two Hugo winning novels to date. She opens the book with 16 pages of reference material, the kind of historical stuff that usually lives in appendices, and for the first time in my experience, it really seemed to make the book drag. It's picked up since, and I think it may be a lot better than Hammerfall (it's immediate predecessor), but I don't know if it'll hook readers.

On another related point: is Cherryh the most important female space opera writer of the past quarter century? She doesn't get the credit for it, but I can't honestly thing of too many competitors for the title. Hmmm.

posted by Jonathan Strahan | 9:11 PM | Discuss

Tuesday, May 18, 2004  

No, I get excited about this.

You can never get enough good news. I just sold another anthology, and I'm really excited about this one. It's an original young adult science fiction anthology, tentatively titled The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows, and it's due out in hardcover in mid-2006 from Viking Children's. There are several great things about this project. First, it's a cool idea. I'll post more here about it shortly, but I just really like this book. Second, it should look terrific when it's published (Viking's The Green Man and The Faery Reel are just lovely books). The best thing though, is that I am going to be working with the altogether amazing and wondrously talented Sharyn, which is a very good thing. I am happy.

posted by Jonathan Strahan | 7:59 PM | Discuss
 

You get excited about that?

This afternoon I received my Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN) from the US Internal Revenue Service, which almost got me excited. I first found out I needed one of these things when I was negotiating to do Best Short Novels: 2004 with the SF Book Club, and it's taken till now to get one! I can now finish up that project, complete payments etc, and am set for future projects on a much smoother basis. I did wonder what took so long, though, and then I looked closely at the envelope. It appears that the IRS sent the envelope to Austria, which is helpful.

posted by Jonathan Strahan | 7:47 PM | Discuss

Wednesday, May 12, 2004  

If you want to see a little information about the year's best novellas book, Best Short Novels: 2004, the Science Fiction Book Club has put up a page about it here. The only thing I wouldn't pay too much attention to is the pub date. The book is, to the best of my knowledge, due in July.

posted by Jonathan Strahan | 6:41 AM | Discuss

Monday, May 10, 2004  

I don't often comment much about the venerable magazine for which I work, and I certainly don't respond to criticism etc, but I was struck by something I read over on Rick Kleffel's The Agony Column. Referring to the latest issue of Locus, where Terry Pratchett and Liz Williams are interviewed, Kleffel writes:

...it's a misnomer to say that these are interviews, really. They're not conversations with a critic or reader. They're actually just long essays by the authors themselves on Stuff They Want To Write About...

While this isn't a criticism per se, it's also not really accurate at all. I've conducted three or four interviews for Locus (Charles Stross, Robert Silverberg, Sean Williams), sat in a bunch, and have seen the raw transcripts of many others.

Ignoring my own efforts, Locus's interviews are deftly handled conversations between a Locus interviewer (almost always Charles Brown, but in recent years often Jenni Hall) and the interviewee, and they very clearly do include back and forth between the two parties. They are genuine interviews.

The key here is that Locus has decided to keep the focus on the author, to highlight their views, their perceptions, and to try to understand what they are trying to achieve, rather that trying to highlight anything the interviewer themselves may think. For that reason, the interviewer's comments are removed, and the interview is edited into a seamless whole. It's something that I think works remarkably well, and has proven very successful over the years.

Why respond here to this particular comment? Well, Kleffel clearly is positive about Locus and means well, but it seemed to me at least that his comments didn't justice to what Locus was achieving.

posted by Jonathan Strahan | 1:22 PM | Discuss

Monday, May 03, 2004  

Stories

So, I've been reading some anthologies of late, in a bid to get a move on with the 'year's best' reading. Worked my way through Al Sarrantonio's Flights, which is a very mixed bag. It's a 200,000 word anthology with some great stories by Liz Hand, Tim Powers, Gene Wolfe, and others. There's also an interesting Narnia story by Neil Gaiman. And, if your tastes run to the train-wreck kind of thing, it includes a Larry Niven story which is just about the worst thing I've seen to appear under a professional by-line in years. Should you go read it? Yes. There's 100,000 words of good to great stuff (if it was just that 100,000 words Flights would be the fantasy antho of the year), and some very ordinary material. Surprise of the book, for me, was Janny Wurts, who has a very good story that was marred a little for me by a New Agey ending. Looking back on it, Flights isn't as strong or consistent as The Faery Reel (which I expect will be the fantasy anthology of the year), but it is worthwhile.

The other anthology I'm checking out is Deborah Noyes' Gothic!, which has ten original gothic tales by the likes of Joan Aiken, Garth Nix and Neil Gaiman. The Gaiman story, "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nameless House of the Night of Dread Desire", is terrific and worth the price of admission by itself. More soon...

posted by Jonathan Strahan | 7:17 AM | Discuss
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Kathryn Cramer; Neil Gaiman; Paula Guran; Graham Joyce; Mark R. Kelly; Colleen Lindsay; Ken MacLeod; Cheryl Morgan; Patrick Nielsen Hayden; The Virtual Sharyn November; Robin Pen; Tim Pratt; Charles Stross; Jeff VanderMeer.

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currently
  • Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
  • Deborah Noyes ed., Gothic!: Ten Original Dark Tales
  • previously
  • C.J. Cherryh, Forge of Heaven *
  • Charles Stross, Iron Sunrise
  • Alexander C. Irvine, One King, One Soldier *
  • Al Sarrantonio ed. Flights! Extreme Visions of Fantasy
  • Minister Faust, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad
  • Bruce Sterling, The Zenith Angle
  • Scott Westerfeld, Midnighters Vol.2 Touching Darkness
  • Jennifer Stevenson, trash sex magic *
  • Scott Westerfeld, Midnighters Vol.1 The Secret Hour
  • Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
  • Margo Lanagan, Black Juice
  • Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle
  • Charles de Lint, Medicine Road
  • Paul Di Filippo, Spondulix
  • Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling eds., The Faery Reel
  • Garth Nix, Grim Tuesday
  • Guy Gavriel Kay, The Last Light of the Sun
  • Cory Doctorow, Eastern Standard Tribe
  • Ken Macleod, Newton's Wake
  • Patricia McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn
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