A science fiction blog featuring science fiction book reviews and with frequent ramblings on fantasy, computers and the web.
A classic. Obviously spawned from minds affected by mushrooms, but a classic nonetheless.
[via Divers and Sundry]
See also:
Free Fiction and Stuff [courtesy of QuasarDragon]
Late-breaking news! Harlan Ellison is not a science fiction writer!
So says the man himself in this audio interview with @Studio 360. Ellison (Dreams with Sharp Teeth) says he has “never written science fiction” but has “occasionally used some of the furniture from that genre”.
SF Signal has 3 copies of Rachel Caine’s latest book, Carpe Corpus, to be given away FREE to three lucky readers!
The deadline, June 1st 2009, is approaching faster than a vampire bat!
Head on over to the original post to see the ridiculously easy entry details.
Free Fiction and Stuff [courtesy of QuasarDragon]:
Pixar’s Up has just hit theaters this weekend and the reviews are stellar and I’ve seen a couple that say Up is Pixar’s best film yet. Wow. But what does Pixar choose to follow Up with? Toy Story 3! The teaser below doesn’t explain anything about story, but it sure is heavy on the characters.
More cool covers!
Your Mission (should you choose to accept it): Tell us which cover you like best and why. Go!
Books shown here:
NOTE: Click on the book images or title links to access bigger & better versions of the cover art…
Torchwood: Children of Earth is premiering on BBC America this July and they’ve just released a trailer for the show. Children of Earth is a story told over 5 nights and and re-joins Captain Jack, Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones as they face a threat to the human race.
It certainly has a creepy, Children of the Corn vibe to it but it looks interesting. Perhaps I’ll need to go watch the first season of Torchwood.
Here’s a new batch of Free Fiction and Stuff [courtesy of QuasarDragon]:
Careful, Captain Kirk…your Freud is showing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….
AT Cnet, Gordon Haff tells us Why e-books aren’t cheaper:
We’ve all heard the rant. With e-books, there’s no paper, printing, transportation, and so forth. So why should an e-book still cost $9.99 (typical for Kindle) or even more?The idea of e-books being cheaper makes a lot of intuitive sense. If everything you physically hold in your hand and everything it took to deliver that physical good to your hand can be converted to a few megabytes worth of electrons, surely the cost of the book must be dramatically lower than a typical hardcover–and the price should reflect that fact.
The problem is that the costs aren’t nearly as much lower as you might believe.
…
…if you want the same level of professional preparation and promotion associated with a typical printed book–the $9.99 e-book price that a lot of people grumble about is probably pretty near the floor.
I wonder what the sweet spot is for eBooks. I’m not knowledgeable in the economics of books sales, but as a consumer I can’t help thinking that cheaper means more sales and thus more profit.
Here’s why:
Some books are perfectly good but ultimately predictable. When you’ve been reading for a long time, more and more books fall into that category. We ask writers and critics of today what books still make you sit up and take notice.
Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Award winning novel One for Sorrow, and most recently The Love We Share Without Knowing. His short stories have appeared in a variety of venues, including The Years Best Fantasy and Horror, LCRW, Strange Horizons, Interfictions, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. He teaches fiction writing at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio.
The last sf/f book that really surprised me was Paul Park’s A Princess of Roumania. I read it in 2005, when it appeared. Some friends sent a copy of it to me in Japan as a gift. I’d heard good things already about it, but when I first started reading it, I wondered if it wasn’t perhaps only just hype, because for a good portion of the first few chapters it seems as if it was going to be any other YA teens get transported to another chintzy world novel. Then the story began to unfold in such a way that what kind of book you thought you were reading wasn’t actually that at all, but its inverse, a narrative that made the world you inhabit outside the reading of a book the fantasy, and the one inside the book reality. An alternate Roumania in which magic exists, and a political system that felt all too believable and beautifully contrived at the same time. In the foreground of this astonishing backdrop were these wonderful characters, too, some incredibly good, and others, like the Baroness, deliciously insane and evil. Reading this book took me back to my early days of reading fantasy novels, when I hadn’t read so many to grow bored yet by the vast amount of repetitive and derivative fantasy novels that flood bookstore shelves each year. In many ways, this novel is a very traditional fantasy with a few twists of the tale I hadn’t seen before, but it’s the uniqueness of the world and especially its characters that made me feel like I was finally reading an original fantasy novel again, for the first time in years.
Ellen Datlow has posted the table of contents of her upcoming best-of anthology Best Horror of the Year #1, along with the original source publication:
College Humor explains what their favorite science fiction movie of all time is and now that they mention it, it’s uncanny, really.
‘Tis the long dark summer of our science fiction discontent…
It’s been almost two weeks since the best show, SF or otherwise, on TV ended its season (LOST) and many more SF shows before it also ended, either for the season (Fringe and Dollhouse) or for good (Sarah Connor and Galactica). With the ending of LOST, the science fiction on TV has a long period of nothingness, or endless CSI re-runs which is basically the same thing, to look forward to over the summer. There is literally nothing promising on the network TV front until next fall. The only glimmer in the darkness is on the Sci Fi Channel (soon to by Sy Fy) as Eureka returns in July along with new series Warehouse 13 and possibly The Listener on NBC, though I’m not hot to watch that one.
Since I like Eureka I’ll definitely tune in for that and I’ll take a look-see at Warehouse 13 because there’s nothing else to watch. And even when the new season starts up again in the fall, there’s really not a lot of good SF returning then. Fringe is almost a must-see and I may catch up with Dollhouse over the summer. It’s not until next year that LOST returns and Flash Forward and Stargate Universe premiere.
Our question to you is: What will you be doing over the summer to quench your SF TV thirst?
There’s a lot of options for online viewing from catching up on older shows or watching some new web series. I’ll probably do some of both. I also have an enormous backlog of SF anime just screaming at me to watch. Some on Crunchyroll and some not. Netflix and other sources will also help out. Hopefully we’ll all be able to weather this SF interregnum without losing our sanity.
REVIEW SUMMARY: A wonderful space opera with some surrealistic elements that (mostly) work.
MY RATING: 
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: A seriously dysfunctional crew of a scavenger ship faces a deadly threat in deep space.
MY REVIEW:
PROS: Interesting plot and interpersonal relationships between characters; a unique take on space opera.
CONS: The surrealistic elements of the plot were huge pills to swallow; abrupt ending.
BOTTOM LINE: A good story with an intense space opera vibe.
One of the quotes on the cover of Paul Jessup’s novella, Open Your Eyes, calls it a “surrealistic space opera”. What a perfectly succinct way of describing the book’s feel.
