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The Reference Library by Don Sakers

Last issue I talked about the vast expansion of places to find good science fiction. Reading the print magazines and prowling bookstores used to be enough, but now quality SF also appears in television and movies, radio and podcasts, comics, webzines, small presses, e-books, and games. New venues spring up without warning.

How is an SF reader to keep up?

First, don’t overlook the obvious: review columns in SF magazines (to paraphrase an old commercial, you’re soaking in one right now). There’s Peter Heck at our sibling publication, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and a whole stable of book and film reviewers at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Interzone from the U.K. has a large array of reviewers (www.ttapress.com/interzone/). Many online SF zines also have review columns—Strange Horizons in particular (www.strangehorizons.com).

Then there are zines devoted to news and reviews of SF publishing. The granddaddy of them all is Locus (P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661); the online version (www.locusmag.com) is a distinct yet related entity. The annual Locus Awards are well worth following. Romantic Times also reviews new SF of interest to romance readers, available online at www.rtbookreviews.com/genre/science-fiction. The New York Review of Science Fiction (www.nyrsf.com) is a good source for reviews of literary SF.

You’ll want to watch SF reviews in some of the publishing industry’s standard sources: Publishers Weekly (www.publishersweekly.com), Library Journal (lj.libraryjournal.com), and Kirkus (www.kirkusreviews.com). These sources, aimed at bookstores and libraries, review scads of SF books in each issue.

It helps to pay attention to the websites of your favorite publishers and authors, which you can find with a simple online search. A caution about author websites, though—many of them are not as frequently updated as one would wish, so take them with a grain of salt. (Authors: update your websites! The readers who come there are generally already fans—just the people you want to inform about your newest titles. Sheesh!)

There are a number of specialty sites that have lists and recommendations of SF books. First are the booksellers: www.Amazon.com, www.BN.com, iBooks, etc. You should also be aware of online communities of readers, such as Goodreads (www.goodreads.com) and Library Thing (www.librarything.com). One interesting site is BookLamp (www.booklamp.org), which uses computer text-analysis to analyze books and offer recommendations.

If your eyes aren’t glazed over yet, you’ll want to check out some SF news sites. Some that lean more in the direction of books are Fantastic Reviews (www.fantasticreviews.com), Science Fiction World (www.sciencefictionworld.com), SFRevu (www.sfrevu.com), SF Signal (www.sfsignal.com), SF Site (www.sfsite.com), SFF World (www.sffworld.com), and Worlds in Ink (www.worldsinink.blogspot.com).

Sites that lean more toward visual and audio SF include Slice of SciFi (www.sliceofscifi.com), SciFi News (www.scifinews.net), SciFi Stream (www.scifistream.com), SFcrowsnest (www.sfcrowsnest.co.uk), and SFX (www.sfx.co.uk).

The Anime News Network (www.animenewsnetwork.com) does a great job of following developments in the anime world, with an emphasis on science fiction. The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (www.geeksguideshow.com) is a podcast that covers the whole continuum of science fiction in all formats.

Finally, Analog readers in particular need to pay attention to io9 (www.io9.com), which bills itself as “a daily publication that covers science, science fiction, and the future.” Think of it as the electronic equivalent of Analog without the fiction.

I know keeping up with all these sources sounds like an awful lot of work, but most of them offer RSS feeds so you can arrange to get the majority of your SF news in one place. Making the time to keep up with it, I leave to you.

I left out one more source for keeping up with SF, one that leads directly into this month’s reviews:


Nebula Awards Showcase 2013
edited by Catherine Asaro
Pyr, 390 pages, $18.00 (trade paperback)
iBooks: $9.99, Kindle, Nook: $10.31 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-61614-783-9
Genre: Reprint Anthology

 

Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

A great place to find quality SF is in the various “best of the year” anthologies. At the moment, four are regularly published: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (edited by Jonathan Strahan), The Year’s Best Science Fiction (edited by Gardner Dozois), The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (edited by Richard Horton), and Nebula Awards Showcase (with a different editor each year).

In the first three, the “best” stories are chosen by the respective editors. The Nebula Awards Showcase is a mixture. The winners and nominees are chosen by vote of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America; the editor includes all the short fiction winners, but exercises discretion in choosing which nominees to include.

Because of the mechanics of the Nebula process, there’s always a lag between publication and award. Though dated 2013, this current edition contains stories published in 2011.

Both science fiction and fantasy are eligible for the Nebula, and this year’s volume includes some of both. While none of the stories appeared in Analog, there are a few that would have been perfectly at home in these pages.

Take the nominee novelette “Sauerkraut Station” by Ferrett Steinmetz. This is a coming-of-age story of a young woman on the periphery of an interstellar war, and I think most Analog readers would enjoy it quite well. E. Lily Yu’s short story “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” examines two very alien societies of social insects. Grand Master Connie Willis’s short story “Ado,” about the danger of putting facts to a vote, could almost be a Probability Zero feature.

Some of the other stories aren’t Analog fare, but are good stories nonetheless. Kij Johnson’s winning novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” is a character-focused story set against the background of two cities separated by a mysterious and unexplained Mist filled with dangerous creatures, and brings this unfamiliar world to marvelous life. The novelette winner, “What We Found” by Geoff Ryman, is another character-rich tale of a near-future Nigeria and a boy who becomes a geneticist with an unconventional theory.

In addition to the short fiction, there’s an essay from John Clute (who shared with Octavia Butler the Solstice Award, given to individuals who have had “a significant impact on the science fiction or fantasy landscape”), some poems, and excerpts from two novels—Nebula winner Among Others by Jo Walton, and The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman, winner of the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book.


The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
Connie Willis
Del Rey, 496 pages, $27.00 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $13.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-345-54064-5
Genre: Collection

The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award is given by SFWA to a living author in recognition of lifetime achievement in the SF/fantasy field. In the beginning there was a limit of six Grand Masters per decade; mercifully that requirement was dropped in 1994. Since the first award in 1975 (to Robert A. Heinlein), 29 Grand Masters have been named.

As I mentioned above, the 2011 Grand Master award went to Connie Willis. It’s hard to imagine a better choice. With 11 Hugo Awards and seven Nebulas to her name, Willis has won more times than any other writer in the field. Her tales span the range from light comedy to deep tragedy and everything in between. Her work is accessible to every kind of reader, and equally well regarded in literary and popular SF circles.

On top of all that, in her recent two-volume masterwork Blackout/All Clear, she pulled off the near-impossible trick of writing a thousand-page novel that was too . . . damned . . . short.

To celebrate Grand Master Willis, Del Rey has put together this collection of all ten of her Hugo-winning short pieces. Willis added an introduction to the volume, an afterword to each story, and the text of a couple of speeches (including her Grand Master acceptance).

If there’s a common thread to all these excellent stories, it’s the presence of ordinary people. The characters Willis writes about—from the family in the post-apocalyptic “A Letter From the Clearys” to the denizens of wartime London in time-travel tale “Fire Watch,” from the newspaper reporter in alien-contact “All Seated on the Ground” to the haunted protagonist of the dystopian “The Last of the Winnebagos”—aren’t the usual larger-than-life heroes but just plain folks trying to live their lives as normally as possible in the midst of tumultuous events.

You’ve probably read some, or most, of these stories before. You might very well have them all on your shelves in one form or another. The afterwords and the convenience of having them all in one volume might not be worth shelling out the money. I can respect that.

However . . . if you know someone who doesn’t read science fiction, I can think of no better way to introduce them to the wonders of the field. If anyone can be named “best science fiction writer of the age” it’s Connie Willis, and these stories are the best of her best. Truly, it doesn’t get any better than this.


Shadows of the New Sun
edited by J.E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett
Tor, 416 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)
ISBN: 9780765334589
Genre: Tribute Anthology

Shadows of the New Sun

Time is a strange thing in the publishing world. Take this column for example. I’m writing these words in April, to appear in the October issue—and you’ll probably be reading them sometime in August.

Connie Willis was presented with the 2011 Grand Master Award in May 2012. The 2012 Grand Master, announced in December 2012 and awarded in May 2013, is Gene Wolfe. You’d expect any celebratory book to be out in, say, early 2014. Yet here is Shadows of the New Sun, subtitled Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe.

There’s really no mystery: At about the same time SFWA decided to give Wolfe a long-deserved Grand Master Award, Tor was deciding to honor him with a long-deserved tribute anthology.

And what an anthology! The lineup is like a Who’s Who of SF writers: David Brin, Jack Dann, William C. Dietz, David Drake, Neil Gaiman, Joe Haldeman, Nancy Kress, Jody Lynn Nye, Michael A. Stackpole, Michael Swanwick, Todd McCaffrey, Timothy Zahn . . . and two stories by Wolfe himself. Like Wolfe’s work, the stories run the gamut from humor to serious, fantasy to science fiction, and adventure to literary.

Some of these stories are homages or companion pieces to specific stories of Wolfe’s, others are set in worlds he wrote about, and still others are simply inspired by Wolfe’s work in general.

A tribute anthology is always a hard thing to judge. Stories must not only stand on their own, but must also have some connection to the honored author’s work. The vast majority of the 19 stories in this volume manage to do both. A reader who’s never heard of Gene Wolfe could enjoy this book; a reader intimately familiar with chapter and verse of everything Wolfe’s written will enjoy it on a completely different level. And readers who don’t yet care for Wolfe won’t be looking at this book anyway, so it’s pretty much win-win for everyone.


Snipers
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
WMG Publishing, 348 pages, $18.99 (trade paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-615-76205-0
Genre: SF Thriller

Snipers

If you’re like most SF readers I know, you’re usually a little disappointed by thrillers. Oh, the suspense and adventure are fine, but even in “science based” thrillers by the likes of Michael Crichton or Dean Koontz, the science aspects are thin gruel indeed. Overworked SF tropes, which were handled more intelligently in Astounding in the 1940s, are about the best the genre can offer.

Thankfully, there’s an alternative. A number of authors manage to blend real science fiction with the suspense and adventure of popular thrillers—and Kristine Kathryn Rusch is among the best of them.

Rusch is best known for her Retrieval Artist series, but occasionally she gives us a standalone gem like Snipers.

At the center of this tale is the Carnival Sniper—a serial killer who stalked 1913 Vienna. The killer was never apprehended, and his identity was never uncovered. The ranking police detective, Johann Runge, went to his grave haunted by his greatest unsolved case.

Curtain up in 2005. Sofie Branstadter is a writer of best-selling true crime books, and she takes on the assignment of reopening the Carnival Sniper case with modern forensic science. She approaches Detective Runge’s last living descendent, a classical pianist named Anton Runge. At first Anton rebuffs her, but as he begins to inspect long-forgotten papers in the basement, he finds himself drawn in to her quest to find the Sniper’s identity.

Then Sofie uncovers evidence of Soviet experimentation, circa 1950, with time travel.

Suddenly the case isn’t as cold as they think, and ninety years doesn’t seem like such a safe interval anymore. . . .

Snipers is a riveting suspense tale and a fine SF story—what more could we want?


The One-Eyed Man
L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
Tor, 352 pages, $24.99 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3544-9
Genres: Alien Beings, Ecological/Environmental SF

The One-Eyed Man

L.E. Modesitt, Jr. is best known for his fantasy series The Saga of Recluce, but he’s equally at home in science fiction. The One-Eyed Man is a fine standalone novel of ecology, economics, colonization, and personal redemption.

The planet Stittara is the main source for the longevity drugs known as anagathics. The interstellar government, the Unity of the Ceylesian Arm, recognizes that any disruption of Stittara’s fragile ecosystem endangers the anagathics. Trouble is, with human colonies on Stittara, disruption seems inevitable.

When the Unity decides to send a consultant to assess the environmental danger, Dr. Paulo Verano has good reason to take the assignment. He’s just been through a nasty divorce and needs to get away from his old life, so off he goes.

Stittara is a fully developed world, one brimming with wonders. Primary among these are the skytubes—enormous airborne creatures that drift above the surface seemingly oblivious to the human colonists. Verano’s intuition tells him that the skytubes are the key to Stittara’s ecosystem. But before he can learn their secrets, he has to deal with hostile colonists, hurricane superstorms, and hidden government agendas.

While the parallels are obvious, this book is no Dune. The One-Eyed Man is quite a bit more subtle and gentler than Frank Herbert’s masterpiece. Paulo Verano is more like a Connie Willis character than an Atreides—all he really wants is to do his job and get on with his life. And Stittara is definitely not anything like Arrakis.

Modesitt is a master of big ideas, and a great storyteller. Let him tell you about Stittara; you won’t regret it.

And now I’m out of space. Until next issue, remember that good SF could be anywhere. Have fun looking.


Don Sakers is the author of The Eighth Succession and The Leaves of October. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.

"The Reference Library" Copyright © 2013, Don Sakers

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