I was going to post this yesterday, but real life interfered:
An evening with China Miéville.
Paul Wiseall interviews China on his first clear science fiction book. I’d argue that most of his novels from Perdido Street Station have been science fiction, but that’s a matter of taste as much as anything.
Paul Kincaid: Learning to Read Adam Roberts & Rich Puchalsky: On Learning to Read Adam Roberts
How do you solve a problem like Adam Roberts, a writer every book of which I’ve read I’ve disagreed with and/or disliked? Whom, despite this, I still keep coming back to every few years or so. Bad writers you can dismiss, writers that you dislike you can dismiss, even writers you like and enjoy you can often set aside more easily than a writer that irritates you, like a piece of sand in an oyster. With Roberts, I find that his view of what science fiction should be is different enough from mine to be challenging, while at the same time I often can’t believe either his characters or the situations they find themselves in. Paul Kincaid has a similar problem and his post is an attempt to deal with it, to which Rich Puchalsky has replied.
Martin Lewis reviews Arslan.
A review which does not make me want to read this any more than Abigail Nussbaum’s review did. Arslan is a novel that starts with a horrific rape scene in which a teenage boy and girl are raped by Arslan the warlord, which in itself is enough to squick me out, but what both reviews also made clear is that the setup of the novel is far from realistic. Arslan is a warlord out of a fictional country in the former USSR, who by way of nuclear blackmail becomes ruler of the world, only to end up micromanaging a small town in flyover country USA. It’s an absurd setup that Arslan‘s author needs to tell the story she wants to tell. I can deal with novels that rely on either of these two authorical tricks, but novels that use both need to be very good to end on my to read pile and so far nothing I’ve read makes me think Arslan falls in that category.
The History of Science Fiction as depicted in one crazily detailed artwork by Ward Shelley.
Too gorgeous to nitpick.
