science fiction Archives - Page 30 of 44

Sidewise in Links — sci-fi Sundaze

Published on February 27, 2011

You know you’re not enjoying an SF novel when you keep stopping to read a really badly written academic text on international relations.
— Jonathan McCalmont.

A year of reading women:

Niall Harrison reviews Bold as Love: part I, part II, part III, part IV.
Fuck Yeah Lady Writers.
Abigail Nussbaum has a list of books by women sf writers she’s planning to read and asking for suggestions for more.
The table of comments for volume one of The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller.

Earth is Room Enough — Isaac Asimov

Published on February 26, 2011

Cover of Earth is Room Enough

Earth is Room Enough
Isaac Asimov
208 pages
published in 1957

As the backcover blurb has it, “ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN and probably will RIGHT HERE ON EARTH” — which is why Earth is Room Enough for Asimov to set his stories on. This, with another Asimov collection, Buy Jupiter, is one of the books that made me into a science fiction reader and fan. It’s not so much that this is an outstanding collection — a good few of the stories here are amusing at best — but that Asimov is at any rate such an easy and pleasant writer to meet when you’re young. A clever ten year old can follow his stories but since they were originally written for adults, there’s no talking down here. Asimov might not be the best writer now to introduce you to science fiction, but he was for me.

Earth is Room Enough, originally published in 1957 and which stayed in print for at least twenty years is is a collection of stories written between 1951 and 1957 and somewhat of a grab bag, jokes and shaggy dog stories intermixed with more serious ones. As said, all stories were set on Earth and deliberately picked by Asimove for the collection, to prove he could do more than write galactic space opera. Mind, he cheats a bit by including two pieces of comic verse… It doesn’t make for a first rate collection, but it certainly wasn’t a chore reading this either.

Golden the Links were – Oh! Oh! Oh! — Sci-Fi Sundazes

Published on February 13, 20111 Comment

Your complete linkguide to the great e-book piracy controversy of January ’11.
Harlan Ellison has been awarded the 2011 Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction. As a tribute, eI publishes a special Harlan Ellison tribute issue.
Missed it: Adam Roberts dissects the Booker prize.
Atlanta Nights has been optioned for a movie. That Atlanta Nights.
Damien G. Walter thinks Britain needs a national library service; in comments, Martin Lewis disagrees
Gav Reads has its first review up: City of Ruin by Mark Charan Newton. Also, Gav explains why he returned to blogging after stopping his first project, NextRead and why he doesn’t just restart that.
Not science fiction — I think: “the Good Detective”, a short story by M. John Harrison.

Sci-fi Sunday: linkers live in vain

Published on February 6, 2011

More links for a rainy|sunny|strike where not applicable Sunday afternoon.

Five cups of tea are drunk on approximately two occasions over the course of The Day of the Triffids.
Mark Chadbourn interviewed by Fantasy Literature.
If zombies embody the fear of proles and vampires are aristocratic monster, which archetype represents the middle classes?
If it were October and I was in Germany, I would be going to this: John Scalzi on tour.
The e-book version of the Leigh Brackett selected The Best of Edmond Hamilton can be downloaded for free at Ebook/POD retailer Phoenix Picks. According to the ISFDB this is the same collection as the old Ballatine/Del Rey collection from the late seventies. If so, this is essential reading.

Is the Locus Recommended List biased towards America? Cheryl Morgan thinks not, but judge for yourself.
Not (just) science fiction, but a glimpse of the future: the proposal to put all Icelandic literature online: “the total literature of Iceland is under 50,000 books, which is easily scannable in 2 years by 12 people.

The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin

Published on January 30, 20113 Comments

Cover of The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. LeGuin
286 pages
published in 1969

Last year I discovered I read why too few science fiction books written by women and started making up for this lack by (re)reading some favourite writers. With the new year and following the example of several fellow science fiction bloggers, I decided to approach this more systemically, by pledging to read at least one science fiction or fantasy book by a female writer each month. The Left Hand of Darkness is the first and I choose it because it was a well respected classic novel, winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, I had never managed finish before, despite having tried three or four times and as important, it was short.

Since The Left Hand of Darkness is such a well known work, over forty years old and discussed and summarised extensively during that time, you can’t help but come to it with certain preconceptions about it. The most important of which you’ll have to let go if you want to get the shape of the true book. This is not a feminist science fiction novel. It’s a novel about gender and gender expectations and the role our assumptions of having two separate sexes each with their own character, strength and weakness play in our societies, but it’s not feminist, unless every book about gender is by definition feminist. What you actually get in this story is a fairly traditional view of gender, as I’ll try to show.