- 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.
science fiction
Sci-fi Sunday: linkers live in vain
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
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.
Sci-fi Sunday: First Niall Harrison “Memorial” Edition
Oh god, can I just never see two men salute each other while fighting back the manly tears of manliness ever again? Catvalente.
As Martin Lewis said: Now that Niall Harrison has completed his multi-million pound international transfer from Vector to Strange Horizons, last Friday’s linkdump at Torque Control was probably the last. This leaves a gap in the market for an intelligent round-up of the best links from across the genre blogosphere. This probably isn’t that, but it’ll do until somebody starts something better.
- The Year of Reading Women: Torque Control,
- Ian Sales (first review),
- Martin Lewis
- and yours truly.
- Steampunk is now officially over: “‘Steampunk Palin’ Comic More Insane Than You Imagined“.
- Paul McAuley is thinking about publishing his out of print short story collections as e-books, asked for feedback from his readers and got it.
- At The Guardian, Sam Jordinson is blogging the Hugo winners again, this time covering Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves. Also: Joseph Conrad’s science fiction novel.
- SF Signal Mind Melt: the Future of Publishing with Nick Mamatas, Tim Pratt Cheryl Morgan, Neil Clarke, Gordon van Gelder and Lou Anders. Mamatas is his usual nuanced self: “The major houses are pigs and some of them are going to die. We should gleefully bathe in their blood and fat!”
- Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing is nominated for the Best Animated Short Oscar. Trailer.
- Is science fiction getting more conservative? Since this is Pajamasmedia (sic), no real answer to this question is given, but all involved get to indulge in a good oldfashioned whingefest about how oppressed rightwing science fiction writers are.
- Speculative fiction considered harmful.
- More women writing science fiction: Abigail Nussbaum looks at Joanna Russ and Gwyneth Jones
- And finally something that has nothing to do with science fiction, but is still the most sfnal thing you’ll have read this month.
Surface Detail – Iain M. Banks
Surface Detail
Iain M. Banks
627 pages
published in 2010
The problem with any new Culture novel is that they’ll never be as good as the original three — Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games and Use of Weapons. Back in the late eighties when these books were first published there was literally nothing like them; now we know what the Culture is like, what to expect from Banks and there are whole generations of sf writers who have been influenced by him writing similar sort of novels. Yet everytime I still hope that the next Culture novel is as good as the first three, which is unfair — even if it is, it won’t have the same impact.
But Surface Detail comes close. From his first published book, The Wasp Factory, Banks has had a reputation for writing well crafted but often repulsive scenes of violence and torture and here he surpasses himself. Because in Surface Detail he gives us a horrifying but all too plausible idea: what if you could use virtual realities to create the hells your religion says sinners should be cast down into? What if civilisations routinely went through a stage in their development when their technology was good enough to create simulations of hell, but their morality still primitive enough to actually want to subject people to them? One of the first scenes in the book shows what that would look like from the inside and it’s not for the squeemish; it actually gave me some bad moments reading it just before I went to bed. No cuddly fantasy hell this; imagine whole creative output of an entire species devoted to making up ever more cruel tortures, without end.