Fantastika – Page 31 – Wis[s]e Words

ImagiCon 2015 has Alastair Reynolds as guest of honour

Published on September 9, 20143 Comments

ImagiCon is a new, one day Dutch science fiction convention first held this year. For next year’s edition (march 21, 2015) they’ve announced Alastair Reynolds as guest of honour:

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a warm welcome to our first guest of honor for Imagicon 2015: The world-renowned British writer Alastair Reynolds! SF readers probably know him as the author of heavy books filled with exciting space opera like Revelation Space, House of Suns and Blue Remembered Earth, but also as the author of many short stories. Whovians may know of him from his Doctor Who book The Harvest of Time. On Imagicon you get can get to know everything about him, and of course you can ask for his autograph!

Of course under Dutch appelstroop rules –if an author is born in the Netherlands, has lived there for a significant time or has ever tasted appelstroop– Alastair Reynolds is Holland’s most renowned science fiction author, as he lived here from 1991 to 2008. He’s one of my favourite science fiction writers and although I’d already decided to go to ImagiCon next year, this only makes it easier.

UPDATE: a point of criticism. I actually went over to buy my ticket (only 16 euros! Reasonable!) but saw I had to register first for a horrible Paylogic system. Which wouldn’t be so bad, but it asks for all sorts of information, name, address, gender undsoweiter all to be able to use a system in all likelyhood I’ll only use for this con. Why not provide Paypal or Ideal, payment systems where the risks and safety is known off, rather than saddle your members up with an unneeded new system to keep track off?

The Steerswoman — Rosemary Kirstein

Published on September 8, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Steerswoman

The Steerswoman
Rosemary Kirstein
279 pages
published in 1989

As long as I’ve been online and talking to other fans I’ve been hearing about The Steerswoman, how it’s one of those great lost books of science fiction and how sad it was that it had fallen out of print, how everybody who read it loved it; I never heard anybody say anything bad about it. Now, finally, after twenty years of hearing this I had the chance to judge for myself and you know what? Everybody was right. And if you want the chance to see for yourself why this book is so highly rated, the ebook is very reasonably priced.

But reading The Steerswoman, after having heard so much about, brings on a strange tension. As with any such book, you come into it with a certain knowledge about it, an expectation about how the plot would roughly develop, somewhat of an idea of the central gimmick of the novel, of what makes it special. It makes me wonder how I would’ve read The Steerswoman had I stumbled over it in 1989, before I had that knowledge. So erm, for any reader who doesn’t know about it, do me a favour and read it before you read the rest of this post and tell me what you think? Don’t read on, just go out and buy it from the link above.

Clarkesworld’s secret project

Published on September 7, 2014Leave a comment

Clarkesworld has announced a new, no longer secret project:

I am pleased to announce that Clarkesworld has entered into an agreement with Storycom International Culture Communication Co., Ltd. to showcase a short story originally published in Chinese in every issue. Each month, an all-star team of professionals intricately familiar with Chinese short fiction will be recommending stories for this special feature and I’ll select which ones get translated and published in each issue. This team includes:

Liu Cixin—the most-famous science fiction writer in China and author of the THREE BODY TRILOGY
Yao Haijun—Editor-in-Chief of Science Fiction World

Zhang Zhilu—Scriptwriter at the China Film Group Corporation and one of the pioneering scriptwriters of science fiction movies in China

Wu Yan—a Doctoral Supervisor for the Science Fiction Literature major at Beijing Normal University and President of World Chinese Science Fiction Association

Ken Liu—Award-winning American science fiction writer

This is such a good idea I immediately subscribed. If we as a science fiction community want to see more diversity, more attention paid to non-English language science fiction, we need initiatives like this. If this is successfull I hope Clarkesworld also looks at other parts of the world: I’d love to see selections of Brazilian or Indian or Nigerian science fiction or …

I also hope this initiative inspires other magazines to up their game and pay more attention to science fiction written in other languages than English.

Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating and a lot will depend on the stories chosen and the quality of the translation, but just having a well established magazine like Clarkesworld take on this project is a good thing.

The Honor of the Queen — David Weber

Published on September 6, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Honor of the Queen

The Honor of the Queen
David Weber
384 pages
published in 1993

The Honor of the Queen is the second novel in the Honor Harrington series, which finds Honor promoted after the events of On Basilik Station and off to command a small flottila escorting a diplomatic and trade mission to the Grayson Republic, which the Manticoran Kingdom hopes to gain as an ally. The thing is, Grayson is a system settled by American fundamentalist Christians who lived in isolation for centuries on a planet that was literally poisonous to them due to the amount of heavy metals in its soil. They have a bit of a problem therefore with women serving in the military, which complicates things for Honor. Meanwhile, on the planet of even more fundamentalist Christians, Manticore’s ancient rival the Haven Republic is busy meddling…

The Honor Harrington books are purely escapist mind candy for me, books I grab when I really don’t want to make an effort but still want to read something. Weber is a good enough author that he keeps your attention throughout, that he keeps you wanting to read on to find out the rest of the story no matter how often you’ve read it, which is why I’ve read his Harrington novels more often than many much better novels. They just give me something other books can’t. Even if objectively speaking they’re not very good.

Zwarte Sterren — Roelof Goudriaan (editor)

Published on September 5, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Zwarte Sterren

Zwarte Sterren
Roelof Goudriaan (editor)
209 pages
published in 2005

Growing up in the Netherlands I of course read a lot of science fiction in Dutch, but never read much Dutch science fiction, if only because there wasn’t that much in the first place. Plenty of young adult science fiction, with Thea Beckman and the Euro 5 series being particular favourites of mine, but not many writers of grownup science fiction. Most sf publishers rather translated cheaper British or American science fiction than gamble on a Dutch or Belgian author. Better get some more Van Vogt instead.

And to a certain extend, especially once I started reading English good, there was the cultural cringe. It all seemed a bit less interesting, a bit more naff when written in Dutch. It just doesn’t have the grandiosity or bombast of English and attempts to achieve the same effects usually end up sounding corny or fake. So while there were a couple of authors I liked, Wim Gijssen and especially Belgian author Eddy C. Bertin, I haven’t attempted to keep up with Dutch science fiction at all.

Until the recent Worldcon that is.