science fiction

A Point of Honor — Dorothy J. Heydt

Published on August 7, 2011

Cover of A Point of Honor

A Point of Honor
Dorothy J. Heydt
302 pages
published in 1998

A Point of Honor is the seventh book I’ve read in my Year of Reading Women challenge and the first I’ve read before. When I was setting up my reading list last year I wanted to include not just feminist sf classics or books to challenge myself, but also some old favourites that deserve a wider audience, of which this is one. I had read A Point of Honor when it was published back in 1998, after it had gotten some buzz on the old rec.arts.sf.written Usenet group, back in the day when that was still the number one science fiction hangout on the internet. The author herself was one of the group’s regulars, well respected and liked, one reason why I tried out her novel. This wasn’t the first nor the last time I did that: other writers I got to know through rec.arts.sf.written were Jo Walton, Brenda Clough and Matt Ruff, to name just three.

A Point of Honor is one of only two novels Dorothy Heydt wrote, the other being The Interior Life, a fantasy novel she wrote under the pseudonym of Katherine Blake. Apart from that she has only written short stories, some two dozen in total, the last ones a couple of years ago. None of her work is currently in print that I know off. A pity, but unfortunately an all too common fate for science fiction writers as their books for one reason or another fail to reach an audience. Which is another reason why I wanted to talk about this book, to bring some attention to an unfairly overlooked writer and do for A Point of Honor what Jo Walton did last year for The Interior Life.

The Halfling and other Stories — Leigh Brackett

Published on July 31, 2011

The Halfling and other Stories

The Halfling and other Stories
Leigh Brackett
351 pages
published in 1973

The Halfling and Other Stories is the sixth book I’ve read in the Year of Reading Women challenge I set myself after I’d noticed last year how few female written science fiction books I read. I had chosen this because it was something I hadn’t read before and I always liked Brackett. Unfortunately it turned out this was one of her lesser collections. The stories don’t fit well together, there’s no real theme to the collection and some are decidedly on the weak side.

It doesn’t help that the first two stories are basically the same. In both there’s the hardbitten protagonist falling for a mysterious beautiful alien girl who he knows is trouble yet can’t help himself but get involved with, who then turns out to be evil. Worse, in both stories this girl is shown to be representative of her race, their evil part of their biology. It’s a bit …uncomfortable… shall we say, but unfortunately these sort of assumptions are build into the kind of planetary romances Leigh Brackett wrote.

Bringing back the midlist

Published on July 29, 20113 Comments

Last week I wrote about the new Gollancz ebooks gateway which will launch “this autumn”. A week later and we’re slowly getting to see which authors will have books on this service, as they start to mention it on their blogs.

One of the authors I’m most excited about, who most unfairly has been out of prints for years, is Pat Cadigan:

It’s been busy around here but, yes, in case you haven’t heard me turning handsprings from wherever you are, Orion/Gollancz is bringing all of my work back into print. Synners is going to be in the SF Masterworks series and Mindplayers, Fools, and Tea From An Empty Cup will be published in a single omnibus volume. My collections Patterns and Dirty Work will be ebooks.

And all will be part of Orion’s SF Gateway program.

also back in print, Nicola Griffith’s first two science fiction novels:

Ammonite appeared in early 1993 (from Ballantine/Del Rey in the US and HarperCollins/Grafton in the UK). It won some awards. Slow River followed two years later (ditto). And ditto. But the books still went out of print in the UK. (That’s the UK publishing reality. It’s different in the US. Here both books here have been through a zillion printings and still sell steadily, if not spectacularly, in print and digital editions.)

So it’s wonderful to be able to announce that I’ll finally be a Gollancz author–back where I started all those years ago. Repeat Yodel of Triumph, add Nod of Satisfaction, and follow, as always, with beer.

I was already interested in seeing what Gollancz was up to ebookwise, but these two announcements make it much more likely that’ll will buy books through them. Much will still depend on price, easy of buying and the absence of intrusive DRM on the books. The price needs to be roughly in the range of what I would spend on secondhand paperbacks or it wouldn’t be worthwhile to me, though I am willing to pay a bit more for the convenience of buying online, certainly for authors like Nicola Griffith and Pat Cadigan.

As Pat Cadigan noted in her post, twenty-thirty years ago it was normal for most of science fiction’s back cataloque to be in print and easily available. In the last decades this backlist has been steadily eroded as it no longer made commercial sense to keep most authors in print. Epublishing changes this equation: once an ebook is created, selling more of them doesn’t cost more unlike with physical books, where new print runs are usually too expensive for moderately profitable books. The Gollancz intiative helps to re-establish the backlist, another good reason to support it.

(Edited to erase an incredibly stupid brainfart; see comments.)

Bold as Love — Gwyneth Jones

Published on July 22, 2011

Cover of Bold as Love

Bold as Love
Gwyneth Jones
403 pages
published in 2001

Bold as Love is the second book in my year of reading women sf challenge, chosen partially because Niall Harrison was also going to read it in February, for Torque Control‘s similar project. For a long time I wondered whether I had made a mistake selecting this book, picking it up and putting it down again, not getting to grips with it. Didn’t like the writing, didn’t believe the world building or plot, couldn’t care for the protagonists. Only the fact that I was reading this as part of a self imposed challenge kept me going. That, and the feeling that a novel which had won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and which was commercially succesful enough to span four sequels, must have something in it that I was missing.

Perhaps it was just that this was a novel I needed to immerse myself in fully, not read in bits and chunks here and there during the daily commute. Gwyneth Jones is not a writer who grabs you from the first sentence — at least she isn’t for me. She writes her characters from the outside in, rather coolly and hence it takes more time to get into her characters’ heads than it would with a more “warmer” writer. I had the same sort of problems with the future England Bold as Love predicted, which at first seemed dated and implausible, more sixties New Wave than early 21st century science fiction.

Shuttlepunk

Published on July 21, 2011

It isn’t ironic that the last flight of this:

Happens on the anniversary of this:

But it is the end of an era. I’m too young for the Apollo missions, but old enough to remember when the Space Shuttle was still the promised miracle ship that would get us into space properly, back before Challenger showed us how much of this promise was just wishful thinking. The Space Shuttle was the last gasp of the idea of manned space exploration as something analogous to the discoveyr and settlement of America, something that could be done just as long as we had enough willpower and enginering fortitute to pursue it. The end of the shuttle does not mean the end of space exploration, but with its retirement the science fiction dreams of L5 space colonies with millions of inhabitants, Helium-3 mines on the moon and asteroids being melted in low earth orbit for their metals has finally gone the way of all science dreams made obsolete by reality.

So in honour of steampunk (the faded dreams of Victorian era science fiction), dieselpunk (thirties), atompunk (fifties and sixities), I’d like to propose shuttlepunk as a new genre for all those stories that still think those seventies and eighties ideas about the colonisation of space can be made into reality. First candidate as proto shuttlepunk: Stephen Baxter’s Voyage. Science fiction being what it is, I’m sure we’ll see quite a few shuttlepunk novels coming out in the next few decades looking back towards an old, discarded future in preference to inventing new ones…