science fiction – Page 62

Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille — Steven Brust

Published on May 18, 2011

Cover of Cowboy Fengs Space Bar and Grill

Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille
Steven Brust
223 pages
published in 1990

Sometimes when I’m depressed I go on a book reading binge — I managed to read every Wheel of Time book up to Lord of Chaos in a week when I was at a low point during my time at college. Pure escapism, fleeing into a story to temporarily ignore the world around me. A few weeks ago I fled back in that habit when my wife was having a very bad night, the day before she had to go back to hospital again. I was sleeping on the couch to try and give her an easier night’s sleep but then couldn’t sleep myself, so I grabbed the nearest book at hand. This turned out to be Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille.

Which perhaps wasn’t the best book to keep the night terrors at bay. Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille is a strange book, if only because it’s one of Steven Brust’s rare science fiction novels, but also because it’s a light adventure story about a Strange Bar, set amongst a series of nuclear holocausts. Amongst Brust fans it’s apparently a bit of a controversial book with some hating it, but for me it was the right book at the right time. It may be strange to think of a book that has a succession of nuclear wars at its heart as comforting, but that’s what it was.

It’s comforting because Brust makes it so. The nuclear death is in the background, while in the foreground we get the story of the bar that has the best matzo ball soup in the galaxy, as well as some of the best Irish musicians. Whether or not Billy, the protagonist narrating the story in first person, counts himself amongst them remains unrevealed. This is the picture you get in the first few sentences and the cozy atmosphere it evokes neutralises much of the existential dread the nukes evoke. It reminds me of the urban fantasy people like Emma Bull and other of the Scribblies — a group Brust of course belonged to too — were writing in the eighties.

China Mountain Zhang — Maureen F. McHugh

Published on May 15, 2011

Cover of China Mountain Zhang

China Mountain Zhang
Maureen F. McHugh
313 pages
published in 1992

China Mountain Zhang is the fourth novel I’ve read in my Year of Reading Women project. It had been on my shelves unread for over a decade before that, silently accusing me every time I walked past. Some novels are like that, shoved aside each time for a more interesting looking book. Which is one of the reasons I put it on my list of twelve science fiction novels written by women to read this year: to force me to finally read it.

Because I should’ve read this long ago. China Mountain Zhang was Maureen McHugh’s debut novel and was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1992, winning the Lambda Literary Award (best science fiction with LGBT themes), the Locus Award for best first novel, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award (feminist themed science fiction). It also has always been a highly regarded novel in the fan circles I hang around in. Yet until now I never had even tried to read it, largely because everytime I looked through my bookshelves the cover repelled me. And of course you should never judge a book by its cover, but in this case the cover did seem to promise something worthy but dull I never was quite in the mood for. A bit dumb, because of course China Mountain Zhang turned out to be just as good as its hype had made it out to be.

Who keeps inviting John C. Wright to these things?

Published on May 14, 2011

SF Signal is a commercial science fiction portal/blog which holds regular socalled Mind Melts, where they asks several science fiction writers their opinion on some topic or other. Usually these are mildly diverting but no more than that, as everybody struggles to say something original to questions like “which difficult science fiction books would you recommend”, but sometimes it goes wrong and they invite John C. Wright to participate. It’s not just that he’s a Libertarian-Catholic wingnut with a persecution complex the size of Jupiter, but that he’s so unbelievably pompous. For example:

World of Null-A was savaged by science fiction’s earliest and best known professional critic of the genre, Damon Knight, who pushed the work into undeserved obscurity, perhaps because he preferred the type of works written, or, rather, committed, by poseurs and artistes such as I mention with scorn above. Mr. Knight dismissed the paradigm-shifting technique of plot-weaving as mere sleight of hand. But perhaps it not as easy as it looks to juggle all the pieces of a jigsaw in midair, forming one picture to the reader, and then, by flipping one more bit of the puzzle into view, to both change the whole picture of what has gone before, and have the picture make sense; and then to do it again. The scientific process itself is nothing other than this juggling of jigsawwork to create successively more elegant and accurate pictures of the cosmos: to dismiss it in art is to overlook it’s significance in life. Others have attempted the Vanvogtian style of paradigm-shifting, either successfully, as with The Paradox Men by Charles L. Harness, or unsuccessfully, as with Mr. Knight’s own deservedly forgotten Beyond the Barrier, a work that serves as a living reminder that those who cannot perform a tricky technique of art at even an apprentice level should not mock it as a mere trick.

Nails on chalkboard.

Get Nick Mamatas a hugo: All You Need is Kill

Published on May 12, 2011

Nick “proven noticable” Mamatas is up for the Best Editor, Long Form Hugo for his work on the Haikasoru line of translated Japanese science fiction. James Nicoll has decided to campaign for him, by reviewing all Haikasoru books he can lay his hands on. He started with All You Need Is Kill, coincidently the only Haikasoru book I’ve read myself, so I thought to help out by reposting the review f it I did last year at my booklog:

All You Need Is KILL

All You Need Is KILL
Hiroshi Sakurazaka & Alexander O. Smith (translator)
381 pages
published in 2004

James Nicoll was casting about for science fiction books to read one day last week and got pointed in the direction of Haikasoru Books, a newish line of translated Japanese science fiction, found something to his liking and posted about it, as well as a poll on which Haikasoru title to read next. All of which explains why I was pulled towards the cover of All You Need is Kill when I saw it in a local bookstore. Since James liked the Haikasoru that he got and I trust his taste, that was enough reason for me to take a chance on this. I wasn’t disappointed.

What I got with All You Need is KILL is a fast paced, short novel (only 200 pages) that takes two old, familiar science fiction concepts and mashes them up into something new: Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day. Earth has been invaded by the alien Mimics, seemingly non-sapient but still with the ability to learn from their mistakes and most of the poorer part of the world has been overrun already. Keiji Kiriya is just one recruit given a short training, shoved into a battlesuit called a Jacket, sent out to defend Japan from the Mimics then dying in his first battle — only to wake up in his bunk the day before.

John C. Wright comments on that Superman news

Published on May 3, 2011

James Nicoll, delighting in the pain of his readers again, brings us John C. Wright’s considered response to the news that Superman is giving up his American citizenship:

No, to avoid the legal implications, I suggest we, the comicbook-loving community, merely appear at the offices of DC comics, and stage a riot, have the level of violence spiral out of control, drag the editors and owners bodily out of the building, and hang them from lampposts, and laugh and tell Monty Python jokes while their legs kick, dancing with spasms, in the air, inches from the ground. Then we can scratch their car paint with keys.

I agree, this might cast a pall over the comicbook-loving community, and folk may look down upon us as barbaric—which is why we should all dress in headscarves and Bedouin robes for the bloody event, whereupon the news media and all righthinking people will take great care to present our side of the story in the most sympathetic possible light, and any one who points out, truthfully, that our barbaric act of vigilante multiple murder over an issue of trivial comicbook geekdom nerdification was, well, barbaric, any such feckless abecedarian naif can be silenced and ostracized by being called a racist.

John C. Wright, for those who not know him, is a science fiction writer and a self confessed Christian Randoid whose writing has been noted for being fond of having underage school girls getting tied up and spanked and liking it. The response above is typical of him; yet he thinks of himself as a rational man. Which is also why he can be an Ayn Rand fan and a Catholic. We might think these beliefs conflict, but we lack his innate rationality.