The 2009 Locus awards for the best science fiction books were announced yesterday. You can see the whole list of winners at their website but here are the highlights
Sci fi novel: Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Fantasy novel: Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
First novel: Singularity’s Ring by Paul Melko
YA book: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Novella: Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link
Everyone seems to be chattering about the gorgeous teaser photos from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and I can see why - the rich color, fantastical distortion and surreal decor certainly lend an air of magic and excitement to the project.
And I can think of no better subject for Burton’s brand of weird, dark, beautiful and grotesque art than Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. From the hookah smoking caterpillar to the Cheshire cat, Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum to the white rabbit, the books were wonderful and nightmarish, hallucinogenic and marvellous, full of lush, strange imagery throughout.
If you’ve never read the book of Alice in Wonderland it’s well worth it. Carroll’s talking animals, funny backward logic and adventures are perfect for children, and the vivid imagery and bizarre story are dark and interesting enough to have adults turning pages, too.
Here are some more beautiful Alice in Wonderland pictures - this time, of some of the collectible, unusual and always gorgeous editions of Alice in Wonderland available on AbeBooks.
It would appear that JK Rowling is facing not one but two accusations of plagarism.
John Buechler, director of the film Troll claims that Rowling used a script from the film to create her Harry Potter series. Buechler says the film is based on the experiences of a young wizard and wants to prove to Warner Bros that Troll was actually the beginning of Harry Potter.
Secondly, the family of late English writer Adrian Jacobs is suing Rowling and her publisher for £500million. They claim that Harry Potter was copied from Jacobs’ Willy the Wizard. The manuscript for Willy was sent to Bloomsbury Publishing’s literary agent Christopher Little who later represented Rowling, but the book was rejected. The book was published by a smaller company under the name The Adventures Of Willy The Wizard No 1: Livid Land. Jacobs died in 1997, before the success of Harry Potter played out but now his estate which includes his son and grandson, claim that Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire was plagarised.
Now doesn’t this also mean that John Buechler should be suing Jacobs’ estate and vice-versa?!
Congratulations to Edward L. Ferman (editor and publisher), Michael Whelan (artist), Frank R. Paul (artist) and Connie Willis (author) on being the 2009 inductees into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
The four join the ranks of such celebrated names as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Jules Verne, and many many more.
I’m happy to see Connie Willis in there, finally -I think The Doomsday Book is among the finest pieces of science fiction ever written. It’s an excellent book.
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame is found at the EMP/SFM (Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum) in Seattle, which, if you’ve never attended, is a pretty cool and fascinating way to spend a half day or so (no fewer than three hours - last time I went I rushed, and was pretty disappointed).
How fantastic. In Adventure and fantasy writer’s Jules Verne’s hometown of Nantes, France, the Estuary 2009 Arts Festival will include a 9.5- metre-tall deep-sea diver, the latest creation from French mechanical marionette street theater company Royale de Luxe.
The theater company includes elaborate stories with each of their creations, and the giant deep-sea diver is no exception. His history includes the Titanic, a dead sister, a missing niece, secret messages from geysers and a job spent sawing icebergs.
On Friday, the giant “woke” and made his way through the town, to the delight, admiration and astonishment of onlookers. The functioning marionette weighs two and a half tons, and requires 30 people to operate and move him.
I can only imagine Jules Verne, with his love of adventure, a story well told, and the grandiose, would approve.
The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
In completely unrelated news, Yahoo News reported today that Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro teamed up with thriller writer Chuck Hogan to write a book called The Strain that combines three things I find almost irresistable - post-apocalyptic type stuff, vampires, and zombies. Actually, it sounds like a mutant virus that sort of COMBINES vampires and zombies. Watch out for the vampies! Anyway, it’s already out - why did I not know about this before?! AND it’s the first book of a trilogy, so if I love it, I get to enjoy the giddy agony of waiting for the other books.
“…a visceral page-turner that reimagines vampirism as a virus that causes its victims’ bodies to mutate — disgustingly — into buglike creatures, stomping zombie-style around Manhattan and wreaking havoc. A disparate team of a rogue CDC doctor, rat-catcher and an Eastern European pawnshop owner come together to try to stop them.”
Anyway, I have two predictions. The first is that it will be pretty bad, and the second is that I will devour and love every minute of it nonetheless (then lick the orange powder from my fingers).
I am unabashedly a fan of NBC’s comedy-drama series Chuck. I love the humor, I love the music, I love the 80’s references, I love John Casey’s sarcastic barbs. Hence, the fact that the fate of the show for the next season is in question is of concern to me - great concern. So much so I’ve had to join ranks with fans such as the Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan, and jump onto the “Save Chuck” bandwagon.
Working at AbeBooks has actually helped in my appreciation of the show. For example, in one episode, a character was named “Harry Lime”. Thanks to having worked on our Graham Greene feature, I knew that Harry Lime was the name of the character in The Third Man.
Not being much of a comic person, I wouldn’t really have known about Comic Con (which features prominently throughout the show via posters etc.) without AbeBooks. But it’s hard not to learn about Comic Con when reading about Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore.
Then there are the actual Chuck comic books. I came across these in NBC’s store and thought they’d be a neat gift for a fellow Chuck fan that does have an appreciation for comic books. Good idea but they don’t ship outside of the US which isn’t helpful for a Canadian resident. Hurrah for the AbeBooks Wants system that will notify me when more of these comic books are listed now that the copy I’d looked at has sold!
Oh and I can’t forget Twitter. Through my job, I was introduced to Twitter and how it works. This turned out to be a vital bit of information - the Chuck campaign and fans’ Twitter efforts have reached as far as the NPR.
So there you go - my appreciation for the TV series Chuck and my job at AbeBooks go nicely hand-in-hand. It would be a terrible shame to lose this synergy. So NBC execs, PLEASE renew Chuck for a third season…and if you’re another viewer who’d like to save the show (or if you’re just a terribly kind person who’d like to help a girl out), add your name to the petition, buy a footlong sub sandwich at Subway and support the show by watching tonight’s finale! If you could, that’d be AWESOME. :)
Attention science fiction and fantasy fans. The Nebula Awards were handed out at the weekend. Ursula K Le Guin won for the novel category for Powers – that’s her fourth Nebula victory for a novel. In 1969, she won for The Left Hand of Darkness, and, in 1974, for The Dispossessed, and then 1990 for Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea. She’s also won a couple of Hugos for novels. Ursula will be 90 in October.
Nebula Award winners (25 April 2009)
Best novel – Powers by Ursula K Le Guin
Best Novella - The Spacetime Pool by Catherine Asaro
Best Novellette - Pride and Prometheus by John Kessel
Best Short Story - Trophy Wives by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy - Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) by Ysabeau S Wilce
Here’s a list of all previous Nebula and Hugo award winners.
I came across this interesting list via blog.oup.com. It’s 9 words that while you think they originated from real science, they actually first appeared in science fiction.
I love etymology and I love science-fiction, so this is really cool. I was especially surprised by #3. Zero-gravity and zero-g were originally fictional terms?! Arthur C. Clarke, you’re the bee’s knees. Just more proof that the real cool kids in town are the nerds (she said, hopefully).
Nine Words You Might Think Came from Science but
Which Are Really from Science Fiction
1. Robotics. This is probably the most well-known of these, since Isaac Asimov is famous for (among many other things) his three laws of robotics. Even so, I include it because it is one of the only actual sciences to have been first named in a science fiction story (”Liar!”, 1941). Asimov also named the related occupation (roboticist) and the adjective robotic.
2. Genetic engineering. The other science that received its name from a science fiction story, in this case Jack Williamson’s novel Dragon’s Island, which was coincidentally published in the same year as “Liar!” The occupation of genetic engineer took a few more years to be named, this time by Poul Anderson.
3. Zero-gravity/zero-g. A defining feature of life in outer space (sans artificial gravity, of course). The first known use of “zero-gravity” is from Jack Binder (better known for his work as an artist) in 1938, and actually refers to the gravityless state of the center of the Earth’s core. Arthur C. Clarke gave us “zero-g” in his 1952 novel Islands in the Sky.
4. Deep space. One of the other defining features of outer space is its essential emptiness. In science fiction, this phrase most commonly refers to a region of empty space between stars or that is remote from the home world. E. E. “Doc” Smith seems to have coined this phrase in 1934. The more common use in the sciences refers to the region of space outside of the Earth’s atmosphere.
5. Ion drive. An ion drive is a type of spaceship engine that creates propulsion by emitting charged particles in the direction opposite of the one you want to travel. The earliest citation in Brave New Words is again from Jack Williamson (”The Equalizer”, 1947). A number of spacecraft have used this technology, beginning in the 1970s.
6. Pressure suit. A suit that maintains a stable pressure around its occupant; useful in both space exploration and high-altitude flights. This is another one from the fertile mind of E. E. Smith. Curiously, his pressure suits were furred, an innovation not, alas, replicated by NASA.
7. Virus. Computer virus, that is. Dave Gerrold (of “The Trouble With Tribbles” fame) was apparently the first to make the verbal analogy between biological viruses and self-replicating computer programs, in his 1972 story “When Harlie Was One.”
8. Worm. Another type of self-replicating computer program. So named by John Brunner in his 1975 novel Shockwave Rider.
9. Gas giant. A large planet, like Jupiter or Neptune, that is composed largely of gaseous material. The first known use of this term is from a story (Solar Plexus) by James Blish; the odd thing about it is that it was first used in a reprint of the story, 11 years after the story was first published. Whether this is because Blish conceived of the term in the intervening years or read it somewhere else, or whether it was in the original manuscript and got edited out is impossible to say at this point.
Fine, fine, so you’re too cheap to shell out the $116 grand required to buy first editions of every Hugo Award and Nebula Award winner ever.
Maybe you’d rather buy the house built by Sci-Fi/Fantasy author Robert Heinlein, the brilliant mind behind Starship Troopers?
Actually, at $650,000.00, it doesn’t seem a bad deal for four bedrooms, four bathrooms and 4456 square feet in Colorado. Although what’s with the desert section in the yard there?
But it’d be pretty tempting, because you just KNOW there’s going to be a secret room full of jetpacks, with a launchpad and a control panel. And it TOTALLY has to have a holodeck. And like…a SPACE SHOWER of some kind.
Yup.
How cool. StarShipSofa, the Audio Science Fiction Magazine, has done something nifty and made all seven of the 2008 Nebula nominees, short story category, available as free audio podcasts. So you can download the podcasts, listen to them at your convenience, and decide on your favourite contender before the winners are even announced (if you’re quick - winners announced April 24-25). From their web site:
“Tony, who helms the podcast, says, “The Nebula’s are a very special event in the SF world and I wanted the StarShipSofa to mark this occasion by doing something unique for this year’s awards. “I wanted to put out all the stories nominated in one day so people can, straight away, have them downloaded back to back… sitting on their iPod and, for the next few hours, submerge themselves in SF stories of the very best calibre. All for free. “Things are changing rapidly in this medium and this is one example of StarShipSofa pushing the boundaries of normal podcasting in both terms of quality and accessibility. “It’s what the StarShipSofa was built for.” “
For me, I’d rather read them than listen to them any day. For some reason, my attention span serves far better for reading than for listening, and I find with audiobooks, I really miss a lot of the intended twists and nuances. But for those who don’t find that a problem, this is a real treat.
And in case you missed it, AbeBooks has every book that has ever won a Nebula or Hugo Award in the novel category for sale, as well as comprehensive lists of the winners. Glorious science fiction!
Through my first-cup-of-coffee haze, the title “Sarah Palin As Dorothy? We’re Not In Kansas …” caught my attention.
Really, nothing surprises me a whole lot in the political world any more and I’m all for utilizing one’s imagination but this seemed quite the stretch. Further investigation revealed that it wasn’t a casting announcement (thank goodness) but rather a look at an argument going back more than 40 years and the true meaning behind L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
In 1964, author and historian Henry M. Littlefield wrote an article arguing that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz wasn’t a children’s novel but rather was a commentary of the politics of the monetary system of the late 19th century.
Now scholar Quentin Taylor says that Littlefield’s argument isn’t as far-fetched as some may think. The book was published at the time that the United States’ reliance on the gold standard was up for debate and populism was on the rise. Taylor has also written an article on the subject entitled, Money and Politics in the Land of Oz.
Who do the characters represent? Littlefield proposed:
Quentin Taylor suggests that Baum’s tale could be interpreted according to the current political and financial climate. Describing Sarah Palin as “attractive, wholesome [and] somewhat provincial”, he suggests she could be Dorothy and Rep. Barney Frank might fit as the Cowardly Lion. Taylor also says, “There’s … one last character not in the film, but in the book — this is the queen of the field mice. I thought that Speaker Nancy Pelosi fit this the best. After all, she presides over a collection of diminutive, chattering rodents.”
Just remember folks, it’s Dorothy that kills the Wicked Witch and saves the day.
This Sunday, March 15th, I had occasion to attend a reading by fiction author James Morrow. Morrow’s subject matter often runs to science and religion and the connections between the two. I’ve only read one novel of Morrow’s, Only Begotten Daugter, but I enjoyed it tremendously and found it endlessly creative, wry and evocative. In that story, the only daughter of God (Julie Katz, Jesus’ half-sister, whose life was somehow immaculately sparked within the walls and petri dishes of a sperm bank). The book is very funny and touching. I wonder if I would have been shocked by it, were I staunchly religious and conservative (God is referred to throughout the text as female, and is, at least at one point, revealed to be a sponge named Amanda), but since I’m not, the text felt rich with wonderings and supposings about how things bigger than us interact around us. I liked it.
Morrow’s reading was from his new book, Shambling Towards Hiroshima. The premise:
In the summer of 1945 war is reigning in the Pacific Rim, while in the U.S., Syms Thorley continues his life as a B-movie actor. But the U.S. Navy would like to use Thorley in their top-secret Knickerbocker Project, putting the finishing touches on the ultimate biological weapon: a breed of gigantic, fire-breathing, mutant iguanas. Thorley is to don a rubber suit that will transform him into the merciless Gorgantis and star in a film that simulates the destruction of a miniature Japan—if the demonstration succeeds, the Japanese will surrender, sparing thousands of lives; if it fails, the mutant lizards will be unleashed. Godzilla devotees and history buffs alike will be fascinated by this conspiratorial secret history of a war, a weapon, and an unlikely hero who will have to give the most convincing performance of his life.
Morrow read a chapter in which Thorley is bewildered but awestruck at the attention to detail in the model of the city he is supposed to smash (whilst costumed). The descriptions are fantastic, and the dialogue is perfect, particularly with Morrow’s own inflections. The book looks to be very funny.
Morrow himself is a bit of a hippie looking guy, with a grey ponytail and a hat, and a face that constantly looks like it’s about to smile (which, from my very brief time to observe him,seems true). He reads quickly and clearly, and obviously enjoys what he’s doing. He did a question and answer period at the end and seemed interested in answering every question thoroughly. When I asked him what he was reading these days (when he’s not writing), he responded that he’s always writing, at least in his head, and all his reading tends to be background and research. Right now he’s reading a book about Charles Darwin, and he wasn’t too shy to declare that currently, there is no good actual fiction about Charles Darwin.
Looks like that’s next on the list.
He inscribed my boyfriend’s two books gladly, and seemed more than happy to chat with the people there to see him. All in all, a nice way to spend an afternoon…and more books to add to my “to-read” pile.
*for more on the books of James Morrow, check out ‘A Fan’s Notes’ by The Stranger’s Paul Constant, clearly a big fan indeed.