I just heard it from Andrew McKie, who posted it about fifteen minutes before the moment in which I am typing. I can’t say that’s a result that disappoints me in any way whatsoever. Congratulations, Mr. Harrison. Well deserved.
It’s true, I do. My review of Vernor Vinge’s early novel The Witling is in the current SF Site update, should you care to take a look.
Great news via Big Dumb Object – the next Iain M. Banks novel is scheduled for release next February.
It’s set in the Culture (which was revealed a little while ago, IIRC), and will be called Matter (apparently just to annoy internet people, as that was the working title for Steep Approach to Garbadale).
According to BDO, the sample the man himself read out had all the usual IMB goodness we have come to expect. There’s a reason to look forward to the new year – as far as I’m concerned, the release of an Iain M. Banks novel should be treated as just cause for national holiday.
Banks holiday weekend, anyone?
OK, I’ll get my coat.
Two superb bits of critical writing in the RSS feeds today.
“Violent confrontation is the engine of all Morgan’s novels. What makes them unusual is that this confrontation is almost always verbal. At least at first. Marsalis is always happy to crush a windpipe or break a kneecap, but only after trying to assert dominance through words. It is not just winning the fight that is important: you have to win the argument. It is the praxis of force and knowledge, and it brings out the key difference between Morgan and his peers. Black Man is what you might call paramilitary SF, a point on the thriller-to-war-story spectrum somewhere between cyberpunk and mil SF.”
Lewis writes about books the way I wish I could write about books. However, doing so brings its own hazards – a gentleman in the comments appears to have taken Lewis’ critique in a way that I’m sure it wasn’t meant. Then again, maybe I’m misreading both of them – text is an inherently low-bandwidth medium, after all.
Secondly, Vicky and Nic from Eve’s Alexandria do a double-team review of Adam Roberts’ Gradisil. Interestingly, neither of them seem to have been deterred by what I have heard others describe as the very unfeminine female characters in the novel:
“Now it’s true that Roberts’ prose is sometimes pedantic and that his characters are often, and above all else, cold and distant but, as I see it, these qualities serve Gradisil’s ultimate purpose. The Gyeroffy women, Klara and Gradi both, are quite disagreeable creatures, hard-nosed and closed off. Neither of them exhibit ‘maternal’ instincts and neither is ‘feminine’ or ‘intuitive’ or ‘emotional’, and this is only right. They are, after all, women living on the outskirts of life, at the very edge of the permissable. Like all pioneers and colonists they are driven by physical hardship to positions untenable in the heart of society; and they’re both consumed by a vision of the Uplands as it was or as it could be.”
In the discussions of gender and sf that I have read or listened to, there has often been a prevailing condescending (and, sad to say, male) attitude that female readers don’t like science fiction because they find the female characters hard to reconcile with the roles that society has taught them are ‘correct’. Maybe the truth of the matter is that female readers don’t identify with female characters in sf because a great number of their mostly male writers can’t write a believably flawed female character …
Roger Levy, ‘Icarus’ – Gollancz SF, August 2006, 432pp, £12.99, ISBN 057507860X
Haven is a barren world, its surface scoured by ferocious winds. The human colony it holds has burrowed into the rock of the planet – years of desperate effort to stay alive have rendered their origins all but forgotten. What remains is held in the Vault, rigidly mediated by the Directorate of Fact. Storytelling is forbidden, as is the speaking of ‘unFact’. When two survey-drillers discover a vessel buried in a sea of solidified magma, far out beyond the boundaries of the colony, Fact moves to conceal the evidence that it contains. One of the Surveyors, Quill, manages to escape alive with some mysterious artefacts and a whole lot of questions. He is a wanted man, on the run and in search of the truth …
[This review originally published in Vector #250; the complete article can be read on the Vector website.]
OK, so perhaps it’s just me, but when I heard (from Big Blog of Cheese) that there’s a review written in the style of a graphic novel about a graphic novel, that is itself a story that combines not just the history of the graphic novel as a format but also a re-examination of a canonical English fantasist author -
Well, let’s just say that the whole meta-ness of it brought a real big grin to my face. File under ‘reasons to leave the house more often’ and ‘postmodernism is rotting my brain’, perhaps?
Managed to actually get up early enough to force coffee down my neck and head to the BSFA novel award taster reading panel … Continue reading “Eastercon Saturday: BSFA Novel Award taster reading and more”
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