Nebula 2008 Roundup

Much like last year I didn’t manage to read all the Nebula nominees. Not for lack of trying. I was able to lay hold of all the novels, but several of the anthologies weren’t to be found in the library. Maybe there’s less room in the budget to buy obscure small press collections. While I […]

Re: Powers

It’s dangerous to come in at the third novel of a series. You might get bogged down in recaps. You might get dumped into the middle and left totally confused. Powers, by Ursula K. Le Guin, opens at a new begining. Gavir, a young slave in the household of Arcamand, looks forward to becoming a […]

Re: Shoggoths in Bloom

Professor Harding, educated at a college in Alabama (I’m guessing Tuskegee) and Yale, comes to Maine to pursue a line of inquiry no one else wants: shoggoths. “Shoggoths in Bloom“, by Elizabeth Bear depicts in wonderful, luscious prose the beauty of the Maine shore and sky, as well as the discomfort and wary approaches between […]

Re: The Twilight Year

After enjoying “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide” and “Pride and Prometheus,” I kept flipping through that same issue of F&SF and got caught up in “The Twilight Year,” by Sean McMullen. It begins in Britain long after the Romans have left little behind but ruins. The narrator is a bard who seems to have an effect […]

Re: Pride and Prometheus

In a double pastiche of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, John Kessel‘s “Pride and Prometheus” introduces Mary Bennett to Viktor Frankenstein. Being a tortured romantic hero, Viktor fits neatly into Mary’s world, seeming at first merely to be a moody, intelligent young man who is unaccountably intrigued by what Mary’s interest in natural philosophy. But […]

Re: If Angels Fight

Living near Boston means I hear more than enough about the Irish in Boston, the Kennedys in Boston, and crony politics in Boston. Thus when I meet with these Boston tropes in fiction, my resistance goes way up. In this case, I simply could not fight my way past my prejudices. I will have to […]

Re: Kaleidoscope

In “Kaleidoscope,” by K.D. Wentworth, Ally finds herself caught in a kaleidoscope of possible worlds. In some she returns a stray dog to its home. In others, it gets run over. In some her friends are married and thriving. In others they’re in various stages of breakup. And in some, she just might find her […]

Re: Dark Rooms

In “Dark Rooms“, by Lisa Goldstein, the realistic but fictional Nathan Stevens encounters the fantastic but real George Méliès. Stevens meets Méliès in a dark room watching turn of the 20th century films, when cinema was in its infancy. Stevens has come to Paris to be an artist, and joins Méliès in the new art […]

Hugos pile on

I’ve barely started reading the Nebula nominees, and the Hugo ballot has also been announced. While I find reading both lists interesting, the Hugos are the ones I can actually affect. I even got my act together in time to sign up and nominate a book: Anathem. Not surprisingly, it’s the only work on the […]

Re: 26 Monkeys

Like the story says: Aimee’s big trick is that she makes twenty-six monkeys vanish onstage. Except it’s not really Aimee’s trick, it’s the monkeys’. Then Kij Jonhson’s “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” goes on to reveal that the monkeys (and one chimpanzee, who is not a monkey) have plenty of other tricks up their, um, […]