Looking forward to reading the Hugos

I’ve got May all charted out for reading the Hugo nominees, plus a smattering of other works I like. I’m come really close to actually casting a vote in past years, but never managed to read them in time. Well, this year, I’ve got this blog to give me an excuse. Now if I could […]

2007 Nebula recap

I didn’t quite manage to read the Nebula ballot before they announced the winners. Here are the stories, anyway, ordered very roughly by how much I enjoyed them. I definitely want to read more from Nalo Hopkinson, Ted Chiang, and Vera Nazarian. I was so disappointed by the Nancy Kress stories, I want to go […]

Re: Odyssey

Considering my resistance to children in stories, I was beginning to worry I was being too much of a curmudgeon. But I can see I have some learning to do if I want to be nearly as grumpy as Gregory McAllister. The dominant voice in Odyssey, by Jack McDevitt, Mac is an editor with a […]

Re: Spin

Some science fiction reads like thinly disguised science articles, which makes me more interested in reading the source material than the stories. Sad, I know. Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson, overcomes this by focusing on the lives of three people while using the science as a visionary backdrop. By the end of the first chapter, […]

Re: Ragamuffin

Back at Boskone 44, I heard Tobias S. Buckell explain how he pulled together a list of all the cool stuff he wanted to see in a book–and then he wrote the book. And another one. Lots of cool stuff and great action. The hero of Ragamuffin is Nashara, a superhuman warrior woman, the last […]

Re: Memorare

In “Memorare,” by Gene Wolfe, March Wildspring is a producer, filming a documentary about memorials orbiting Jupiter near the places where people died trying to colonize the solar system. Like the pyramids, they are booby-trapped. The narrator of his films, his beloved Kit, brings along an assistant, a woman who hides until she’s forced to […]

Re: The Accidental Time Machine

If you’d like a taste of The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman, it’s worth listening to this interview from November 2006. He gives a great reading from the first chapters, in which Matt Fuller, lab assistant and sometime grad student at MIT, stumbles on a calibrator that’s taking tiny little jumps into the future. […]

Re: The Last Stand of the Elephant Man

“Captive Girl” may have creeped me out, but when a story gets under my skin like that, there’s a writer who knows what’s she doing. So I went looking for other works by Jennifer Pelland, and was glad to find “The Last Stand of the Elephant Man“. Joseph Merrick (once known as the “Elephant Man” […]

Re: Bright of the Sky

I heard Kay Kenyon present at Readercon and liked her, so I went looking for Bright of the Sky. The book has a very cool opening, in which a quantum AI grew obssessed with evidence for another universe. I wanted to know more about the AI, but the story is really about the other universe.

Re: Stars Seen Through Stone

Vernon is a small-time regional music producer who landed in Black William, Pennsylvania with his (now) ex-wife, Andrea, when their car broke down. Perhaps because he’s recounting events that happened ten years before the main action of the story, the opening passage of “Stars Seen Through Stone,” by Lucius Shephard, sounds stiff in its formality […]