Lost worlds and ports of call
I have busy with a new site, too busy really to blog things that have appeared.
I will be shutting down this site and moving to a different location once I have finished the new site design.
The new site will contain much more stuff, including items related to Prometheus, the newsletter of the LFS.
The Horror Writers of America selected two recipients of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and F. Paul Wilson. Wilson won the first Prometheus Award in 1979 for Wheels Within Wheels. Since then he also has won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2004 (Sims), and the Hall of Fame Award in 1990 and 1991, for his novels Healer and An Enemy of the State.
Nice article at reason magazine about The Prisoner from a French perspective.
Victor Koman, author and proprietor of Kopubco, is running a 20% of sale. Aside from the fantastic savings, check out the fantastic offerings, from Prometheus Award winning novels, to New Libertarian issues, to Star Wars fandom and beyond.
Finally, I am able to output the content of the past couple of years in one export file. Alas, the format is XML, so now I have to puzzle through the file tree and see how to bring the export into a database for local storage.
A very evocative and timely poem from Bruce Boston, over at Strange Horizons.
No other issue exceeded deadlines as much as this one. Two months late, but finally ready, and in the mail next week. Includes coverage of the 2008 Prometheus Awards in Denver, and reviews of books by Cory Doctorow, S. M. Stirling, Lois McMaster Bujold, Joe Martino, George Zebrowski, and Brian Francis Slattery. Looks like the next issue also will be late at this point, but not nearly as late as this one.
From Gauntlet Press, this announcement:
Coming in 2009: New John Shirley Novel
We are pleased to announce we’ll be publishing a new John Shirley
novel in the fall of 2009, Welcome to Freedom. Here is the author’s
description:
“After a disaster wrecks a long section of the California northern coast, the town of FREEDOM, which has attempted to live without federal interference as much as possible, finds it has a little too much chance to go it alone. Vicious human predators take advantage of the situation, waves of brutality roll through the area, and a young man new to town has a coming of age confrontation with what it takes to survive at any cost… The town wants to maximize its freedom from outside help, influence and control. See what happens when you have real freedom day after day, and no rules? Is it heaven–or hell?”
The book is scheduled for a January 2009 release.
In April of this year Katherine Mangu-Ward from reason magazine interviewed me as part of a story on the 2008 Prometheus Award finalists. This article appears in the December issue of reason, and has been posted online. Tor published all five finalists, and reason thought this interesting enough to write a long story on the libertarian elements of sf and Tor. Tor should not be considered libertarian, or any -ian/ist, but they have a fearless and independent editorial policy. Tor publishes great fiction, and does not shy away from political books. SF mega-blog site io9 also picked up the story.
A few items I’d like to note: The title of the article actually comes from a speech F. Paul Wilson gave in 1983. I think I attributed those words to Wilson, but if somehow I omitted to do this, my apologies. Also, L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach was published first by Del Rey, and that is the edition that won the Prometheus Award. Tor reprinted the book twice, for which they should be commended, as the book long had been out of print and is a libertarian classic. Many libertarian sf writers failed to get mentioned, especially Vernor Vinge, who has published many books with Tor, and won both the Hugo and Prometheus Awards.
Anyway, hopefully this article reaches more libertarian sf fans out there and gains some attention for the Prometheus Awards.
Will Terry Pratchett’s new novel give Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother some competition for the 2009 Prometheus Award? The synopsis certainly sounds intriguing, and I am reserving judgment on Little Brother until I have read all the other nominees. I enjoyed 95% of Doctorow’s novel, but felt rather let down at the end.
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