Yowza! Just read a great post by mystery and sf writer Sarah Hoyt over at <<Lensman’s Children>> that makes me want to run out and read all her books. Hoyt’s most recent novel is Darkship Thieves, published this month by Baen Books.
Category: sf (Page 4 of 5)
Regarding the post below about the interview with Boston, it is apropos to mention his latest collection – Masque of Dreams. More information over at http://www.bruceboston.com/MasqueofDreams.html and this time the url is the link. Contains novelettes, short stories, and poems. Since I printed two of Boston’s poems in the Summer 2009 issue of Prometheus, I believe I must acquire this book.
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It is too bad that someone even has to write what Wendy McElroy recently wrote at her site, but somehow I’m not surprised.
While I’m still training my new computer (since the old one crashed), I have not finished transitioning to my new site. Here’s an interesting perspective on libertarian sf, by the media sf blogging web site, io9.com.
With a headline like “Anti-Corporate Libertarian Futurism in ‘The Unincorporated Man’” from io9.com, the LFS definitely needs to check out this novel.
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.
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.
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.
This weekend I read a tough little cookie of a YA novel, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. Published earlier this year, the book is already nominated for next year’s Prometheus Award, and could indeed be a strong contender. I’m working on a review of the novel for Prometheus (unless any other brave souls out there would like to contribute a review…), but I’m already jokingly calling this the book that sent me to the ER.
The Young Adult fiction market these days is smokin’ hot. As a grown up reading some these books I can’t help but be irritated and impatient with the tendency toward a very simplistic style. I struggled to get going with Little Brother, and the ended certainly fizzled into a “Rock the Vote” solution that does nothing to advance individual liberty (a recent conversation with L. Neil Smith comes to mind, where he said that it’s easy to write dystopias, as we all can agree upon what we are against. But it’s damn tough to come up with better solutions. ) Still, the middle part of Doctorow’s novel is worth every penny, and is the part that most readers probably will remember.
I used to average reading 100-150 books a year. A middling amount, maybe, as some people never read a book and others read probably far more than this number of volumes. Though that number dipped for a while, I’ve probably ready between 1000 and 2000 books in the past two decades. Far from all are science fiction. Still, I’d be the first to admit there are far more sf books out there that I have NOT read, so I try to catch up on some of these every year.
Not sure if 1987 can be considered olden times, but 1965 predates me and so I say it qualifies.
I just finished reading David Brin’s The Uplift War, which is the third volume in his Uplift series. I read some other Brin novels in the 1980s, early 1990s, but none of the Uplift books. I do have the tendency to pick up new series in the middle or end, and then work my way backwards, so now I need to check if I have the first two books in the series and seek them out. There were times I skipped ahead, but overall I enjoyed the book.
I’m in the early stages of H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, which is another book that’s been in my shelves for many, many years. I keep meaning to read it, but never get around to it. Already in the first 50 pages, hell, the first 10 pages, I can see that this book deeply influenced L. Neil Smith’s novel, The Probability Broach. Good stuff also so far, but of a different cut altogether from the Brin book.
