Got the last of the P. K. Dick nominees in the mail today. Adding it to the to-read stack!
Books
I read…a lot. Here’s where I ramble about books and printed media.
All but one of my P. K. Dick novels arrived today (one’s on back order). Yay MOAR BOOKS! Now, which to read first…?
2012 Philip K. Dick Award Thoughts
One of the highlights of Norwescon is the award dinner for the annual Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. For the second year running, I’ve purchased and read each of the nominated books. What follows are the brief reviews I posted to Goodreads as I finished each book.
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Helix Wars by Eric Brown
My rating: 3 of 5 starsFirst off, to borrow an old cliché, don’t judge this book by its cover. The cover, of a suited warrior firing a laser rifle against a backdrop of explosions, gives the impression that this is a military sci-fi novel (a genre which I’m not terribly interested in). Instead, this book, the second in a series, has much more in common with Larry Niven’s Ringworld, as it deals with the interplay between races on a giant helical constructed world, wrapped around a star like a slinky, with thousands of cylindrical worlds strung along like beads on a necklace.
However much the construct may invite comparisons to Niven’s Ringworld, though, Brown’s worldbuilding isn’t quite so engrossing. The structure of the Helix allows for lots of variety in environments and races, but leaves a lot of the technical underpinnings (for instance, how do the individual worlds have gravity?) to be either entirely unexplained or brushed off as “technology so advanced we can’t understand it”. The concept sounds very hard-SF, but the execution leaves something to be desired.
That said, the book isn’t at all bad, though it’s not likely to end up as my pick for this year’s P.K. Dick award (for which it is one of seven nominees). I just hoped for a little more Niven-like exploration of the hard-SF concept that instead acts as little more than an interesting background for the story itself.
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Fountain of Age: Stories by Nancy Kress
My rating: 4 of 5 starsImpressive selection of stories; unlike many anthologies (both single- and multi-author), not a single story I’d consider a dud. Many deal with the not-too-far-future complications of genetic modification, and the whole book has a somewhat melancholy, moody feel to it that I liked a lot.
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Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery
My rating: 3 of 5 starsI almost gave this one two stars, but that wouldn’t have been fair to the book. It’s good, well written, and the style is…well, I want to say pretty, but “evocative” is probably a better word. The book was just too sad, too much of a hard slog through a broken country with broken people. Though described as post-apocalyptic, that’s not quite right, as the apocalypse is still in progress during the events of the book. There are moments of hope, but they’re always overwhelmed by despair. I know it’s good…I just didn’t enjoy reading it.
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The Not Yet by Moira Crone
My rating: 3 of 5 starsI had trouble getting into this one — it was interesting, and has some interesting ideas on mortality and the effects of enhanced longevity, but for some reason, it didn’t really pull me in until the last chapter when everything wraps up.
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Harmony by Keith Brooke
My rating: 3 of 5 starsThree and a half stars would be more accurate. There’s a lot of fascinating worldbuilding here, presented very much in the “sink or swim” style where you’re simply dropped into the world and must figure it out as you go. Neat stuff, but the pacing felt a little off…there’s a lot of time spent setting the board, only to have the endgame sprung upon you faster than you expect. I’m not sure if I’d have preferred less setup (at the possible expense of less comprehension of the world) or more climax/denouement (which might remove some of the power of the “aha!” moment at the end), but it felt somewhat off-balance.
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Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot
My rating: 3 of 5 starsAt times both fascinating and frustrating. While there was a lot to like in this, taken as a whole, it just didn’t quite mesh. Neat and very believable ideas (like the Bionet) mixed with wild absurdism (the Malaspina glacier gone rogue) mixed with I’m not sure what (a Mario-Brothers-meets-zombies video game sequence that I’m still not sure how to interpret). Interesting and, on the while, enjoyable, but perhaps a bit too absurdist.
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LoveStar: A Novel by Andri Snær Magnason
My rating: 5 of 5 starsThis one, I really, really enjoyed. Frighteningly believable (if improbable) biotech-meets-marketing serves as a base for paired stories of lovers torn apart and a brilliant CEO on a reluctant quest for God. Frequently funny and sweet, this was easily my favorite of this year’s crop of Philip K. Dick Award nominees.
Free Islamist SF anthology eBook
This looks interesting to me. I’ve downloaded it, and it’ll be on my iPad soon.
A Mosque Among The Stars available for free!:
A Mosque Among The Stars was the first anthology that dealt with the subject of Muslim characters and/or Islamic themes and Science Fiction. It was edited by me (Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad) and the Canadian Muslim author Ahmad Khan. It came out in 2007. Now that it has been years since it was released in printed form, we have decided to release A Mosque Among The Stars to the public as a Creative Commons Licensed (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) book.
(Via Boing Boing)
That 100 Book List (That’s Not Actually From the BBC)
There’s been a book list meme going around Facebook for some time now that purports to be a list of 100 books of which most people will have read only six. I’ve been tagged a few times, and have seen the note pop up when other friends have passed it on. I’ll go ahead and toss my list in this post, but there’s one thing about this that’s been bugging me.
The list has nothing to do with the BBC — the closest the BBC gets is The Big Read, a 2003 list of Britain’s 100 most popular books as determined by BBC viewer nominations — and actually appears to be taken from a 2007 article in The Guardian, reporting on the results of a poll of 2,000 people by the World Book Day website.
In this context, whether looking at the BBC list or the World Book Day list, the claim that most people will have read only six of the books on the list makes little to no sense. Both lists were of the most popular books as selected by the people who took the survey, which carries a strong implication that these are generally well-read books. Furthermore, according to the Guardian article, the “2,000 people who took part in the poll online at worldbookday.com nominated their top 10 titles that they could not live without” (emphasis mine) — so they had to have read more than six, and it’a actually a list of some of the most popular books.
It looks like the bit about most people only having read six was added at some point just to give people a reason to feel superior and to get them curious enough to slog through the list and figure out just how many they have read.
Still. That said. I’m okay with feeling superior. And I read a lot. So, even though the “background” has been thoroughly debunked…here’s how I stack up.
Unpopular Questions
Okay, folks. Some of you aren’t going to like this at all. However, I think these are questions worth asking.
Every year, I see a strong majority of my friends and acquaintances promoting Banned Book Week, “an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment…[that] highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship [and founded on] the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular.”
Last April, the internet and many people I know were thrown into a tizzy because of apparent censorship of LGBT-themed books, prompting the creation of the #amazonfail hashtag.
So, now we have the latest uproar over a book with unpopular ideas that is under attack — only this time, the popular call is for boycotting Amazon until the book is removed. And, apparently all the uproar was successful, because it seems the book is no longer available.
So, folks, which is it? Do we decry the censorship of ideas that are unpopular, or do we celebrate the censorship of ideas that are unpopular?
Yes, the content of the book in question is disturbing and advocates unethical, immoral, and illegal behavior. Depending on who you talk to and what area of the country or world you live in, most if not all of the LGBT section of any modern bookstore, including Amazon, can be described in exactly the same way.
Either censorship is horrible and should be battled in whatever form it appears, or it is acceptable and necessary and you just better not be writing anything that people in power disapprove of. But it doesn’t work both ways. At least, not justifiably.
From » Banned? Wait, what?! Stop Motion Verbosity:
Good thing Nabokov wasn’t “investigated” because of Lolita. Of course, Lolita was also banned for a while. But hey! Who cares, right? Wait, maybe it isn’t books that are clearly fiction, it’s manuals and guidebooks.
Good thing the Anarchist Cookbook is banned. Oh, wait, hold on. Right! It isn’t. Because free speech isn’t just protected when you agree with it. Because the alternative is madness.
[…]
You don’t get to call for a boycott to delist a book when you feel like it, without being willing to sit while someone boycotts for a book you like, the next day.
This is why we don’t ban books, remember? Because it’s dangerous and fucked up and wrong. Even when the book is horrible and morally objectionable. Even then.
That’s the price we pay for free speech. And if you aren’t willing to pay it, then you better duck, because that has consequences you may not enjoy for very long at all. About the time someone disagrees with you and you can’t do anything about it, I’d think.
(Via MissAmberClark)
And this next bit is from a 2008 post in Neil Gaiman’s Journal, which addresses a different specific controversy, but the same questions: Why defend freedom of icky speech?:
Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you’re going to have to stand up for stuff you don’t believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don’t, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person’s obscenity is another person’s art.
Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.
[T]hat’s what makes the kind of work you don’t like, or don’t read, or work that you do not feel has artistic worth or redeeming features worth defending. It’s because the same laws cover the stuff you like and the stuff you find icky, wherever your icky line happens to be: the law is a big blunt instrument that makes no fine distinctions, and because you only realise how wonderful absolute freedom of speech is the day you lose it.
(Via bicyclefish)
My Famous Awkward Family
(Apologies to Facebook friends who are seeing this multiple times. I think this should be the last time this pops up in my feed.)
Last year, I stumbled across a new humor site called Awkward Family Photos, which was posting funny old family photos. It gave me a laugh, and I started going through what they’d posted…only to suddenly find one of my own family’s old photos on the site!
Amused by this, I commented, telling them that if they really wanted an awkward photo, they should see this other one we had, which has always been one of my favorites. Not long after that, that photo was posted as well, and we became the first family to voluntary submit a photo to their site.
As the site gained popularity, they decided to release a book, got our permission to use our photos…and today, at long last, I got my copy of the AFP book, which uses both photos we submitted! One is on the back cover, and one is given the place of honor as the first featured photo in the book, opening Chapter One. We’re also given thanks in the Acknowledgements section as the first family to send in a shot.
This is great! Many thanks to Mike and Doug at AFP, and to my family for sharing my amusement at all of this!
…but there your rights stop.
I’m no big fan of Philip Pullman — not that I go so far as to actively dislike him for any reason, I just didn’t think the His Dark Materials trilogy was really all that good — but this quote, in response to someone asking whether his latest book was “offensive,” is a thing of beauty:
It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That’s all I have to say on that subject.
(via Boing Boing)
Links for January 18th through January 19th
Sometime between January 18th and January 19th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- H. G. Wells on ‘Metropolis’ (1927): "Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary series of strained events. It is immensely and strangely dull. It is not even to be laughed at. There is not one good-looking nor sympathetic nor funny personality in the cast; there is, indeed, no scope at all for looking well or acting like a rational creature amid these mindless, imitative absurdities. The film's air of having something grave and wonderful to say is transparent pretence. It has nothing to do with any social or moral issue before the world or with any that can ever conceivably arise. It is bunkum and poor and thin even as bunkum. I am astonished at the toleration shown it by quite a number of film critics on both sides of the Atlantic. And it costs, says the London Times, six million marks! How they spent all that upon it I cannot imagine. Most of the effects could have been got with models at no great expense."
- Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion: From what we've been able to piece together, the book "lending" takes place in "libraries". On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a "card". But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there's no admission charge and it doesn't cost anything to borrow a book, there's always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material.
- AirTran 297 – Anatomy of an Urban Legend: Since the flight and initial media reports, several blogs and Internet sites have recounted the incident as portrayed by a passenger originally scheduled for the flight. Below is that passenger’s account (unedited in any way including spelling and grammar), as reported on several blogs. Highlighted between the passenger’s account, are the factually accurate circumstances surrounding this incident. We bring this to your attention in order to dispel myths that are beginning to make the rounds in chat rooms, blogs and conspiracy theorists’ Web sites.
- Dear God, please confirm what I already believe: God may have created man in his image, but it seems we return the favour. Believers subconsciously endow God with their own beliefs on controversial issues. "People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want," the team write. "The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."
- Insanely Vulgar ‘Better Off Ted’ Outtakes (NSFW Video): "ABC's 'Better Off Ted' recently had an episode where a mistyped inter-office memo encouraged employees to swear insults at each other, with PG-rated results for broadcast. Below are the ridiculously NSFW outtakes, scripted for Web-only release. If you are offended — not even 'easily' … but, like, even slightly, by graphic language, do not watch this video, which is like melding the Disney-owned TV network with 'The Aristocrats.' According to a network spokesperson, ABC did not post this."
Top 100 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novels of All Time
Obviously, a list like this one is subject to a lot of debate due to everyone’s personal taste. Still, it’s not a bad list of works. Herewith, in true blog-meme style, the list, with those that I’ve read in bold. 35 out of 100. Not bad, but could be better!
(Note: Though this list is numbered 1-100, it should be read as being 100-1. That is, the #100 spot on this list is the #1 spot on the original list. Just a side effect of the HTML list that I don’t feel like trying to hack around.)
- The Word For World Is Forest by Ursula K. LeGuin
- Sorcerer’s Son by Phyllis Eisenstein
- Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
- Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
- The Company by K.J. Parker
- An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe
- Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
- Danny, The Champion of the World by Roald Dahl
- Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch
- Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
- Song of Kali by Dan Simmons
- Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
- A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller
- Sphere by Michael Crichton
- Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin
- The Alteration by Kingsley Amis
- The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
- The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- Griffin’s Egg by Michael Swanwick
- Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
- Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe
- Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
- Ringworld by Larry Niven
- Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling
- Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
- Maske: Thaery by Jack Vance
- The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
- The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
- Flow My Tears The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
- The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
- The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
- The High Crusade by Poul Anderson
- A Song for Lya by George R.R. Martin
- At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
- Wildlife by James Patrick Kelly
- The Book of Knights by Yves Maynard
- The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (Well, I made it up to book six or seven, then decided to wait until he was dead or the series was finished, since there was no end in sight. Now he’s dead, and I’m just waiting for the last book to appear in paperback before starting over.)
- Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman
- Nightwings by Robert Silverberg
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
- Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- The Book of the Short Sun by Gene Wolfe
- The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
- Foundation by Isaac Asimov
- The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
- The Demon Princes by Jack Vance
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
- The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson
- Alastor by Jack Vance
- The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
- Flatland by Edwin Abbott
- Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein
- A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
- Lyonesse by Jack Vance
- Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
- True Names by Vernor Vinge
- Ubik by Philip K. Dick
- The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons
- Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
- A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
- More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- 1984 by George Orwell
- I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
- The Cadwal Chronicles by Jack Vance
- Lost Horizon by James Hilton
- Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
- The Fifth Head of Cerebus by Gene Wolfe
- A Song of Ice And Fire by George R.R. Martin
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
- The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay
- The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
- All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Planet of Adventure by Jack Vance
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
- The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
- The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe