Ono-Sendai VII Not Included

Chris Nakashima-Brown reviews the William Gibson Aviator Briefcase.

My Current State Of Mind

(I have five manuscripts to proofread and a creative writing course to teach next week, and I've a short story I'm itching to write.)

Wanting Gyrocopters, Getting V2s

Third in a series of posts in which Jack Womack is assembling an alternate history of the days of future past.

Never Ending Sun

One week of summer in the Arctic. Music by Avi Hochberg. Via Neatorama

Adventures in Hyperreality

I posted a couple of lists of worthwhile science fiction and fantasy books a little while back, and was gratified by the degree of knowledgeability and enthusiasm displayed by the commentariat. I left those two lists incomplete, and thanks to numerous suggestions have been able to finish them off and have just posted them on the cobwebby web site (which I really must do something about, soon; it’s really showing its age). They were generated for a short, intense creative writing course I’ll be teaching next week. The idea is to provide a list of books anyone with an interest in science fiction and/or fantasy might consider interesting, worthwhile, or even essential. There aren’t any titles less than twenty-five years old because I planned to ask the people taking the course to generate short lists of their own. Lists of books - or anything else - they’ve found inspiring.

That ‘anything else’ brings me to another pair of lists, got up by M. John Harrison over at his blog around about the same time I was working up mine. They’re far more catholic than mine, don’t have an artificial end point, and include all kinds of stuff in addition to books: David Bowie’s 'Diamond Dogs' for instance, and Tom Waits’s ‘What’s He Building’. I stuck up a link to the video of the latter because I was going to write something appreciative about those lists, but then life (okay, mostly a big block of copy-editing) intervened and more than a week has passed. Anyhow, MJH’s lists are seriously playful, crammed as they are with ‘stuff that turned me on when I read it or watched it; or which still turns me on now’, and embody the kind of stuff that gets incorporated into writers’ creative juices. In a later post, MJH lays out another good boundary-demolishing, viewpoint-skewing thesis - a lot of the stuff in the happening world, from L’Oreal ads to Lewis Hamilton’s career, are fantasies as carefully constructed as any triple-decker post-Tolkein magical kings’n’queens commercial fantasy novel. Hyperreality rules.

Oh, and found over on John Crowley’s blog, here’s another great reading list: non-fiction books any good fantasy writer should study and absorb, structured around the topic of ‘Cultures We Really Evolved that are Stranger Than Any You can Think of.’ We need to be reminded as often as possible that the world is stranger than we can imagine.

Sidewise

The 2008 Sidewise Awards will be presented at Anticipation, the 67th Worldcon, to be held in Montreal, Canada from August 6-10, 2009. The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were established in 1995 to recognize excellence in alternate history fiction. The winners are selected from a panel of judges that currently includes Stephen Baxter, Evelyn Leeper, Jim Rittenhouse, Stuart Shiffman, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven H Silver.

Short Form:
"A Brief Guide to Other Histories," by Paul J. McAuley (Postscripts #15)
"G-Men," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)
"Night Bird Soaring," by T.L. Morganfield (Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Autumn/08)
"The People's Machine," by Tobias Buckell (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)
"Poison Victory," by Albert E. Cowdrey (F&SF, 07/08)
"Sacrifice," by Mary Rosenblum (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)

Long Form:
The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann (Snowbooks/Tor, 2009)
The Dragon's Nine Sons, by Chris Roberson (Solaris)
Half a Crown, by Jo Walton (Tor)
Nation, by Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins/Doubleday UK)
Swiftly, by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

Sightings

Just noticed that Subterranean Press have posted the first part of my novella 'Crimes and Glory' in their online magazine. Meanwhile, over at The New Yorker, there's J.G. Ballard's absolutely positively last story (as opposed to the last-ever-Ballard story published earlier in the Guardian (and earlier still in Interzone). The New Yorker published a science-fiction story by Gail Hareven last week. Build on this trend: send them your best stories!

The Twenty-First Century So Far

Pyr PS

Hero editor Lou Anders has just let me know that you can pre-order the US edition of The Quiet War from a well-known online bookseller. Hey. It's good to be back.

Holding Pattern

I'm currently hip-deep in copy-editing Gardens of the Sun and posts will be a bit sparse in the next couple of weeks, so in the great blog tradition here are a few links to some good stuff:

The Guardian has published J.G. Ballard's last short story - as David Pringle notes elsewhere, only 13 years after it was first published in Interzone.

I know I bang on rather a lot about the sheer awe of the pictures of Saturn and its rings and retinue of moons transmitted by the Cassini probe, but here are three especially fabulous collections, selected by Alan Taylor at the Boston Globe.

Futurist visions of the future (via the ever-reliable Bruce Sterling).

Deja vu all over again: 1976 Swine Flu Propaganda:

Free Ticket

I'm taking part in a panel, 'Building a Sci-Fi/Fantasy World', in the Literature Lab sessions associated with the Sci-Fi London film festival. It's on at 2.20 pm on Monday May 4 at the Apollo Cinema, Picadilly Circus London. And I have a free ticket to give away. If you want to come along, email me at PJC[insert my last name]@gmail.com and give me your name, and I'll make sure the comp ticket is waiting for you at the door.

UPDATE: ...and it's gone!

USSA

'This is the voice of Communist government speaking. Today, Communist forces have completed the occupation of your country. The United States no longer exists. It is now the Union of Soviet States of America. Long live the USSA!'

Man, I wish I'd known about this when I was writing Cowboy Angels . . . A 1960s comic book about America under the Reds - sponsored by the Catholic Church and approved by J. Edgar Hoover! Via Infinite Thought.

Reality V. The Future

Regents Canal, King's Cross

First Past The Goldilocks Test?

The lightest exoplanet yet has been discovered around the red dwarf star Gliese 581 - and even better, refined measurements suggest that the orbit of one of its companions, Gliese 581 d, is within the habitable zone. Although, at around the size of Neptune, Gliese 581 d is too large to be a rocky planet like Earth, it may well be an ice giant that wandered inwards, and could be covered with a deep ocean - 'the first serious "water world" candidate.' What days!

A Message From Our Sponsors

Like a quite a few blogspot users, I've been marked by a robot as being a possible evil robot, intent on flooding the intertubes with spam. If the blog locks or turns off in the next couple of weeks, or starts displaying alarming notices, that's why. Meanwhile, I hope you don't mind going through a word verification step before posting; I set it up to stop the real evil robots wasting my time.

Welcome to the twenty-first century...

Uh-Oh

Ancient reefs recently exposed in Mexico show that sea levels can rise by as much as 10 feet in half a century. (Abstract for original paper here - needs a subscription to read all of it).

'Humanity Would Largely Look Like A Forest Of Quiet Semiconductor Trees.'

Anders Sandberg examines the energetic costs of the ultimate in sustainable living.

(Via Oliver Morton's Heliophage.)

(Hmm, kind of reminds me of William Hjortsberg's Grey Matters.)

J.G. Ballard

Just learned that J.G. Ballard has died. It isn't unexpected, because he has been ill for some years, but it's still a major shock and a major loss. According to the BBC news, he was a 'cult' author - whatever that means. He was one of the few people to fully understand the second half of the twentieth century, and how it continues to shape the future.

UPDATE: obituaries by David Pringle in the Guardian, Christopher Priest in the Financial Times; others in the Telegraph, and the Times. Tributes and links collected at Ballardian.com.

ALSO: Clute on Ballard.

Gardens Of The Sun - Cover Copy

The Quiet War is over. The city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, founded by descendants of refugees from Earth’s repressive regimes, the Outers, have fallen to the Three Powers Alliance of Greater Brazil, the European Union, and the Pacific Community. A century of enlightenment, rational utopianism and exploration of new ways of being human has fallen dark. Outers are herded into prison camps and forced to collaborate in the systematic plundering of their great archives of scientific and technical knowledge, while Earth’s forces loot their cities and settlements and ships, and plan a final solution to the ‘Outer problem.’

But Earth’s victory is fragile, and riven by vicious internal politics. While seeking out and trying to anatomise the strange gardens abandoned in place by the Outers’ greatest genius, Avernus, the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen is embroiled in the plots and counterplots of the family that employs her. The diplomat Loc Ifrahim soon discovers that profiting from victory isn’t as easy as he thought. And on Earth, in Greater Brazil, the democratic traditions preserved and elaborated by the Outers have infected a population eager to escape the tyranny of the great families who rule them.

Meanwhile, in the outer reaches of the Solar System, a rag-taggle group of refugees struggle to preserve the last of the old ideals. And on Triton, fanatical members of a cabal prepare for a final battle that threatens to shatter the future of the human species.

After a conflict fought to contain the expansionist, posthuman ambitions of the Outers, the future is as uncertain as ever. Only one thing is clear. No one can escape the consequences of war -- especially the victors.

Star Trek: The Next Next Generation

Down into town today to see a preview showing of the new Star Trek film, the eleventh, and a major reboot of the series. I've always had a soft spot for the original flavour Star Trek - along with Doctor Who and Thunderbirds, it was an important part of my media landscape when I was growing up. So I was relieved to discover that the reboot dutifully hit all the major nostalgia points while cleverly subverting its predecessors.

The plot involves time-travel, branching universes, and the usual one-dimensional villain (a rogue Romulan called Nero - presumably because he burns down the Rome of the old franchise). Eager to avenge the death of his wife and his planet, Nero attacks a Federation starship and leaves Kirk growing up to be 'a genius-level repeat offender' without a father or any particular direction until he meets up with Uhuru and Captain Pike and joins Star Fleet Academy. So in one stroke, things are changed forever; the previous ten films and six TV series are consigned to the dustbin of an alternate history. Kirk and Spock first cross blades when Kirk is suspended after breaking the rules by reprogramming the famous Kobayashi Maru test. When a crisis looms and the fleet is dispatched, fellow cadet Leonard McCoy sneaks Kirk aboard the Enterprise, and thereafter the tearaway Kirk begins to explore his potential and exert his authority.

The heart of the original Star Trek was the friendship between Kirk and Spock, and both Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Spock) convey the storied essence of their characters while bringing some subtle variations into the mix. The ensemble of supporting characters is pretty good too: Zoe Sanatana's Uhuru has more to do than answer the phone; Karl Urban is a very credible McCoy; Simon Pegg successfully plays a broadly comical Scotty. There are plenty of iconic moments to please the fans; the plot is reliably daft and full of holes; the physics is as dodgy as ever; an ice planet features the usual monsters with no ecological rational. State-of-the-art SFX renders the space battles dizzyingly kinetic, and with a lot of story and introductions to pack into a little over two hours the pace is often frenetic. There's a short scene when we track a hapless crew member who's sucked out of an exploding corridor into the vacuum of space, and the view expands to take in other drifting bodies in sudden silence; a few more moments like that would have been nice. And it would good, too, if we could finally get away from the plot cliche in which the hero has to prove himself worthy of his father - in Kirk's case, not only his dead father, but the father-figure of Captain Pike, and the uber-father of the Academy. Been there, done that, got the Starship Troopers T-shirt.

But despite the cliches and Bad Science, there's a lot more wit and sass in this space operatic reboot than in most of its too-often ponderous predecessors, and you're left with a sense that the franchise is ready to head off into new and unexpected directions. And also, in my case, having seen Winona Ryder play Spock's mother, feeling rather old.