If you are looking for links to other reviews, these guys do a very good job of putting together lists of links to heaps of reviews and interviews. Even better, it's updated a few times every week. I discovered this blog when they began to add links to my own stuff.
You can check them out here.
Serenity
Finally, I have found the time to rent Serenity. You know what they say: Better late than never!;-)
I wanted to go see this movie when it was still playing on the silver screen, what with all that buzz surrounding it. Though my expectations were kind of high, I was nevertheless pleasantly surprised. After so many mediocre science fiction movies in the last few years, it's nice to see that some people still get it. With a very modest budget but a good story, these people have created a fun and entertaining scifi adventure. If Hollywood only understood that special effects and huge budgets cannot replace a great story. . .
Anyway, I enjoyed Serenity a lot. So much so that I'll certainly try to get my hands on the Firefly DVDs. Hopefully I can find a place to rent them.
Here's to hoping that the powers that be in the cinema industry are paying attention and that we'll have the pleasure of seeing more movies like this hit the theatres in the next few years. Needless to say, I'm not holding my breath!
If anyone from the cast and crew is reading this, congrats on a terrific job!:-)
Win a free copy of David Farland's SONS OF THE OAK
Hi!
Just got word that Tor Books will supply two winners with a copy of David Farland's Sons of the Oak, the fifth volume in The Runelords series. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "OAK." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy.
Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
The images
Yes. . .
By popular demand I've decided to give in and now post book covers and other images. God knows I've been asked to do this since the very beginning.
The reason why it took so long for me to do this, you ask? Pure laziness on my part! Simple as that!
Enjoy!;-)
By popular demand I've decided to give in and now post book covers and other images. God knows I've been asked to do this since the very beginning.
The reason why it took so long for me to do this, you ask? Pure laziness on my part! Simple as that!
Enjoy!;-)
The Peter Watts contest winners!
Hey there!
Thanks to the generosity of Tor Books, two lucky winners will get a complimentary copy of Peter Watts' Blindsight. Many thanks to the folks at Tor Books for their support.:-)
The winners are:
Steve Spaulding, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (RaceBannon42 at asoiaf.westeros.org -- a two-time winner if I'm not mistaken)
Maria Avrutsky, from Troy, Michigan, USA (etulftune at asoiaf.westeros.org)
Thanks to all the participants! Stay tuned for more!;-)
This week's New York Times Bestsellers (November 28th)
In hardcover:
R. A. Salvatore's Road of the Patriarch is down five positions, ending its third week on the bestseller list at number 25. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
In paperback:
Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is up two spots, finishing its sixth week on the NYT list at number 28. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Submit your questions for an interview with Orson Scott Card
Hi there!
I've juste secured an interview with Orson Scott Card. As always, fans of the author are encouraged to submit their own questions. The most interesting questions will be included in my interview. To submit a question, just leave it in the comment section.
Other than that, William Lexner (Stego) and I will soon be interviewing Peter Watts, author of Blindsight. I also have interviews with both Joe Abercrombie, author of The Blade Itself, and Brian Ruckley, author of Winterbirth, lined up. In addition, I'm trying to get a Q&A with Guy Gavriel Kay. Hopefully it will become a reality!
And in case you didn't know, I have interviews with both China Miéville and Peter F. Hamilton coming up after the Holidays! As to what happened to the Q&A Rob and I did with Greg Keyes, Del Rey Books are still trying to figure that one out.
So as you can see, there are a few interesting forthcoming interviews on the Hotlist!;-)
I've juste secured an interview with Orson Scott Card. As always, fans of the author are encouraged to submit their own questions. The most interesting questions will be included in my interview. To submit a question, just leave it in the comment section.
Other than that, William Lexner (Stego) and I will soon be interviewing Peter Watts, author of Blindsight. I also have interviews with both Joe Abercrombie, author of The Blade Itself, and Brian Ruckley, author of Winterbirth, lined up. In addition, I'm trying to get a Q&A with Guy Gavriel Kay. Hopefully it will become a reality!
And in case you didn't know, I have interviews with both China Miéville and Peter F. Hamilton coming up after the Holidays! As to what happened to the Q&A Rob and I did with Greg Keyes, Del Rey Books are still trying to figure that one out.
So as you can see, there are a few interesting forthcoming interviews on the Hotlist!;-)
The Blade Itself
Joe Abercrombie's debut is making some noise all over the internet. Understandably, little more was needed to pique my curiosity! I wish to thank Joe for sending me signed copies of both The Blade Itself and Before They Are Hanged when I could not get through with his publicist.
The Blade Itself is a throwback to what used to dominate the genre during the 80s before doorstopper fantasy epics took over. As such, it is reminiscent of David Eddings and Raymond E. Feist in their heydays. What does that mean, exactly? Well, The Blade Itself is a character-driven tale that is not comprised of countless storylines. The First Law is a trilogy, so the author has no choice but to keep this story under tight rein. There is also a certain sense of adventure throughout, something that was popularized by the sword and sorcery sub-genre during the 80s.
There is a lot to like about Joe Abercrombie's debut. As a throwback fantasy novel, I found it refreshing. It's nice to see the" a The Blade Itself will please some fans, it will fall short with other readers.
As he stated in a recent interview, Joe Abercrombie doesn't attach that much importance to worldbuilding. He prefers to let the readers discover his universe and its inhabitants through the eyes of his characters. Don't expect a level of details similiar to what you'd find in a Jordan, Erikson, Martin, or Bakker book. Still, the author provides enough background info to keep things interesting.
Characters always make or break a book/series. And nowhere is it more evident than in a self-described character-driven novel. The characterizations found in The Blade Itself are at times very good, but some also leave a little to be desired. Characters like Inquisitor Gokta and Logen Ninefingers are well-done, and they literally carry this tale on their shoulders. Others, like Bayaz and Jezal dan Luthar, are clichéd and somewhat of caricatures. A few are barely introduced, like Ferro and Yulwei, yet are intriguing.
One of this book's main facet -- and this is where it might alienate some readers -- is how humorous in tone the story is told. À la David Eddings, the narrative is always written in droll style, making it all but impossible to reach the emotional impact necessary to create powerful scenes. Very similar to J. V. Jones' The Book of Words trilogy and, to a lesser extent, to Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. As I said, I found this approach refreshing. But it's obvious that some readers will be put off by this. Don't let the beginning fool you. As you read on, you realize that, beyond that humorous tone, there is a lot more depth to those plotlines than meets the eye.
As a very accessible novel that can potentially please many disparate fantasy fans, I'm persuaded that The Blade Itself will be a success. Much like Sanderson's Elantris was last year. And with Pyr set to release it in North America in 2007, Abercrombie's debut will get an even bigger readership.
The author will probably never win any awards. In all likelihood he'll never be held in high esteem by aficionados. What he'll do, however, is sell books. What we have here is another bright new voice in the fantasy genre. And there can never be too many of those!
The Blade Itself is a solid debut. I'm curious to see where Abercrombie will be taking this story in the sequel. . .
The final verdict: 7.5/10
For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe
'Tis the Season
Hey there!
Well, December is just around the corner and thankfully we have yet to receive any snow over here. That will soon change, of course. There's no helping it.
Now that Larry (Dylanfanatic) has announced that the time has come for the OF Awards on wotmania.com (I have two nominations this year. Crazy, I know!), I thought it was time to reveal the different categories of my very own Year-End Awards. I had fun doing it last year, so I've been thinking about this for over a month now.
There are more categories this year, and more might be added if inspiration strikes me. Here they are:
- My Top 10 of 2006
- Most Promising New Voice
- Most Hyped Book
- Most Ambitious Project
- A Jewel in the Rough Award
- Greatest Comeback
- Unexpected Surprise
- Most Accessible Author
- The Sky's the Limit
- Most Entertaining Read
- Most Underrated Work
- Most Overrated Work
- Most Disappointing Book/Series
- Best-Kept Secret
- Rookie of the Year Award: Best Debut
- "I'd rather be at the dentist" Award: Worst Book of the Year
- Interview of the Year
- "Best thing since sliced bread" Award
- The Beastie Boys "I'll kick you out of my home if you don't cut that hair" Award
- The K-Fed Award: Dumbass of the Year
- Best Book I've read this Year:
- Best Fantasy Message Board
- The Lois McMaster Bujold "This one will win an award or three" Award
- Quote of the Year
As you can see, there are quite a few categories. As always, not everyone will agree with my choices. But it wouldn't be fun otherwise, right!?! Feel free to suggest additional categories, if the mood strikes you.:-) The Fantasy Hotlist Awards shall be unveiled during the last week of December. So stay tuned!
Well, December is just around the corner and thankfully we have yet to receive any snow over here. That will soon change, of course. There's no helping it.
Now that Larry (Dylanfanatic) has announced that the time has come for the OF Awards on wotmania.com (I have two nominations this year. Crazy, I know!), I thought it was time to reveal the different categories of my very own Year-End Awards. I had fun doing it last year, so I've been thinking about this for over a month now.
There are more categories this year, and more might be added if inspiration strikes me. Here they are:
- My Top 10 of 2006
- Most Promising New Voice
- Most Hyped Book
- Most Ambitious Project
- A Jewel in the Rough Award
- Greatest Comeback
- Unexpected Surprise
- Most Accessible Author
- The Sky's the Limit
- Most Entertaining Read
- Most Underrated Work
- Most Overrated Work
- Most Disappointing Book/Series
- Best-Kept Secret
- Rookie of the Year Award: Best Debut
- "I'd rather be at the dentist" Award: Worst Book of the Year
- Interview of the Year
- "Best thing since sliced bread" Award
- The Beastie Boys "I'll kick you out of my home if you don't cut that hair" Award
- The K-Fed Award: Dumbass of the Year
- Best Book I've read this Year:
- Best Fantasy Message Board
- The Lois McMaster Bujold "This one will win an award or three" Award
- Quote of the Year
As you can see, there are quite a few categories. As always, not everyone will agree with my choices. But it wouldn't be fun otherwise, right!?! Feel free to suggest additional categories, if the mood strikes you.:-) The Fantasy Hotlist Awards shall be unveiled during the last week of December. So stay tuned!
The Joe Abercrombie contest winners!
Hi there!
The names of our two winners have been drawn, and each will now receive a copy of Joe Abercrombie's debut, The Blade Itself. Joe told me that he would try to get you guys signed copies. Many thanks to Gollancz Books for their support.
I'm almost done with this novel myself, so expect my review soon.
The winners are:
Alexis Bormans, from Massy, France (Publivore on www.elbakin.net)
Sarah Lee, from Dublin, Ireland
Thanks to all the participants!:-)
The names of our two winners have been drawn, and each will now receive a copy of Joe Abercrombie's debut, The Blade Itself. Joe told me that he would try to get you guys signed copies. Many thanks to Gollancz Books for their support.
I'm almost done with this novel myself, so expect my review soon.
The winners are:
Alexis Bormans, from Massy, France (Publivore on www.elbakin.net)
Sarah Lee, from Dublin, Ireland
Thanks to all the participants!:-)
This week's New York Times Bestsellers (November 21st)
In hardcover:
R. A. Salvatore's Road of the Patriarch is down four positions, ending its third week on the charts at number 20. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe.
Max Brooks' World War Z. An Oral History of the Zombie War is down nine spots, finishing its fifth week on the bestseller list at number 35. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe.
In paperback:
Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is down two positions, ending its fifth week on the NYT list at number 30. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe.
R. A. Salvatore's Road of the Patriarch is down four positions, ending its third week on the charts at number 20. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe.
Max Brooks' World War Z. An Oral History of the Zombie War is down nine spots, finishing its fifth week on the bestseller list at number 35. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe.
In paperback:
Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is down two positions, ending its fifth week on the NYT list at number 30. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe.
The Brian Ruckley contest winners!
Yep!
The names have been drawn and we have our three winners. Thanks to Orbit Books, each of them will receive a copy of Brian Ruckley's debut, Winterbirth.
The winners are:
Chris Hyland, from Bideford, Devon, England
Elio García, from Nödinge, Sweden (Ran on asoiaf.westeros.com -- our first three-time winner!)
Elias Fernandez-Combarro Alvarez, from Oviedo, Spain (Odo on fantasybookspot.com and sffworld.com)
Thanks to all the participants!:-)
The names have been drawn and we have our three winners. Thanks to Orbit Books, each of them will receive a copy of Brian Ruckley's debut, Winterbirth.
The winners are:
Chris Hyland, from Bideford, Devon, England
Elio García, from Nödinge, Sweden (Ran on asoiaf.westeros.com -- our first three-time winner!)
Elias Fernandez-Combarro Alvarez, from Oviedo, Spain (Odo on fantasybookspot.com and sffworld.com)
Thanks to all the participants!:-)
The Dark
Steven Erikson, David Keck, Mark Paxton-MacRae have created this brand new scifi serial. And from what I read on the malazanempire.com forums, it looks pretty good!:-) Here is some background info:
The Dark:
Space is dark...silent...lethal.
Ships stay quiet when they can and when they can’t, it’s because they’re too damned big. Either way, no spotlights shining on white hulls, no glowing nacelles. Nobody hails anybody. Space is an unlit sea and everything swimming in it is hungry. Planet systems mean resources and, unless someone says otherwise, it’s there for the taking.
It’s been decades since the last independent nation on Earth was absorbed by the Community of Aligned Nations (aka. Generica). The solar system has been colonised, more or less, and things are going swimmingly for the genetically optimized citizens of Generica; until, that is, the aliens arrive to obliterate most everything.
Mysterious aliens. No one has actually seen them, just their massive, all-devouring ships, and no two of those alike. There has been no communication either, and Generica’s increasingly desperate pleas to negotiate go unanswered. It’s war; and for humans, it’s going very badly indeed.In the unlit labyrinth of undifferentiated asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, three old ships from a long-defunct independent republic drop out of deep-freeze and begin waging their own kind of war against the aliens. Crewed by misfits, genetically randomized (normal folk), these ships, the Widow, Wolf and Recluse begin an unrelenting campaign using stealth tactics, snatching small victories where great navies find only destruction. Like the hunter subs of the first cold war, they lurk in the dark, communicating with no one (not even, no especially not, Generica), with no base to call their own, and each operating with fierce independence.
This is the story of one of those ships: Recluse. Damn-near invisible in space, powered by a throbbing fusion reactor, and inhabited by a crew for whom cabin-fever is a way of life. Each is a study in paranoia, neuroses and just plain weirdness. These men and women are our heroes.
Here is what the creators have to say about the Dark:
The Dark is an independently written and produced sci-fi serial, available strictly through the web to our loyal subscribers. It's been a group effort, from the beginning, and we are proud to be involved in this original web serial that was developed in Rick's Garage, a coffee shop called Bar Italia and a speakeasy dubbed 'The Smiling Fist.'
Over the past three years we have worked hard to bring you these two free, proof-of-concept videos, to deliver a taste of what we're about. We're trying to keep this independent, to remain in control of the story. We want to maintain the vision and send out a great tale where the edges aren't rounded down by constant abrasion with formulaic TV production, middlemen or bland committees. However, an ongoing serial requires moolah, kash, cheddar to make it real.
This is where you come in. The vision is there, the story is there, the talent is there. We're asking you, the reader, to support us in our vision and help create some great sci-fi moments with non-run-of-the-mill stories sparked with characters as deep as space and often just as dark.
The Dark is crafted to fit into a new universe of original web entertainment. It's cheap, too. US $20 one time and then around a US $1 an episode when the show goes live.
Our mission is to tell a great story, and we want you to be a part of it … a lot. So, we're also looking for feedback as well as your dosh. In the spirit of the web, we want our viewers and our loyal subscribers to be part of the process. Enter The Forum. Here the actors and writers will offer up contributions. We're even planning to publish live webcasts of the filming process and off-screen discussions. Through input on The Forum subscribers may end up contributing to the actual content of the series. Talk to us. We'll listen. Luck out and you might get to climb into a freezer on an episode. And that's just the beginning …
We loved making these promos, and we fervently want to make the full series come to life. So have a look. We think you'll find a reason to keep watching as we roll out fresh episodes; hopefully enough to enlist and purchase a subscription.
Welcome to The Dark, the new high definition digital edge in space fiction.
Intrigued!?! I know I am! Truth be told, I've been curious about this ever since Steven mentioned it in our very first interview last January.
The first two episodes are available for free on www.thedarkfiles.com. The site contains a ton of info, as well as other interesting things. Check it out!;-)
I'll give you my two cents as soon as I've had the opportunity to download and watch the two opening episodes!
To Steven, David and Mark: Best of luck in this new endeavor. Hopefully this post will help put asses in the seats!
The Dark:
Space is dark...silent...lethal.
Ships stay quiet when they can and when they can’t, it’s because they’re too damned big. Either way, no spotlights shining on white hulls, no glowing nacelles. Nobody hails anybody. Space is an unlit sea and everything swimming in it is hungry. Planet systems mean resources and, unless someone says otherwise, it’s there for the taking.
It’s been decades since the last independent nation on Earth was absorbed by the Community of Aligned Nations (aka. Generica). The solar system has been colonised, more or less, and things are going swimmingly for the genetically optimized citizens of Generica; until, that is, the aliens arrive to obliterate most everything.
Mysterious aliens. No one has actually seen them, just their massive, all-devouring ships, and no two of those alike. There has been no communication either, and Generica’s increasingly desperate pleas to negotiate go unanswered. It’s war; and for humans, it’s going very badly indeed.In the unlit labyrinth of undifferentiated asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, three old ships from a long-defunct independent republic drop out of deep-freeze and begin waging their own kind of war against the aliens. Crewed by misfits, genetically randomized (normal folk), these ships, the Widow, Wolf and Recluse begin an unrelenting campaign using stealth tactics, snatching small victories where great navies find only destruction. Like the hunter subs of the first cold war, they lurk in the dark, communicating with no one (not even, no especially not, Generica), with no base to call their own, and each operating with fierce independence.
This is the story of one of those ships: Recluse. Damn-near invisible in space, powered by a throbbing fusion reactor, and inhabited by a crew for whom cabin-fever is a way of life. Each is a study in paranoia, neuroses and just plain weirdness. These men and women are our heroes.
Here is what the creators have to say about the Dark:
The Dark is an independently written and produced sci-fi serial, available strictly through the web to our loyal subscribers. It's been a group effort, from the beginning, and we are proud to be involved in this original web serial that was developed in Rick's Garage, a coffee shop called Bar Italia and a speakeasy dubbed 'The Smiling Fist.'
Over the past three years we have worked hard to bring you these two free, proof-of-concept videos, to deliver a taste of what we're about. We're trying to keep this independent, to remain in control of the story. We want to maintain the vision and send out a great tale where the edges aren't rounded down by constant abrasion with formulaic TV production, middlemen or bland committees. However, an ongoing serial requires moolah, kash, cheddar to make it real.
This is where you come in. The vision is there, the story is there, the talent is there. We're asking you, the reader, to support us in our vision and help create some great sci-fi moments with non-run-of-the-mill stories sparked with characters as deep as space and often just as dark.
The Dark is crafted to fit into a new universe of original web entertainment. It's cheap, too. US $20 one time and then around a US $1 an episode when the show goes live.
Our mission is to tell a great story, and we want you to be a part of it … a lot. So, we're also looking for feedback as well as your dosh. In the spirit of the web, we want our viewers and our loyal subscribers to be part of the process. Enter The Forum. Here the actors and writers will offer up contributions. We're even planning to publish live webcasts of the filming process and off-screen discussions. Through input on The Forum subscribers may end up contributing to the actual content of the series. Talk to us. We'll listen. Luck out and you might get to climb into a freezer on an episode. And that's just the beginning …
We loved making these promos, and we fervently want to make the full series come to life. So have a look. We think you'll find a reason to keep watching as we roll out fresh episodes; hopefully enough to enlist and purchase a subscription.
Welcome to The Dark, the new high definition digital edge in space fiction.
Intrigued!?! I know I am! Truth be told, I've been curious about this ever since Steven mentioned it in our very first interview last January.
The first two episodes are available for free on www.thedarkfiles.com. The site contains a ton of info, as well as other interesting things. Check it out!;-)
I'll give you my two cents as soon as I've had the opportunity to download and watch the two opening episodes!
To Steven, David and Mark: Best of luck in this new endeavor. Hopefully this post will help put asses in the seats!
Another good one
Hi guys!
I know this is a bit out of sort, but I've found another good and affordable wine. So if you're looking for something that won't require you to break the bank, this one's for you!;-)
My first pick a few weeks back was the Duca Di Castelmonte Cent'are Nero D'avola 2003. This one pleased everyone who tasted it during a big dinner we held last month.
My second pick is the J. P. Chenet Merlot-Cabernet 2004 (Premier de Cuvée). You can't miss it, as it comes in a funny-looking bottle. I'm definitely buying this one again! We had fondue on Saturday night with a group of friends, and this wine went down too easily!
I'm aware that most people who stop by are looking for recommendations pertaining to fantasy/scifi/speculative fiction novels. But one day, when you're on a date with that gorgeous girl and you're looking for a fine wine that won't make you go broke and will make you look as though you know what you're doing, perhaps you'll thank me!;-) And most girls I know prefer wine to any other type of booze, so everyone's winner here!
Cheers!
I know this is a bit out of sort, but I've found another good and affordable wine. So if you're looking for something that won't require you to break the bank, this one's for you!;-)
My first pick a few weeks back was the Duca Di Castelmonte Cent'are Nero D'avola 2003. This one pleased everyone who tasted it during a big dinner we held last month.
My second pick is the J. P. Chenet Merlot-Cabernet 2004 (Premier de Cuvée). You can't miss it, as it comes in a funny-looking bottle. I'm definitely buying this one again! We had fondue on Saturday night with a group of friends, and this wine went down too easily!
I'm aware that most people who stop by are looking for recommendations pertaining to fantasy/scifi/speculative fiction novels. But one day, when you're on a date with that gorgeous girl and you're looking for a fine wine that won't make you go broke and will make you look as though you know what you're doing, perhaps you'll thank me!;-) And most girls I know prefer wine to any other type of booze, so everyone's winner here!
Cheers!
The L. E. Modesitt, jr. contest winners!
Hey!
Okay, so we have our two winners. Each will receive a copy of Modesitt's Soarer's Choice. Once again, many thanks to Tor Books for their support.
The winners are:
Michael Natale, from Cumberland, Rhode Island, USA (dingosatemybaby on asoiaf.westeros.org)
Michelle Crane, from Trenton, Ontario, Canada
Thanks to all the participants! And stay tuned for more!;-)
Okay, so we have our two winners. Each will receive a copy of Modesitt's Soarer's Choice. Once again, many thanks to Tor Books for their support.
The winners are:
Michael Natale, from Cumberland, Rhode Island, USA (dingosatemybaby on asoiaf.westeros.org)
Michelle Crane, from Trenton, Ontario, Canada
Thanks to all the participants! And stay tuned for more!;-)
The Orson Scott Card contest winners!
Hi!
The names have been drawn and we have our winners! Both will receive a complimentary copy of Card's latest, Empire. Many thanks to Tor Books for their support!:-)
The winners are:
- Gil Thibault, from Kansas City, Missouri, USA (Sir Tybalt on wotmania.com)
- Marc Roden, from Bloomington, Indiana, USA (Palimpsest on asoiaf.westeros.org)
Thanks to all the participants! And stay tuned for more!;-)
The names have been drawn and we have our winners! Both will receive a complimentary copy of Card's latest, Empire. Many thanks to Tor Books for their support!:-)
The winners are:
- Gil Thibault, from Kansas City, Missouri, USA (Sir Tybalt on wotmania.com)
- Marc Roden, from Bloomington, Indiana, USA (Palimpsest on asoiaf.westeros.org)
Thanks to all the participants! And stay tuned for more!;-)
Win a free copy of Peter Watts' BLINDSIGHT
Hi there!
Just got word from Tor Books that I have two copies of Peter Watts' Blindsight up for grabs!:-) William Lexner (www.speculativereviews.blogspot.com) gave this novel a 9.5/10 and that's good enough for me!;-) I have a review copy on the way, and now you guys have the chance to win it and see what the buzz is all about! For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "BLINDSIGHT." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
P. S. In case you didn't know, just scroll down for a few more contests!
Just got word from Tor Books that I have two copies of Peter Watts' Blindsight up for grabs!:-) William Lexner (www.speculativereviews.blogspot.com) gave this novel a 9.5/10 and that's good enough for me!;-) I have a review copy on the way, and now you guys have the chance to win it and see what the buzz is all about! For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "BLINDSIGHT." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
P. S. In case you didn't know, just scroll down for a few more contests!
Donating books
This isn't exactly breaking news: Books are expensive.
Which is why I make it a point to donate what books I have and no longer want. As a reviewer, I now receive a panoply of novels all the time. More often than not, the packages that come my way are review copies I requested. Still, I frequently receive books that I never asked for, or books that, for a variety of reasons, I elect not to read. And those add up.
To remedy that, last year I started donating books to my local libraries. That way, countless people can take advantage of the stories they contain, and I feel that this is as it should be. In the last year or so, I must have donated close to a hundred books. And since a majority of those were either fantasy/scifi/speculative fiction books, my donations are even more important, since the libraries here don't stock that much material in those genres. Especially not in English.
I encourage you to do the same.:-) By acting thus, we are ensuring that people who can't necessarily afford them get the opportunity to discover new authors and their works.
Which is why I make it a point to donate what books I have and no longer want. As a reviewer, I now receive a panoply of novels all the time. More often than not, the packages that come my way are review copies I requested. Still, I frequently receive books that I never asked for, or books that, for a variety of reasons, I elect not to read. And those add up.
To remedy that, last year I started donating books to my local libraries. That way, countless people can take advantage of the stories they contain, and I feel that this is as it should be. In the last year or so, I must have donated close to a hundred books. And since a majority of those were either fantasy/scifi/speculative fiction books, my donations are even more important, since the libraries here don't stock that much material in those genres. Especially not in English.
I encourage you to do the same.:-) By acting thus, we are ensuring that people who can't necessarily afford them get the opportunity to discover new authors and their works.
This week's New York Times Bestsellers (November 14th)
In hardcover:
R. A. Salvatore's Road of the Patriarch is down three positions, ending its second week on the bestseller list at number 16. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is up one spot, finishing its fourth week on the charts at number 26. For more info on this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Laurell K. Hamilton's Strange Candy is down six positions, ending its fifth week on the NYT list at number 30. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
In paperback:
Eric S. Nylund's latest Halo novel, Ghosts of Onyx, debuts at number 13. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is down ten spots, finishing its fourth week on the prestigious list at number 28. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
R. A. Salvatore's Road of the Patriarch is down three positions, ending its second week on the bestseller list at number 16. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is up one spot, finishing its fourth week on the charts at number 26. For more info on this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Laurell K. Hamilton's Strange Candy is down six positions, ending its fifth week on the NYT list at number 30. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
In paperback:
Eric S. Nylund's latest Halo novel, Ghosts of Onyx, debuts at number 13. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is down ten spots, finishing its fourth week on the prestigious list at number 28. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
THE BLOOD DEBT contest winners!
The names of our winners have been drawn. Those three lucky people can expect to receive a copy of Sean Williams' The Blood Debt delivered right to their mailbox in the next couple of weeks.:-) Congrats! Many thanks to Pyr for their support.
Here are the winners:
Jason Farrell, fromMulberry, Florida, USA (Silvercream on fantasybookspot.com)
Benjamin Sparrow, from Coralville, Iowa, USA
Josh Williams, from Fairfield, Ohio, USA (Ser Mosh on asoiaf.westeros.org)
Here are the winners:
Jason Farrell, fromMulberry, Florida, USA (Silvercream on fantasybookspot.com)
Benjamin Sparrow, from Coralville, Iowa, USA
Josh Williams, from Fairfield, Ohio, USA (Ser Mosh on asoiaf.westeros.org)
Win a free copy of Joe Abercrombie's THE BLADE ITSELF
Hi guys!
This month is turning into one of those free books' galore!;-) You see, it pays to stop here every once in a while!
Thanks to the author himself and Gollancz, I have a couple of copies of Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself up for grabs. And Joe tells me that the books might even be signed! I'm reading this novel next, so I'll give you the lowdown soon enough. Meanwhile, for more info on this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "BLADE." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
This month is turning into one of those free books' galore!;-) You see, it pays to stop here every once in a while!
Thanks to the author himself and Gollancz, I have a couple of copies of Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself up for grabs. And Joe tells me that the books might even be signed! I'm reading this novel next, so I'll give you the lowdown soon enough. Meanwhile, for more info on this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "BLADE." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
A Clash of Kings
Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. I have finally read George R. R. Martin's A Clash of Kings! And this is good stuff, let me tell you!;-)
Once again, I really enjoyed this second volume. But where A Game of Thrones was perfectly paced, this sequel suffered from occasional sluggishness. Nothing major, mind you, but it was a bit slow-going at times.
There is little progress where worldbuilding is concerned. Martin utilizes the traditional medieval setting, but the author's eye for details brings the world alive in a manner that only Katherine Kurtz can rival. Interestingly enough, the only two storylines involving some worldbuilding were my two favorites. Daenerys' flight east was particularly well-done, and I found the locales and their societies to be exotic and fascinating. This character annoyed me in the first volume, yet she's truly coming into her own as the story progresses. Jon and the Night's Watch's foray beyond the Wall was my favorite plotline in A Clash of Kings.
The characterizations are superbly executed. This might sound like a bold claim, but I believe that George R. R. Martin could well have no equals when it comes to telling a tale through the eyes of multiple POV characters -- fantasy fiction or otherwise. He moves the story along with the sure assurance of a master storyteller, making A Song of Ice and Fire a vastly superior series to what is the norm in today's market.
Having said that, I think I'm beginning to understand why some fans of Robert Jordan and Steven Erikson don't necessarily get into this series as much as Martin's rabid fans, and vice versa. Both Jordan and Erikson work on a much bigger scale. Compared to these two, Martin doesn't work on such an epic scale. With first-rate characterizations, Martin somehow reduces everything to a smaller, more intimate scale. And as such, some readers prefer one approach, while others prefer the other. As for me, I enjoy both -- when they're done well, of course.
We all know that fantasy writers have their quirks. Jordan feels the urge to describe every facial feature imaginable on every character, great and small, as well as their entire attire, rdown to the last thread of embroidery. Erikson, for his part, tries to insert the words "must needs" in every chapter or so. Martin, well the man is obviously a "food" person. I've never seen an author go to such lengths to describe the food being eaten. While the battle for Blackwater Rush is raging around King's Landing, Martin shifts the narrative to a Sansa POV that tells us all about the different courses of the women's meal, right down to what's in Cersei's salad! What's up with that!?!
I'm actually shocked that Arya, Jon and Tyrion have all managed to survive this one -- even if the Imp is alive, but not kicking. I'm a bit disappointed by the body count, to tell the truth. I was expecting much worse. But the proverbial shit has hit the fan, and the stage is set for A Storm of Swords.
I love the way Martin shifts his POV characters from book to book, permitting us to see how the different storylines unfold through the eyes of a very disparate group of men and women.
The final verdict: 9/10
For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe
Once again, I really enjoyed this second volume. But where A Game of Thrones was perfectly paced, this sequel suffered from occasional sluggishness. Nothing major, mind you, but it was a bit slow-going at times.
There is little progress where worldbuilding is concerned. Martin utilizes the traditional medieval setting, but the author's eye for details brings the world alive in a manner that only Katherine Kurtz can rival. Interestingly enough, the only two storylines involving some worldbuilding were my two favorites. Daenerys' flight east was particularly well-done, and I found the locales and their societies to be exotic and fascinating. This character annoyed me in the first volume, yet she's truly coming into her own as the story progresses. Jon and the Night's Watch's foray beyond the Wall was my favorite plotline in A Clash of Kings.
The characterizations are superbly executed. This might sound like a bold claim, but I believe that George R. R. Martin could well have no equals when it comes to telling a tale through the eyes of multiple POV characters -- fantasy fiction or otherwise. He moves the story along with the sure assurance of a master storyteller, making A Song of Ice and Fire a vastly superior series to what is the norm in today's market.
Having said that, I think I'm beginning to understand why some fans of Robert Jordan and Steven Erikson don't necessarily get into this series as much as Martin's rabid fans, and vice versa. Both Jordan and Erikson work on a much bigger scale. Compared to these two, Martin doesn't work on such an epic scale. With first-rate characterizations, Martin somehow reduces everything to a smaller, more intimate scale. And as such, some readers prefer one approach, while others prefer the other. As for me, I enjoy both -- when they're done well, of course.
We all know that fantasy writers have their quirks. Jordan feels the urge to describe every facial feature imaginable on every character, great and small, as well as their entire attire, rdown to the last thread of embroidery. Erikson, for his part, tries to insert the words "must needs" in every chapter or so. Martin, well the man is obviously a "food" person. I've never seen an author go to such lengths to describe the food being eaten. While the battle for Blackwater Rush is raging around King's Landing, Martin shifts the narrative to a Sansa POV that tells us all about the different courses of the women's meal, right down to what's in Cersei's salad! What's up with that!?!
I'm actually shocked that Arya, Jon and Tyrion have all managed to survive this one -- even if the Imp is alive, but not kicking. I'm a bit disappointed by the body count, to tell the truth. I was expecting much worse. But the proverbial shit has hit the fan, and the stage is set for A Storm of Swords.
I love the way Martin shifts his POV characters from book to book, permitting us to see how the different storylines unfold through the eyes of a very disparate group of men and women.
The final verdict: 9/10
For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe
Win a free copy of Brian Ruckley's WINTERBIRTH
Hi guys!
I've heard a lot of good things about this novel and I'm eager to read it. The good people at Orbit were kind enough to support this contest, which means that I have three copies of Brian Ruckley's Winterbirth up for grabs. For more info about the book: Canada, USA, Europe.
You can also read an excerpt on his website at www.brianruckley.com.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "WINTERBIRTH." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
I've heard a lot of good things about this novel and I'm eager to read it. The good people at Orbit were kind enough to support this contest, which means that I have three copies of Brian Ruckley's Winterbirth up for grabs. For more info about the book: Canada, USA, Europe.
You can also read an excerpt on his website at www.brianruckley.com.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "WINTERBIRTH." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
Win a free copy of L. E. Modesitt, jr.'s SOARER'S CHOICE
Hi!
Gee, second contest announcement today! Once again, the good people at Tor Books have accepted to support another contest. They will hook up two lucky winners with a copy of L. E. Modesitt, jr.'s Soarer's Choice. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe. Plus, each winner will receive a little surprise from the publisher.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "CHOICE." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
Gee, second contest announcement today! Once again, the good people at Tor Books have accepted to support another contest. They will hook up two lucky winners with a copy of L. E. Modesitt, jr.'s Soarer's Choice. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe. Plus, each winner will receive a little surprise from the publisher.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "CHOICE." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
Win a free copy of Orson Scott Card's EMPIRE
Hi there!
Thanks to the great folks at Tor Books, I have two copies of Orson Scott Card's Empire up for grabs! For more info about the novel: Canada, USA, Europe.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "EMPIRE." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
Thanks to the great folks at Tor Books, I have two copies of Orson Scott Card's Empire up for grabs! For more info about the novel: Canada, USA, Europe.
The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "EMPIRE." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
This week's New York Times Bestsellers (November 7th)
In hardcover:
R. A. Salvatore's Road of the Patriarch debuts at number 13. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Laurell K. Hamilton's Strange Candy is down seven spots, finishing its fourth week on the charts at number 24. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War drops down four positions, ending its third week on the bestseller list at number 27. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Drew Karpyshyn's Star Wars: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction is down seven spots, finishing its fifth week on the NYT list at number 28. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
In paperback:
Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is down one position, ending its fourth week on the prestigious list at number 18. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
R. A. Salvatore's Road of the Patriarch debuts at number 13. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Laurell K. Hamilton's Strange Candy is down seven spots, finishing its fourth week on the charts at number 24. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War drops down four positions, ending its third week on the bestseller list at number 27. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Drew Karpyshyn's Star Wars: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction is down seven spots, finishing its fifth week on the NYT list at number 28. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
In paperback:
Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is down one position, ending its fourth week on the prestigious list at number 18. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Mark Z. Danielewski contest winners!
Hey there!
The names of our two winners have finally been drawn. Both will receive a copy of Danielewski's latest, Only Revolutions. Many thanks to the great folks at Transworld for supporting this contest.:-)
The winners are:
Robert Dover, from Cambridge, United Kingdom (Sir Thursday on Malazanempire.com and asoiaf.westeros.org)
Bjørn Nicolai Olsen, from Rogaland, Norway
Thanks to all the participants!
The names of our two winners have finally been drawn. Both will receive a copy of Danielewski's latest, Only Revolutions. Many thanks to the great folks at Transworld for supporting this contest.:-)
The winners are:
Robert Dover, from Cambridge, United Kingdom (Sir Thursday on Malazanempire.com and asoiaf.westeros.org)
Bjørn Nicolai Olsen, from Rogaland, Norway
Thanks to all the participants!
John Scalzi contest winners!
Hi!
The names have been drawn and we now have our two winners! A pair of Canucks, no less! Each will receive a copy of The Android's Dream delivered right to their mailbox! Many thanks to the good people at Tor Books for making this possible.
The winners are:
Ghislaine Meilleur, from Powell River, British Columbia, Canada
Mary J. Daley, fromToronto, Ontario, Canada
The names have been drawn and we now have our two winners! A pair of Canucks, no less! Each will receive a copy of The Android's Dream delivered right to their mailbox! Many thanks to the good people at Tor Books for making this possible.
The winners are:
Ghislaine Meilleur, from Powell River, British Columbia, Canada
Mary J. Daley, fromToronto, Ontario, Canada
New Ian McDonald Interview
Hi guys!
Well, after being blown away by River of Gods, I knew I had to get an interview with Ian McDonald. And since William Lexner (the infamous Stego on asoiaf.westeros.org) was the one whose review piqued my curiosity, I decided to ask him if he'd care to join me on this little project. His blog is a perfect place to read good book reviews, as always. And although he was swamped at work, William still managed to submit a couple of questions just before the deadline.
Many thanks to the folks at Pyr for making this Q&A possible. And most of all, thanks to Ian McDonald for taking the time to answer each question and making this one of the most interesting interviews I've done thus far.
Enjoy!
------------------
- For the benefit of those of us new to your work, without giving too much away, give us a taste of the story that is RIVER OF GODS.
A taste, you say? An Indian thali then --a selection of small, intensely flavoured snacks on one plate. . There's a computer-generated soap opera where all the characters are played by Artificial Intelligences --who also play the actor's playing the characters, because the gossip-column world outside the soap is as important and the soap itself. There's an embattled Prime Minister being drawn into a water war with her immediate neighbour to save her career and her government from the threat of a Hindu fundamentalist populist party. There's a Krishna Cop whose job it is to track down and excommunicate unlicensed 'aeais' --Artificial Intelligences. There's an American scientist gone native down in Kerala who is drawn back into the world to interpret a seemingly impossible astronomical event. There's a stand-up comedian who inherits a power company, there's a new third sex --that doesn't do sex. There's cricket (and if you haven't been to India, it's hard to imagine how important cricket is there: it is to India what soccer is to Brazil: any open space, someone will set up stumps and make a bat from a piece of old wood. We were there for the 2003 final of the cricket World Cup --India versus Australia. I read recently that China has officially decided it is going to adopt cricket, because it reckons it's a sport at which it can excel. That makes it at a stroke the world's biggest sport. China/India test matches will be the planet's biggest sporting fixture. There are street criminals, glittering parties, gods and monsters, scandal, intrigue... Just another couple of months in India --or what remains of India-- in 2047.
- What made you decide to set the story in India? With its myriad gods, cultures, etc, how much of a challenge was it to get every little detail "right?"
India had never featured in SF. Africa, well covered, China --when the US (and SF is still a largely US-centric genre) thinks of Asia it tends to think China and Japan --East Asia. When did you ever see an India on Star Trek? Or, for that matter, a Brazilian? (Trek has always reflected US internal ethnicity and foreign policy --the bad guys are who the administration wants everyone to be scared off at that time. Klingons were of course the barbarous red horde, the Borg the faceless drone Korean car worker destroying the US economy, the infiltrating, sleeper shapeshifters and the fanatical Jen Hadar, well, 'jemadar' is a Hindi word fro a sergeant in the Indian Army...) On our side of the Atlantic we've always had a much closer historical and colonial relationship with South Asia and, when the first wave of outsourcing broke, the bright idea was to outsource cyberpunk along with it. Bruce Sterling wrote in the introduction to Mirrorshades about wanting to 'distil the weak beer of space opera' into something stronger. I wanted to distil the weak beer of cyberpunk into something stronger --and funkier. At the same time fashion was changing in the UK: for a while it had been cool to be Irish (no, really); then Brit-Asian became the fashionable ethnicity: Talvin Singh won the mercury Music prize, all of a sudden the desi thing was on the horizon, and the proper responses of a science fiction writer to these things is to ask, well, what about?
Research: well, 90% of your research you never use, but you have to do it because you never know what that 10% that lifts a book --I think of it like yeast in bread- and makes the reader think, yes, this is real, he's seen/experienced this. Any writer will tell you that quite a lot of imagination-stuff can be raised by one true, real-world insight. Research began in 1999, writing in 2003, after I'd been out on the research trip, which took in the usual touristy destinations (and why not?) and a three day trip sailing down the Ganges, camping on sandbars, into Varanasi, which is the only way to arrive, IMHO. Then up into Nepal, which I had initially thought of as an add-on, which spawned the companion story The Little Goddess. In terms of difficulty, there's a huge amount of material out there to draw from and source; Brazil was much much harder to research. It may be the fifth largest country in the world (you can drop the conterminous states comfortably into Brazil) but there are twelve times as many books on tiny (but fashionable) Cuba. Then again, I like to think I'm that wee bit ahead of the curve, so Brazil should be appearing on the mass popular radars about the same time the books comes out. I'm reading about Turkey now. My projects tend to be long slow and painstaking --I'm a slow writer and a slow reader.
- Speaking of which, have you received much feedback from Indians pertaining to RIVER OF GODS' accuracy or lack thereof?
The general opinion is 'not bad for a firangi' (foreigner), together with a mild head-slap of 'why didn't we think of this?' That latter one is a more general response I've had from other writers as well: basically, Of course, it's so bloody obvious. There was one extended argument I linked into from my blog of the 'who does this westerner think he is to try to write about my culture?' (this, of course without having bothered to read the book) that centred on the whole argument of western/Indian developed/developing world power structures and (I simplify grossly here) exploitation. Of course, I can stand up and wave my hand and say, hey, I'm the one living in the British Empire's last colony, not you, but that doesn't fit the script. It's pretty much the standard Western-liberal-guilt argument, but it has made me think about what I write --for some time now I've been shifting my fiction away from the Western and the developed world and into the developing world. After all, the future comes to Kenya or Kolkata as surely as it comes to Kansas. But when I sold the movie rights, the producer (who works a lot with Bollywood) hinted, wryly, that I'd so extensively settled the terrain that it would be quite a long time before anyone else tackled it. Well, Alan Dean Foster has published Sagramanda (also from the mighty Pyr) a techno-thriller set in near-future India. I discovered at Worldcon that Alan and I were in India at he same time: he was driving up from Mumbai as I was setting off down the Ganges; so it was clearly something that was in the air at the time. There will be more stories from the RoG world --I'm wrangling with the opening of one now -- but I wouldn't want anyone to think I was disenfranchising or discouraging India SF&F writers. It's a big country.
- Many readers seem to have a hard time adapting to the unconventional structure of RIVER OF GODS? What made you decide to use such disparate POV characters to tell the story?
There are stories you can tell in books that you can't in any other format. Because of their length and the amount of time it takes to read them, books can work much more with memory than more time-based media like film and television. The underlying narrative structures are the same, but one of the virtues of the novel is that it operate on a vast scale. In RoG, Bharat is much a character as any of the humans --as indeed is Town and Country, the CGI soap opera... and I wanted to find a way to show it. I remembered the old Indian story of the blind men and the elephant --each feels a different part, and imagines that an elephant is like a tree trunk, like a snake, like a whale. I wanted multiple perspectives on the future India, because this would show its breadth and depth, where following a single POV narrator would mean vast amounts of info-dumping or a flatly-lit world that didn't convince, live and breathe. Worldbuilding is one of the virtues of SF, so I wanted to use it to create India 2047. The heart of the story is a huge conspiracy, and conspiracies only succeed if its very hard for any one person to see it all. Each character has an angle on the story, but not al of it, it's only when they start to come together that it all begins to make sense to us, the readers, if not to the characters themselves. There are several characters at the end of the book who never get to see the bigger picture, but completely satisfy their own stories.
- Characters often take a life of their own. Which of your characters did you find the most unpredictable to write about?
I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to writing because I plan everything out in advance. Writing is hard enough without having to think up what happens next when you're staring at a flashing cursor. I sell a book on a long and pretty detailed outline, then can run up to two or three hundred pages of notes and backgrounding. I do character bibles: about a dozen pages on each character before I start to write the book, then fill in the little details. Of course all characters surprise you --it was halfway through Brasyl that I realised that Edson's girlfriend Fia had a bad temper and could be a real snappy cow. It's one of the givens of writing that no plot should ever hinge on characters being stupid (your average computer-generated teen slasher movie) but characters can do stupid things because of their internal flaws, fears or limitations. As long as there is conflict --inner conflict--there is drama. In RoG a lot of plots revolve around character's weaknesses --and are redeemed to some measure by their strengths. In particular, Shaheen Badoor Khan, the advisor to Prime Minister Sajida Rana and the only Muslim in the Hindu government of Bharat, grew beyond the limits of his plot. I ended up liking and respecting him a lot, he seemed to retain a strange integrity and dignity.
- You're seen as one of the major players in the new European onslaught on speculative fiction, despite being a published author for almost two decades. What do you see as the reason behind the recent domination of the fields of science fiction and fantasy by authors from the U.K.?
The UK realised some time ago that tomorrow doesn't belong to it. That's a great challenge to any SF writer --that his or her cultural POV may not be the prevailing one. I think it helped spawn the great Brit space-opera boom --if the future isn't going to look like us, then it's not going to look like anyone --but it might look like everyone. For me, it was looking outside the West --to Africa for my take on First Contact, to India for Khyberpunk, to Brazil for Dickian reality-bending. In a sense it's taking the tropes of SF and asking, what can a non-Western culture do with them? There are a lot of great writers over here --a lot of us (alas) are the same age and emerged in the Thatcher era, when, for a moment, SF and Fantasy felt slightly subversive. Charlie Stross is the wunderkind of the past five years, but he's been writing since God was a boy: the Eighties Interzones at least.
- I've read that you've changed your U.K. publisher. Care to shed any light on who the new publisher might be? Will we still get a cover as pretty as that for RIVER OF GODS for BRASYL?
I've returned to Gollancz. (So there's a chance the endlessly-delayed but plotted-out conclusion to the Chaga trilogy may eventually happen).
- Speaking of BRASYL, what's the progress report on your new novel?
Done, dusted, copyedited. have a look here and here.
Great cover by the mighty Stephan Martiniere. Due out in May. It's definitely not RoG2: that was one thing I wanted above all to avoid, but I think you'll find it as rich, deep, dazzling and strange. India is in yer face. The culture slaps you the moment you step out of the airport (in fact, as the plane was touching down). Brazil creeps up on you, shakes its ass, gets you to buy it a drink and the next morning you wake up with your passport gone, your wallet lifted and one kidney replaces with a row of sutures. Peter Robb's magisterial 'A Death in Brazil' carries the line 'Brazil is one of the world's greatest and strangest countries', and it's only a year after being there that the full understanding of that arrives. It is like nowhere else --certainly not in South America, in the same way that India is like nowhere else. And it's history is more or less completely unknown in the rest of the West.
- PYR is earning loads of acclaim and new readers in the US. How do you feel about the eclectic and expansive output, other than RIVER OF GODS, of this new publisher? Do you have any favorites from their catalog?
David Louis Edelman's Infoquake. So fresh and good I shamelessly stole an idea from it: the whole premise of a future corporate thriller. I remember Lou Anders pitching this one at the Pyr panel at Worldcon in Glasgow and thinking, of course! It's so bloody obvious! That's a genius idea. It sent me back to an old novel by James Clavell called 'Noble House' about corporate intrigue in an old Anglo-Chinese trading company (it got made into a pretty dire TV miniseries), so that's in the mix at the back of my head. Buy Infoquake, read it (I think The Steg already has). Give him the Philip K Dick award.
- What do you feel is your strength as a writer/storyteller?
What, just one strength? No, hubris aside (and this is a very hubristic question). Much as I deride 'The Method', I think I'm a bit of a 'Method-Writer', in that I immerse myself pretty completely in what I'm writing. This sounds pretty damn pretentious, but I've not just come out writing a book set in Brazil, I've come out of thinking Brazilian. Maybe its because I grew up in a society with a very very keen sense of social nuance (there are thousands of subtle and not-so-subtle ways of telling what another person's religion is in Northern Ireland and in the not so distant past, that literally could be a matter of life and death) that I have or a feel for those unspoken social rules in other societies. I like to immerse readers in a complete experience, so they come out with a gasp, saying, 'whoa, that was intense.' Intense, yeah. I'm the Christian Bale of SF.
- What was the spark that generated the idea which drove you to write RIVER OF GODS in the first place?
It's well known that I was at a lunch with my agent John Richard Parker and my then-editor John Jarrold (truly a legend) and over the umpteenth bottle of wine, we were talking about Kipling, and, against contemporary convention, that Kim is a great novel of India; and I mentioned it would be great to try to write the science fictional equivalent of Kim. I could never be accused of excess of modesty, and other ideas were falling together at the same time as I said above. This was 1999, and it seemed a blindingly obvious thing to do --as far as I knew, no one else has tried anything on this scale, that was as much about India as set in India-- so I started to lay out the building blocks. Because it was such a huge concept it drove me back to John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, which impressed me when I read it as a teenager as one of the first SF futures that felt lived in. It felt wide and deep and complex and his multi-media technique seemed to be a clever and effective way of getting that wide-screen epic style I was looking for. As it happened, I used a slightly different method, of multiple POV characters, but Brunner was in the mix.
- Were there any perceived conventions of the scifi genre which you wanted to twist or break when you set out to write RIVER OF GODS? How about with BRASYL?
I think I do that to a certain extent in everything I write. It makes it fun to read and fun to write. It's a game, and there's a game at the heart of every SF story: what if? One of SF's great virtues is it's self-awareness and internal dialogue, it's not a very big field, everyone is two handshakes away from anyone else and it contemplates and talks about itself constantly. Every book, either knowingly or unknowingly, is part of that discourse, maybe I'm just a bit more knowing about it. There's a lot more SF around now, but in a sense it's harder now than ever; there's a very strong 'noveltarian' strain in the genre, which values new ideas and conceits and scientific speculations. Fair enough, science has expanded many times beyond what was known in the so-called 'Golden Age', and even then, major ideas like quantum theory weren't being used much. For me the big values have always been the sense of wonder and the sense of the strange. I'm somewhere I haven't been before. It's unfamiliar, a little uncomfortable but I can live here.
- Given the choice, would you take a New York Times bestseller, or a Hugo Award? Why, exactly?
New York Times bestseller. No disrespect at all to the Hugo's --I'm lucky enough to have been nominated twice now, and it is true, the honour's in being nominated. But to hit the New York times list is to haul in those readers outside fandom, the casual fantasy and SF readers, the ones who have Harry Potter or George R. R. Martin, or the Time Traveller's Wife. I'm with Gollancz editor Simon Spanton when he talks about the 'lapsed Catholic' audience on this, those who once read SF but dropped away, because it wasn't doing it for the, because they want more than juvenile lots and characters, because they want worlds and people and situations they can believe in, because media SF has so successfully colonised the low and fertile floodplain that it's all people think of when they hear the words Science Fiction. This was a brief blog-bubble between myself, Paul McAuley, Lou Anders, Charlie Stross and Paul Cornell as a counterblast to the 'back-to-basics' movement advocating a return to Golden Age style space adventure. My position on this is well known: of course there's always going to be a need for space-fic --what the general public think of and call 'sci-fi', and it may draw readers in at the bottom end, but it sure won't hold them. 'Mediaesque' sci-fi may, in that sense, 'save' science-fiction, but it sure will lobotomise it. And there are a lot of general readers out there who will buy and enjoy science-fiction if they can convince themselves it's not that geeky stuff...
- Honestly, do you believe that the speculative fiction genre will ever come to be recognized as veritable literature? Truth be told, in my opinion there has never been this many good books/series as we have right now, and yet there is still very little respect (not to say none) associated with the genre.
Everything is a genre these days, which of course means that everyone then fights turf wars. Literary Sharks and Jets. In SF there is, and always has been, a degree of cross-over, usually from literary-genre writers moving into sf-genre: Margaret 'Squids in Spaaaaace!' Atwood, Kashuo Ishiguro; it's obvious to any SF reader that David 'Cloud Atlas' Mitchell grew up an SF reader. Iain (m) Banks gets a lot of this 'why are you still writing that icky sci-fi stuff?' He's at the stage where he can just look at them, but I think the problem, deep down, is that it's seen as a childish genre. Of course, if an SF breakout books succeeds, then, in the great lines of Kingsley Amis (a great friend of SF in the 1960s, as Brian Aldiss will testify)
SF's no good
They bellow till we're deaf.
But his looks good!
Well, then it's not SF.
Whenever RoG came out in the UK, it came out as a mainstream title, it got stacked at the front of the shop as such as lot of people bought it as such. They enjoyed it as well. There are a lot of people out there who think the SF they see on TV, and the written SF which emulates it, is fun but for kids really. But give them something adult, give them something that doesn't have a spaceship full of windows on the cover, ands they'll buy it. Of course, publishing is all about niche marketing these days, and I know that the US Pyr edition, which is card-carrying hand-on-heart SF, is aimed at that specific market, and that's good, because I've been out of print in the US for ten years, and I need to build and rebuild a readership.
- What authors make you shake your head in admiration? If you could recommend just one book to the world, what would it be?
One book, divided into twenty volumes. I am evangelical about Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series. Captain and surgeon-spy in His Majesty's Napoleonic-era navy? What's not to love? Think of it a one six thousand page novel divided into twenty volumes. It builds completely it's own world, and, though the action is great, and the series contained the one piece of writing that made me go 'fuck me!' in amazement when I read it, it's the little scenes of shipboard life, the dinners, the music, the social order that stops everyone killing everyone else on this tiny wooden village out in the blue water, that are the real joy. And they're funny as well. Also, because I'm researching Turkey at the moment, I'm reading Orhan Pamuk's memoir of Istanbul --which maybe dwells a little heavily on the nostalgic and melancholic. William Dalrymple always astounds: the depth of his research and scholarship --and he does that thing as a travel writer that the vastly over-rated Bill Bryson doesn't: he talks to people.
- You have gained a lot of new fans with the release of RIVER OF GODS? What can you tell them about your earlier projects?
Much of the backlist is loooong out of print, but there are some I can look back on without a wince, with something approaching affection. King of Morning Queen of Day still surprises me when I flick through it--there are whole chunks I don;t remember writing. It's a pre-Buffy fantasy (remember that). Desolation Road still stands, and there's it's companion (not sequel) Ares Express, which may be seeing a US publication. The Chaga Saga: Evolution's Shore, Kirinya and the novella Tendeleo's Story I like still.
- How would you like to be remembered as an author? What is the legacy you'll be leaving behind?
Oh God, am I that old?
Many thanks again for accepting to do this interview with us. We wish you continued success with your career and best of luck with the upcoming release of BRASYL.
Well, after being blown away by River of Gods, I knew I had to get an interview with Ian McDonald. And since William Lexner (the infamous Stego on asoiaf.westeros.org) was the one whose review piqued my curiosity, I decided to ask him if he'd care to join me on this little project. His blog is a perfect place to read good book reviews, as always. And although he was swamped at work, William still managed to submit a couple of questions just before the deadline.
Many thanks to the folks at Pyr for making this Q&A possible. And most of all, thanks to Ian McDonald for taking the time to answer each question and making this one of the most interesting interviews I've done thus far.
Enjoy!
------------------
- For the benefit of those of us new to your work, without giving too much away, give us a taste of the story that is RIVER OF GODS.
A taste, you say? An Indian thali then --a selection of small, intensely flavoured snacks on one plate. . There's a computer-generated soap opera where all the characters are played by Artificial Intelligences --who also play the actor's playing the characters, because the gossip-column world outside the soap is as important and the soap itself. There's an embattled Prime Minister being drawn into a water war with her immediate neighbour to save her career and her government from the threat of a Hindu fundamentalist populist party. There's a Krishna Cop whose job it is to track down and excommunicate unlicensed 'aeais' --Artificial Intelligences. There's an American scientist gone native down in Kerala who is drawn back into the world to interpret a seemingly impossible astronomical event. There's a stand-up comedian who inherits a power company, there's a new third sex --that doesn't do sex. There's cricket (and if you haven't been to India, it's hard to imagine how important cricket is there: it is to India what soccer is to Brazil: any open space, someone will set up stumps and make a bat from a piece of old wood. We were there for the 2003 final of the cricket World Cup --India versus Australia. I read recently that China has officially decided it is going to adopt cricket, because it reckons it's a sport at which it can excel. That makes it at a stroke the world's biggest sport. China/India test matches will be the planet's biggest sporting fixture. There are street criminals, glittering parties, gods and monsters, scandal, intrigue... Just another couple of months in India --or what remains of India-- in 2047.
- What made you decide to set the story in India? With its myriad gods, cultures, etc, how much of a challenge was it to get every little detail "right?"
India had never featured in SF. Africa, well covered, China --when the US (and SF is still a largely US-centric genre) thinks of Asia it tends to think China and Japan --East Asia. When did you ever see an India on Star Trek? Or, for that matter, a Brazilian? (Trek has always reflected US internal ethnicity and foreign policy --the bad guys are who the administration wants everyone to be scared off at that time. Klingons were of course the barbarous red horde, the Borg the faceless drone Korean car worker destroying the US economy, the infiltrating, sleeper shapeshifters and the fanatical Jen Hadar, well, 'jemadar' is a Hindi word fro a sergeant in the Indian Army...) On our side of the Atlantic we've always had a much closer historical and colonial relationship with South Asia and, when the first wave of outsourcing broke, the bright idea was to outsource cyberpunk along with it. Bruce Sterling wrote in the introduction to Mirrorshades about wanting to 'distil the weak beer of space opera' into something stronger. I wanted to distil the weak beer of cyberpunk into something stronger --and funkier. At the same time fashion was changing in the UK: for a while it had been cool to be Irish (no, really); then Brit-Asian became the fashionable ethnicity: Talvin Singh won the mercury Music prize, all of a sudden the desi thing was on the horizon, and the proper responses of a science fiction writer to these things is to ask, well, what about?
Research: well, 90% of your research you never use, but you have to do it because you never know what that 10% that lifts a book --I think of it like yeast in bread- and makes the reader think, yes, this is real, he's seen/experienced this. Any writer will tell you that quite a lot of imagination-stuff can be raised by one true, real-world insight. Research began in 1999, writing in 2003, after I'd been out on the research trip, which took in the usual touristy destinations (and why not?) and a three day trip sailing down the Ganges, camping on sandbars, into Varanasi, which is the only way to arrive, IMHO. Then up into Nepal, which I had initially thought of as an add-on, which spawned the companion story The Little Goddess. In terms of difficulty, there's a huge amount of material out there to draw from and source; Brazil was much much harder to research. It may be the fifth largest country in the world (you can drop the conterminous states comfortably into Brazil) but there are twelve times as many books on tiny (but fashionable) Cuba. Then again, I like to think I'm that wee bit ahead of the curve, so Brazil should be appearing on the mass popular radars about the same time the books comes out. I'm reading about Turkey now. My projects tend to be long slow and painstaking --I'm a slow writer and a slow reader.
- Speaking of which, have you received much feedback from Indians pertaining to RIVER OF GODS' accuracy or lack thereof?
The general opinion is 'not bad for a firangi' (foreigner), together with a mild head-slap of 'why didn't we think of this?' That latter one is a more general response I've had from other writers as well: basically, Of course, it's so bloody obvious. There was one extended argument I linked into from my blog of the 'who does this westerner think he is to try to write about my culture?' (this, of course without having bothered to read the book) that centred on the whole argument of western/Indian developed/developing world power structures and (I simplify grossly here) exploitation. Of course, I can stand up and wave my hand and say, hey, I'm the one living in the British Empire's last colony, not you, but that doesn't fit the script. It's pretty much the standard Western-liberal-guilt argument, but it has made me think about what I write --for some time now I've been shifting my fiction away from the Western and the developed world and into the developing world. After all, the future comes to Kenya or Kolkata as surely as it comes to Kansas. But when I sold the movie rights, the producer (who works a lot with Bollywood) hinted, wryly, that I'd so extensively settled the terrain that it would be quite a long time before anyone else tackled it. Well, Alan Dean Foster has published Sagramanda (also from the mighty Pyr) a techno-thriller set in near-future India. I discovered at Worldcon that Alan and I were in India at he same time: he was driving up from Mumbai as I was setting off down the Ganges; so it was clearly something that was in the air at the time. There will be more stories from the RoG world --I'm wrangling with the opening of one now -- but I wouldn't want anyone to think I was disenfranchising or discouraging India SF&F writers. It's a big country.
- Many readers seem to have a hard time adapting to the unconventional structure of RIVER OF GODS? What made you decide to use such disparate POV characters to tell the story?
There are stories you can tell in books that you can't in any other format. Because of their length and the amount of time it takes to read them, books can work much more with memory than more time-based media like film and television. The underlying narrative structures are the same, but one of the virtues of the novel is that it operate on a vast scale. In RoG, Bharat is much a character as any of the humans --as indeed is Town and Country, the CGI soap opera... and I wanted to find a way to show it. I remembered the old Indian story of the blind men and the elephant --each feels a different part, and imagines that an elephant is like a tree trunk, like a snake, like a whale. I wanted multiple perspectives on the future India, because this would show its breadth and depth, where following a single POV narrator would mean vast amounts of info-dumping or a flatly-lit world that didn't convince, live and breathe. Worldbuilding is one of the virtues of SF, so I wanted to use it to create India 2047. The heart of the story is a huge conspiracy, and conspiracies only succeed if its very hard for any one person to see it all. Each character has an angle on the story, but not al of it, it's only when they start to come together that it all begins to make sense to us, the readers, if not to the characters themselves. There are several characters at the end of the book who never get to see the bigger picture, but completely satisfy their own stories.
- Characters often take a life of their own. Which of your characters did you find the most unpredictable to write about?
I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to writing because I plan everything out in advance. Writing is hard enough without having to think up what happens next when you're staring at a flashing cursor. I sell a book on a long and pretty detailed outline, then can run up to two or three hundred pages of notes and backgrounding. I do character bibles: about a dozen pages on each character before I start to write the book, then fill in the little details. Of course all characters surprise you --it was halfway through Brasyl that I realised that Edson's girlfriend Fia had a bad temper and could be a real snappy cow. It's one of the givens of writing that no plot should ever hinge on characters being stupid (your average computer-generated teen slasher movie) but characters can do stupid things because of their internal flaws, fears or limitations. As long as there is conflict --inner conflict--there is drama. In RoG a lot of plots revolve around character's weaknesses --and are redeemed to some measure by their strengths. In particular, Shaheen Badoor Khan, the advisor to Prime Minister Sajida Rana and the only Muslim in the Hindu government of Bharat, grew beyond the limits of his plot. I ended up liking and respecting him a lot, he seemed to retain a strange integrity and dignity.
- You're seen as one of the major players in the new European onslaught on speculative fiction, despite being a published author for almost two decades. What do you see as the reason behind the recent domination of the fields of science fiction and fantasy by authors from the U.K.?
The UK realised some time ago that tomorrow doesn't belong to it. That's a great challenge to any SF writer --that his or her cultural POV may not be the prevailing one. I think it helped spawn the great Brit space-opera boom --if the future isn't going to look like us, then it's not going to look like anyone --but it might look like everyone. For me, it was looking outside the West --to Africa for my take on First Contact, to India for Khyberpunk, to Brazil for Dickian reality-bending. In a sense it's taking the tropes of SF and asking, what can a non-Western culture do with them? There are a lot of great writers over here --a lot of us (alas) are the same age and emerged in the Thatcher era, when, for a moment, SF and Fantasy felt slightly subversive. Charlie Stross is the wunderkind of the past five years, but he's been writing since God was a boy: the Eighties Interzones at least.
- I've read that you've changed your U.K. publisher. Care to shed any light on who the new publisher might be? Will we still get a cover as pretty as that for RIVER OF GODS for BRASYL?
I've returned to Gollancz. (So there's a chance the endlessly-delayed but plotted-out conclusion to the Chaga trilogy may eventually happen).
- Speaking of BRASYL, what's the progress report on your new novel?
Done, dusted, copyedited. have a look here and here.
Great cover by the mighty Stephan Martiniere. Due out in May. It's definitely not RoG2: that was one thing I wanted above all to avoid, but I think you'll find it as rich, deep, dazzling and strange. India is in yer face. The culture slaps you the moment you step out of the airport (in fact, as the plane was touching down). Brazil creeps up on you, shakes its ass, gets you to buy it a drink and the next morning you wake up with your passport gone, your wallet lifted and one kidney replaces with a row of sutures. Peter Robb's magisterial 'A Death in Brazil' carries the line 'Brazil is one of the world's greatest and strangest countries', and it's only a year after being there that the full understanding of that arrives. It is like nowhere else --certainly not in South America, in the same way that India is like nowhere else. And it's history is more or less completely unknown in the rest of the West.
- PYR is earning loads of acclaim and new readers in the US. How do you feel about the eclectic and expansive output, other than RIVER OF GODS, of this new publisher? Do you have any favorites from their catalog?
David Louis Edelman's Infoquake. So fresh and good I shamelessly stole an idea from it: the whole premise of a future corporate thriller. I remember Lou Anders pitching this one at the Pyr panel at Worldcon in Glasgow and thinking, of course! It's so bloody obvious! That's a genius idea. It sent me back to an old novel by James Clavell called 'Noble House' about corporate intrigue in an old Anglo-Chinese trading company (it got made into a pretty dire TV miniseries), so that's in the mix at the back of my head. Buy Infoquake, read it (I think The Steg already has). Give him the Philip K Dick award.
- What do you feel is your strength as a writer/storyteller?
What, just one strength? No, hubris aside (and this is a very hubristic question). Much as I deride 'The Method', I think I'm a bit of a 'Method-Writer', in that I immerse myself pretty completely in what I'm writing. This sounds pretty damn pretentious, but I've not just come out writing a book set in Brazil, I've come out of thinking Brazilian. Maybe its because I grew up in a society with a very very keen sense of social nuance (there are thousands of subtle and not-so-subtle ways of telling what another person's religion is in Northern Ireland and in the not so distant past, that literally could be a matter of life and death) that I have or a feel for those unspoken social rules in other societies. I like to immerse readers in a complete experience, so they come out with a gasp, saying, 'whoa, that was intense.' Intense, yeah. I'm the Christian Bale of SF.
- What was the spark that generated the idea which drove you to write RIVER OF GODS in the first place?
It's well known that I was at a lunch with my agent John Richard Parker and my then-editor John Jarrold (truly a legend) and over the umpteenth bottle of wine, we were talking about Kipling, and, against contemporary convention, that Kim is a great novel of India; and I mentioned it would be great to try to write the science fictional equivalent of Kim. I could never be accused of excess of modesty, and other ideas were falling together at the same time as I said above. This was 1999, and it seemed a blindingly obvious thing to do --as far as I knew, no one else has tried anything on this scale, that was as much about India as set in India-- so I started to lay out the building blocks. Because it was such a huge concept it drove me back to John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, which impressed me when I read it as a teenager as one of the first SF futures that felt lived in. It felt wide and deep and complex and his multi-media technique seemed to be a clever and effective way of getting that wide-screen epic style I was looking for. As it happened, I used a slightly different method, of multiple POV characters, but Brunner was in the mix.
- Were there any perceived conventions of the scifi genre which you wanted to twist or break when you set out to write RIVER OF GODS? How about with BRASYL?
I think I do that to a certain extent in everything I write. It makes it fun to read and fun to write. It's a game, and there's a game at the heart of every SF story: what if? One of SF's great virtues is it's self-awareness and internal dialogue, it's not a very big field, everyone is two handshakes away from anyone else and it contemplates and talks about itself constantly. Every book, either knowingly or unknowingly, is part of that discourse, maybe I'm just a bit more knowing about it. There's a lot more SF around now, but in a sense it's harder now than ever; there's a very strong 'noveltarian' strain in the genre, which values new ideas and conceits and scientific speculations. Fair enough, science has expanded many times beyond what was known in the so-called 'Golden Age', and even then, major ideas like quantum theory weren't being used much. For me the big values have always been the sense of wonder and the sense of the strange. I'm somewhere I haven't been before. It's unfamiliar, a little uncomfortable but I can live here.
- Given the choice, would you take a New York Times bestseller, or a Hugo Award? Why, exactly?
New York Times bestseller. No disrespect at all to the Hugo's --I'm lucky enough to have been nominated twice now, and it is true, the honour's in being nominated. But to hit the New York times list is to haul in those readers outside fandom, the casual fantasy and SF readers, the ones who have Harry Potter or George R. R. Martin, or the Time Traveller's Wife. I'm with Gollancz editor Simon Spanton when he talks about the 'lapsed Catholic' audience on this, those who once read SF but dropped away, because it wasn't doing it for the, because they want more than juvenile lots and characters, because they want worlds and people and situations they can believe in, because media SF has so successfully colonised the low and fertile floodplain that it's all people think of when they hear the words Science Fiction. This was a brief blog-bubble between myself, Paul McAuley, Lou Anders, Charlie Stross and Paul Cornell as a counterblast to the 'back-to-basics' movement advocating a return to Golden Age style space adventure. My position on this is well known: of course there's always going to be a need for space-fic --what the general public think of and call 'sci-fi', and it may draw readers in at the bottom end, but it sure won't hold them. 'Mediaesque' sci-fi may, in that sense, 'save' science-fiction, but it sure will lobotomise it. And there are a lot of general readers out there who will buy and enjoy science-fiction if they can convince themselves it's not that geeky stuff...
- Honestly, do you believe that the speculative fiction genre will ever come to be recognized as veritable literature? Truth be told, in my opinion there has never been this many good books/series as we have right now, and yet there is still very little respect (not to say none) associated with the genre.
Everything is a genre these days, which of course means that everyone then fights turf wars. Literary Sharks and Jets. In SF there is, and always has been, a degree of cross-over, usually from literary-genre writers moving into sf-genre: Margaret 'Squids in Spaaaaace!' Atwood, Kashuo Ishiguro; it's obvious to any SF reader that David 'Cloud Atlas' Mitchell grew up an SF reader. Iain (m) Banks gets a lot of this 'why are you still writing that icky sci-fi stuff?' He's at the stage where he can just look at them, but I think the problem, deep down, is that it's seen as a childish genre. Of course, if an SF breakout books succeeds, then, in the great lines of Kingsley Amis (a great friend of SF in the 1960s, as Brian Aldiss will testify)
SF's no good
They bellow till we're deaf.
But his looks good!
Well, then it's not SF.
Whenever RoG came out in the UK, it came out as a mainstream title, it got stacked at the front of the shop as such as lot of people bought it as such. They enjoyed it as well. There are a lot of people out there who think the SF they see on TV, and the written SF which emulates it, is fun but for kids really. But give them something adult, give them something that doesn't have a spaceship full of windows on the cover, ands they'll buy it. Of course, publishing is all about niche marketing these days, and I know that the US Pyr edition, which is card-carrying hand-on-heart SF, is aimed at that specific market, and that's good, because I've been out of print in the US for ten years, and I need to build and rebuild a readership.
- What authors make you shake your head in admiration? If you could recommend just one book to the world, what would it be?
One book, divided into twenty volumes. I am evangelical about Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series. Captain and surgeon-spy in His Majesty's Napoleonic-era navy? What's not to love? Think of it a one six thousand page novel divided into twenty volumes. It builds completely it's own world, and, though the action is great, and the series contained the one piece of writing that made me go 'fuck me!' in amazement when I read it, it's the little scenes of shipboard life, the dinners, the music, the social order that stops everyone killing everyone else on this tiny wooden village out in the blue water, that are the real joy. And they're funny as well. Also, because I'm researching Turkey at the moment, I'm reading Orhan Pamuk's memoir of Istanbul --which maybe dwells a little heavily on the nostalgic and melancholic. William Dalrymple always astounds: the depth of his research and scholarship --and he does that thing as a travel writer that the vastly over-rated Bill Bryson doesn't: he talks to people.
- You have gained a lot of new fans with the release of RIVER OF GODS? What can you tell them about your earlier projects?
Much of the backlist is loooong out of print, but there are some I can look back on without a wince, with something approaching affection. King of Morning Queen of Day still surprises me when I flick through it--there are whole chunks I don;t remember writing. It's a pre-Buffy fantasy (remember that). Desolation Road still stands, and there's it's companion (not sequel) Ares Express, which may be seeing a US publication. The Chaga Saga: Evolution's Shore, Kirinya and the novella Tendeleo's Story I like still.
- How would you like to be remembered as an author? What is the legacy you'll be leaving behind?
Oh God, am I that old?
Many thanks again for accepting to do this interview with us. We wish you continued success with your career and best of luck with the upcoming release of BRASYL.
Spellbinder
This novel marks the long-awaited return of Melanie Rawn. After a hiatus which lasted close to a decade, I was very curious to read this one.
To my surprise, I discovered that the author has changed -- very much so. For the better, that is! She was already a "big name" in epic fantasy, thanks to two solid trilogies. But nine years can be a mighty long time between books. And yet, Spellbinder shows a more mature, more confident author. For my money, Spellbinder is Rawn's best work to date. It will be interesting to see how this will affect her next epic fantasy novel.
As a matter of course, there is romance involved. What would a Rawn book be without romance, anyway!?! Have no fear, though, for this is no chick lit. Had it been, I would never have been able to reach page 5.
Characterizations have always been the author's bread and butter, and Spellbinder is no different in that regard. Both Holly McClure and Evan Lachlan, the main characters, are particularly well-drawn. Honestly, I expected no less. The rest of the cast, especially those characters close to the two protagonists, are interesting, three-dimensional men and women.
Sign of the times, there's a lot of sex in this book. À la Laurell K. Hamilton and Jacqueline Carey, Spellbinder could well transcend the genre and appeal to a broader audience.
I don't really recall ever being amused or laughing out loud when reading Rawn's previous novels. But there is a lot of humor in this one, which I found refreshing. It helps create a balance with the "darker" episodes of the story. I found myself chuckling on more than one occasion.
Rituals play an important role in this book. I believed that Katherine Kurtz had accustomed me to such things, but Rawn takes it up a notch. You'll learn more than a thing or two about witches and magic. It shows that a lot of research went into this facet of the tale.
With Spellbinder, Melanie Rawn demonstrates that she's back, and she does it without missing a beat. Like most readers, I was disappointed when I discovered that her comeback wouldn't begin with The Captal's Tower. In the end, however, it's much better this way -- for the author and her fans. As I said, this is probably her best effort thus far.
Although I've enjoyed the book, I have a feeling that female readers will like it more than their male counterparts. Then again, isn't that true about all Melanie Rawn books!?!
For those who doubted that Rawn could return and write something that would satisfy readers' expectations, you have another think coming. Melanie Rawn is indeed back, and in top form.
The final verdict: 7.5/10
For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
To my surprise, I discovered that the author has changed -- very much so. For the better, that is! She was already a "big name" in epic fantasy, thanks to two solid trilogies. But nine years can be a mighty long time between books. And yet, Spellbinder shows a more mature, more confident author. For my money, Spellbinder is Rawn's best work to date. It will be interesting to see how this will affect her next epic fantasy novel.
As a matter of course, there is romance involved. What would a Rawn book be without romance, anyway!?! Have no fear, though, for this is no chick lit. Had it been, I would never have been able to reach page 5.
Characterizations have always been the author's bread and butter, and Spellbinder is no different in that regard. Both Holly McClure and Evan Lachlan, the main characters, are particularly well-drawn. Honestly, I expected no less. The rest of the cast, especially those characters close to the two protagonists, are interesting, three-dimensional men and women.
Sign of the times, there's a lot of sex in this book. À la Laurell K. Hamilton and Jacqueline Carey, Spellbinder could well transcend the genre and appeal to a broader audience.
I don't really recall ever being amused or laughing out loud when reading Rawn's previous novels. But there is a lot of humor in this one, which I found refreshing. It helps create a balance with the "darker" episodes of the story. I found myself chuckling on more than one occasion.
Rituals play an important role in this book. I believed that Katherine Kurtz had accustomed me to such things, but Rawn takes it up a notch. You'll learn more than a thing or two about witches and magic. It shows that a lot of research went into this facet of the tale.
With Spellbinder, Melanie Rawn demonstrates that she's back, and she does it without missing a beat. Like most readers, I was disappointed when I discovered that her comeback wouldn't begin with The Captal's Tower. In the end, however, it's much better this way -- for the author and her fans. As I said, this is probably her best effort thus far.
Although I've enjoyed the book, I have a feeling that female readers will like it more than their male counterparts. Then again, isn't that true about all Melanie Rawn books!?!
For those who doubted that Rawn could return and write something that would satisfy readers' expectations, you have another think coming. Melanie Rawn is indeed back, and in top form.
The final verdict: 7.5/10
For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
This week's New York Times Bestsellers (October 31st)
In hardcover:
Laurell K. Hamilton's Strange Candy is down six positions, ending its third week on the charts at number 17. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Drew Karpyshyn's Star Wars: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction is down three spots, finishing its fourth week on the bestseller list at number 21. For more info about this one: Canada, USA, Europe.
Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is down three spots, ending its second week on the prestigious list at number 23. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things continues to slip, down three positions, to end its third week on the NYT list at number 24. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories debuts at number 34. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
In paperback:
Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is up three spots, finishing its third week on the NYT list at number 17. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys returns to the bestseller list at number 35. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Laurell K. Hamilton's Strange Candy is down six positions, ending its third week on the charts at number 17. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Drew Karpyshyn's Star Wars: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction is down three spots, finishing its fourth week on the bestseller list at number 21. For more info about this one: Canada, USA, Europe.
Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is down three spots, ending its second week on the prestigious list at number 23. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things continues to slip, down three positions, to end its third week on the NYT list at number 24. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories debuts at number 34. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
In paperback:
Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is up three spots, finishing its third week on the NYT list at number 17. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys returns to the bestseller list at number 35. For more info about this book: Canada, USA, Europe.
