Books

It's been eight long years since Connie Willis has published a new book. This is a big deal. If you haven't noticed, she's become one of the most important authors in the science fiction field today. She's quietly amassed more Hugo and Nebula awards than any other science fiction writer in history.

Her new book is called Blackout and it returns to familiar territory. Like her Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing About the Dog, it deals with time-travelling historians. This time, they are sent back to London during the Blitz, a theme that she visited in her fantastic novellette, Fire Watch.

The only thing you should know before reading the book is that it is actually part one of a two-part story. The story concludes in her next book, All Clear.

Considering her stature, some have dubbed her the heir to Robert Heinlein's throne as the genre's top dog. There was a time that people pointed to Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke as the genre's Big Three. There have been no one like that since, but Willis might be this generation's addition.

Perhaps realizing a need to preserve her legacy, she has donated some of her papers to the University of Northern Colorado to help document her writing process.

In honour of St. Valentine's Day, I offer up these links with a romantic theme. Don't worry, they still contain enough science fiction content to stay on topic.

The first is Techland's guide to the top 5 science fiction date movies. These are films that will satisfy fannish viewers, but still have enough of a romance quotient that your average female non-fan will enjoy them. Who knows, it might be a way to convert them over to the fan side of things.

Next up is a list of science fiction's most epic love stories. These are couples taken from both books and movies.There's no mention of my favourite couple, Fox Mulder and Dan Scully from the X-Files, but I suppose their relationship was platonic for too long and not epic enough to qualify.

For romantic science fiction books, this list is a good primer of some of the best. Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars makes the list and it's a good one. I think John Carter and Deja Thoris' courtship was the model for many a subsequent science fiction and fantasy story.

While most of the books listed above feature romances, they aren't romantic enough for fans of science fiction romances, a sub-genre that has a niche following. Those same fans would like to see the sub-genre be more mainstream and one offers these steps on how that could happen.

William Tenn wasn't the most prolific science fiction writer, but the quality of his output was high and he was one of the last of the major science fiction authors from the Golden Age until his death this weekend.

His real name was Philip Klass and his death has prompted several online tributes to the man. He died just short of his 90th birthday.

The Internet Science Fiction database maintains a list of the oldest-living science fiction writers. There are lots of names on the list, but many of them are of minor writers. The biggest names on the list that were of Tenn's generation are men like Jack Vance, Frederik Pohl, E.C. Tubb and Ray Bradbury.

One name no longer on the list is the dearly departed Hal Clement, one of the nicest fellows to ever have written a science fiction story. I bring up his name because when I took a recent quiz on "which science fiction writer are you?", I was Clement.

I am gobsmacked at the size of the recommended reading list for science fiction and fantasy books for 2009 as presented by Locus Online. It includes 52 novels, an even larger number of anthologies, related non-fiction titles, YA books, novellas, novellettes and short stories. If I were to actually read everything on the list, I think it would take me more than 12 months and by then their 2010 list would be out. I do own a few of the books on the list already, so maybe I'll start with those and see how it goes.

As for other books to add to your potential reading list, here are some reviews that offer possibilities. The first is for Robert Sawyer's new book, Wake. My wife just read it and thought highly of it.

Kim Stanley Robinson has a new book out called Galileo's Dream which is part sci-fi and part historical fiction which sounds something like what Neal Stephenson was trying to accomplish with his Baroque Cycle.

I am not familiar with Charlie Huston, but he recently wrote a book called Sleepless which, judging from this interview, sounds like an interesting story.

Another title that sounds like one worth seeking out is Adam Roberts's Yellow Blue Tibia, a book that was pegged as being a possible Booker Prize winner, but which was ultimately snubbed.

With the announcement last week of Apple's new iPad, it looks like Amazon's ebook reader, the Kindle, will have some serious competition. While the iPad isn't more of a multi-purpose device than the Kindle, many readers are intrigued by the possibilities of the new Apple tablet, especially comic book fans.

If that wasn't enough bad news, Amazon got into a public fight with the book publisher Macmillan over setting the price of electronic books. Macmillan, which operates the science fiction imprint Tor, wants to control pricing, but Amazon wouldn't let them, so they delisted all of their books from their site over the weekend.

It wasn't long before Amazon caved in and agreed to let the publisher sell the books at prices higher than the $9.99 set by the online retailer. SF author John Scalzi thinks the move has tarnished the company's reputation with its users as well as authors.

Amazon has been working hard to get people to buy their electronic books and one strategy they have is to give away free books for people to download to their Kindles although they are primarily public domain classics.

Meanwhile, the company which is most likely to prevail in all of these electronic book skirmishes is Google. They have been quielty digitizing books for years and are slowly building a massive online library of electronic titles and are poised to begin selling them. One author who is pissed off at Google's strategy is Ursula LeGuin. She's been mobilizing other authors against the agreement to let Google sell their books because she sees it as surrendering of copyright to a huge corporation.

In other electronic book developments, futurist Ray Kurzweil is entering into the fray with a new reader platform called Blio. It's not a device, but is software that will run on computers and mobile devices.

While all of this posturing for market share continues, the Chinese are working on their electronic book readers that will ultimately force reader prices downwards and probably outsell all of their American competitors by a wide margin.

Do you have aspirations of being a prolific writer of science fiction short stories? Here are 12 tips to get you on your way which are actually very useful.

One of their suggestions was to write in a shared universe. You may not be able to publish your work professionally, but being able to write a story set in an established world with known characters saves you some work and will help you get started. Who knows? If you get good enough at it, maybe you can do it for money. If you want to know what it's like to be a "hack" writing in someone else's universe, read it from someone's who been there.

Another idea is to join an online writing community. The feedback from other writers can be invaluable for improving your work. Once such community is Necrotania, although there are plenty of others.

While you are writing, remember to avoid using clichés. This writer offers some concepts that she considers to not belong in a good science fiction story.

So what do you do with your story once it's done? You can always self-publish it. The technology of today certainly makes it easy. Some mainstream publishers are teaming up with self-publishing companies to build electronic imprints to publish new authors. They've taken some heat for it from writers' organizations, but the CEO of one-such company defends the practice.

I'm glad to see that Joe Haldeman is being honoured by the SFWA with a Grand Master Award this year.  He's written some great books over the years and seems to be a genuinely nice guy. He deserves it. I'm glad to have met and chatted with him a bit at Worldcon last summer.

Another Worldcon attendee who is a nice guy and is also a Grand Master is the venerable Robert Silverberg. I've always thought that he was too often overshadowed by other big names in the genre and, despite the SFWA award, never truly got the recognition he deserved from fans. He recently spoke about his time writing for the pulps in this fascinating interview.

SF Signal recently posted a batch of video interviews with previous Grand Master winners. They are fascinating artifacts from the past.

One writer who surely deserves the Grand Master title, but never received it is none other than Philip K. Dick. The L.A. Times recently wrote about his last decade when he lived in Orange County, California. During that time he wrote some of his best books, including VALIS and A Scanner Darkly.

Interest in Dick's works seems to grow with each passing year. One of his short stories will soon be published as a graphic novel by Marvel.

I guess they don't hand out the award posthumously.

Never mind vices like gambling and pornography, the Bible-thumpers have set their sights on another target - science fiction.

"Science fiction takes the reader into a strange world without God. Oh, there might be 'a god,' a 'force,' but it is definitely not the God of the Bible, and the prominent names in this field are atheists," notes an anti-sci-fi screed which has drawn some attention from people outside its target audience, such as noted atheist Richard Dawkins.

I'm curious to hear the reaction from the folks at Christian SciFi, Where the Map Ends or other Christian fans, who are probably quite numerous and I'm willing to wager that more than a few of them have been lining up to see Avatar, a "science fiction" movie which is set to be the biggest-grossing movie of all time.

The first week of the year hasn't ended yet so it's still safe to post some links to those year-end lists that people like to write in advance so they can go on vacation at the end of the year. This time the links are about the best books.

Barnes & Noble offers up some suggestions as to what were the best books of 2009. I can't comment on any of them because I have read not a single book on the list, so I am obviously out of touch or too broke to buy hardcover editions of new book releases. Amazon has a similar list which has a bit of overlap, but also offers some other titles to consider, but it also lists fantasy books and not just SF.

What about the best science fiction books of the past decade? Here is one person's list, but I've bot to question the choices. World War Z, in my mind , was mediocre and Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End was not his best work. I liked this list better. It included Neil Gaiman's American Gods, a book that is one my favourites, although I guess you'd have to classify it as a fantasy novel and not a science fiction book.

Maybe it's better to just forget about the best books of the year or decade and look for the best books and not worry about what year they were published. For example, here's a list that presents the best time travel books of all time, although I'd put Connie Willis' Doomsday Book on my version of that list.

What are your favourite books of the last year or decade that you think should be on a top 10 list?

It looks like I'm not the only person who is wearied by the constant declarations that science fiction is dead. I wrote a few months back about a spate of essays stating that the genre was on the way out.

Author Neal Asher has found a few more such essays and has had enough. He is tired of the debate which he suspects has been popping up regularly since the day Sputnik launched.

One of the doom-sayers is fantasy author Marc Charan Newton who believes that the fact that fantasy sales are up and science fiction sales are down is proof that the genre is on its last legs. As Asher points out, there is no evidence that the two trends are linked. It's not a zero-sum game where people hold up two books, one fantasy and the other SF, and decide they will buy one over the other.

Never mind Newton's assertion, I'd like to see him back up his arguments with some actual statistics.