The Year's Best SF 18, edited by David G. Hartwell, was a distinct pleasure to read. The pleasure began with the very first story, "Old Paint." Megan Lindholm tells the story of a family that inherits grandpa's old car, a woody-style station wagon, whose technology is way behind the times. Mom even makes her teenager learn to drive it, ( Read more... )

     It seems they're having Martian trouble in Lincoln, Nebraska. At least that's the impression one takes from Laura Madeline Wiseman's chapbook Stranger Still, from Finishing Line Press.
     Pittsburghers will be glad to know that there is, of course, a reference to Mars, PA. There are all sorts of references, because the magic of this ( Read more... )

   As I was wrapping up the paperwork on the thesis novels for the term, I finally plucked from the shelves Libyrinth, written by one of my colleagues at Seton Hill's WPF program, under the name Pearl North. It's a YA Science Fiction novel cleverly set in a Fantasy-like post-apocalyptic setting.
   Let me discuss this cleverness. I read a lot of ( Read more... )

        My 15th completed book of the year is China Miéville's Embassytown. I should probably hate Mr. Miéville, for being so wildly inventive, and for pulling off things that I've long wished to do. In fact, I will hate him for it, once I get over enjoying the ride.

This is a work of speculative fiction, mostly resembling science fiction ( Read more... )

        My dozenth completed title for the year is The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.. I buy the Dozois collections every year, but during the current century I've been very irregular about getting around to reading them cover-to-cover. I look, now, over at the teetering pile of books on the corner ( Read more... )

         All the time I was reading Surface Detail, I was realizing that I'd only have one more new Iain M. Banks novel to read after this. That is just sad.

On the other hand, I've read very few of his literary novels, written as Iain Banks, sans M, so all is not lost.

This science fiction novel is set in the Culture, a universe ( Read more... )

        I discovered this 1929 item of boys' science fiction, By Air Express to Venus, in an antique shop. It declares the author to be Roy Rockwood, but that was a syndicate pseudonym, owned by the same folks who invented the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift.

The title and a small image of a dirigible drew my eye to the spine of the ( Read more... )

        Zoo City, by South African writer Lauren Beukes, reads like a cross between William Gibson (who blurbed the book) and Ian MacDonald. Since both of them are on my read-everything-they-do list, Beukes may have to be added to it, as well.

I'm planning to put this on my World Literature reading list, should I teach it again, so I won't ( Read more... )

         First, the bad news: grimace count = 7
         Then the worse news, and the reason I don't want to be writing this review: Iain Banks is dead, and there will be no more Culture novels after The Hydrogen Sonata.
         As usual, I'm a few years behind on Iain M. Banks's Culture series, so I just got around to Matter, the ( Read more... )

         I finished Year's Best SF 17, David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer, eds., last week, but the end-of-term frenzy kept me from commenting earlier. As always with these collections, it's a fine anthology of a variety of types of science fiction short story. Not a clunker in the bunch, this time.          There are four stories (Elizabeth Bear' ( Read more... )