SFFreader

This blog is on vacation until July 5th or thereabouts. It’s very excited about the ocean water and sandy beaches that it expects to see during its time off. The key is under the mat - happy reading!

IN MY MAILBOX
The latest issue of Analog arrived this week (September 2007). Fiction contents:

Novellas
“Some Distant Shore” by Dave Creek
“Vertex” by C. Sanford Lowe and G. David Nordley

Novelettes
“Stranger Things” by E. Mark Mitchell
“Ginger Ear and Elephant Hair” by Uncle River

Short Stories
“A Plutoid By Any Other Name” by Richard A. Lovett
“Palimpsest” by Howard V. Hendrix

IN MY BROWSER

IN MY PODCATCHER

I had this excellent plan. Since I’m going on vacation for a couple of weeks, I thought I’d read ahead in The List^TM and post commentary on all these stories ahead of time. Because of WordPress’s goodness, I would pre-date the posts and they’d automatically publish on the dates I picked. No one would even know I was gone.

Needless to say, getting ready for the vacation is taking time. Getting things lined out at work and home for a two week absence has made it difficult to get ahead here. One of the things I wanted to do with SFFreader 2.0 is to take a little more time with each story. Instead of rushing through, I’ve decided to wait until after vacation. The next two stories are wonderful: “What I Didn’t See” by Karen Joy Fowler and “Bloodchild” by Octavia E. Butler. It’d be a shame to rush through those.

So, the next post from The List^TM will be on Monday, July 9. I’ll post a “What’s New” this Friday, skip Friday June 29, then catch up on July 6.

And that is the plan in all its bloggy glory. Thanks for reading!

PS - I hope the blog doesn’t get washed away in a tidal wave of spam. I’ve been dealing with a lot of that lately. Suggestions would be helpful!

In the universe depicted in this 1993 Hugo winning novelette by Janet Kagan, there are lots of alien races. Humans were one day alone, and the next were members of a large galactic community. They established embassies as quick as they could, and trade, both economic and cultural, started.

The story starts with a conversation between a human and an alien about what Christmas is. For this human, the nutcracker is part of her tradition, and that is explained to the alien. Some time after, another human celebrates Martin Luther King day, and again the holiday is explained to the aliens. The combination of the ideas of these two holidays results in a change in behavior of the aliens, which in turn leads to a revolt by those aliens against their own social system.

Rarely in science fiction do we see an alien race as diverse as the human race, and rarely do we see aliens that are really alien. Kagan’s aliens are, though not humanoid, very human-like, and appear to me as impressionable children. Kagan is exploring the idea of the Prime Directive, as it’s called in Star Trek, which is the idea that cultures should be shielded from interference by more advanced cultures, because meddling, even in good faith, could have unintended consequences.

I found this one in a book called Hugo and Nebula Winners from Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, published in 1995, edited by Sheila Williams.

Prepaid debit card give the perfect gift for any occasion. Janet Kagan’s website: LINK

Janet Kagan on ISFDB: LINK

The List? What List?: LINK

The winners of the Locus Awards were announced on Saturday. The short fiction winners were:

Best Novella: “Missile Gap”, Charles Stross (One Million A.D.)
Best Novelette: “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, Cory Doctorow (Baen’s Universe 8/06)
Best Short Story: “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things)
Best Magazine: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Best Anthology: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin’s)
Best Collection: Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman (Morrow; Headline Review)
Best Editor: Ellen Datlow

Congratulations to all! Click HERE to see all the award winners.

John Joseph Adams, the Assistant Editor over at F&SF, points to “an experiment in web publishing” by the magazine. Online now is “The Thief With Two Deaths” by Chris Willrich!

IN MY BROWSER
At Strange Horizons: “Gift of Flight” by Nghi Vo.
Best SF Presents debuts with “The Last Reef” by Gareth L. Powell.

IN MY PODCATCHER
Escape Pod - “Frankie the Spook” by Mike Resnick!
StoryPod 2.0 - next up in James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod is “Saint Theresa and the Aliens”.

“Allamagoosa” is a short story by Eric Frank Russell that holds the distinction of winning the first Hugo ever awarded for Short Story (1955). The story is an enjoyable satire of military bureaucracy. The captain and crew of the spaceship Bustler have to account for every single item they had been provided when they left on their mission. They go through all their stuff, checking things off a list as they go. This goes well until they find an item on the list called an “offog”. What’s an offog? Well, they don’t know either, so they build one in time for an inspection.

I won’t reveal what an offog is. Suffice to say the story is funny, and a solid piece in the history of science fiction humor, which places Eric Frank Russell in company with authors like Robert Sheckley and Douglas Adams.

I read this in The Hugo Winners Volume I and Volume II, edited by Isaac Asimov.

Read the whole story over at SciFiction (while it lasts): LINK

Eric Frank Russell on ISFDB: LINK

He’s a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame: LINK

What’s this List I keep babbling about: LINK

While doing a little research on the next story in the list, “Allamagoosa” by Eric Frank Russell, I found that SciFiction will be taken down on or after June 15. I knew that they were no longer publishing new content, but now it looks like the archives are coming down:

As of Friday, June 15, 2007, SCI FICTION will no longer be available on SCIFI.COM. SCIFI.COM would like to thank all those who contributed
and those who read the short stories over the past few years.

“Allamagoosa” is on that site, HERE. Congrats and thanks to Ellen Datlow for such an excellent magazine.

I’m a big Roger Zelazny fan, but I hadn’t read “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai” before now. No one writes quite like him, but if I had to compare him to a current author, I’d pick Neil Gaiman, since gods and myth find major roles in writings by both of them. Now that I’ve read this story, I see that Zelazny can also be compared to writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. “24 Views” is not gritty like Neuromancer, which was published the year before this story (1984), but it does deal with some of the same digital territory.

In the story, a man programs and breaks codes while connected into a computer through a headset. When his wife (Mari) notices that he is spending much more time than usual in the connection, she asks him about it. He says he is meditating. His philosophical musings become disturbing, and soon she finds him in a coma, headset connected. After the funeral, he contacts her - turns out he’s not dead at all, but has followed the flow right into the machine.

All of this is back story. When the story opens, Mari is running from her husband, who has become insistent that he join her. The novella contains 24 chapters, the setting of each one corresponding to a woodblock print that is part of Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji, a work by Japanese artist Hokusai Katsushika (1760-1849). As Mari floats through the virtual world in an attempt to keep ahead of her husband, she puts herself in settings inspired by these prints.

Like Vinge’s “The Cookie Monster”, the story posits that a person’s consciousness can be uploaded into a computer. However, Zelazny’s character is not whole after the move. Mari, after taking a small taste of what it’s like to be uploaded, is horrified by the experience. Her husband, though, is enthralled by it. At one point, he tries to convince her to follow him, and she tries to explain why she doesn’t want any part of it. The conscience vanishes, she argues. All actions lose their meaning. Action and consequence are all just illusion, he says. Mari argues to keep those parts of herself that she deems the most important. Her husband argues that it’s all illusion anyway; how could it not be, when these things no longer exist where he is? But, in this story, he’s no longer himself - and no longer human - after the upload, perhaps because he’s lost the things Mari holds dear.

Of Zelazny’s other works, I found reading this novella to be most similar to Lord of Light, a novel which also won a Hugo Award. Though the subject matter is different, both stories unfold in the same way. The reader can’t tell exactly what’s happening until the story is well underway. Zelazny’s one of the best, though. Trust him, follow where he leads, and you won’t be disappointed.

I found this story in The New Hugo Winners, Volume II, presented by Isaac Asimov.

A Roger Zelazny website: LINK

A collection of all 24 Hokusai prints mentioned in the story: LINK

What’s “The List”? LINK