Books

Girls and non-white guys write great science fiction books too*. On the plus side, he mostly likes Dave Marusek’s book. (I was feeling charitable.)

*I’m not saying that’s not a list of great books, but not one woman? No Chip Delany?

Updated: Matt Cheney breaks down what’s wrong with the column, something I was far too lazy to even attempt.

Lauren McLaughlin, more charitably, thinks the column raises some valid points for SF writers to consider.

Carrie thinks this may be the NYTBR’s "first hipster book column."

Some things must go! Small Beer Press needs warehouse space and so they are selling batches of CRAZY GOOD books CRAZY CHEAP.

Go look. Have your credit card handy.

In an otherwise fine piece about Octavia Butler in the WaPo, they spell Delany wrong (more than once):

Black science fiction trailblazer Samuel Delaney, 63, remembers teaching Butler as a 23-year-old student at the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop.

Forcing me to insult either the writer of the piece or a lazy, lazy copy editor: You don’t even know how to spell Delany, bitch.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Octavia Butler died yesterday. The reports available so far seem to indicate a stroke and a fall. An unexpected tragedy.

I’ve been avoiding the computron for the last two days (on dial-up no less) and found this out from Christopher this afternoon. I still can’t quite believe it.

UPDATED: Scott’s remembrance of Butler. And Jenny’s. Oh, and Moorer sums it all up, better than I could.
REUPDATED: A beautiful post by Ed, who is doing a great job catching other people’s posts.

Now I’m as happy as anyone to see Kevin Brockmeier getting his props, but why, why, why did Meghan O’Rourke feel the need to trot out her "authority" on science fiction? See for yourself:

Though The Brief History of the Dead may resemble science fiction, Brockmeier’s interests are very different from those that animate most science-fiction writers. Science fiction often tends toward allegorical tidiness (despite the alien quality of the landscape) or toward a fetishization of the alien. But like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, this novel turns to sci-fi futurism to capture something about how foreign our near future might look to us.

Is it just me or does the verb animate in relation to science fiction writers imply that they are something less (or perhaps more?) than human? Grrr. The rest of it is fine as long as she realizes that these are BOTH SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS. (Because, as we all know, literary and SF aren’t mutually exclusive, nor are they solely defined by the section a book is shelved in.) She’d have been on solid(er) ground had she left out that whole resemble business. I say again: grrrr.

Then again, this is the same dolt who hated The Jane Austen Book Club.

UPDATED: Speaking of controversy and SF, this is hilarious. (Via Maud.)

(Better, thank you; yesterday was just a hell day.)

I finally got around to reading the Locus interview with Geoff Ryman (addt’l excerpts at the link). Here’s a couple of sections I thought worth pulling out:

The great thing about science fiction is that you can be valued for a whole range of different things, from the literary to the utterly commercial. I just wonder how long we’ll be able to keep it up. I wouldn’t want to be an idiosyncratic young fiction writer now. If you’re good and idiosyncratic, you might have trouble getting published, since the independent houses are getting swallowed up by the conglomerates and it feels like it’s getting much more monolithic, like there are only about seven games you can play. In mainstream they call it "false literature": books that sound like they’re going to be literary, but anything that’s challenging or difficult to read or complicated is just ironed out so it slips down like honey and it’s very relaxing.

It seems to me that’s a bit on the dire side, since some of the best and brightest of the young, idiosyncratic crowd are being published by editors at big houses like Juliet Ulman and Jim Minz (to name a couple), but yeah, I’d like to see MORE of that, obviously. And there’s truth there. Plus, I’d never encountered the false literature thing before, and I like that (not meaning that I like reading it, but that it’s a useful term).

And on one of the more controversial elements of Air (which I’m now forcing Christopher to read):

The first draft of Air was finished in 1996. I stopped working on it to do 253, and then the publishers said they wanted something more like that, so I did Lust. By the time that came out, everyone was expecting a Mundane novel. I didn’t know about the Mundanes when I started writing Air, and the heroine Mae is unapologetically pre-Mundane. Everybody’s thrown by the stomach pregnancy, because it can’t happen, but it links up with earlier events in the book. Mae actually finds a way to do magic, and that’s the reason the stomach pregnancy works. I’m very pleased to have published a ‘difficult literary’ science fiction novel. And I never promised to write only mundane fiction. One of the reasons I’m not in there punching and kicking is that I still intend to write fantasy.

There’s stuff about King’s Last Song too. (And then I jump up and down like an excited kid.)

So I am way behind the others at actually saying anything about most of the paltry six books I’ve read so far this year, but consider this my effort to catch up. I have been keeping the little star-based sidebar going down there at the end of the righthand column. And, because I have no time, I’m just thumbnailing these. (Or linking them, but the little sidebar will take you straight to the correct Amazon page and if you click and buy, I get a kickback. Just saying. Mama needs Wiscon plane tix.)

1. The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World by Thomas M. Disch – I read this after I did an interview with Kevin Brockmeier and he brought it up. Science fiction rules the world and all that. I semi-hearted it; finding some things a bit outmoded already, but still, interesting concepts and worth a read if you’re interested in this kind of thing. (I found the chapter on feminism in SF thinner than I wanted, but also think that’s just me and my own druthers and that the way it’s handled works fine in the context of the rest of the book.)

2. Manstealing for Fat Girls by Michelle Embree – A wonderful, gritty book about the horrific yet hopeful lives of poor teenagers in 1980s St. Louis. The period is perfectly evoked as is the real-deal, brutality of high school and just how ugly it can get. But, like I said, it’s a hopeful book too. The narrator, Angie, has a thoroughly charming, believable voice that owns the book. The promotional materials describe it as John Waters meets John Hughes and that’s apt, with perhaps some Harmony Korine thrown in. I stayed up late, late, late reading this one even though I was Martian Death Cold felled (and have Jenny D to thank for it — the book, not the cold).

3. Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos – Loved it. See this.

4. Other Electricities by Ander Monson – (A reread, but it counts!) Liked it a great deal, even more the second time around. See this.

5. The Tourmaline by Paul Park – I’ll have more to say on this one at some point in the future. But: It didn’t disappoint. It does, however, suffer more than the The Princess of Roumania from the split, mostly at the beginning. It was hard for me to get back into the world and I kept just forcing myself to keep going and then lo and behold the second section of the novel came and it was suddenly an effortless read. Because the beginning of The Tourmaline is an ending. In fact, if just the first hundred pages of this one had been left at the end of Princess, it would have been better for both books. (And actually, this is my own weird tic, but I was more likely to pick these up as two not-huge novels instead of one big fat chihuahua killer. Although I disagree with the split on philosophical grounds, on purely selfish ones I accept it with grace.) Anyway, like I said, more to come, but yes, yay, next part, please.

6. The Rainbow Opera by Elizabeth Knox – An amazing first young adult novel by the amazing Elizabeth Knox (whose other novels, for adults, are some of my favorites). Justine first tipped me off to this one; you should read her more detailed post here. Anyway, if you’re a fan of big, complex dreamlands and maps and flawed, engaging characters and beautiful imagery and sand golems and big, sweeping set-ups and political intrigue… Getting my drift? This book unfolds in deceptively simple fashion, but underneath is a rich, complex story that, thankfully, continues in a coming-relatively-soon second installment (at least to countries from where it can be procured online). One of my favorite things was the best friendship at the heart of the story — it’s honestly drawn, with none of the cartoonish competition that so often characterizes the friendships of girls in fiction. And the ending is completely satisfying if cliff-hangery, but my copy (unlike Justine’s) did indicate it was part one of a "duet." I wish I wasn’t slammed so I could devote an entire post to this one.

I’m almost done with Justin Tussing’s book and a reread of Mothers and Other Monsters, but not quite, so I’ll let myself off those particular hooks for now. I’ve also started reading stories for the Fountain Award, which is tres fun so far, but counts not at all on the 75.

Happy Valentine’s Day — I can’t think of anything better to give you than a recommendation for Cecil Castellucci’s new book The Queen of Cool. Run out and buy it immediately; you can, because today’s the official release day. (And hey, look at that, Amazon is pairing it with her WONDERFUL, WUNDERKIND first novel Boy Proof — get it too, if you don’t have it.)

Queen is the story of Libby Brin, a popular girl who’s dying of boredom on the inside. Her friends are the thin kind of clever (if), dedicated to endless, half-hearted attempts at entertaining themselves. Libby decides one day to join an internship program at the L.A. Zoo, even though her friends don’t much like the idea. She’s grouped with the memorable Tina aka "Tiny," a little person with an outsize personality, and Sheldon, the most appealing, nerdiest science nerd in recent memory. Despite Libby’s natural efforts to sabotage the whole thing, ultimately she begins to see that her new uncool life is far better than her old one.

Any such description of this book is a pale version of the real thing. Cecil Castellucci writes like no one but herself. Her characters live inside this amazing voice she has and they breathe and act a million times bigger than should be possible in so few pages. (The perfect amount of pages.) It’s a magic trick to cram such a big book with such big emotions into such a slender volume. Not a word is wasted. So, read her already, okay? Love you too.

(p.s. If I had a million dollars, I would have sent you all copies of this today.)

See also:
Interview at Cynsations
Colleen’s take
Interview at the Montreal Mirror

I’m the extremely intimidated juror out on this year’s stellar Fountain Award jury: Jeff Ford, Carol Emshwiller, Mary Anne Mohanraj and James Patrick Kelly. Anyway, editors of magazines and anthologies have three more days to submit their nominations. All the info you need is included behind the cut:

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Short Fiction Service AnnouncementRead More »

Maureen McHugh has an excellent post about a local event featuring Dan Chaon and a psychoanalyst discussing his novel, You Remind Me Of Me (which I found beautiful but almost too sad, sad, sad). Sez she:

This seemed a strange thing to me. The characters in a book are manifestly not real. Someone (in this case, Dan Chaon) made them up. I really like psychological realism, but I think it’s an illusion, just like so much else in fiction. The suggestion of psychological complexity is a characteristic of mimetic fiction–meaning that if you want your story to feel real, you should also make the characters feel like they have a complicated psychological make-up. But characters that are as arbitrary as real people feel thin on the page, just as dialogue that is realistic feels strung out and boring. It’s all fake.

But wait! There’s more. Go read it.