Month: June 2011

The Naked Truth

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews

The Naked Truth is the second book in Lilly Cain’s Confederacy Treaty series from Carina Press. The opening book in this series is Alien Revealed.

Captain Susan Branscombe of the Starforce Marines is cussing like a Marine in the opening of this book, and no wonder, she’s been tortured and she hopes she doesn’t survive, even though her captors’ ship is now being invaded by her very own Marines. But survive she does, only to be accused of selling out to her captors and committing treason.

But Earth has recently been contacted by an alien race, the Inarrii (read the first book in the series, Alien Revealed, for that story) and a treaty is being negotiated. The terrorists who tortured Branscombe were against alien contact. The Inarrii demand a full investigation under their control. And that’s where the story really begins.

The Inarrii communicate through mental telepathy in a way that involves intimate touch. But once the mental bonds are established, it is not possible for someone to lie through those bonds, either mentally or emotionally.

In order to preserve the treaty negotiations, the Inarrii need to know everything Captain Branscombe learned during her imprisonment. Not just whether she is a traitor, but also whether their enemies, the Raider alien races that they wish to thwart, may be involved with the terrorists. In order to be certain, the Inarrii Examiner, Asler Kiis, must examine the memories and the emotions of Captain Branscombe. What he discovers makes him yearn to heal her, body and soul.

Although I enjoyed the story, I kept wanting to know a little more about what made these two characters fall for each other. I liked them both, I just wasn’t quite sure why they’d been waiting for each other.

The Confederacy Treaty series is science fiction romance, and, in spite of the opening scenes of this entry, lighter on the plot, heavier on the romance side of that particular equation.  If you’re interested in other science fiction romance titles, take a look at Romance with a touch of Rocket Fuel.

Romance with a touch of rocket fuel

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | books

Sometimes I like my romances with just that little bit of rocket fuel to flavor the plot. I’m referring to science fiction romance, or SFR. After all, if love makes the world go round, there’s nothing to say it can’t power a starship, too!

One of the best writers in the genre right now is Linnea Sinclair. She’s the first author I read who made me recognize that this was really a separate category, and not just an offshoot of romance or space opera. Sinclair’s Dock Five Universe series can be read as pure space opera, if you want. Sixth-Fleet Captain Chasidah Bergren is court-martialed for a crime she didn’t commit. After being railroaded through Fleet justice, she is committed to a prison planet from which there is no escape. Except…after Chaz kills a guard in self-defense, a man she thought dead steps out of the shadows to take her out of prison, and into the rebellion against the Empire. Gabriel’s Ghost is the introduction to Dock Five, followed by Games of Command, Shades of Dark, Hope’s Folly and Rebels and Lovers. The Dock Five universe is a complex one, a world of political machinations, power, money, and evil on a galaxy wide scale. At the same time, love, honor and courage still motivate and compel humans to rise above themselves, to save their homes and their loved ones. Love still conquers all, even if it occasionally needs some help from engineering.

One of the longest running and most honored science fiction series had its origins as a science fiction romance. In 1986, Lois McMaster Bujold published the novel Shards of Honor. This is the first book in her multi-multi award winning Vorkosigan series, and it is absolutely science fiction romance. Cordelia Naismith, captain of a Beta Colony survey ship, meets Captain Lord Aral Vorkosigan when they are marooned together after a raid on a newly discovered planet. When they are “rescued” his crew mutinies and she assists him in defeating the mutineers. He proposes marriage. She is captured by Aral’s enemies, tortured, and then rescued again. Eventually, she is returned to her home, Beta Colony. There’s this one little problem. Aral Vorkosigan is known as the “Butcher of Komarr”, and her people believe that he tortured her, not his enemies. They think she’s been brainwashed. She finally runs away to his home planet Barrayar, to elope with Vorkosigan. If that’s not science fiction romance, then what is?

The Vorkosigan series is ongoing. The most recent book, Cryoburn, was nominated for the Hugo Award in 2011.

Last year, the Galaxy Express posted a list of the 100 best science fiction romances. I’ve read over a third of the list and I’m working my way through the rest. Linnea Sinclair and Lois McMaster Bujold are definitely there. But some are a surprise. I would never have thought of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War as SFR. I loved the book and I would highly recommend it to anyone who reads SF. But it’s more like one of Robert A. Heinlein’s juveniles written for adults and updated 50 years. On the other hand, there is a love story involved, but it is understated and very low-key, especially in the first book. Read it and see.

Howsomever, if you really want to get hooked on something, find your way into the Liaden Universe by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. It’s an addiction.  Either start with Local Custom or Agent of Change.  Liaden is set in a future some unspecified number of centuries, or more likely millennia from now, after a space diaspora from some original planet, that may or may not be Terra, and a Terra which may or may not be Earth. Liaden is a universe of mercantile empires more than space armadas, but wars can be fought with weapons other than guns. So, Liaden is mercantile space opera. It is also about family, and family obligations, and duty and honor. And yes, each book does have a central love story. But mostly, they’re just plain good. The end of Crystal Dragon, I knew what was coming, and it still gave me the sniffles. What happened at the end was necessary, but it hurt.

But it was a good kind of hurt. The kind that makes you want to dive back in and read some more.

 

Good cops, strange beats

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Uncategorized

In an urban fantasy, when the detective needs to round up the “usual suspects”, those suspects can be pretty unusual. That’s actually part of the fun, seeing how close the author can hew to the traditional line of the mystery or police procedural formula and still bite the reader with that touch of the weird.

In any urban fantasy, there is a touch of alternate reality going on. History as we know it has gone down a different leg of the trousers of time (to borrow a phrase from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld) and magic works in the here and now. In urban fantasy, it’s our world, our history, our pretty much everything, except there’s this one big change–magic and magical creatures co-habit with science.  How that happened changes from one author to the next.

A lot of authors work from the theory that magic has always existed but that magic practitioners have tried to hide themselves. Remember the Salem Witch Trials? If magic does exist, that era of real history would be enough to keep any real witch (or any other unusual being, for that matter) from revealing themselves for several generations.

In Laura Anne Gilman‘s alternate New York, her world has always contained magic. Magic is current, that is, electricity. Ben Franklin wasn’t out there with that kite because he was conducting a science experiment, oh no. He was trying to control the lightning because in Gilman’s version of history, Franklin was a mage! But Gilman’s modern-day protagonist, Wren Valere, has a slightly more profitable use for her magic–she is a retrieval agent. She finds things that are lost, or missing, or stolen–and retrieves them–even if they are protected by magic. But Wren’s life is complicated by too many things: her changing relationship with her business partner, her friendship with the demon P.B., and that fact that Wren is a Lonejack, a Talent who works alone, and now the organization that keeps tabs on Talents, the Cosa, short for Cosa Nostradamus, suddenly wants to control her. The first book in Gilman’s Retrievers series is Staying Dead. Wren’s journey is worth following.

In P.N. Elrod‘s Vampire Files series, the detective is a vampire, although he keeps it a secret from everyone except his partner. Jack Fleming’s first case is to find out who turned him. Bloodlist has all the elements of a 1930’s noir detective novel except that the detective is a vampire. The moral dilemma of a vampire dealing with, and later in the series, becoming, a Chicago mobster in the 1930’s is absolutely priceless.

But my current favorite for mind-bending urban fantasy is DD Barant‘s Bloodhound Files series. So far, it’s Dying Bites, Death Blows, and Killing Rocks. The title puns are pretty typical of the gallows humor. Jace Valchek is a FBI profiler who specializes in serial killers, the really whacked-out kind. Her job is exciting enough in the first place. Then she gets whisked away to an parallel universe by the their national security administration because in their version of reality, only humans commit serial crimes, and, humans are less than 1% of the population. So what are the rest? Vampires, werewolves, golems, and pretty much every other supernatural creature that Jace only knows of in legends. But someone is murdering them, and Jace is the one expert they located who could possibly figure this out.

So Jace is stuck. Unless she finds their serial killer, she can’t go home. She might find another magic practitioner to send her to her world, but only they know exactly when they took her from. Her best chance of going back to find her old life reasonably intact is to help. And profiling serial killers is what she does.

What I enjoy about Jace’s story is her point of view. The mystery she solves in each book is fun, but I like being in her head. Her story is a “fish out of water” tale. The world she has been taken too is “almost” like hers, like ours, but not quite. She starts to adapt, and then something brings her up short. Her partner is a golem, named Charlie of all things. Charlie is a snappy dresser, and he likes to dance! But he’s made of rock. When he gets wounded, he needs a patch kit, not a medic. Her new boss is a vampire who may look like an 18-year-old surfer dude, but is actually hundreds of years old. In every encounter with the bad guys, she is reminded that she is part of an endangered species. Humans are called O.R.–that’s short for “Original Recipe”, and the name is derived from KFC. Like Jace, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at that revelation. See what you think.

If you just want a sample of some weird detecting? There is an urban fantasy anthology titled, you guessed it, Unusual Suspects.

 

The Art of Video Games

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | video games

Are video games art? The Smithsonian Institution seems to think so. They are building an exhibit on just that subject.  The Art of Video Games will be open at the American Art Museum between March 16 and September 30, 2012. I want to go.

The Smithsonian’s first step in building the exhibit was crowdsourcing. They created a list of 240 games from the history of gaming, and then invited the public to vote. The trick was that you only got 80 votes. It seems like that should have been enough votes, but I’m not so sure. Not all my favorites made it into the exhibit.

But the question remains, are video games art? I watched Galen play L.A. Noire, a new game from Rockstar Games, last night. In the game, the player takes the part of a rookie cop just back from WWII and working his way up through the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department. But in order to faithfully recreate LA in the late 1940’s, the designers extensively utilized archival photos and film footage of downtown LA to make the game look and feel like you’re really there. Not just the background, but the clothes, the cars, the dialogue, the way the characters look and act and even the billboards and radio programs.

But it’s not just the art. Each case that the character works on is a story. And in addition to the stories solved onscreen, original fiction has been written based on the game. Not just work-for-hire fiction either. Some major name authors (Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Block, Joe, R. Lansdale) have contributed to L.A. Noire, The Collected Stories, the ebook anthology of short stories that is available for free download.

So we have pictures and stories. But L.A. Noire could be said to be easy, and in some ways it is. It is based on a set of known, historical images, and a genre we are all familiar with. Los Angeles in 1947 did exist. There are picture to work from. Noir films are a known genre. The achievement is in creating reasonably lifelike characters and a totally immersive set without using real people or real sets, and in getting the human player caught up in the action that he (or she) is creating. When Galen crashes the car through the streets of LA, I flinch. It works.

Video games have been good at telling stories for a long time. One of the first widely known computer games was a text-based game called “Colossal Cave Adventure”, or more commonly just “Adventure”. It was based on Dungeons and Dragons, which was very loosely based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. When the game is text-based, the “art” is all in your head.  In order for video games to actually become art, technology had to catch up, a lot.

“Colossal Cave Adventure” came out, released, spawned, propagated (I’ve never been sure what the right word for that thing was) in 1975. The Atari 2600 was the machine that brought video games home for most people, but with the big blocky pixels that came with them, I’m not sure that they brought art. Still, they brought arcade-style gaming home. Considering that the IBM PC wasn’t born until 1981, this was truly a long time ago in a galaxy very far away.

The first time I saw something that I would call art in a video game was 2001. Galen was playing Final Fantasy X and it stopped me in my tracks. To this day, the music still does. That game was the first time I saw where a company put the entire package together, art, scenic backgrounds, story, characters, voice, music, and created not merely a game, but a world. Ten years later, it still consistently makes polls of the best video games ever.

The story is a classic. Boy meets girl, girl saves the world, girl loses boy. Good triumphs over evil. But the ending is bittersweet, because nothing worth having is ever won without cost. It is a video game, and there are a few holes in the plot. However, the characters are well drawn, and for the first time, ever, they have facial expressions that mostly match what they are saying. And, also for the first time, instead of the player reading their dialog from onscreen text, there are actors voicing the dialog, and the voice acting choices were spot on. Topping it off, the scenes and the art themselves are gorgeous.

There have been some games since that have been as involving as Final Fantasy X. Lost Odyssey, Dragon Age Origins, and Uncharted come to mind. But that was the first.

In April, 2010, the movie critic Roger Ebert went on record in his blog that video games could never be art, without ever having played one. After receiving over 4,500 responses, more than 4,200 of them in opposition to his position, he decided it might be best to apologize. He realized that he might have been a little hasty. For one thing, he said that video games will never be art. He admitted that predicting the future was perhaps stretching things. And, that his opinion on the subject as a whole was purely theoretical and would remain so.

The Smithsonian thinks some video games are art.  If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it makes you think, it’s art. If it moves you, it’s art. Under those definitions, video games can definitely be art. Try one sometime and see. But be warned, they can also be the black hole into which weekends fall.

Cougars in romance

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews

I received my first NetGalley egalley for review yesterday. I was excited even before I read the book, just to receive the notification. I had requested a romance from Carina Press and I will confess to a certain amount of curiosity just to see whether or not I would get the book. This is a book I requested on my own, not one I’m reviewing for Library Journal.

NetGalley is a service that allows publishers to make their electronic galleys available to librarians, reviewers and bloggers ahead of publications, so that folks who will review and hopefully say good things have a chance to get the word out before the book comes out. Making electronic galleys has to be the wave of the future, even for print books.

However, Carina Press is the electronic-only “imprint” of Harlequin. Harlequin has been very forward-thinking when it comes to ebooks. Everything they publish in print is available as an ebook, and always at a slightly lower price than the print version. Whether what they publish is to an individual person’s taste or not, well, that is what the acronym YMMV is all about. But the business model is definitely worthy of note. Harlequin also publishes some extremely good fantasy and urban fantasy under their Luna imprint. But I digress.

Carina Press has just celebrated their one year anniversary. I have purchased some of their books. They generally make wonderful “mind-candy”. They’re not deep, but they are fun.

So, on to Lessons in Indiscretion, by Karen Erickson. The story is set in the Regency period, but this is certainly not an old-fashioned Regency! Widowed Lady Julia has decided to take a lover, and has set her sights on a younger man, the Earl of Bedingfield, who has been a family friend since he was 14. Now he is 26, and her husband is dead and she is out of her widow’s weeds. While Lady Julia nearly scandalizes herself by her desire for the younger earl, she is surprised to discover that he is just as interested in a liaison with her!  She believes that, due to the difference in their ages and stations (he is very wealthy, she is not) that he will be tired of her in a short period of time. He, of course, being the hero, finds himself enchanted and surprised by his possessiveness. Their secret affair brings out the sparkle that she never had, and other men find her both interesting and desirable.

I wanted the story to be longer. There just wasn’t enough of it. Everything happened in less than 50 pages. One lunch and it was over <sniff>. I could have stood just a little more plot. But for something to while away an hour, it was good fun.

This is not the first older woman/younger man romance Carina Press has published or the first one I have read. Stroke of Midnight, by Bonnie Edwards, is a contemporary romance with the same theme, also published by Carina. For something that has more depth, Laura Leone’s Fallen from Grace has just been released as ebook. Fallen from Grace won the RITA award for Best Contemporary Romance the year it came out, and it has been on a number of “best romance” lists, but the print version has been very hard to find for years. It also deals with an older woman/younger man romance, but there are a lot of darker issues involved with the story. Laura Leone also writes Science Fiction and Urban Fantasy under the name Laura Resnick.

A post earlier this month on the Dear Author blog commented that “Older women-younger men must be the new vampires…” because the commenter was finding the theme so prevalent. Searching for recent titles, I don’t think it’s that common, but particularly since Demi Moore threw Bruce Willis over for Ashton, the Cougar story has become a recurring theme in romance fiction. And personally, I think Demi traded down.

June is Audiobook Month

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audiobooks

The Audio Publishers Association promotes June as Audiobook Month. Last week, when we had to drive up in separate cars, I couldn’t even think about the drive without planning for an audiobook. I never drive long distance without one. The question was, which one?

I was in the middle of a mystery, A Test of Wills by Charles Todd. It’s the first book in his/her/their Inspector Ian Rutledge series. (Charles Todd is a pseudonym for a mother-and-son writing team) There was no question that I was going to either finish the CDs before I left Florida, or I was going to copy the thing to my iPod and finish on the road. I finished on the road.

By the time I decided to return everything to the library, I only had 2 discs left, so I needed a second book for the 6-hour trip. I chose An Impartial Witness, the second book in Todd’s Bess Rutledge series as my next selection, and purchased it from Audible.com. I had already read A Duty to the Dead, the first book in the series, and found it excellent, so I was looking forward to continuing Bess’ story.

Both books were appropriate choices for the Memorial Day weekend, as well as just plain good books. The Todds series are historical mysteries, focusing on the World War I era in England. Bess Rutledge serves as a nurse or, as they were called in England during that period, a nursing sister, with the British Army. Her father is a retired Colonel still doing classified work for the military, and Bess and her mother have “followed the drum”, going with her father to his various postings around the British Raj. From her travels and her own profession, she has acquired a much broader and less prejudiced viewpoint than would be typical of her race and class at that time. Her nursing experience, and the disruption brought about by the Great War, cause her to get involved with people and circumstances she might not otherwise, and bring her into contact with potential crimes, as well as potential spying and put her life in danger at home as well as from bombing near the front.

Inspector Ian Rutledge survived his war, just barely. Rutledge is the victim of shell-shock, what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. He was an officer during World War I, but before the war, he was a police inspector, solving homicides. He has returned to Scotland Yard in the hope that returning to his old job will help keep the quite literal voices in his head from hounding him into bedlam. He is uncertain if he retains enough of his old skills to perform his old job, and he is handed a case deliberately designed to trip him up. But coming face to face with his own demons turns out to be just the boost he needs.

So, on Memorial Day I listened to mysteries during wartime. I admit, I didn’t see the symmetry until afterwards. I was looking for compelling stories, and I found them.

Culling or Surrender

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | books

I’m still trying to decide whether this article was the most frightening or the most liberating thing I ever read. The post is in the PBS blogs, “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re Going to Miss Almost Everything.” It’s enough to either make or ruin your day.

The writer has done the math on what a person can reasonably expect to accomplish of a particular task in a given lifetime. For example, if, like me, you like to read, and you expect to read two books a week, if you start when you are 15 and you live to be 80 you can reasonably expect to read 6,500 books in your lifetime. A person who reads faster might read more per week, and a precocious child might start sooner. Someone with good genes might live longer (my mom is 82, and still reasonably healthy, I have hope).

Wikipedia says there were over 288,000 titles published in the US in 2009 alone. But in one lifetime, one person can only read so much! And while I might not want to read every single book published in any given year, there are lots of books published in the past that I would want to read, and plenty of books yet to come that I will want to read.

And for every minute I spend reading, that means there is something else I’m missing out on. What’s a person to do?

To begin with, there’s the problem of deciding what “the good stuff” is, even among the books. If almost 300K books are published a year, I’m not going to read them all, I’m going to pick and choose. I’m even going to pick and choose what I’m going to pick and choose from.  This is the culling aspect. It can be pretty powerful to declare, up front, that certain aspects of life, the universe and everything are not worth wasting my time on, for whatever reason I choose.

One of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction, Ted Sturgeon, is famous for something called Sturgeon’s Law. “90% of science fiction is crap. But then, 90% of everything is crap”. Culling is all about deciding, up front, what you believe that 90% consists of from your point of view and delineating it as unimportant from the get-go. I don’t read literary fiction unless I get a personal recommendation from someone I trust an awful, awful lot. We didn’t get cable TV when we moved, because we don’t watch it. We get our TV from Netflix, or DVD box sets. TV is just not important.

The thing about Sturgeon’s Law is that if you don’t cull in giant swaths, knocking out whole categories like literary fiction or TV, then you have to figure out which part of each specific subcategory is part of the 90% chaff, and which is that 10% wheat you’re looking for. For areas where someone is well informed, it can be relatively easy, but if you are attempting to be well-informed across a broader and broader spectrum, it gets more and more difficult.  We focus on what we love and what we care about because it’s easier.

Surrender is different, surrender is more like saying, “I know that I would love that art exhibit, and I’ll be sorry that I missed it, but something else had a higher priority. Life’s too short.” It’s hard to admit that we won’t get to do it all. I want to read all the books. I want to watch at least all the science fiction TV series that I haven’t seen, and see all the reboots that haven’t yet been made. And yet, if I’d done every single thing I ever wanted to do, wouldn’t that be boring? What would come next?

I wonder how Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson would do now with the volume of information that comes pouring down the internet every nanosecond. Would they cull, or would they surrender?

 

Detecting with cats

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | cats

Mystery author Lilian Jackson Braun died Saturday, June 4 at the age of 97. Braun was the author, or perhaps the perpetrator would be the better description, of The Cat Who series of mysteries. She was probably the single author responsible for the entire genre of cozy mysteries with cats as, not merely lap adornments, but actual detectives.

The concept began innocently enough. Her human protagonist was a newspaper reporter named Jim Qwilleran. Like so many detectives, both amateur and professional, Qwill has gone through some rough patches in his life, and is now trying to get his life back on track. A former crime reporter, he is now “demeaning” himself by covering the art beat–a last chance given by an old friend. But crime comes to him, a gallery owner is murdered, and Qwill decides to investigate the homicide. As part of his investigation, he “temporarily” adopts the gallery owner’s Siamese cat Koko, convinced that the cat must have seen, heard, or perhaps sniffed something related to the murder. Qwill’s investigation, his redemption, and his growing “partnership” with the cat Koko complete the story of The Cat who could Read Backwards, the first in the 29-book series that ended with Braun’s death this weekend.

Braun started a trend. Throughout the series, Qwill believes that Koko is providing him with hints and clues, but Koko still acts like a cat, and only like a cat. The “clues” that Qwill gets from the big Siamese are all a matter of the human’s interpretation.

But it’s pretty easy to trace the line of descent from Koko to two feline detectives who really ARE the detectives, Midnight Louie and Joe Grey. Midnight Louie is the co-narrator of a series of mysteries, starting with Catnap by Carole Nelson Douglas. His human is a public relations freelancer named Temple Barr, and the city they investigate is the Sin capital of the U.S., Las Vegas. Midnight Louie is an overweight, all black tomcat who sounds like he just stepped off the stage of the latest “Guys and Dolls” revival. Louie has clawed his way through 21 books so far, and is still going strong.

Joe Grey is my personal favorite, partly because Joe knows what happened to him is wrong for a cat, and he thinks about it sometimes, then washes himself and goes back to solving crimes, usually after he’s ordered delivery from the local deli over the phone. In Cat on the Edge by Shirley Rousseau Murphy, we discover Joe Grey, a smoke grey tomcat with white socks a docked tail. Joe suddenly discovers he can talk, and understand, human. He just doesn’t know why, or how. Then he witnesses a murder behind his favorite deli. Now he has the power to do something about it. But with the ability to talk like a human, comes the ability to think like one, too. Cats don’t face moral dilemmas–but Joe Grey does.

Lilian Jackson Braun created a cat who had his human convinced that he was helping him solve crimes. After three books, she stopped her successful series for 18 years, then picked it back up by moving her human and his feline assistant from the big city to a place she created, Pickax City in Moose County, a place “400 miles north of everywhere”.  Moose County was so far north, it even had a town named Brrr. Read the books. Especially some night when you need to cool off.

 

Visions of Futures Past

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | libraries

The British Library has just opened an exhibition on the history of science fiction. I had to read the article twice just to prove to myself it was real. The exhibition is called “Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it” The exhibit will be running through 25 September 2011, for anyone who has a chance to visit London.

Besides the images from the early science fiction pulp magazines, which are incredibly awesome, there is a lot on the blog and in the exhibit about science fiction as literature. science fiction is a literature of ideas, after all. As a concept, it’s been around for a couple of centuries, depending on how one defines it. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were writing science fiction, among other things. So was Lewis Carroll. And Mary Shelley–what is Frankenstein if it isn’t science fiction? The exhibit traces SF back to writings in the 17th century!

Science fiction has always looked at other worlds. Either worlds in the future, alien worlds, virtual worlds, parallel worlds, perfect worlds, or apocalyptic worlds. Those are the themes described in the exhibit, with covers from the pulps or illustrations from classic novels to match. But the fact is that modern SF subgenres derive from those original themes; future world stories are now hard sf,  alien worlds are space opera, virtual worlds are cyberpunk, parallel worlds are alternate history, perfect worlds equal utopian, and apocalyptic worlds are post-holocaust novels. Someone else’s mileage may vary on definitions, but the principle holds.

The history of SF is all around me in this room, too. We re-shelved through the letter H over the weekend. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy is here. One of the surviving space operas. It’s a story that transcended its original time to become a cornerstone of the genre. Also, Asimov’s Complete Stories is here, which includes his 3 laws of robotics somewhere in there. Every robot story since has dealt with those laws in some way, either to use them or to flout them.

Ray Bradbury is shelved in the next section, so there’s Fahrenheit 451 along with a thick volume of his stories. Can anyone who loves books ever forget the power of that story?

On the very first shelf, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy rests along with the other books in the series. True humor in science fiction is really hard to do well. The Hitchhiker’s Guide was a incredible accomplishment.  Every once in a while, someone can catch that lightning in that bottle.

Way, way, way, too many years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. I only say too many because each volume is positively huge. They take up two shelves, all by themselves.

Harlan Ellison is here, with so many Dangerous Visions. Some Robert A. Heinlein, but I kept only the good stuff. There’s a lot of Frank Herbert, and I still have a copy of Dune from when it was published by Chilton. Yes, Chilton was the original hardcover publisher back when no one else would touch it.

At the same time, there are newer books in here as well.  A lot of Eric Flint’s 1632 series. Alternative history is still considered science fiction, mostly because it isn’t anything else. Kage Baker’s Company series, which is a combination of time travel and alternate history.

But I can’t get over the idea that the British Library is doing a major exhibition on the history of Science Fiction. The BL is a place I associate more with the Magna Carta than Orson Scott Card!

The power in book recommendations

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | books> ebooks

There’s been a lot of talk recently about just how hard it is for ebook sellers to duplicate the experience of book recommendations that independent bookshops and libraries provide. Earlier this week, I experienced again for myself just how powerful a personal recommendation can be.

The latest entry in Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling series was released on May 31. Kiss of Snow was her first hardcover release after 9 paperbacks. I pre-ordered the book from B&N, and, joy of joys, it automatically downloaded to my iPad a little after midnight on 5/31. There’s convenience for you! But I first started reading the series after the third book because a friend recommended it to me. She knew I read paranormal romance, and was pretty sure I would like the series. So, even though I had looked at the first book, Slave to Sensation, in the bookstore more than once, based on her personal recommendation I bought the book. And my friend was absolutely correct. I did love the book, and every single one since including the latest, which I devoured in between unpacking boxes earlier this week.

I am a subscriber to the Yahoo Group “Letters of Mary”, which is a list devoted to the works that Laurie R. King has written about Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes. The first book in the series is The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. (If this sounds interesting, read this post for more details about the series) Among the discussion in the Group, one of the more prolific authors uses a quote from Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache as her sig, “He…told him the four sentences that lead to wisdom. *I’m sorry. I was wrong. I need help. I don’t know.* He’d never forgotten them and when he took over as Chief Inspector, Gamache passed them on to each and every one of his agents. Some took them to heart, some forgot them immediately. That was their choice.” The quote is from the latest book in the series, Bury Your Dead, which recently won the Agatha Award for Best Novel of 2010. But at the time I kept seeing the quote, the book hadn’t won the award yet, it just caught my interest. Even though I had never met the person who used it as her sig, I respected her work in the group enough to take it as a recommendation of the series of books. The series, starting with Still Life, is really, really good. It is one of those mysteries where you start to wonder about the body count in the small town, but the character of Chief Inspector Gamache is definitely worth getting to know. I’m just sorry I have to wait until the end of August for A Trick of the Light, which is the next and seventh book in the series.

L.E. Modesitt’s Imager is a book that I practically shoved at people. A lot of fantasy series are coming-of-age stories. In this particular case, although the hero does come into his power, it is specifically not a coming-of-age story–the protagonist is already an adult, although just barely. It was one of the things about the book I liked quite a bit. So, I recommended it, over and over. A friend in the next office at my LPOW read fantasy, I knew he liked Ray Feist’s Magician series, so I convinced him to read this. We ended up practically fighting over the library’s copies of books 2 and 3 of the series, Imager’s Challenge and Imager’s Portfolio, and had endless conversations about how we thought the story ought to go. He also started reading the rest of Modesitt’s books (there are LOTS) which I haven’t gotten around to yet. I will definitely read Scholar, the next Imager book, in November.

My point is that a significant number of book purchases came from three recommendations. My friend told me to read one Nalini Singh book. I ended up buying 10 so far since the series is still ongoing. One person on the “Letters of Mary” group effectively recommends the Louise Penny books in her sig file, and because of that, Galen and I have both read all 6 books in the series so far, and have continued to recommend them to others. I read Imager, recommended it to at least two other people, and I know one has read all of the Imager series, and the other has started reading all of Modesitt’s work, which consists of 56 books and rising according to Wikipedia.

Book recommending is a virtuous circle, the trick is in figuring out how to start it.