Tag: science fiction

Spoiled but not rotten

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | reading

When I think of “spoilers” I hear the word spoken in River Song’s particular sing-song, usually accompanied by the endearment, “Sweetie”, and inevitably followed by the opening of her Tardis-blue diary.

The Doctor and River Song are living their relationship out of sync with time relative to each other. The first time the Doctor meets River, she has known him all of her life but he’s never met her before. Every time they meet after that, each of them remembers different pieces of their relationship, but on the whole, at least so far, what she remember is his future, and what he remembers is her future — and he knows that her future is going to end badly. His is going to contain an unbearable amount of pain. But then, so does his past. However, there’s the inevitable time paradox involved. His future is her past, so what has happened must happen. Even though River knows it will bring him agony, she must let it happen–she can’t spoil it. The actual fate of the universe is at stake. “No spoilers,” are allowed.

But we regular humans seem to like spoilers. Or we do according to an article that appeared earlier this month in Wired that immediately went viral. The research indicates that spoiling the ending of the book or the big surprise finale of a TV show helps most people enjoy the story.

This makes sense, doesn’t it? How many readers thumb to the end to find out what happens? Honestly? I know I do. Not at first, because the ending wouldn’t make sense. But after a third or maybe halfway, then I’m interested in seeing if I’ve figured things out. I’m curious if I’ve guessed “whodunnit”. Or if the evil villain I thought it was really is the actual “big bad”, because sometimes the “man behind the curtain” conceals yet another “man behind another curtain”. Of course, sometimes that “man” is a “woman” or a vampire, or a dragon. To each genre their own.

Even when I find out the ending, I still don’t know how the author gets there. The journey is always entertaining, even when I am certain of the destination. And when I have guessed wrong, then I really, really want to know how the author fooled me.

If we humans didn’t enjoy predictability in our fiction, we wouldn’t re-read the same books over and over, which we do. We also wouldn’t re-make the same story in different settings. West Side Story is still Romeo and Juliet. It was a good story both times, but it was the same story, dressed up in different clothes. Everyone knew how it ended.

The thing about thumbing to the end is something that is different with ebooks and digital media. I wonder what effect it will have?

Listening to an audiobook, it’s just difficult to zip to the end and then zip back to where you were. This is particularly true since people often listen to audio because their hands are otherwise occupied with something important, like driving. The medium just doesn’t lend itself to the idea of the casual flip to the back of the book and then flop back to where you were before.  Mysteries are particularly popular in audiobooks, and this maybe the reason. It’s just plain hard to find out if “the butler did it” until the end, even if you really, really want to.

With ebooks its a lot easier. I can bookmark the page I’m on, go to the end, and then go back to my bookmark. It’s possible. It’s even easy. I’m realizing that I just don’t do it, and I don’t know why. New medium, new method.

The Windup Girl

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is a book that I picked up because a lot of people talked about it. And because it won the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

The Windup Girl represents a type of post-apocalyptic story that is such a fundamental part of science fiction. In this particular case, the apocalypse in question is a result of genetic engineering, specifically the manipulation of food crops. Somewhere in the two centuries preceding the novel, there has been world-wide crop failure as the bio-engineering has also resulted in pests that are resistant to the pesticides.  Finally the cycle collapsed. Civilization has retrenched and sunk. Our present “Expansion” is reviled, and has become a myth. Agribusinesses are called “Calorie Companies” because that’s what they sell, calories so that people can work, and live. No one is fat, instead, people are starving.

The story is set in the city of Krung Thep, formerly Bangkok. It is told from five perspectives: Anderson Lake, an American Calorie Man; Hock Seng, a Chinese refugee; Jaidee, a captain in the Environmental Ministry Corps; Kanya, his second in command; and Emiko, the Windup Girl herself.

The post-civilized world in this story is interesting, but there wasn’t enough story in this book to satisfy me. The narrative skipped from character to character, and none of them were people I had any sympathy for. Nor did the author allow the reader to spend enough time with any of the characters to understand their motivations. There clearly is a well-thought out background, and two of the short stories in Bacigalupi’s collection Pump Six and other stories (“Yellow Card Man” and “The Calorie Man”) are prequels for Windup. But that background isn’t in the novel, adding a layer of confusion that wasn’t needed. One of the points of the story was that every character was hiding their true motivations from everyone else. And sometimes from themselves.

The future portrayed in this dystopian tale was grim enough on its own merits. It was not necessary for the author to add to the murk by leaving so much of the backstory outside of the work in hand.

Theirs not to reason why: a soldier’s duty

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews

A Soldier’s Duty is the opening title in the new military science fiction series, Theirs Not to Reason Why, by Jean Johnson.

We first meet Ia as a 15-year-old on the Terran colony of Sanctuary as she navigates the time-streams after a horrifying vision of the future annihilation of human civilization. Through her frantic search of the possible futures for one tiny glimmer of hope, we catch a glimpse of our heroine as well. Her precognition is a recognized fact, and this future accepts psi-powers, at least to some extent. She is a determined, even driven individual, who will sacrifice her dreams, even her very definition of her self, to salvage everyone who can be saved.

Three years later, the moment she reaches legal majority, Ia joins the military. She gets herself a berth as a recruit of the Terran Space Force Marines. It is here that the story truly begins.

The future she has seen tells her that she must be a “boots on the ground” Marine. Not an officer, and not the member of Special Forces her precognitive powers entitle her to be. Also, she must walk a fine line between displaying exactly how much she knows of future events, and being promoted too quickly, and knowing just enough to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. She can never get too close to anyone, because she knows the fate of each person she meets–she has already seen it in the time-streams.

Spock said, but Ia lives it, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or of the one.” Everyone Ia meets must be nudged in the direction that will save the most people at the best time, even if the individual must be sacrificed in Ia’s here and now.

Escape Rating A: This book could easily have been titled Young Woman’s War, as it bears many parallels to John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. In both stories, a person without military experience but a lot of knowledge is thrust into the military at the entry level and applies their full intellect to the problem at hand to provide a new solution to old problems. All the while providing interesting observations in a unique voice to their superiors and to the audience.

Ia also reminds me a lot of Sgt. Torin Kerr in Tanya Huff’s Valor Confederation series. Kerr is also a woman in the Space Marines, although Kerr remains a noncom and proudly so.

A Soldier’s Duty ends, appropriately, with Ia being promoted to Lieutenant. The next book in the series is An Officer’s Duty, and it unfortunately will not be out until sometime in 2012.

The series title is very apt in some ways, but not in others. It is a quote from The Charge of the Light Brigade, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

“Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.”

Ia knows why. That is the point of the story. She will do and do and do, and will die before her task is done. Some of her tools also know, but some don’t. Those have served the future, and done, and died. But unlike the poor sods in the Light Brigade, their commander seems to know what she is doing. It is well worth reading her story to find out what she will do next.

NPR wants your vote

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | reading

NPR is back with their continuing search for the top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books of all time. Or, at least the list as NPR listeners see it from the vantage point of the summer of 2011.

NPR provided listeners the opportunity to nominate titles and complete series for the top 100 earlier this summer. Yours truly provided the results of her agonized selection in this post.

After what appears to have been much deliberation, and the considered input of the expert panel of John Clute (coauthor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy), Farah Mendlesohn (coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction) and Gary K. Wolfe (science fiction critic and longtime reviewer for the science fiction and fantasy magazine Locus), NPR collated several thousand inputs into a list of approximately 200 titles.

Now, NPR wants your vote. Really, they want 10 of your votes. Each time you input, you can vote for your 10 favorites that have made the list. (I almost said it was a Chicago election, but you can’t vote for the same book 10 times on the same pass. You’d have to come back 10 times for that. But you could…)

The list is eclectic. And it shows that we science fiction and fantasy readers are a diverse bunch of folks. But one thing it does not show is that we have forgotten that the current writers stand on the shoulders of giants. The classics are there, and in amazing variety and number. Conan the Barbarian and Frankenstein coexist with Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. There is a certain irony to seeing Lev Grossman’s The Magicians on the list, when the work it is derived from, C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, was ruled ineligible as children’s literature.

I recognize everything, and I’ve read almost half. I’m not sure whether to be proud or appalled. Whether I agree with things being on the list is an entirely different question. And some, well, I think they’re marvelous books, I’m just not sure they fit the definition of either science fiction or fantasy. What is Outlander doing on this list? I loved it, but there was way more romance than there was time-travel.

So I had to vote on which 10 were my absolute favorites. That was a lot harder than one might think. For one thing, the creators of the list did not include Terry Pratchett’s Discworld as a single entity. Whose idea was that, anyway? The series as a whole is fantastic, but trying to decide which one of the few nominated is one of the 10 best, I couldn’t do it. AAARRRGGGHHH!

All my other favorites made the list, so that was easy. And voting for The Lord of the Rings was probably a no-brainer for a lot of people. Me, I lost count of how many times I re-read it after the first 25.

The list is in alphabetical order, so American Gods was in the first screen. So was its sequel, Anansi Boys, but I didn’t take the two-fer. Anansi Boys was fun, but didn’t tie me up in knots the way Gods did.

I am proud to say that I now have a friend hooked on the Old Man’s War series, proving to me that this one is as good as I remember. Meeting John Scalzi at the American Library Conference in June and getting a signed copy of Zoe’s War was just a bonus.

Recently, I thumbed my copy of Tigana again. The ending still wrings me out. But I love Kay’s writing so much that I not only voted for Tigana, when I saw the Fionavar Tapestry on the list, I voted for it, too. That was when I first discovered his writing, and that I have re-read, at least three times. There are parts that are almost as gut-wrenching, but not quite.

Seeing the entire list of titles makes things both easier, and more difficult. On the one hand, it’s a tremendous nostalgia trip. I wanted to read, or re-read, every single book I saw. Let’s just say there were a lot of old friends on that list. Of all the ones I knew, it was incredibly difficult to pick just 10.

NPR needs your vote, too.  So now it’s your turn. Try it and see how hard it is to pick just 10. I dare you.

Life after Harry

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Uncategorized

When I say “Harry”, I mean Harry Potter, of course.  Who else could I possibly mean?

The movie poster for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?

Harry Potter fans have been in a curious kind of limbo since July 21, 2007, when the last book was released. We’ve all known how the story ends. But as long as the movies were still being released, the “illustrated” edition was, in effect, still putting out supplements. There were still some unknowns, just not very many. Now that saga, too, is complete.

There are generations yet unborn who will discover Harry for the first time, but there will never be another who will grow up exactly as he does, while he does. Even for those of us who read the series as adults, the experience of waiting for the next book, and speculating on what might happen will never be the same. All has been revealed.

The magic of Harry Potter was not in Diagon Alley, or even at Hogwarts Castle. It was in the overwhelming desire it created in both children and adults to pick up a book and READ! What comes next? Or who?

The inevitable lists have come out, suggesting books that people can turn to as alternatives. For example, Kirkus Reviews published a list of books called “For those suffering from Harry Potter withdrawal“. It’s a great idea, but I’d love to have seen more suggestions for adults suffering from Potter Withdrawal Syndrome (PWS, anyone?) and not just books for kids. And, of course, some of my favs are missing. Tamora Pierce belongs on any list for the magically inclined, either starting with Song of the Lioness or the Circle of Magic. And so does Diane Duane’s series starting with So you want to be a wizard.

Of course, Hollywood is looking for the next big blockbuster. Deathly Hallows 2 had the biggest opening weekend of any movie in history. It’s too bad they didn’t split it into three parts. Just think of all the money they could have made!

Or, if George R.R. Martin had held out for a series of movies instead of an HBO series for The Song of Ice and Fire. On second thought, that’s one saga that is better as a mini-series. Those books are huge. Condensing them to a mini-series was probably difficult enough.

However, io9‘s Facebook users have leapt into the breach and suggested a list of 10 fantasy book series that could replace Harry Potter at the movies. People were supposed to suggest series for their movie-worthiness; whether the books in question were “good” books or not is, as always, a matter of personal opinion. What was interesting about the list was that the books were not necessarily new, not necessarily popular, and not necessarily good. Having read 7 out of the 10 books listed, I’m can definitely testify to any of the above.

The number 1 listed series was Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. From 1936! These are classics. I mean, really classic. As in, Leiber not only coined the term “sword and sorcery” but Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are arguably among the foundation stories in the genre. If you’ve never had the pleasure the first book is Swords and Deviltry. Or, for a real treat, try the graphic novel version.

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series was also listed. This is not a big surprise. The series is not just long, but it has a huge number of fans. Artemis Fowl was also mentioned, as he is frequently listed as a successor to Mr. Potter. I haven’t read him, but I have the first three books in the vast TBR pile.

The surprise of the list was Dragonlance. I had to groan. And I did read them, so I am entitled to my groan. I read the Dragonlance Chronicles on a Trans-Atlantic flight, when those were the only three books I had. I can’t sleep on airplanes. If I could have slept, believe me, I would have. Essentially, someone took a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and wrote it up into three books. The trilogy sold well enough that they managed to sell a second trilogy. That first book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, was almost painful. But as I read it, I could see the writers learning their craft as the book progressed. By the end, it wasn’t too bad. But filming it?

I’d rather see anything else on the list. But then again, the first time I saw the trailer for Cowboys & Aliens, I thought it was either a joke or a video game. Whatever it is, it’s not a substitute for Harry Potter. Or John Wayne either, come to think of it.

 

Doctor Who and the Spam Planet

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews

First of all, that’s not the real title. When I requested this title from NetGalley to review it, the official listed title was Doctor Who II Volume 1. That’s way too boring for the Doctor. And it’s not even technically correct. The publisher, IDW, lists it as Doctor Who Volume 2 #1. Still boring.

The graphic novel is definitely not boring. What it is is an absolute howl. After the wedding, Rory and Amy are traveling in the TARDIS, and Rory finds one of the many phones that the Doctor has spiffed up over the last few years for his human companions. So what does Rory do? Does he phone home? No, not our Rory. He signs it up for a data plan. Only one problem with that. The TARDIS may have lots of really neat features, but one of the things the old girl doesn’t have is a firewall.

The Doctor discovers what Rory has done when the TARDIS gets flooded with spam. And not just spam email, but spam holograms. Yes, spam gets much more sophisticated as the millenia move on, and this is not a GOOD THING. The poor TARDIS overloads, shuts herself down, and they crash. Nothing unusual in that. Howsomever, the TARDIS crashes on a planet chock-full of holograms, holograms and nothing but holograms. Many of whom are spam. And one little holographic stapler, who just wants to help.

And, in true Doctor Who style, the planet is about to be destroyed by intergalactic scroungers who are more than a wee bit annoyed that the holograms can’t be taken off-planet and sold as slaves.

There’s a good time to be had just in playing “spot the trope” among the various types of spam that the planet, the email run amok and the Doctor’s own plots foist on the raiders and on the readers.

This was lighthearted fun. I had a good time giggling with the story over my lunch. And the drawing of the characters worked for me. I know what the Doctor and Amy and Rory are supposed to look like. That can make it difficult for a graphic novel to be “close enough”. This one was. Some of the images of the Doctor were spot on, and he’s the character that matters most.

The adventure the Doctor has on the spam planet is just the lighthearted opener to a much more serious encounter with Jack the Ripper.  In The Doctor and the Ripper, it looks like the Doctor is going to get in some serious trouble, again.

What makes the better man?

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Uncategorized

What does it mean to be “the better man”? And which matters more, being “better” in the moral and ethical sense, or being “superior” in the evolutionary sense?

After a recent viewing of the movie X-Men: First Class, those were the questions that kept circling my mind, like the never-ending debate between Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, the future Professor X and Magneto.

We first really see Charles Xavier in the midst of World War II at age 12 in the kitchen of his family’s estate. He interrupts his mother in the kitchen in the middle of the night. Except it’s not really his mother. It’s a little girl who is capable of mimicking the outward appearance of anyone, anyone at all. She has the mutation of being a human chameleon. Her true outward appearance consists of slightly scaly blue skin, red hair and yellow eyes. She is a mutant. But Xavier is not all that astonished. He is a mutant too, but his mutation is on the inside. He can read her mind. And everyone else’s.

Erik Lehnsherr spends his war in a Concentration Camp with a number tattooed on his arm. His introduction shows him, also at a young age, being separated from his mother during the sorting process at the Camp entrance by the Nazis. In his grief and rage at the separation, young Erik uses his burgeoning power to start pulling the metal gates that separate him from his mother off their hinges until a guard knocks him out with a rifle butt. A doctor decides to bring his power to full fruition, using the most obscene lever at his command, Erik’s love for his mother. The doctor kills her in front of the boy, and the power explodes, sending all the metal objects that Erik can see into a swirling Armaggedon.

When we see them each again, it is 1962. They have all grown up. Xavier is graduating from Oxford as a Professor of Genetic Mutation. Erik is traveling to Switzerland and South America, taking his own personal revenge on the Nazis. The little blue girl Xavier found in his kitchen, well, she is still with him in Oxford, pretending to be his sister, and using her chameleon ability to pretend to be normal. And that sums up the three protagonists, one the son of privilege, one the survivor of man’s absolute inhumanity to man, and one a mutant who is ashamed of herself.

They collide in the middle of the ocean. Erik is in pursuit of the doctor who killed his mother. Xavier is in pursuit of the man who wants to start World War III. They happen to be the same mutant, now going by the name of Sebastian Shaw, backed by a small army of mutants. Shaw believes that the spontaneous rise of mutations is the result of atomic testing, and that the release of nuclear war will create more mutants, whom he will rule.

This is the central conflict between Erik and Xavier. Xavier believes that the “better man”, the morally superior man, would capture Shaw and let some higher authority judge him for his crimes. Erik just wants to kill him for the crime of murdering his mother and torturing him, whatever else the villain has done. The problem is that Shaw is a psychopath as well as a powerful mutant who can absorb any energy that is thrown at him. But primarily, he is a psychopath, and probably would have been even if he hadn’t been a mutant. Killing him is the only way to stop him from starting World War III (in the movie, Shaw was the motivating force behind the Cuban Missile Crisis). To borrow from a different science fiction universe, the needs of the many, in this case the entire human race, outweigh the needs of the few. Erik did the right thing, even if his motives were selfish.

Mutants are superior to homo sapiens in an evolutionary sense. Xavier believes that if his people do the moral thing, the better thing, that the homo sapiens will treat his people fairly and not act irrationally. In other words, not turn on them out of fear. Erik knows what it is like to be irrationally hated, he has already been there. He is certain that once their powers are revealed, humans will fear them, and will act on that fear. The story proves him correct. What is interesting is that Xavier has known this all along, he has just refused to admit it, even to himself. That is why he has hidden his talent, and why he has made his mutant friend Mystique use her chameleon talent to hide hers, to keep himself from being exposed.

In Harry Potter’s world, the wizards and witches hide from the Muggles. In Deborah Harkness’ book, A Discovery of Witches, the witches conceal their talents from the world at large as well, and for the same reason. The magical folk remember the witch burnings all too well, and do not want them to happen again. Concealment is safer.

Katherine Kurtz’ series about the magical Deryni said it best, and the words still send a chill up my spine. “The humans kill what they do not understand.”

Transplanted Revolutionary Values

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | books

They always say that freedom isn’t free. Sometimes we forget that the United States of America was a grand experiment when it was first formed.  No country had ever tried to actually implement the novel idea of widespread democracy before, even on the somewhat limited basis upon which our Founding Fathers made their attempt in 1776. It was limited based on the standards we have now. I could not have voted. I am female, and that would have disqualified me. And gender was not the only restriction in the 1700’s. The Declaration of Independence was a start, not an end.

History doesn’t allow “do-overs”. Time marches on, and we all live with the results. But alternate history is the art of speculating about the “what-ifs”. What if history had marched down a different path? Alternately, no pun intended, what if something like the American Revolution happened on some other world? Science-fictionally speaking, of course.

Eric Flint’s 1632 series is one of the most fun alternate history series that I’ve run across. The first book in the series is 1632, but Flint kept going. Independence Day brought it to mind because the story is about transplanting middle-American values, virtues and gumption to an extremely unlikely time and place, and recreating the practical parts of the United States somewhere and somewhen they should never have been. In the opening of 1632, Grantville, West Virginia is in the middle of celebrating a wedding between the younger sister of the local president of the United Mine Workers of America and the son of one of the wealthiest steel families from Pittsburgh.  A lot of college friends and their families have come to this small and otherwise slowly dying town in West Virginia coal country, population 5,000 hardy souls, augmenting the mix of professionals and regular folks just enough to make things interesting when the disaster happens. Grantville and its environs get scooped out of the ground in  late 20th century America and deposited in Thuringia, in western Saxony, in 1632, in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War.

Why is this fun? Because the inhabitants don’t just sit on their hands and cry about what they’ve lost. They realize pretty quickly that they are in it for the long haul, and that the history in the books in the high school library they brought with them has been changed, forever. There is a major politcal fight about values. Will they be an exclusionary enclave, or will they openly expose American values, like democracy and freedom and religious tolerance, to the surrounding area, knowing that those ideas and values are somewhere between revolutionary and heretical in the 1600s? How much history will they manipulate? For a little while, they know who lives and who dies, and how to prevent it. What should they do? How much of an industrial revolution should they start, and how much can they maintain? The lessons in the “art of the possible” were fascinating.

Some Revolutions are born in fire. David Weber’s space opera series of the adventures of Honor Harrington has grown to contain some stories that are sidebars to Honor’s main story arc. Among the stories in what is referred to as the Honorverse is the story of the liberation of the slave planet Torch from the slave-masters corporation, Mesa. In Crown of Slaves, the opening of the story, incompetence on the part of one Star Empire’s ministers, plus an assassination of the person who was the voice of conscience of another, impatience on the part of a third, hyper-competent spying on the part of a fourth, and terrorism and kidnapping by the understandably radical freed slaves’ organization leads to the creation of Torch.  In Torch of Freedom, the second book, the newly-freed slaves must defend their freedom from their former masters and learn to become a government instead of a radical terrorist group. The second is sometimes more difficult than the first.

And last, but not least, Robert A. Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress. This was the last of his four Hugo award winners for best novel. The concept is not unfamiliar. If man colonized the moon and then used it as a penal colony, what would happen? The science of why it would be a one-way, multigenerational trip is probably way off, but long-distance penal colonies have certainly been done before. Australia being the best known example, but Georgia was also a penal colony. And if the penal colony was a multigenerational one-way trip, so that a sentence condemned future generations to indentured servitude with no way out, what would the eventual result be? Revolution?

There are four main characters in Moon. Manny, a computer technician who discovers late one night that the computer he has been working on all these years has actually become self aware. Wyoming Knot, known as Wyoh, a young political agitator who has spent her entire life traveling from colony to drum up support for a revolution. The Professor, an elderly academic, recently committed to the Moon, who has realized that the Lunar economy/ecology is running on empty. And finally, Mike, the self-aware computer. Mike might be Data’s great-grandfather, or at least a great-uncle. Mike wants to save his friends, now that he knows what friendship is. He will save them no matter what it might cost him. And Mike, just like Data, can calculate the exact odds of success–or failure.

If anyone ever says, “TANSTAAFL” to you, and you wonder where it comes from, it’s from Moon. It’s an abbreviation for “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. There wasn’t for Mike, and it’s still true.

NPR and the Top 100 SF/F

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | books

If I didn’t already love NPR, I would now. But I’ve sat in the car too many times laughing myself silly at the Car Talk brothers not to love NPR.

However, they just gave me a whole new reason to love them. NPR is putting together a list of the 100 best science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) titles “ever written”. The list will be based on recommendations submitted here.

There are, naturally, a whole bunch of caveats built into this kind of thing. NPR wants this list to be strictly science fiction and fantasy for grown-ups (admittedly that term alone can be pretty loosely defined). YA SF/F will be covered some other summer. Besides, as NPR put it best, won’t it be nice to have someone besides Harry Potter win for a change?

Also, they are limiting to purely SF/F, so no paranormal or horror. Stephen King is out, and so is Sookie Stackhouse. So is Twilight. On the other, and much more interesting hand, it is perfectly okay to nominate an entire series as a single entity. So the Lord of the Rings counts as one nomination. Five noms to a posting, probably just to keep the lists manageable.

But my brain keeps hashing over what to nominate. There are two lists running in my head. One list is of the books/series that I have read and loved. Those are ones I would recommend in a heartbeat to someone who was remotely interested in science fiction or fantasy. Or someone I could get to sit still for ten seconds and listen.

1. The Lord of the Rings. This is still a comfort read. Or a comfort listen. I have multiple copies in print, and both the unabridged recording and the radio play. Tolkien could write beautiful words, and there are parts of this thing that still ring in my head, and still wring my heart. The tvtropes wiki says there are 7 basic plots; 1)Overcoming the Monster, 2)Rags to Riches, 3)The Quest, 4)Voyage and Return, 5)Comedy, 6)Tragedy and 7)Rebirth. The Lord of the Rings has everything but a comedy plot. There’s comedy in there, but it isn’t a major plot thread.

There are still things in LOTR I would like to have a serious talk with Prof. Tolkien about, if he were still around. The lack of female characters in the Fellowship. The shortage of strong female characters, period. And that’s just for starters. But the quibbles stand out because the whole is so very, very good.

2. American Gods by Neil Gaiman. The premise caught me, and didn’t let go. Every deity that had every been worshiped on American soil was alive, if not well, somewhere in the U.S. Some are still active, and some are trying to blend in, but they are all still here. Then Shadow meets Mr. Wednesday on a plane, and everything starts to fall apart, or come together. American Gods is part of the great American road novel tradition, except it’s written by a British ex-pat who seems to have swallowed a mythopedic dictionary whole. The point where the Egyptian gods were running a funeral parlor in Cairo, Illinois, I think I had tears in my eyes, laughing. But there’s more pathos than humor, and every god and monster has his, or her, day. The ending took me by complete surprise. And I loved every second of it.

3. Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Pratchett’s Discworld can be seen as a parody of any number of fantasy worlds. Or all of them. When he’s funny, he’s screamingly funny. But it’s the kind of humor that makes you think, and more and more, makes you want to weep. Havelock Vetinari, the Patrician of the city of Ankh-Morpork, makes Machiavelli look like an amateur. Death is personified as the bony gentleman with the scythe–on the other hand, his adopted granddaughter is considerably scarier than he is. After all, Death named his horse ‘Binky’. Start with either Mort or Guards, Guards. Just start.

4. Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay. I would include this because reading it once hurt so much I’ve never been able to read it again. Tigana is a country that is lost, gone. It was not just conquered, it was also cursed. The wizard who conquered it laid down a curse that no one who was not born there before the fall could say the name, or hear it spoken. Tigana, beautiful, artistic, advanced, lovely as it was, was doomed to be forgotten in a generation. There was only one chance to save it. A desperate group of survivors banded together to infiltrate the court of the wizard king and assassinate him before the last of those born in their beloved country before its fall became too old to recreate what they had lost. What they did not count on was how long it would take, or how much the part you are playing becomes you, if you play it for too long.

5. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi. You know up front that this is not a coming-of-age story. More like wish-fulfillment, at least up to a point, as all the major characters start out as senior citizens who suddenly get brand new young bodies. Then they have to go fight aliens with those upgraded bods. This reads like one of Robert Heinlein’s space stories at its best, updated 50 years and without Heinlein’s attitudes about women. Or maybe that’s the updating. This is a great space opera. And because the point-of-view character is older, his perspective gets to use that life experience to wonder what the hell is going on. It’s a very important part of the story. He questions, and he wants answers. As he gets them, so does the reader.

These books are ones I have read, finished and would recommend unconditionally. In another post, I’ll list the ones I want to read this summer, and why.

Where ebooks? There ebooks!

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

Last night, we had our first guest come to the house since we put up our books. It reminded me of an essay I read in Wired a couple of weeks ago that has generated a lot of comments on the Digital Book World group on LinkedIn.

The essay, “5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet,\” by John C. Abell, came to mind because of his 5th reason: you can’t use ebooks as an interior design element. He’s right. One of the first things that people used to say whenever they visited us was something about how many books we had. They were everywhere. Every room in every house had bookshelves, overstuffed bookshelves, including the master bedroom. Every flat surface overflowed. We had boxes of books we never unpacked. And since new books we wanted to read continued to be published, we bought more. But in this move, we shed 1,700 books, and we’re down to 2,300, thanks to our iPads. So the impression of tons of books simply isn’t there. There are four bookcases in the front room, and all the others are in our offices upstairs. The physical collection is shrinking.

What did we lose? We lose that impression of being excruciatingly well-read. Possibly, we lose the impression of being insane. YMMV. In the decision of where to start the alphabet, we were conscious that the end of the alphabet and the miscellany that followed would be on immediate display to anyone who entered the house. Visitors see the Tolkien collection, and all our media books, so Star Trek, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, etc will be right by the door. Anyone who doesn’t know we both like Science Fiction and Fantasy will soon figure it out.

On the other hand, everything from 2010 onwards is missing. It’s on one of our iPads. Did we stop reading? Will anyone care? Or is it the mass of books that impresses? Who knows?  All that can be inferred from the iPads is that we’re both geeks. That’s fairly obvious anyway. We also have every game console known to geek-kind currently hooked up to the TV. But books, books imply an air of erudition that the iPads, consoles and computers just don’t match, no matter what’s concealed within them.

His other reasons were also interesting to think about. His number one reason was something I’ve written about before, that eTBRs don’t command your attention. There’s no pile of books in your physical space getting in your way to jump out at you and say “READ ME!” the way there can be with print books. I borrowed one print book from the local library last week. I finished that one pronto. But that may have more to do with my not owning the thing  (I have over 200 print books I own and haven’t read yet in my house) than it being print.

But Abell’s second reason is the one that I can personally get behind. He comments that a big problem to be solved in the ebook business in general is that if you read ebooks a lot, you don’t have one set of shelves, you have a set of shelves for every app, and no easy way to blend them. He’s right. and it is a right royal pain in the patootie. The joy of using an iPad is that it is supplier-agnostic. I can get ebooks from pretty much anywhere, and I do. But that means I’ve got ebooks in every app imaginable; Nook, Kindle, Google, Overdrive, Bluefire, iBooks, Stanza, etc., with no easy way to combine the lists. In the bad, old print days, my first choice TBR pile was the far end of the kitchen counter. I piled everything there. I need an ebook everything TBR app. Except that it isn’t in the ebooksellers’ best interests to allow me to combine my lists, so that app doesn’t exist yet. I’ll confess that I’ve started using the Overdrive Media Console iPad app as my ereader for any EPUB that isn’t tied to a particular company. It’s a surprisingly good general purpose ereader, and it eliminates my need for a couple of those apps. If only it read PDFs…

Ebooks are here to stay. There are still some issues to be resolved, but there’s no longer a question of whether enough people will adopt ebooks to make them profitable for publishers.

On the other hand, books are here to stay, too. Very few technological revolutions completely wipe out the predecessor. We still have radio, it’s just changed. We still have LPs, they’re just a niche market. We may not ride horses for everyday transportation, but horses are still ridden. Books, both to be read and as treasured objects, will always have a place. I recently watched Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, again. Early in the movie, Spock gives Kirk a copy of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities as a birthday present. Ebooks make good reading, but there’s no way to attach ceremonial weight to them.  For that, you still need a book.