Dan Simmons’ Ilium packs a lot of story into 570 pages– but you’ll have to wait for Olympos (to be released next Spring) to learns how it ends.
Ilium won the 2004 Locus Readers Poll Award for best novel, and is a finalist for this year’s Hugo, to be awarded in August.
The Hugos will be given out, once again, at the World SF Con, which will be in Boston this year. I hope to review more of the Hugo-nominated novels, and the shorter fiction, over the course of the summer.
Five short stories have been nominated. They are ranked and linked here (read them online), with my thoughts.
Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, part one of The Baroque Cycle, runs a scant 927 pages. Part 2, The Confusion is already available, so you can take both with you to the beach or cottage!
Judging from Quicksilver, these books, even more than Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, form a coherent whole. My review must be read with the understanding that nearly 2000 pages remain, and the story, at present, is incomplete.
Larry Niven has forwarded a message from Tor to the
larryniven-l discussion list, asking for people to be
made aware of the official
Ringworld’s Children page of Tor’s
website. It was released on June 1. I have my copy
already, but I want to reread The Ringworld
Throne first; I’m 41 pages into that one.
Expect both books to be reviewed by the end of the
summer. (Ringworld and The Ringworld
Engineers have already been reviewed; see this
list while I still have that webspace.) UPDATED: Title changed from Ringworld’s Throne official site to Ringworld’s Children official site to match the actual content of the article.
I re-read this book at the behest of a fellow Bureau author, who told me that he’d been asked to review it but was swamped. I promised I’d review it m
yself as soon as I possibly could – and promptly blew it. That was several months ago. But I have read the material once more, and am ready to shove my
opinions down your throat in the fine tradition of literary reviews. The short review? Read this book.
Continue reading →
Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry features a bloodsucker unlike any other in fiction. He has a mosquitoesque device in his tongue, instead of fangs. He appears to be very long-lived, though he recalls little of his past lives and knows nothing of his origins.
He also meets some unusual humans in this 1980 novel, comprised of related novellas.
If you’ve somehow managed to live your life without
being spoiled with the true nature of the
relationship between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, read it
now.
Continue reading →
“Mars was empty before we came. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened….”
Can it be? Bureau42 has never reviewed the SF novel of the 1990s?
If you haven’t read Red Mars, the first of Kim Stanley Robinson’s celebrated Mars trilogy, go out and buy it now. Because it begins in years most of us should live to see, it will become dated in our lifetime. Right now, especially right now, we can believe it will happen.
So Connie Willis steps into the elevator and I introduce myself and mention that someone has just quoted her, only moments earlier. She is pleased. Then I have to admit that, no, despite her multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, I haven’t actually read any of her work. “Well, read her stuff!” her friend says, as we part at the ground floor.
The Doomsday Book took both the Hugo and the Nebula for best novel back in 1992. Yes, Willis makes heavy use of handwavium . A near-future world very like ours, but with time-travel, seems so unlikely as to be impossible. It is necessary, however, for the novel to work. Willis uses the premise to tell a remarkably well-researched and well-crafted story.
The first half of the Amber Chronicles have now been
reviewed. The rest will be reviewed eventually as
well. (General impressions of books 6-10: good, but
not as good as 1-5.)