![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
james_nicoll which is where I got this from):Best Novel: The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon (born 1963; first Nebula or Hugo)
Best Novella: "Fountain of Age", by Nancy Kress (born 1948; fourth Nebula, also has a Hugo)
Best Novelette: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", by Ted Chiang (born 1967; fourth Nebula, also has a Hugo)
Best Short Story: "Always", by Karen Joy Fowler (born 1950; second Nebula)
I note that 1) Once again, at least one of the Nebulas has gone to a first-time winner; there has never been a year without at least one first-time Nebula winner; 2) two out of four went to women; the Nebulas are more gender-balanced than the Hugos; and 3) two out of four were born between 1942 and 1951, whereas the average number of Nebulas won in previous years by authors aged between 57 and 66 is almost exactly 1, further evidence for my assertion that authors of that cohort win twice as many awards.
The winning novel is the only one of the nominees I had read (or indeed intend to read), and I enjoyed it. "Fountain of Age" is on my reading list for the Hugos; I've already read "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", and wouldn't be surprised if Chiang pulls off the double again, though I have not yet read any of the other Hugo nominees in that category.
Other Nebula/SFWA stuff:
Nebula for Best Screenplay: Pan's Labyrinth
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
Damon Knight Grand Master for 2008: Michael Moorcock
SFWA Service Award: Melisa Michaels and Graham P. Collins
Author Emeritus: Ardath Mayhar (who I hadn't heard of)
SFWA President: Russell Davis (whew!)
SFWA VP: Elizabeth Moon
SFWA Secretary: Mary Robinette Kowal
SFWA Treasurer: Amy Casil
SFWA Eastern Regional: Bud Sparhawk
SFWA Overseas Regional Director: Ian Whates
Well done Serbia on winning Eurovision; time for some good news there.
Novels: The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner is owned by more LibraryThing users than any two other nominees combined.
Novellas: only four??? One of those by Michael Burstein??? And the panel couldn't bring themselves to add anything else???
Novelettes: again, interesting that the jury couldn't bring themselves to add anything. Peter S. Beagle has a shot at winning the Hugo/Nebula double, the only one of last year's Hugo winners to be on the short list (Spin having been pruned from the long list).
Short Stories: haven't read any of them yet, except helen Remembers the Stork Club, downloaded from FictionWise and read in new York last week (and by coincidence, it is set there). Will report back.
Scripts: Go Doctor Who!
davidbrider has done a compilation of Doctor Who opening titles. I would be interested in feedback on this from those of you who have never watched Doctor Who and wonder what the heck I am writing about - I think it's a rather gripping compilation, though there is an unfortunate (and I guess unavoidable) change of tempo for the eighth and ninth Doctors (who are not themselves portrayed here). via
yhlee, a time-lapse video of a drive from LA to NY; I found the music forgettable but the images fascinating.via
coalescent at Vector, all the Nebula winners in haiku.I'm off to Berlin for a couple of days; be good while I'm away and see you when I'm back.
And so I have three sets of interview questions, which I will answer as follows:
From
loveandgarbage - Your LJ is always very interesting to read and you exhibit an eclectic range of interests. What has led you to have such a diverse range of interests; and do you feel that this range of interests led you to seek out your work, or your work led you to broaden your interests? ( answer )
- Some years ago Updike wrote a novel entitled "Memories of the Ford Administration". What are yours? ( answer )
- Given your analyses of SF book award winners do you think book awards reward the best novels, or are other factors at play? ( answer )
- Which Wodehouse books would you recommend to someone new to his work? ( answer )
- If you had the power to erase one film, one book, and one TV show from history with the consequence that no-one was aware they had ever existed what would you choose and why? ( answer )
electricant : - What's the best thing about being a father? ( answer )
- I get the impression you have friends dotted all over Europe. Is this the case? How do you go about maintaining long distance friendships with people in other countries? ( answer )
- Why do you book blog? What do you get out of it? ( answer )
- How do you feel about the way geek and sf communities sometimes characterise themselves as being full of people with autistic-spectrum-type tendencies? Do you think it raises genuine awareness of autistic spectrum disorders, or does it only create misunderstandings? ( answer )
- How important is your career to you? If it all fell to pieces tomorrow how would you feel and what would you do? ( answer )
ninebelow : - How on Earth do you find the time to read so many books? ( answer )
- You got very angry about George Osbourne's off the cuff remarks about autism early in the year. What is the balance to be struck between holding people accountable for their remarks and avoiding public figures sticking entirely to vetted talking points? ( answer )
- What is your favourite language? ( answer )
- Can you ever imagine yourself going into politics (ie as an elected representative)? ( answer )
- What is the worst book ever to win a Hugo or Nebula? ( answer )
powered by performancing firefox
2) In case anyone interested hasn't already seen it, the Robert Anton Wilson appeal has been a success. The man himself responds:
To steal from Jack Benny, "I do not deserve this, but I also have severe leg problems and I don't deserve them either." ...You have all reminded me that despite George W. Bush and all his cohorts, there is still a lot of beautiful kindness in the world.3) If you're wondering why I haven't posted any book reviews yet this month, given that it's already the 7th, the reason is that in the spirit of this post I'm reading Neal Stephenson's The System of the World and it is taking me, er, a long time.
4) I did read Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and came away somewhat unconvinced. It seems to me almost axiomatic that real artificial intelligence, whatever it turns out to be, will be very different from the way humans experience intelligence and consciousness; the Turing test is basically a parlour game. But I really hate "cute robot" sf stories, and perhaps I was biased against Turing's argument because I feel he bears some responsibility for that particular genre.
5)
del_c posted a response to my various crazed rantings about how authors born between 1942 and 1951 have won twice as many Hugos and Nebulas as would have been expected. I think his argument fails even a simple visual inspection of the data he presents, but look for yourself. fjm offers an interesting theory in a comment to my last post on the subject; I should like to be able to quantify it a bit better.6) The Belgian municipal elections are tomorrow, and voting is compulsory for those foreigners who (like me) bothered to sign up to the electoral register. Our mayor has been in power since the 1976 reorganisation of local government and is running for a sixth term. There's very little to choose between the parties; the Mayor's list of candidates is officially independent but unofficially Liberal (the Liberals in Belgian are to the right of centre); he is in coalition with the Christian Democrats, led here by our local MEP; the Socialist Party leaflet had no identifiable policies in it at all; one of our neighbours is standing for the Greens so I will probably vote for her. (The far-right "Vlaams Belang", formerly the "Vlaams Blok", have no candidates here.)
7) Thanks to everyone who has posted good wishes on certain entries recently. You know who you are.
8) Good night.
james_nicoll's post on "The Secret of the Over-Achieving Cohort". Most of the comments on that post (which number well over a hundred in total) are dedicated to disproving Doug Muir's over-hasty statement that "there are very few SF writers under 35 today, and basically none under 30". There were, however, several directed to my argument, as follows:( why it's real )
( Here it is )
In summary: authors born between 1942 and 1951 have won almost twice as many Hugos and Nebulas as might be expected, comparing them with all Hugo and Nebula winners.
Well, that's it: I have now read every single novel that has won the Nebula Award.
And while this one is not in the top half of my list, it's not so very close to the bottom either. Most of it is a rather good retelling of Heinlein's Tunnel In The Sky, with better world-building and characterisation. Mia, our narrator and heroine, has grown up on a generation starship where the young folks must endure a month on the surface of whatever nearby planet is handy to become full citizens. Her father, incidentally, is a senior politician on the starship.
This better-than-average sf Bildungsroman is then completely wrecked by the concluding section, in which Mia's people decide to blow up the planet on which she underwent her rite of passage - not because of the brutal treatment meted out by its inhabitants to her and her friends, not because they might be a potential military threat in the future, but purely because they don't use contraception enough. A truly great author might have made this into a great sf story (or at least a satisfactory denouement), but unfortunately Panshin isn't up to it.
So, an OK book with a terrible conclusion.
Did it deserve to win the Nebula? In an indifferent year, it would have been excusable. But this was up against the Hugo-winning Stand on Zanzibar, and also against two books that I reckon are better than either, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. So, as often happens, a very peculiar Nebula winner, but at least not one that is as embarrassing as The Terminal Experiment or The Quantum Rose.
This is not quite as bad a book as I had been led to believe. The prose is often leaden - in particular, the cringe-worthy opening passage which I think should be used as a model of how not to write in classes for impressionable young writers, and the numerous info-dumps idicating that the characters have read all the available scientific literature up to 1994 (which is a shame as most of the book is set in 2011). What appears to be the killer idea of the first half of the book - that science can detect the soul leaving the body at death - is simply forgotten for the last third of the narrative, which plays the rogue-AI's in the net cliche as a murder mystery, leading to an unconvincing resolution. The detective character herself violates standard operating procedure by burbling her theories about the crime to one of the key suspects.
But apart from that, the characters were not too unbelievable and the exploration of the issues of artificial intelligence and the scientific basis of the soul not too undergraduate (with all due respect to my undergraduate readers). And he does predict a future Pope Benedict XVI. (Of course, whether the present Pope will still be there in 2011 is another matter.)
Still, it is pretty surprising that this won the 1995 Nebula Award for Best Novel. I confess I haven't read any of the other nominees, and if this was voted better than them I don't really intend to. (Actually, I may have read Beggars and Choosers by Nancy Kress - I know I read one of the later books in the series, and was seriously unimpressed.) The Hugo for the equivalent year went to Bujold's Mirror Dance, which is the start of the superb four-book climax to the Vorkosigan saga (as continued in Memory, Komarr, and A Civil Campaign).
This is not the worst Nebula-winning novel I have read - that title goes to either The Quantum Rose by Catherine Asaro or The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov - but it is certainly in the bottom four. I can't decide if I like it less than Neuromancer, because I can't remember anything about the Gibson book, even though I know I have read it several times.
OK, only Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin to go...
Two more Nebula winners to read, Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer.
I thought I'd read a fair amount of Silverberg when I was a teenager but this one had definitely passed me by. I thought it was rather good. The narrator, living in a culture so reserved that the words "I" and "me" are obscenities, gets hold of a drug that allows him to telepathically share thoughts with others, and sets out to revolutionise his society. Sounds a bit like a metaphor for the late 1960s, but I thought it was very well done. Would make an interesting paired reading with Dying Inside. Probably deserved to win the Nebula that year; I haven't read any of the other nominees except The Lathe of Heaven which is not as good as this. It was beaten for the Hugo by To Your Scattered Bodies Go, which I guess is more of a Hugo book than a Nebula book. (As a Zelazny fan, I'd have voted for Jack of Shadows that year myself.)
Finally got around to the next in my series of reviews of fiction which has won both Hugo and Nebula, here.
Only three Nebula winners left to read now, Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin, A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer.
I found the surface narrative engaging enough - though I did wonder why the protagonist ("the bureaucrat") is never actually named. There's obviously lots going on below the surface too. But this was up against Bujold's Barrayar for both Nebula and Hugo; and my vote (as was the Hugo voters') is for Bujold.
Only four Nebula winners left to read now, Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin, A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg, Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick, and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer. I checked the 1989 shortlist to see what this book beat: I must have read both Prentice Alvin and Ivory shortly after they were published, and remember the latter as particularly engaging, though I think that The Healer's War is better. (The others were Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson, Good News From Outer Space by John Kessel and Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen; this was the equivalent year that Hyperion won the Hugo for Best novel, with the Card and Anderson books on both shortlists.)
This was one of those years when the Nebula system managed to recognise an exceptional novel that would never win a Hugo. The Healer's War is a somewhat autobiographical account of the Vietnam war as seen by an American military nurse, with precisely one sfnal element: a magic amulet, with slightly healing powers, which gives the narrator the power of empathy with the Vietnamese of all sides and of none (and indeed with her fellow Americans as well). It is a fair comment that the magic amulet is a literary device that enables the author to tell the story she wants (Scarborough herself says so in an afterword). But I think it's still entirely legitimate to count the book within the genre, and to acknowledge its merits accordingly.
It's a stark contrast with other war stories I have read, which tend to concentrate on the view of the individual soldier (eg, Catch-22 and War and Peace; see also my reviews here, here, here and rather notoriously here). The Healer's War concentrates on the non-soldiers involved in war, and indeed its military characters tend to be pretty unpleasant, whether Americans or Vietnamese of either side. But I felt that none of them slipped into caricature; the narrator's commitment to empathy helped to avoid that trap. It was a gripping and moving read.
Vietnam is coming somewhat indirectly into my life at the moment in a way I had never expected. I hadn't expected it in this book either - it arrived from a second hand dealer the day before we left on holiday, and I packed it without looking at it beyond checking that the title and author were correct. I shall be learning a lot more about Vietnam in years to come, but this was a surprisingly thought-provoking starting point.
Now only five Nebula winners left to read - Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin, A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg, The Healer's War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick, and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer. This got Haldeman his third Nebula for best Novel earlier this year (and led to him surfing my website).
Well, its high points are less high but its low points not as low as the three other books on the Nebula shortlist which I had read (Air, Going Postal and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell). It bears a very strong resemblance to Octavia Butler's Wild Seed, with the story being the interweaving of two threads about immortals (in this case, probably alien) living in our world, who are drawn together by an alien artifact discovered in the Pacific Ocean in 2019. Indeed, perhaps the award of the Nebula was partly a tribute to Butler's novel. Haldeman, of course, puts his own riffs on it - basically, he brings in much more science, and much more of the military, and makes it into a love story as well. All adds up to a very enjoyable book, which I would certainly have overlooked if it had not won the award.
The latest in my quest to finish reading all the winners of the Nebula Award for Best Novel. (Now only six left - Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin, A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg, The Healer's War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick, The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer and Camouflage by Joe Haldeman.)
This is a very good book, one of those rare but welcome moments when the Nebula process picked up on a real gem of a novel that had been overlooked elsewhere, even though it is only barely a genre novel, if anything more of a ghost story than sf or fantasy. The plot concerns an estranged mother and daughter, the former a famous archaeologist working on a Mayan site in the Yucatan, the latter escaping from a set of bad relationships to track down her mother, and the mother's ability to see the ghosts of the past (which has incidentally helped her get lucky with spectacular finds during her career). The writing alternates between first-person POV's of the two women. The third character is a Mayan priestess buried on the site who attempts to project her own life experiences onto the modern women. The writing is gripping and convincing, and although several of the layers of significance are pretty explicit, it worked for me. I'm glad it worked for the 1987 Nebula voters too.
- Mood:
fanboyish
autopope, ianmcdonald, shsilver, Ken, Paul and Cheryl all of whom I think do read me here from time to time (and apologies as well as congratulations to anyone else seeing this who I missed).I don't think he reads this, but in case he does, an extra shouted "Congrats" to Dominic Green, who I haven't seen since student days in Cambridge, though we were in touch a few years ago, er, in 2000 now that I look at it.
Novels: Am stunned and surprised that Anansi Boys didn't make it to the short list. Perhaps it came out too late in the year? Perhaps the reason I particularly liked it - that it marked a move onto slightly different territory for Gaiman - worked against it for most fans? Will obviously have to get hold of Old Man's War and Spin; I have already read the other three.
Novellas: The only two I have read were the Link (which must surely win) and the Sawyer (which rather to my surprise I nominated).
Novelettes: Have read none of them. This will change.
Short Story: Despite my congrats to Dominic, nobody stands a chance against Margo Lanagan.
Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form: Serenity, obviously.
Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form: Good Lord, I have actually seen four of these - the three Doctor Who nominations (for four episodes) and Kim Newman/Paul McAuley's Hugo presentation last year. Despite
pickwick's surprise, it's not so very surprising that the two Worldcon live events both made it to the shortlist. I have a vague feeling this has happened once or twice before but have not yet found supporting evidence.pnh comments, "It’s one of our subcultural myths that we’re “neophilic,” that we routinely acclaim strong new work, and in fact since the first Hugo Awards in 1953, fully 22 debut novels have been among the finalists." He is entirely right to be sceptical of that myth. In fact, the Nebula voters are much more neophilic than the Hugo voters. It is some time since I last crunched the numbers; but in 2002, the 178 Hugos for fiction had been won by 82 different authors while the 148 Nebulas had been won by 89 different authors. If I have counted right, five of the 16 Hugos awarded since then have gone to first time winners (including three last year) - six out of 20 if you count Ray Bradbury's Retro-Hugo; compared with eight out of twelve Nebulas. Having said that, there will be at least one first-time Hugo winner this year as (hat-tip Locus Online) none of the Novelette nominees has ever won it before. And I think we can add Margo Lanagan as well.truepenny came up with a meme - to list all the novels which have won the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, Tiptree, Dick, Stoker and World Fantasy Awards and, as so often, bold the ones you have read. It was a pretty short-lived meme; in the next couple of days 34 people did it (all but one on livejournal) and then it died a death as these things do.I thought it would be intertesting (well, interesting for me, anyway) to crunch through the numbers and see how many people of this self-selected group have actually read each of the award-winners. Excluding the Stoker winners, which seemed to have far less take-up, and the Sidewise Awards, which only one person listed, the results for the other 169 books are as follows (top twenty-ish above the cut tag, and the three which nobody had read below it):
32 (1st): Frank Herbert, Dune
29 (2nd): Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
28 (joint 3rd): Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
27 (5th): J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
26 (joint 6th): Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
William Gibson, Neuromancer
25 (joint 8th): Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Larry Niven, Ringworld
Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
24 (joint 12th): Connie Willis, Doomsday Book
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
23 (joint 14th): David Brin, Startide Rising
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
22 (joint 16th): David Brin, The Uplift War
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
21 (19th): Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
20 (joint 20th): Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
( others, all the way down to... )
0 (joint 166th): Carol Emshwiller, The Mount
Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife
Stepan Chapman, The Troika
I confess that I have never heard of either Louise Erdrich or Stepan Chapman, let alone their respective award-winning novels. Howver, I have read the top forty or so. The first I haven't yet read is China Mountain Zhang, followed by Little, Big and Mythago Wood, and then Thomas the Rhymer and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.
That Dune came out on top overall is not so very surprising. I'm pleased by Le Guin's performance. Slightly surprised that Flowers for Algernon did not do even better - I thought it was a standard high-school assignment (certainly the most-visited page of my own website) but perhaps if you strictly count the novel rather than the original short story the count goes down. Other interesting data there as well, but I have been working on this for long enough.
(Thanks very much to
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
agrumer, apotropaism, badgerbag, blue_condition, http://browriter.blogspot.com, burger_eater, communicator, ellen_fremedon, feyandstrange, firecat, gummitch, hollowpoint, jodawi, jry, kangeiko, katlinel, kerravonsen, ladyoflight2004, lenora_rose, linda_joyce, marykaykare, nhw, nickeyb, pariyal, peake, pigeonhed, sbisson, shsilver, sooguy, spacedoutlooney, tensegrity, tinaconnolly, vierran45 and especially truepenny for putting it into its standard form - user names link to the relevant entry in each case.)
9) The Einstein Intersection, by Samuel R. DelanyNebula winner from way back. I quite liked this at first, with the re-telling of the Orpheus and other myths very reminiscent of Zelazny's This Immortal and of Anderson's "Goat Song" which must have been writen at almost the same time. But it got a bit rambling and disjointed at the end. Also any author who inserts bits of his own writing journal into the text is just showing off. I'm rather surprised that this beat both Zelazny's Lord of Light amd Silverberg's Thorns, but then I have often been surprised by Nebula winners. (The other two nominees were Chthon by Piers Anthony, which I haven't read, and The Eskimo Invasion by Hayden Howard, who I haven't even heard of.)
OK, six Nebula winners left to read.
Thanks to
truepenny here, burger_eater here, gummitch here, peake here, sbisson here and ajshepherd here.( Read more... )
Bah, just realised that I've been reading Dhalgren for the last few days in the mistaken belief that it was also a Nebula winner. Oh well.
Clifford D. Simak's "Grotto of the Dancing Deer".
Surprisingly little to be written about it, in the end, probably partly why it took me so long. Right, now about those other reviews I owe Keith Brooke...
2) Moving Mars, by Greg Bear
This Nebula winner is the autobiography of Casseia Majumdar, Martian stateswoman, who is at the heart of an independence struggle that ends up with the entire planet escaping not just politically but physically from the rest of the solar system. All kinds of resonances in here from sf's history - the three that came immediately to mind were Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, also his Red Planet and Asimov's very early short story, "The Weapon Too Deadly To Use". Plus the deadly nano-bots coming to life and devastating the human settlements, though a classic and almost cliched image of sf, were done very well here.
I really enjoyed this book and I'm rather surprised I hadn't heard more about it from others. In particular, the main hard sf element of the plot, the acquisition by a relatively weak political player (the Martian government) of what is effectively a weapon of mass destruction, seemed to me awfully relevant to contemporary politics, if anything rather more so than when the book was first published in 1993. I guess that Bear's vision of a revolutionary human society on Mars is less grandiose (though I think no less ambitious) than Kim Stanley Robinson's massive trilogy which was coming out at around the same time, and perhaps his portrayal of how the political process appears to insiders - which I felt was realistic and well-informed - was insufficiently romanticised to leave a lasting impression in people's memories.
I raised my eyebrows at first when Casseia was appointed to senior government office before the age of thirty (in earth years); but I had lunch yesterday with a prime minister (admittedly of a small and not-quite-independent European country) who was first appointed to that job when he was 28, and the circumstances described seemed to me to make the scenario just about plausible. And, of course, great stories are often told about unusual events.
Moving Mars scores very well on the sensawunda scale, better indeed than most Nebula winners. I felt it also worked well on the human level, with Casseia's decisions and mistakes, both political and personal, convincingly portrayed. I have had my complaints about some past Nebula winners, but this one was a good call.
I've read only one Delany novel before, one of his minor ones (either The Towers of Toron or The Fall of the Towers, not sure which) and wasn't wildly impressed. This is miles better, and helps me understand why he developed the early reputation that he did. I had been expecting something like a half-way point between Zelazny and Dick; in fact, Delany comes across as more disciplined than either. A lot of Babel-17 is about sensing the universe in a different way - Delany's spaceships require three navigators, an Eye, an Ear and a Nose, who experience space by visual, auditory and olfactory means; and the language Babel-17 itself, the centre of the whole mystery, is also about a new way of understanding the universe. Where a Dick novel would leave you wondering if it all made sense, Delany leaves you in no doubt that there is a real universe out there and it's just a matter of how you choose to interact with it. As for the Zelazny comparison, Zelazny would sometimes let his joy of writing get in the way of having a sensible plot; but Delany's plot is actually rather simple, and as it turns out almost cliched. There's also an aspect all Delany's own, which is the polyamory of several key characters - indeed, one former lover of our heroine is the rather transparently anagrammatic writer Muels Aranlyde.
OK, only 8 more Nebula winners to go...
July Books 1) Sword/Citadel: The Sword of the Lictor & The Citadel of the Autarch, by Gene Wolfe.
Once I'd read all the novels to have won the Hugo, I realised I was only ten short of reading all the novels that have won the Nebula as well, and soundings indicated this might be a good place to start, in that The Claw of the Conciliator (the second half of the first volume, as I bought them) won the 1982 award. I admit I was also intrigued by having read The Shadow of the Torturer and The Sword of the Lictor many years ago and glad of the excuse to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. And I wanted to find out what was behind John Clute's breathlessly enthuiastic (if slightly spoilerish) write-up of it in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:
( Clute quote )He got a lot more out of it than I did. I found the books an entertaining, surprisingly quick read, with indeed a sense of the author playing games with us readers through having an unreliable narrator; I loved the use of language, both the vocabulary of "fuligin", "destrier", etc, and the general descriptions (especially when it turns out that some of them are indeed partial); and I picked up the occasional homage to Borges. I appreciated the understated way in which various characters were dealt with, to the point where I felt sorrier about ( spoiler ) But is this series really so very much deeper than Zelazny's much shorter sequence of The Changing Land and Dilvish the Damned, published at almost exactly the same time? Maybe I'm just too tired to appreciate all its subtleties. Clearly the series arouses deep enthusiasm, not just from John Clute but also here, here, and here/here. However I did enjoy what I thought I was reading. Perhaps I'll reread in a few months and see if I spot anything I'd missed.
- Mood: awake
- Babel-17 by Samuel R Delany
- The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R Delany
- Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin
- A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg
- The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe
- The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy
- The Healer's War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
- Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick
- Moving Mars by Greg Bear
- The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer
- Mood: curious