The Coode Street Podcast

Hosts Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe have created a relaxed and knowledgeable podcast about books and the science fiction community. They frequently have read and praised the best books of the year before they become available to the public, which is valuable to any reader.

As The Coode Street Podcast has matured, their interviews have improved and become the strength of the podcast. I would go so far as to say that these interviews have become important listening for anyone interested in science fiction, fantasy, and related fiction.

Here’s an overview of interviews so far in 2012 that were remarkable:

Elizabeth Hand
Hand discusses her two new novels, Available Dark (sequel to Generation Loss) and Radiant Days. Gary Wolfe suggests that the arts are central to Hand’s recent work, which frequently deal with struggling artists, photographers, painters, the theatre, and Rimbaud in Radiant Days. Hand finds that novella-length may be her natural story length. (follow here)

Ellen Kushner
Kushner shares the process of adapting her novel Swordpoint into an audio book, available on Audible.com. (follow here)

Barry Malzberg
Malzberg, a grand old man of the science fiction field, whose memories and experiences are a treasure, advances his theory that the 1950s is the Golden Age of science fiction. Kindly overlook the comically maladroit use of Skype. (follow here)

Michael Dirda
Essayist and long-time book reviewer for the Washington Post, Dirda shares his enthusiasm for the fathers of genre fiction: Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. (follow here)

Peter Straub
Straub and his hosts consider the wonders and joys of reading Gene Wolfe (I could listen to listen to them talk about Gene Wolfe all day long). Straub praises the work of Brian Evenson and Caitlín Keirnan. He calls Keirnan’s new book, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012), a masterpiece. They discuss the limitations of genre boundaries and the Library of America’s notions of genre. (follow here)

Older episodes of The Coode Street Podcast have featured many fine guests, including Ursula K. Le Guin. Unfortunately they spent the Le Guin interview discussing the (by all accounts) under-informed book of essays about science fiction by Margaret Atwood, instead of talking about something more interesting, like what writing Le Guin herself is working on, or what books that she has read recently that she is excited about.

A list of prior guests reads like a Who’s Who of the science fiction community: Kim Stanley Robinson, Ian McDonald. Alastair Reynolds, Jo Walton, John Clute, Ellen Klages, Eileen Gunn, Geoff Ryman, Terry Bisson, Greg Bear, Karen Lord, Ellen Datlow, Jeffrey Ford and many others.

Recent arrival

The Pottawatomie Giant & Other Stories
by Andy Duncan

So this arrived in the mail. It's Andy Duncan's second collection of short fiction, The Pottawatomie Giant & Other Stories (2012), from PS Publishing. His first collection appeared over a decade ago. This new collection includes "The Chief Designer," a novella that was shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, one of my favorites. It concerns Sergei Korolev, the innovative man behind the early successes of the Soviet space program. Until his death, his name was considered a state secret and he was known only as "Chief Designer." Michael Swanwick wrote in Locus: "A portrayal ... of the single most positive enterprise of the twentieth century -- the emergence of life into outer space. Shorn of the usual American jingoism, the beauty and tragic romance of that emergence is laid bare."

Duncan, one of the best short fiction writers in the science fiction and fantasy genres, frequently explores themes relating to the Southern U.S. The title story, the novelette "The Pottawatomie Giant," won the World Fantasy Award.

Related link:
PS Publishing

Oscars, Hugos, the nature of awards

All award systems are flawed; I hope we can all agree. Popular vote awards reflect popular tastes, but rarely reward artistic merit or innovation or subtlety. Small jury awards can become echo chambers for a narrow set of viewpoints. And so on.

Still, some are more flawed than others. Take, for instance, the recent Oscars awarded by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  There probably are no more commercially successful awards in the world than the Oscars. As a marketing exercise it is rivaled only by the Grammy’s. Unfortunately, the quality of the award winners is less remarkable.

There is something systemically wrong with the methods of the Academy, as evidenced by the premier award category, the Best Picture. Most results are blandly likable and safe (The Artist, The Kings Speech), or bloated epics that rely too heavily on their own seriousness (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Titanic, Braveheart, Dances with Wolves), or sentimental slop (Titanic, Forrest Gump, Driving Miss Daisy, Out of Africa, Terms of Endearment).

Only rarely does the Academy find its way to a movie that reflects the best in film. Looking down the list, I think the hit rate for finding excellence is roughly once every 10 years. While you, dear reader, and I will likely disagree on which film is that once-a-decade wonder, I hope we can agree that one-in-10 is a dismal, dysfunctional hit rate. There were two movies in recent years that I thought demonstrated achievement at or near the best of the year: The Hurt Locker (2009) and No Country for Old Men (2007). Weighing against these is the truly bad Best Picture winner, Crash (2005), the most egregiously odious choice in the past 10 years.

Among 2011 films, I’ve seen three so far that I thought were first rate: The Tree of Life, A Separation, and Martha Marcy May Marlene. Only one of these, The Tree of Life, was on the Best Picture shortlist and, not surprisingly, it didn’t win.

Closer to the topic of this blog, the Hugo Awards, a popular vote award open to anyone willing to pay for a supporting membership in the annual World Science Fiction Convention ($50 this year), is subject to the same blind-spots. For all the criticism of the Hugo Award choices I have made on this blog, the Hugos have a better record than the Oscars. Just glancing at the Best Novel winners:

The Windup Girl (2009) by Paolo Bacigalupi
The City & the City (2009) by China Miéville (tie)
The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007) by Michael Chabon
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) by Susanna Clarke

That’s four first-rate Hugo Best Novel winners in the past 10 years. Not bad.

Related links:

Oscar voters are overwhelmingly white, male, old

Why Best Picture Oscars are like a Broken Clock

Links to essays, reviews, book sales

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer.
The Los Angeles Times today published a book review by Chris Barton about Geoff Dyer's new book, an essay on Soviet-era director Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker. (One of the greatest of all science fiction films, according to your humble blog correspondent.) "For all the witty, self-referential asides that can make the book feel like the smartest 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' episode ever written, it's Dyer's emotional tie to Writer's journey and the wish fulfillment of that vocation that stay with you the longest after the lights finally come up." (follow here)

Rob Latham tackles The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, along with a handful of Dick's science fiction novels in an essay at Los Angeles Review of Books. "Rereading Dick’s early novels through the lens of the events recounted in the Exegesis, just as Dick himself eventually did, shows how consistently the themes of thought-control and ambiguous revelation informed his fiction ..." (follow here)

Graham Sleight’s essay on three of Samuel R. Delany's books appeared in the most recent issue of Locus.
"Dhalgren is that rarest of things: a book that, decades on, has not been normalised. So many innovations of style or content in SF become commodities, to be sold at ever lower prices in ever more ways. Many people have learned a great deal from Delany’s work – I’m thinking particularly of William Gibson’s focus on sensations and the surface of things. But Dhalgren is a book without real successors." (follow here)

The Nebula Awards shortlist of nominees for work from 2011 was announced a few days ago. I've read three of the best  novel nominees:
   God’s War by Kameron Hurley (Night Shade)
   Embassytown by China Miéville (Del Rey)
   Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)
All three are quite strong. God's War is a first novel and while it's the weakest of the three, it's an exceptional first novel. The three nominees that I haven't read look interesting as well.(follow here)

Lavie Tidhar expresses his disappointment in China Miéville's Embassytown. "(I)t is a niggling feeling; it is a sense of regret, and of puzzlement, that afflicts the non-Anglo reader when coming upon Embassytown. Of missed opportunities, of tired acceptance of the sign that says, This Is Not Your Future." (follow here)

Aqueduct Press is offering Rebecca Ore's new novel Time and Robbery on sale until March 1. (follow here)

New York Review Books is offering a 50 percent off sale on some titles, including science fiction novels Inverted World by Christopher Priest and The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. (follow here)

More links, more best SF of the year

Karen Burnham compiled a list of links to free online fiction, where each story appears on the 2011 Locus Recommended Reading List.

Jeff VanderMeer offers his best books of 2011 list. (follow here)

The Not If You Were The Last Short Story On Earth blog offers up its best short fiction of the year lists by Alex, Alisa, Tansy, Mondy, and Sarah P.

Library of America announces two new omnibus editions for 2012, edited by Gary K. Wolfe, that will collect nine classic science fiction novels from the 1950s. (follow here)

New York Review Books announces Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, edited by Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich, to be published April 2012. (follow here)

More best books of the year lists

Locus Magazine has made its 2011 Recommended Reading List available. This annual list is the most comprehensive best books and short fiction list in the science fiction community. Locus offers only the list online, for the commentary that goes with it, pick up the magazine itself. If you’re serious about understanding the science fiction field, you already subscribe. If you’re on the fence about subscribing, this annual year in review issue is the most essential issue of the year.

Other lists include the Strange Horizons' roundup of the year’s best from a roll call of editors and contributors, a varied and fascinating compilation. I direct your attention to the entries by L. Timmel Duchamp, Niall Harrison, Paul Kincaid, Farah Mendlesohn, and Adam Roberts.

Over at Ambling Along the Aqueduct, the blog of the excellent small publisher Aqueduct Press, there have been a series of best of the year posts. Rachel Swirsky has written about the best novellas, best novelettes, and best short stories of 2011. In addition, Ambling Along the Aqueduct presented a series of “best reading” posts from a diverse community of contributors. The whole series is interesting. Especially pertinent to best SF books of 2011 are:  Cheryl Morgan, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Carrie Devall, Lynne M. Thomas, Jeffrey Ford, Cat Rambo, and Liz Henry.

Other best books of the year lists: Michael Berry of the San Francisco Chronicle, Lev Grossman, and George R.R. Martin.

Locus Year in Review for 2011

The Locus annual "year in review" issue is available now. It features recommended reading lists and commentary from reviewers, editors, and professionals in the science fiction community.

Here's a sample of some of the best books of the year list-making that Locus provides:

Jonathan Strahan's picks:
Planesrunner, Ian McDonald (Pyr)
Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness (Walker UK; Candlewick)
Two Worlds and in Between, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean)
Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking)
The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz; Orbit US)
After the Apocalypse, Maureen McHugh (Small Beer)
Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey (Orbit)
The Dragon Path, Daniel Abraham (Orbit)
Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, Gavin Grant & Kelly Link, eds. (Candlewick: Walker UK)

Russell Letson's picks:
Daybreak Zero, John Barnes (Ace)
This Shared Dream, Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor)
7th Sigma, Steven Gould (Tor)
Earthbound, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
Rule 34, Charles Stross (Ace)
Scratch Monkey, Charles Stross (NESFA)
The Children of the Sky, Vernor Vinge (Tor)
Deep State, Walter Jon Williams (Orbit)

Graham Sleight's picks:
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller: Volume 1, Carol Emshwiller (Nonstop)
The Uncertain Places, Lisa Goldstein (Tachyon)
This Shared Dream, Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor)
Unpossible and Other Stories, Daryl Gregory (Fairwood)
After the Apocalypse, Maureen McHugh (Small Beer)
Embassytown, China Miéville (Del Rey)
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday)
The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht (Random House)
The Islanders, Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
Paradise Tales, Geoff Ryman (Small Beer)
Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
Home Fires, Gene Wolfe (Tor)

My own choices fall somewhere between Strahan and Sleight. I'm playing catch up with these industry insiders and their lists will have an influence on which books rise to the top of my to-be-read pile. I've only read one of the books on Letson's list, so far, Goonan's This Shared Dream, and it is excellent.

Related link:
Locus Online: The Website of The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field

Three novels that were too damn long

I've read three novels published in 2011 that were just too damn long. At some point, my interest faded and it was only the desire to see it through that compelled me to continue reading to the end.

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin, 1040 pages
Reamde by Neal Stephenson, 1056 pages
1Q84 by  Haruki Murakami, 944 pages

A Dance with Dragons is a middle volume in Martin’s multi-volume epic, A Song of Ice and Fire, that began with A Game of Thrones (1996). The current volume is the fifth, yet I dare say even Martin seems unsure how many volumes (or years) remain before the end. This is the sort of series that is really one long continuous story. Each volume offers little, if any, closure. It’s the sort of series that I usually avoid reading until the final volume is published. Reading this series has taught me again why I adopted such a policy. Still, there is much to enjoy. In the current volume, there is a wedding scene that is achingly well written, evoking a spectrum of strong emotions. On the whole, alas, it wanders. Characters travel, deals are made, battles are fought or avoided, and so very little is accomplished. It’s a pleasure to spend time in the world that Martin has carefully created, even if the time spent seems aimless.

Reamde is an exercise in plot, or so Stephenson has said in interviews. Unfortunately, by focusing on plot Stephenson has stripped away many of the reasons I enjoy his novels. While Reamde has a science-fictional gaze on the world, it is not science fiction. It’s set in the immediate future. He is the great explainer of concepts, as I’ve written before on this blog, and here he explains a new massive-multiplayer online game, and the economics of gold-farming within the game, which may seem overly familiar if, like me, readers have played a MMORPG sometime in the past decade. What remains is a thriller involving computer hackers, the Russian mafia, and terrorists. A diverting ride, yet disappointing coming, as it does, after a more thoughtful novel, Anathem (2008). (SF Strangelove’s review of Anathem.)

Murakami’s novel 1Q84 (or trilogy of novels, as it was originally published in Japan) is set in Japan in an alternate version of our year 1984, notably different for the presence of two moons in the sky and a handful fantastic events, such as an immaculate conception. The story exists somewhere on the spectrum of what John Clute calls fantastika, which embraces science fiction, fantasy, horror, and related works. I would call it an example of fantastika-lite, where the fantastic elements are used merely for mood and effect, rather than as concepts to be examined and explored. The underlying story is a boy meets girl, boy and girl are separated, and eventually boy and girl are reunited. This simple structure did not sustain my interest for 900-plus pages. These pages are filled with enormous amounts of repetition and padding. Characters frequently repeat dialog back to each other, then they share, and re-share, and re-re-share the same information and concerns over and over again. Amid the multitude of digressions there are some interesting stories within stories. Not enough to make it worth recommending. I could go on about the dozens of “pervy” references to women’s breasts, or the unconvincing way that female characters talk to each other about their breasts (“like a teenage boy’s fantasy of a woman describing another woman’s breasts”). The quotes are from Charles Yu’s review of the book and he has done a fine job. (Charles Yu’s review of 1Q84.)