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Posted by Josh Jasper on November 20, 2009
Lauren Davis has a great post over at io9 that I've been waiting to point to for art loving Genreville readers. I'll pick a few of my favorites and give you my impressions.1984 - Classic riff on Magritte's The False Mirror, which eventually got transformed into the CBS logo, and reminds me of the spying televisions in the book. 1984 - Bauhaus style riff on the structure of buildings. Perhaps it's a comment on how population pressure was on everyone's minds, and might contribute to fascism? ...Read More 
Posted by Rose Fox on November 20, 2009
Sorry to squeeze two posts into one, but I'm swamped getting ready for Philcon (will I see you there?) and keeping track of the brouhaha over Harlequin's new vanity press imprint (N.K. Jemisin has an excellent summary).Style: I'm a bit stumped on this one. Priest comes very close to creating genuinely invisible prose, which is not necessarily a good thing; I read the book a couple of months ago, and while there are lots of things I remember about it, I don't remember a single phrase verbatim. For those of you who read it more recently, are there stylistic elements that stood out for you? Genre context: Every subgenre goes through stages that are sort of similar to generations of an immigrant family, with struggles first to fit in with one's current community, then to claim one's uniqu...Read More
Posted by Rose Fox on November 18, 2009
Our December book club poll is closed, and the winner is Mark Chadbourn's The Silver Skull! We'll be discussing it the week of December 14. I'm really looking forward to reading it and comparing it to other Elizabethan supernatural spy stories, of which there seem to be a surprising number.On to day three of the Boneshaker discussion. Today is character day. First I'll bring up Miriam's comment from the plot discussion: "It's pretty novel to have two leads in a book who are parent/child rather than a romantic pair or siblings." I felt this worked fairly well, though Zeke was a much thinner character than Briar in a lot of ways. A romantic or sibling pairing where the hero was that much less interesting than the heroine probably wouldn't grab me as well, but in this dynamic I thought it was more feasible. On the other hand, they spent so much of...Read More
Posted by Rose Fox on November 17, 2009
John Ottinger included me in today's Inside the Blogosphere, where we discuss the worst endings in SF/F/H. I voted for the famous Hyperion short-stop. Two of us complained about the recent cliffhangers in the Song of Ice and Fire series, and two others trashed Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn deus ex machina. There's plenty of disagreement, too; Alexandra Wolfe calls Greg Bear's Blood Music, which I love, "nothing but a short story stretched tracing-paper thin" and says it "doesn’t just have possibly the worst ending I’ve ever suffered, but is the worst book I’ve ever read." If you like put-the-knives-in reviews, you'll enjoy this post.
Posted by Rose Fox on November 17, 2009
I'll keep today's post short; maybe no one's commenting on yesterday's because I said all there was to say!The key elements of Boneshaker's setting are steampunkish handmade tech and urban decay. The atmosphere inside Seattle's walls is sort of Wild Westish: there's a saloon and an unofficial sheriff and a bad guy who comes into town and disrupts the peaceful lives of the citizens, and whether you're male or female or young or old or disabled matters much less than whether you can shoot a zombie in the head at 300 yards. Following this train of thought, it occurs to me that instead of stereotypical Injun savages, there are... flesh-eating shambling undead. Hm. That is a very unfortunate mapping. Outside is more urban decay, of a run-down and beaten-down sort rather than an abandoned sort. This reminded me of nothing so much as decrepit suburban set...Read More
Posted by Josh Jasper on November 17, 2009
Jessica Mann, a critic and author, recently decided to stop reviewing books she felt had overwhelming amounts of "sadistic misogyny" especially in graphic detail. She makes it clear that she is not ceasing review of all crime fiction, but feels revulsion at some of the more graphic depictions of sadistic, misogynistic torture. You can read the original essay by Mann in Standpoint Magazine. Salon's Broadsheet blog discusses this in some detail and gets much of Mann's underlying frustration. It's not that these books exist, but that they're overtaking everything else, and seeming to escalate in a race to portray the most gruesome tort...Read More
Posted by Rose Fox on November 16, 2009
You have one more day to vote on our December book club selection; if you want to join in, please make your voice heard! Pyr titles The Silver Skull and Diving Into the Wreck are neck and neck, so you could be the one to tip the balance in favor of one or the other.Meanwhile, it's time to kick off our November book club discussion of Cherie Priest's Boneshaker. Usual warnings: spoilers will abound; we discuss the book, not the author or her intent; when responding to other commenters, please address the content of their comments rather than making personal remarks. The goal is to find interesting aspects of the book and explore them, not to come to any conclusion about matters of fact or opinion. Today's discussion focuses on t...Read More
Posted by Rose Fox on November 16, 2009
I love it when things work out perfectly. We've received 16 comments from 15 people who want Domo-kun dolls, and we have 15 dolls to give away, so everyone's a winner! If you left one of those comments and haven't emailed us with your contact info, please do drop me a note now.
Posted by Josh Jasper on November 12, 2009
Sharable.net has an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson in which he described dystopia as something "Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we’re trying for as a civilization. "While I agree that writing compelling utopias can be a chore, I don't agree with the implication that creating a dystopia is easier than creating a utopia. One factor in the equation that Robinson left out of is quality. A quality dystopia is never just disaster porn, because that's not i...Read More
Posted by Josh Jasper on November 11, 2009
Genreville would like to celebrate Veterans Day by talking about some of our favorite military based science fiction and fantasy novels. While I'll admit to being a fan of the concept of John Ringo as a person, I'm not really a fan of his books. Which isn't to say that I don't like a good military adventure. I have a few favorites in both fantasy and science fiction. It's interesting to note that most of my military fantasy favorites tend to be grim or dystopian, whereas my military science fiction favorites tend to be optimistic.Take for instance my most recent acquisition in audiobook format, Richard K. Morgan's The Steel Remains. Boy was that a grim story. It's more of a post war novel, but it does involve a plot by an evil alien race to start a war...Read More
Posted by Rose Fox on November 10, 2009
If you tried to vote in the book club poll yesterday and got an error saying the poll had been closed, please try again; it should be working now. Sorry about that. I've extended the deadline to next Tuesday, so you still have a week to vote.
Posted by Rose Fox on November 10, 2009
After some WFC-related delays, our video interview with John Langan and Michael Cisco is finally up! I hope you'll agree that their tales of juggling horror writing with academia are worth the wait. A transcript follows the embedded video; many thanks to volunteer transcriptionist Kathryn Papanek.Rose, off camera: Can we get some uncomfortable silences? [long silence] Michael Cisco: I generally am stockpiling material for novels....Read More
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