[bookshare-discuss] Re: Next Meeting of the Science Fiction Club, Thursday, December 11, 2014
- From: Lelia <leliastruve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 18:32:15 -0700
Well hello all, it is that time again. This should be a very interesting
discussion. I know that some of you have been discussing it already, but I will
hold my comments until we meet tomorrow. Check out the info below
Lelia
Sent from my iPhone
> On Nov 7, 2014, at 11:35 AM, Evan Reese <mentat1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hello Folks,
> A nice crowd at our most recent meeting. Reviews of our book, 2312 by Kim
> Stanley Robinson, were decidedly mixed. For our next book, we sample the work
> of many modern SF authors in the short story anthology Twenty-First Century
> Science Fiction, edited by two of the best in the field, David G. Hartwell
> and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
>
> The next meeting of the Science Fiction club will be on Thursday, December
> 11, 2014
>
> Place: Book Nook at:
>
> http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs7867a2369e0e
>
> Time: 9 PM Eastern, 8 PM Central, 7 PM Mountain, 6 PM Pacific, and 02:00 UTC.
>
> Our book, Twenty-First Century Science Fiction is available as a digital
> download from BARD at:
>
> http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.nls/db.77946
>
> Here is the NLS annotation:
>
> Thirty-four short stories from authors who came
> to prominence in the early twenty-first century. Includes
> work from Paolo Bacigalupi, John Scalzi, Mary Robinette
> Kowal, Catherynne M. Valente, Jo Walton, and Cory Doctorow.
> In Vandana Singh's "Infinities" an Indian mathematician has a
> life-changing vision.
>
> And here is a review from one of the most awarded editors and anthologizers
> of all time, Gardner Dozois, from Publishers Weekly, taken from Amazon’s page
> for this book:
>
> In my more than 40 years working in the science fiction
> publishing industry, I've seen this notion crop up every 10 years or so:
> Science
> fiction has exhausted itself. There are no good new writers coming along
> anymore.
> The genre is finished! Tor editors Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden thoroughly
> refute
> such claims with their huge reprint anthology featuring 34 stories published
> between
> 2003 and 2011 by writers who came to prominence since the 20th century
> changed into
> the 21st. Here in the second decade of the 21st century, some of these new
> writers,
> like Charles Stross, John Scalzi, and Cory Doctorow, have become big names;
> others,
> like Elizabeth Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, Catherynne M. Valente, and Hannu
> Rajaniemi,
> have multiple novels and major awards to their credit; and some, like Ken
> Liu, Yoon
> Ha Lee, Tobias S. Buckell, and Vandana Singh, are just starting out, but will
> almost
> certainly be among the most recognizable names of the next decade.
> Twentieth-century
> Campbellian SF—the sort published in John W. Campbell's Astounding/Analog
> magazine
> of the '30s, '40s, and '50s—was often about space travel, colonizing other
> worlds,
> space warfare, contact with aliens, and the far future. By contrast, most of
> these
> stories stay closer to the present, and many don't leave Earth at all. Common
> topics
> include posthumans, interrogations of the nature and existence of human
> consciousness,
> and the exponentially expanding possibilities of information-processing and
> virtuality
> technologies. There are also many robots and artificial intelligences,
> including
> human-mimicking dolls, companions, and sexbots. It's worth noting that many
> of these
> authors would have been excluded from Campbell's largely white, male,
> middle-class
> American stable of writers. The face of science fiction has changed as well
> as its
> subject matter. It's hard to pick favorites with so many good stories on
> offer, but
> my personal selections would be Bear's Tideline, in which a dying robot in a
> devastated
> war-torn future teaches some of the human survivors how to become more human;
> Moles's
> Finisterra, a vivid adventure in which people engage in internecine warfare
> among
> huge living dirigibles in a layer of Earthlike atmosphere on a Jupiter-sized
> planet;
> and Watts's The Island, in which a work crew building a series of wormhole
> transport
> gates across the galaxy encounters a living intelligent creature the size of
> a sun.
> I'd like to have seen something by Lavie Tidhar, one of the most exciting new
> SF
> writers of the last few years, as well as some work by Aliette de Bodard and
> Kij
> Johnson, and while the late Kage Baker certainly deserves to be here, I'm not
> sure
> I would have picked Plotters and Shooters, one of her minor works, to
> represent her.
> However, these are just quibbles. Twenty-First Century Science Fiction will
> certainly
> be recognized as one of the best reprint science fiction anthologies of the
> year,
> and it belongs in the library of anyone who is interested in the evolution of
> the
> genre.
>
> Sounds like some really exciting stuff in here. Since this is an anthology,
> there’s bound to be something to please just about any SF fan, so come join
> us on Thursday, December 11 to talk about the book, and SF literature in
> general.
>
> Evan
>
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