association-list

For those of you unfa­mil­iar with the com­pe­ti­tion, the John W. Camp­bell Memo­r­ial Award is a juried best novel prize given out each year. There are rank­ings, 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place prizes are awarded. The jury changes a little each year, it seems and thus things are a little mixed, in terms of pre­dic­tion. They def­i­nitely seem to con­sider all of the major novels each year, and it looks like they try to throw in a few books that wouldn’t nor­mally be con­sid­ered as part of the SF main­stream (i.e. weren’t pub­lished by one of the stan­dard SF imprints.

While I don’t always agree with their selec­tions, there is a hint of award­ing books based on merit rather than pol­i­tics or pop­u­lar­ity, which I can only applaud. I’m not typ­i­cally one for media spec­ta­cle, and some­times the Hugos and the Neb­u­las are irri­tat­ing in that they seem to be over­whelmed by those fac­tors. So, a few words about each of the final­ists, fol­lowed by some pre­dic­tions. But first, a retrac­tion: men­tioned in the last post that I’d talk more about Ian McDonald’s River of Gods in this post, but look­ing again, he doesn’t seem to be here, I’m guess­ing that it was pub­lished too late in the year and will likely make it onto the ballot next year (I also don’t know whether or not the selec­tion com­mit­tee is going off of US or UK release dates in the case that a novel had both, that also might factor in). In any case, he’s not here, and it’s a book that needs talk­ing about. So, another post on McDon­ald, some day soon.

Tran­scen­dent, by Stephen Baxter

I haven’t read this one. It isn’t really my policy to read Baxter any­more. It’s all inter­est­ing big ideas stuff, but his writ­ing never really grabbed me and the level of shared uni­verse navel-​​gazing got too extreme at some point and I stopped reading.

The Meq, by Steve Cash

People seem to like this book, as they also seem to like men­tion­ing that Cash was once part of the The Ozark Moun­tain Dare­dev­ils. The syn­opses and reviews that I’ve read lead me to believe that it isn’t some­thing that I’d usu­ally go for, but I’ll likely pick it up now that the orig­i­nal is in paper­back, on the strength of pos­i­tive buzz, and because I’m a weak, weak man when it comes to buying books.

Child Of Earth, By David Gerrold

I hadn’t heard of this one before today, to be honest (and many read­ers will be won­der­ing why I both­ered com­ment­ing on all of these if I haven’t read any of them. I’ve read most of the second half of the list, I promise). It looks like a YA SF novel, which is really very strange coming from Ger­rold, who I know best from his unfin­ished War Against the Chtorr series, which are grim and vio­lent and sexual to a degree which would make one thing that Ger­rold is an unlikely children’s author. That said, Scott West­er­feld is writ­ing YA now, and all of his books before Mid­nighters are grim and vio­lent and sexual, so what do I know. Evolution’s Dar­ling, one of his ear­li­est, is a won­der­fully strange novel full of post-​​human fuck­ing and inter­clade love affairs, from what I remem­ber. Neat stuff, if often uncom­fort­able. I saw him speak not too long ago and he admit­ted that the rea­sons for switch­ing to YA are at least par­tially finan­cial, which, in my mind, is a sad state of affairs. Not that I don’t like his YA books, but they’re forced by the tenor of the times to skirt too widely around too many issues for them to be entirely engag­ing. But I digress, wildly.

Mind’s Eye, By Paul McAuley

I like Paul McAuley. I haven’t read this, because it isn’t out here and I haven’t seen it at the store (they carry imports, but can’t really get all of them. I’ll have to ask). I have no idea if it’s any good, but I would assume so, based on his history.

Seeker, By Jack McDevitt

I’ve only read one book, Chindi, which I think that this is a follow up to. A lot of people seem to like McDe­vitt, but I don’t really see it. Despite the increas­ingly furi­ous pace of socio-​​technical evo­lu­tion, the people in these books seem already in the past, other than that they’ve got neato space­ships and know how to go faster than light. It makes any spec­u­la­tion that they books may put forth seem strangely stunted. Also the writ­ing is lack­lus­ter and the char­ac­ters seem stock and the whole thing could have been writ­ten 20 years ago. I’m still talk­ing about Chindi, mind you. I haven’t read this one, and some triv­ial research indi­cates that it’s entirely unre­lated and seem­ingly more up my alley than that book. So, we’ll see. When it comes out in paper­back. Maybe.

Learn­ing The World, By Ken MacLeod

OK. Now we’re back on famil­iar ground. Ken MacLeod is one of my favorite authors from the past couple of years, and this is one of his best books. Rarely, in the newly bur­geon­ing field of sin­gu­lar­ity related SF, do you see any­thing pos­i­tive. We’re destroyed or irrev­o­ca­bly trans­formed or frac­tion­ated or herded into easily man­age­able groups. It’s always a dis­as­ter. MacLeod thinks dif­fer­ently. In his future, we’ve sur­vived, Sin­gu­lar­ity is a chronic but tractable infec­tion and mankind has spread to the stars in a big, big way. You can see human space for light years as the stars go green with life. Megas­truc­tures of truly aston­ish­ing scale are mooted. Travel tubes between solar sys­tems? Why not? Immor­tal­ity? Old hat. In my opin­ion this is one of the best visions I’ve seen of a human­ity truly tri­umphant over dumb matter, not hud­dling in tiny colonies on hos­tile world, fight­ing grim, use­less bat­tles with incom­pre­hen­si­bly alien stand-​​ins for earthly foes. Not here. Space is too big and too rich to fight over. Plan­ets are pleas­ant places to evolve and grow up, but a mature civ­i­liza­tion has too much on the move to be both­ered with such lim­i­ta­tions. Throw in an inter­est­ing first con­tact story cum detec­tive tale and you’ve got one hell of a novel.

The Summer Isles, By Ian R. MacLeod

Our second MacLeod, Ian, is a gifted writer. He lacks some of the spec­u­la­tive brio of many other promi­nent SF writ­ers, but he has a true gift for evok­ing atmos­phere, and that’s usu­ally enough. He’s much like Gene Wolfe in that respect, which is high praise. I’m actu­ally not sure whether I’ve read this or not. I’ve read the story of the same name in one of his other col­lec­tions, but it looks like this has been extended out to the length of a short novel, so it’s quite likely that I’ve only read part of it. In any case, it’s very inter­est­ing, a story of an Eng­land that lost WWI and went fas­cist imme­di­ately (rather than wait­ing for Thatcher), and there are many par­al­lels with early Nazi Ger­many, as is stan­dard. The story left me want­ing to know more, so I’ll have to pick up the novel if indeed it’s been extended. Although it looks like it’s going to be an expen­sive book to come by.

Count­ing Heads, By David Marusek

Count­ing Heads, at first, looks like it’s going to be as packed with won­der­ful and bizarre spec­u­la­tion as Stross’s Accelerando, but there are long gaps in the pace of inno­va­tion and there are pacing issues where Marusek seems to just settle down to actu­ally tell the story that’s going on here, and doesn’t quite achieve the bal­ance that he’s look­ing for. I liked it, don’t get me wrong, but it seems a story unfin­ished and one that never quite pays off fully. David Marusek is a fuck­ing crack­er­jack short story writer, and I’m look­ing for­ward to the fol­lowup, as hope­fully he’ll get more com­fort­able with the form and start crank­ing out some incred­i­ble novels.

Mind­scan, By Robert J. Sawyer

Didn’t read this one. Never been a huge fan of Sawyer’s, and the book didn’t really seem all that inter­est­ing to me, as it seems to me that a lot of the issues therein have been richly addressed in the past.

Accelerando, By Charles Stross

Hard to say any­thing about this one that hasn’t already been said, but that never stopped me before. A string of novel­las fix-​​uped into a novel with, as far as I could tell, very little alter­ation. Explo­sively inven­tive to the point that it’s hard to follow occa­sion­ally, as people change and mutate and are manip­u­lated by a weakly god­like feline AI. Even if all of the sto­ries aren’t great and it doesn’t really hang together all that well as a cohe­sive novel, this should be required read­ing if you really want to know what’s pos­si­ble and what’s going on in SF today.

The World Before, By Karen Traviss

I’ve not gotten to this one yet. I thought that City of Pearl, the first book in the tril­ogy of which The World Before is the third novel, was pretty good, and very inter­est­ing as a first novel. Traviss isn’t push­ing a ton of bound­aries, but she’s a good writer and draws inter­est­ing and sym­pa­thetic characters.

Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

I avoided Robert Charles Wilson for years because I con­fused him with Robert Anton Wilson, author of the Illu­mi­na­tus! books. Oh lordy was I wrong. Once I real­ized that, I read every­thing of his that I could get my hands on. Wilson is a fine, fine writer of prose, and never fails to tackle Big Ideas. Some­times he fails, but that’s a good thing. His forte seems to be track­ing in great and telling detail the reac­tions of humans to events quite beyond their ken. A truly enjoy­able read and one that only lets you down a little when the ending doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the start, but you don’t really care because the writ­ing is too won­der­ful to regret.

Evan’s Hope­ful Predicitons:

1. Learn­ing the World

2. Spin

3. Accelerando

Evan’s Cyn­i­cal Predictions:

1. Mind­scan

2. Spin

3. Seeker

Also, I note that I’ve been linked to by Jeremy, which means that there might be more than just two or three of you out there now (gotta love RSS read­ers). Just as a note, I close com­ments because I don’t have time to deal the the com­ment spam, nor do I have the time to learn the ins and outs of wordpress’s spam reduc­tions mech­a­nisms. How­ever, I always enjoy get­ting feed­back and hear­ing what other people have to say about the issues that I’m address­ing. There’s an email con­tact link at the bottom of the page (obfus­cated a tad for spam­mers, but simple enough), and I’d love to hear from you.