The list is very eclectic and leaves out some genre superstars — no Iain M. Banks, Robert Charles Wilson or China Mieville here — instead, focusing on some up-and-coming writers and a few you might not have heard of.

It's also a bit slanted towards fantasy and the gothic: Catherynne M. Valente's well-received urban fantasyPalimpsest makes the cut, as does Cherie Priest's Boneshaker and Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Red Tree. More traditional fantasy also winds up on the list, in the form of David Anthony Durham's The Other Lands and Jesse Bullington's The Sad Tale Of The Brothers Grossbart. Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Roberts' novel which Kim Stanley Robinson said should have won this year's Booker Prize, also makes the cut.

The anthologies on the list are slanted towards the literary and eclectic: Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, the genre-busting Interfictions 2, and the Library of America's Gothic survey, American Fantastic Tales Boxed Set.

All in all, it's a list that's sure to provoke some debate, and hopefully gain some exposure for writers who deserve wider notice.

[Amazon.com]

To create When It Changed, editor Geoff Ryman (author of the multiple award-winning novel Air), set up science fiction authors with scientists, and had them develop stories together. The awesome list of contributors includes Paul Cornell, Justin Robson, Liz Williams, Kit Reed, Adam Roberts, Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod and Ryman himself. According to the publisher's Facebook page:

When It Changed is an attempt to put authors and scientists back in touch with each other, to re-introduce research ideas with literary concerns, and to re-forge the alloy that once made SF great. Composed collaboratively – through a series of visits and conversations between leading authors and practicing scientists – it offers fictionalised glimpses into the far corners of current research fields, be they in nanotechnology, invertebrate physiology, particle physics, or software archaeology. From Planck's Length (the smallest indivisible distance) to Plankton (potential saviours of the Earth's ecosystem), from virtual encounters between Witgenstein and Turing, to future civilisations torn asunder by different readings of the Standard Model, together these stories represent a literary 'experiment' in the true sense of the word, and endeavour to isolate a whole new strain of the SF bug.

Ryman told the news department at Manchester University, where he's based at the University's Center for New Writing:

We wanted to go out and locate what is fresh and new in the sciences, and gives writers a chance to work with researchers to come up with different, contemporary themes. When it Changed actively extends the scientific repertoire of fiction — all fiction, because we have mainstream writers as well. But it gave some of the best SF writers I know of a chance to work closely with a scientist. Some of the ideas they've come up with are mind-blowing ... round the world particle colliders, virtual research, or suits that heal their wearers. And the scientists get to comment or explain.

The book's launch party is tomorrow, Oct. 24, in Manchester, UK. We can't wait to see a copy! Too bad it's not out in the U.S. until April 1 next year.

In Robinson's essay, which we covered more for its assertion that Virginia Woolf was a fan of Olaf Stapledon than for its rant about the Booker Prize, the Red Mars author berates the Booker judges for ignoring SF works of literary quality, like Geoff Ryman's Air or this year, Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia. The British literary establishment is missing out on the fact that there's a new golden age happening in British SF.

One Booker judge, John Mullan, spoke to the Guardian, saying that no publishers submitted SF books for the Booker this year, so the prize couldn't consider any. (With one exception: Margaret Atwood's Year Of The Flood.) And Mullan suggested that science fiction, which had been part of the mainstream when he was younger, had become a "self-enclosed world":

"When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres," he said, but now "it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other."

Roberts, the author that Robinson thought should have won the Booker this year, responded to Mullan in the Guardian today:

Like many sci-fi writers I've plenty of experience of the kneejerk hostility evidenced by, for instance, my professorial University of London colleague and Booker judge John Mullan in reaction to Robinson's article. Without actually reading any contemporary sci-fi, he dismisses the genre as "bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other". Ouch, John. (Also: using "special" in that awkwardly euphemistic way? Not cool.)

And Roberts says the novels which did make the Booker shortlist mostly do deal with the kind of topics that you see in science fiction, including world-building and the nature of divergent realities — they just don't overtly admit that's what they're doing. Maybe these novels would even have been improved by adding a dash of overt speculative fiction, Roberts adds.

But Roberts is more right on, in a sense, when he says the Booker Prize is really just another genre award, this one for "historical and contemporary fiction." Literary fiction is a genre like any other, with its own expectations and tropes. A lot of literary fiction takes it for granted you've read tons of other recent literary fiction. Frequently literary fiction will be commenting on characters/tropes/devices from other literary fiction, or building on narrative devices that other lit authors have used recently.

And of course Mullan is right to some extent, even if his tone is needlessly derisive and snotty. I've lost count of how many times I've heard SF writers refer to SF as a "conversation" in which writers build on each others' themes and ideas — and the implication is often that if you're not carefully following every part of the conversation, you may be a bit lost. To pick a recent example, the Clark Award-nominated novel House Of Suns by Alastair Reynolds is a terrific work in many ways, but it would be utterly baffling to anyone who hasn't read a lot of other works in the "new space opera" genre. House Of Suns takes it for granted you're used to reading about near-immortal characters, hypersleep, interstellar civilizations and machine intelligences. That's part of what allows it to tell such a sweeping, thought-provoking story — but it's also what makes it less accessible to a non-SF buff.

The Hugos, of course, are the fan-voted awards, and anybody who attended last year's WorldCon or plans to attend this year's gets to vote. That makes them the most democratic of all the major awards, although actual numbers of voters still tend to be quite small.

And Roberts argues that the voice of fandom, through the Hugo Awards, has chosen to represent the genre poorly. With the possible exception of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, the six books chosen for the Hugo Awards shortlist are utterly unremarkable, says Roberts. He calls Scalzi's Zoe's Tale "mediocre but pleasant," Gaiman's The Graveyard Book "twee" and "cosy," Stross' Saturn's Children "as scattershot a novel as any Stross has written," and Doctorow's Little Brother "stylistically dull." As for Anathem, it's "enormous and deranged and so boring it goes through boring into some strange condition on the far side."

Adds Roberts:

Widely publicised shortlists of mediocre art are a bad thing. What do these lists say about SF to the multitude in the world-to the people who don't know any better? It says that SF is old-fashioned, an aesthetically, stylistically and formally small-c conservative thing. It says that SF fans do not like works that are too challenging, or unnerving; that they prefer to stay inside their comfort zone.

As for the fact that the novel shortlist is so dominated by young adult fiction, Roberts quotes Abigail Nussbaum who says that's not the real problem:

Though it might be tempting to conclude that the shoddy state of this year's shortlist is the result of the infantilization of the genre, to my mind the problem isn't that YA books are being nominated, but that the wrong YA books have been. How much stronger would this year's best novel shortlist have been if Terry Pratchett's Nation, Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, or even Allegra Goodman's The Other Side of the Island had been on it? (This is not even to mention books that have received a great deal of critical attention, but which I haven't yet read myself, such as Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, Kristin Cashore's Graceling, or Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games.)

But once you unpack Roberts' statements further, you realize that he's actually making a larger argument about what a good novel is, and what science fiction novels should do. It's not just that he didn't like the shortlist, it's that those books didn't do what he wanted them to. Writes Roberts:

[T]he very heart's-blood of literature is to draw people out of their comfort zone; to challenge and stimulate them, to wake and shake them; to present them with the new, and the unnerving, and the mind-blowing. And if this true of literature, it is doubly or trebly true of science fiction. For what is the point of SF if not to articulate the new, the wondrous, the mindblowing and the strange?...

Fandom, look at the 2009 Clarke novel shortlist. Do you know why that list is better than yours? It's not that its every novel is a masterpiece-far from it (although it seems to me regretable that you couldn't you vote books as good as The Quiet War, House of Sons or Song of Time onto your shortlist.) But some of the books on that list fail, no question. Martin Martin's on the Other Side, for instance, is a mediocre novel. But (and this is the crucial thing) it's a mediocre novel trying to do something a little new with the form of the novel. It's an experiment in voice and tone, and ambitious in its way. The novels on the Hugo shortlist-except Anathem, as I mentioned-try nothing new: they are all old-fashioned: formally, stylistically and conceptually unadventurous.

And that's probably the crux of it, I think — do we want awards like the Hugos to celebrate works that tell a good story, or do we want to uplift works that are experimental and "do something a little new with the form of the novel"? I don't think it's actually true that mainstream literary fiction values strangeness or formal experimentation, outside of a few rarified circles. I have a feeling the Hugos represent the books that most of the WorldCon-goers read and liked the most, rather than ones which pushed the envelope in some way.

Maybe we should have a different set of awards for envelope-pushing works? What do you think? [Punkadiddle]

DeathRay wrote of him recently that, "You never know exactly what you're going to get with an Adam Roberts novel, and that's a strength: each of his books is very different in feel from the last."

I certainly think it's a strength, but somehow-I'm ashamed to say-refusing to do the same old thing over and over can hurt you over here in the States when it comes time to building a dedicated readership. And Adam excels at difficult protagonists, often employing people whose values are starkly in contrast to our own, and he loves utilizing the "unreliable narrator," someone who has reason to lie and therefore can't be entirely trusted. It's a technique that is very familiar in the mystery genre, but doesn't always go down well in SF. Honestly, I think if he'd been published over here by a mainstream publisher, he'd be regarded as a serious literary genius like Michael Chabon. As it is, I hope he will forgive me if I say he's something of a well-kept secret. But perhaps that's beginning to change.

It's well worth reading the rest of Anders' post, and now I'm dying to read some of Roberts' novels. Plus his goofy Doctor Who parodies.

Meet Adam Roberts: the King of High Concept [Tor.com]

Reading Peter Crowther's anthology, I was struck by how little had changed, in some ways, about our ideas of artificial intelligence, since Asimov's and Heinlein's tales, not to mention novels like Gerrold's When Harlie Was One. We still have many of the same themes, including A.I.s coming of age, trying to become more human, struggling to understand humanity, or exploring religion. A number of the stories could easily have been written in 1970.

Other commonalities: Many of the A.I.s are female, especially the ones who have lovely bodies that male humans fall in love with or are seduced by. (Alll but one of the collection's authors are male, I think.) A couple of different stories reference HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are two or three stories about an A.I. that's fractured into different personalities, or a composite of personality fragments.

And yet there are many nuggets of innovation scattered throughout the collection. I really liked "Adam Robots" by Adam Roberts, in which two robots named Adam find themselves in a virtual Garden Of Eden, trying to unravel a modified form of the Adam-and-Eve story. (You expect there to be a twist involving what happens when one robot takes the apple of knowledge, but it's not what you expect.)

The story "Sweats" by Keith Brooke has probably the cleverest, and most surprising, concept of them all: someone creates an artificial personality out of pieces of different people's minds, and then installs it into the body of a hapless teenager. This artificial personality is designed to be a cold-blooded killer and sent to murder a politician — so one of the people whose personality traits is used to create this composite mind is arrested for murder. Can we hold someone responsible for a crime committed by a collection of his personality traits mixed with those of others? This story also incorporates a virtual afterlife (like Second Life, but only for reconstructed personalities of the dead) and is vastly entertaining, except that it has one or two plot twists too many and stops holding together by the end.

Also super entertaining is the story "The New Cyberiad" by Paul DiFilippo, in which two artificial intelligences in the distant future decide to build a solar-system-sized time machine to return to the present. They want to collect some present-day humans to repopulate the future, which is now devoid of organic life. It turns into a bizarre, rolicking quest narrative that contains witty nods at Gerrold, Clarke, and several other writers. At one point, the two boy-robots create a girl-robot to handle routine tasks, and then they both fall in love with their creation in a pastiche of the Pygmalion story. It gets more and more demented.

Also a fun read is "The Highway Code" by Brian Stableford, in which a sentient truck grapples with a road-centric version of Asimov's three laws of robotics.

There are a few other clever ideas, but for the most part this anthology felt stronger on ideas than execution. A lot of the writing left me sort of underwhelmed, and there are almost no memorable characters or really strong moments in the collection. Many of the stories in the book felt like they needed a bit more fleshing out, or perhaps a tighter focus, to change them from cool ideas to actual stories.

And then there were a few moments that I found actually embarrassing, like this bit from James Lovegrove's "The Kamizaze Code." A man and a woman (who are lovers) discuss sneaking a bit of code out of a top-secret Ministry Of Defense facility, and we get this bit of dialogue:

"I've thought about that too," said George. "You could smuggle it out... dump it onto a flash drive, then you take the flash drive to work with you..."

"Can't do that. We're not allowed to take equipment onto or off the premises. That's one of the things we're searched for every time we enter or leave."

"I know, but a flash drive is very small. About the size of a marker pen. And they don't do body cavity searches, do they?"

Jennifer caught his drive, and grimaced.

"It'll work," George insisted.

"Why not use your body cavity then, if you're so confident?"

"Becuase you have a body cavity better suited to the task. Trust me, I know," he added, with what he hoped was a safely salacious smile.

First of all, eww. Second of all... so this is a top secret facility without any metal detectors? And third of all, they don't let you take an ipod to work?

Bottom line: There are a few memorable stories here, and most of the other stories have something interesting to say about the nature of A.I. But this is probably one volume you'll want to take out of the library or buy a used copy of.

[Amazon]