I'm surprised Martin Martin's On The Other Side got shortlisted for a Clarke Award. To be sure, it brings a unique narrative voice to the dystopian future canon. But it's also derivative and muddled. Spoilers!
Geoengineers vs. The Mafia State in "The Quiet War"
Eco-political, frantic, and undeniably epic, Paul McAuley's latest novel The Quiet War was nominated for a Clarke this year. It's time to check out this hard science tale of gene wizards and posthuman separatists.
Doctorow's Little Brother Shows The Genesis Of Dystopia
Young-adult authors have conquered science fiction with a mixture of angst, romance, and the discovery that adults are wrong. But Cory Doctorow's Hugo/Nebula-nominated Little Brother puts a geeky, subversive spin on that formula. Spoilers!
Terry Pratchett vs. the Global Economic Crisis
Making Money, Terry Pratchett's Nebula-nominated, thirty-somethingth novel in Discworld series, could be a subtitled, "a comic fantasy on contemporary themes," ie the large-scale consensual fraud that is a banking system.
House Of Suns Is A Flawed Far-Future Thrill Ride
Alastair Reynolds' House Of Suns, shortlisted for the Clarke Award, is a novel of ideas, with all that implies. The space-opera epic throws a dizzying blizzard of concepts at the reader, sacrificing character-development. Spoilers below.
The Woman Who Saves Humanity From Itself in "The Margarets"
In Sheri S. Tepper's The Margarets, nominated for the Clarke, a woman's identity is shattered into seven parts, each going on interplanetary missions to save humanity. This is magical space opera mixed with hardcore eco-politics.
Superpowers Is A CW Show On Paper
With his first novel, David J. Schwartz attempts to imagine ordinary people, in a realistic setting, who gain Superpowers. It's one of the finalists for the Nebula Award.
In "Zoë's Tale," It's Hard to Be a Teenage Messiah
Zoë's Tale, the last book in the Old Man's War sequence by John Scalzi, has just been nominated a Hugo for best novel. It deals with the harrowing complications of interstellar politics and teenage girls.
Neal Stephenson's Tale of Two Planets
Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem comes out next week, and there's something very timely about his tale of aliens on a parallel Earth whose inhabitants are locked into an occasionally-catastrophic conflict between scientific and religious institutions. The planet Arbre, which is very much like Earth in some ways,…
A Sexbot on the Run in a Posthuman Solar System
One of the charmingly weird things about Charles Stross' new novel Saturn's Children is that he manages to include every single cliche of sexual perversion you've seen on the net — and make them somehow fit plausibly into the plot. The author of the critically-acclaimed Halting State has written a fast-paced thriller…
