Author: Andrew Wheeler

SF&F News & Links

  • Uncategorized
  • July 6, 2007

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Forbidden Planet International previews the very cool-looking new entry in the Penguin Modern Classics line, A Science Fiction Omnibus, edited by Brian Aldiss.

Today’s Harry Potter hoopla: The New York Times reports on Harry-themed conferences, parties and festivals taking place this summer.

Also working the HP beat: The Washington Post has an article about avoiding spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with lots of anecdotes about people deliberately spoiling the last book. It’s hard out there for a muggle…

Del Rey’s latest e-mail newsletter announces a giveaway – they want to send thirty advance copies of Terry Brooks’s new novel, The Elves of Cintra, to ordinary readers for their early review. You can get full details at that link, or sign up for the newsletter yourself. [via Fantasy Book Critic]

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Reviews: Graphic Novels and SF/Fantasy

  • Uncategorized
  • July 6, 2007

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Since the name of the site is ComicMix, the comics reviews come first. After the break, some crunchy links to SF/Fantasy book reviews, including one for Mike Carey’s novel The Devil You Know.

And, speaking of Carey, here’s a review from Blogcritics for Re-Gifters, by Mike Carey and Sonny Liew.

Blogcritics also reviews Outsiders: The Good Fight by Judd Winick, Matthew Clark, and Art Thibert.

Blogcritics also also reviews Eric Wright’s My Dead Girlfriend, Volume One.

Dana Stevenson (of Comic Fodder) reviews this week’s Marvel Comics.

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Comics News & Links

  • Uncategorized
  • July 6, 2007

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Greg Burgas of Comics Should Be Good! (and can’t we all agree with that, hm?) dives into the musty longboxes to find Ragman #4, from 1977 by Bob Kanigher and “the Redondo Studio,” and proceeds to review the heck out of it.

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog presents…Ask Road Rage Venom!

Mike Sterling explains what is the Pieta (Michaelangelo) and what isn’t (Superman nuzzling Wonder Woman’s chest).

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Science Fiction/Fantasy Interviews

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Bookninja interviews Guy Gavriel Kay, author of Ysabel. Then they flip out and kill a whole lot of people, ‘cause that’s what ninjas have to do. [via Locus Online]

Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing’s twenty-fifth podcast features an interview with author Walter H. Hunt, plus publishing news and the first installment of “Ask a Writer,” with Tobias S. Buckell.

SciFi Wire talks to Michael Swanwick about his story “Lord Weary’s Empire,” currently a finalist for both the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the Hugo Award. (more…)

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BOOK REVIEW: Soon I Will Be Invincible

invincible-3662675Doctor Impossible is a supervillain; Fatale is a superheroine. They fight, and you know who wins. The end.

OK, maybe that’s not enough.

I haven’t been keeping track, but there seem to have been a lot of novels about superpowered folks lately. I mean, besides the usual licensed products. There was Robert Mayer’s influential Superfolks back in the 1970s, the “Wild Cards” series off and on for the last couple of decades, and then Michael Bishop’s Count Geiger’s Blues in the early ‘90s, but, otherwise, there wasn’t a heck of a lot out there for a long time.

But in the last couple of years, there have been books like Tom DeHaven’s It’s Superman (which was officially licensed by DC Comics, but was a very different kind of book than the usual), Minister Faust’s From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, James Maxey’s Nobody Gets the Girl, and others – on top of the increasing numbers of licensed books, it feels like we’re getting a lot of superheroes in prose these days.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy Interviews

  • Uncategorized
  • July 5, 2007
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The LA Times profiles “the Dean of Science Fiction,” Robert A Heinlein, in preparation for the 100th anniversary of his birth on Saturday.

Michael Cassutt’s new column at SciFi Weekly is also about Heinlein, and gives more details of the Heinlein Centennial going on this coming weekend in Kansas City (Heinlein’s birthplace).

 

The Globe and Mail lists and profiles Canada’s “best-kept secrets in the arts” – among them, Hugo-winning science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson.

 

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Science Fiction/Fantasy Magazine News

The fifth issue of Helix, a free on-line magazine dedicated to publishing stories too extreme for regular print SF/F magazines, has just been published, with new stories by Esther Friesner, Brenda Clough, and others.

Locus, the newsmagazine of the SF/Fantasy field, has mailed their July issue, and posted a profile page about it on their website. The July issue includes interviews with Peter S. Beagle and Paolo Bacigalupi, results from this year’s Locus Poll, and lots of news and reviews.

There’s a new issue of SF Site for July, with lots of reviews, a listing of new books received, and whatnot.

Strange Horizons has an update every Monday, and this week is no exception; new this time is a story by Jerome Steuart and a poem by David Lunde. (more…)

Stuff to Read for Free Online

zefra-9592566Harper’s magazine has an excerpt from Karl Schroeder’s Crisis in Zefra in their July issue, but the whole thing — a fake non-fictional account of a near-future African peacekeeping mission that Schroeder did for the Canadian army a few years ago – is also available online, in a form that makes it look creepily real.

Eric Flint posts “snippets” of all of his current novels on his blog – that sounds like little bitty things, but each day he posts good-sized chunks, and he does dozens of “snippets” for each book. For example, today there’s snippet 30 of 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, snippet 17 of The Mirror of Worlds, and snippet 52 of Pyramid Power.

John Scalzi (the most recent winner of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer) posted a list of his work that’s available for free online, which includes his entire first novel, Agent to the Stars. (Agent is pretty good, actually; it’s the first thing I read by Scalzi, and it made me want to track down his other books.)

Tobias Buckell has posted the first third of his current novel Ragamuffin on the ‘net for everyone to read.

BestSF.net has posted Jonathan Sherwood’s story “Under the Graying Sea,” originally from the Februarty 2006 issue of Asimov’s.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy News & Links

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Mark Evanier shows off the cover to his upcoming book Kirby: King of Comics, and explains what this book is (a big, heavily-illustrated look at Jack Kirby’s comics work) and what his next book will be (a much longer, text-heavy biography of Kirby).

Columnist Alex Stein, in the Guardian, likes to argue with a friend about the use and importance of science fiction. (He’s on the side of the angels) Sadly, Stein seems to be content to argue that there’s some good stuff out there amid the dreck, rather than calling the friend on his category error – the unnamed friend stacks the deck by using the new Transformers movie as the SF exemplar and “some new French slow-burner about adultery” as his example of “real life.” The equivalents of a good serious “real life” movie are movies like Gattaca, or 2001, or Blade Runner; if you want a “mainstream” comparison movie on the same level as Transformers, you’ll have to dig up something like Monster-In-Law. Defenders of SF need to point out that there’s just as much “real life” dreck as fantastic dreck – and our dreck at least has cool pictures to go with the lousy plots.

The Baltimore Sun reports on an exhibition of Star Wars paraphernalia at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore. The materials are all from the collection of Thomas Atkinson, who runs the Star Toys Museum. (more…)

Science Fiction/Fantasy Podcasts

The new episode of The Future And You went up for the beginning of the month; it includes conversations with Battlestar Galactica cast member Bodie Olmos, Walt (The Bananaslug) Boyes from Jim Baen’s Universe magazine, and the authors Robert Buettner, Mike Resnick, Randal L. Schwartz and Stoney Compton. How can you not want to hear what a man named “Bananaslug” has to say?

Episode # 40 of The Sci Phi Show is an introduction to the books and stories of Greg Egan.

The Odyssey Fantasy Workshop has just posted a new podcast, featuring Terry Bisson talking about setting. [via Locus Online]

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