Book review: C. J. Cherryh "Foreigner"

It was a slow-paced book, and I was afraid I wasn't going to finish it -- I no longer force myself to finish books that don't sufficiently appeal to me -- but I finished it because, despite the slowness, it had some indescribable satisfactory quality. Perhaps because it was a book you could watch unfold before your eyes like a movie. Sometimes you read a book where every sentence falls apart into a pile of words as soon as you are finished with it, without adding up to an image in your head. This is the opposite. This book is highly immersive. Just for that quality you might like to continue reading it even when the plot is not very compelling. But those who like fast-moving narrative might not find it to their taste.

The main character, Bren is an ambassador of sorts to an alien race, called atevi that lives on a planet where humans are guests. Or perhaps he is more like a translator between humans and atevi. His official title in atevi language is paidhi, and that's how he is referred to throughout the book. He lives in the royal court of one of the planet's several kings, or aiji. Humans are permanent, though unwanted, guests on this world, because they ended up there by mistake and can't get off of it. Humans live in just one continent, maintain a truce with the atevi, and have been slowly trickling out their technologies to the atevi. At present they brought the local technology up to roughly the level of early 21st century Earth. The locals are civil to the humans, but (as behooves aliens) inscrutable.

One day someone attempts to assassinate paidhi Bren. In response to that, the king / aiji quickly orders him whisked away to a remote corner of the country. It's done under the guise of the paidhi's protection, but it quickly becomes clear that it's more like imprisonment. He is exiled to a place where he is completely isolated and has no way to contact any humans.

This happens fairly early in the book, and then for the next 300-something pages neither he, nor we, the readers, know what was the true reason of his abduction, or where all this is going. The book slows down as Bren tries to figure out where he stands with his captor-protectors based on short, fragmented conversations he has with them.

He is not sure where their loyalty lies. Are they loyal to him? He strongly suspects not. Are they loyal to their employer(s), such as the aiji, or other organizations and alliances? Nor is he sure whether it is useful to them to keep him alive. He knows (but is not sure if the natives known) that the atevi can't use him as a pawn to extract something of value from the humans, because if his life is threatened, the human government will let him die. They said so from the start and he took the job with the full understanding of this. So, in this situation, he knows there is nothing protecting his life but his captors' whim.

He tries to probe their minds via short, fragmented conversations, but those conversations always skirt the essence of the topic. Yet they occupy the next 300-something pages of the book. Those talks are fraught with misunderstandings, some of them absurd, but not in a funny way. For example, the atevi can't fathom that the word "like" has many meanings, and that to like a food is very different than to like a person. This seemed rather unLIKEly to me. Bren even speculates that the locals don't have feelings. At the same time, it is obvious that they have feelings of dignity and pride, and that pride is rather easily wounded by a foreigner asking the wrong kinds of questions.

Those conversations don't go very far, and three quarters into the book we still don't have a clue who Bren can or cannot trust. So we are still waiting for the other shoe to drop, which is to say we are waiting for this low-grade suspense to lead to a huge revelation. There are so many minor shoes dropping throughout the book that you can never tell which of them is "the real thing" as opposed to random incident. Then, finally, around 3/4 into the book, his situation goes from merely uncomfortable to much worse. Only then the key point is revealed, and we find out the real reason he is kept captive. The pace of the book picks up after that.

I didn't understand what conclusion he reached at the ending either. Maybe I need to reread it. It seems like he was faced with a hard conclusion that humans were not welcome on this planet, but found a way to negotiate with atevi that could lead to permanent peace. But if there was an a-ha! moment in this book, it was rather subtle.

To summarize, this is a book for those who like science fiction with lots of psychological nuance. I personally like it too, but this wasn't the kind of nuance I could relate to. But then I'm known to be a robot. If you can tolerate the plot advancing very slowly, and if you are intrigued by characters trying to figure out what another character meant by their every utterance or gesture, with cultural differences thrown in, then it may be a book for you. I have to say, for me, the character's ruminations supplied just enough intrigue not to put the book aside, but ultimately did not add to something satisfying.

Book review: Jo Walton "Just City"

This was an easy and pleasant read. But it could have been so much better if it had actually tackled the premise that it promised. The premise seemed ambitious; ir promised speculative fiction with the capital S. But it didn't deliver.

The Just City in the title of the book is the city that Plato talked about in the Republic. The story describes the social experiment of the Republic implemented in real life. It's set on an island somewhere, presumably, in the Mediterranean sea, in an undefined time in the prehistory. The time it's set in is before the rise of the classical world. Even Illiad and Odyssey had not yet been written. It doesn't matter, because the inhabitants of the island are completely shut off from the surrounding world and have no interaction with it. Most of the inhabitants are 10-year-old children (10080 of them), that were bought from slave traders of different eras, and brought to this island, across time, to be raised according to the Platonic concepts of justice. They are expected to implement Plato's Just City in real life. They are schooled by a number of teachers from different eras of history, and all of them have one thing in common is that at some point they prayed to Athene. For it was Athene that set up this experiment, and transported people through time to bring them here.

The plot of the book is rather uneventful, but I was hoping for plot twists based on the moral dilemmas these people face, and how they have to adjust their experiment when it is not turning out as planned. Of course, the experiment does not turn out as Plato envisioned, because people are people and they bring their human natures with them here. They also bring their prejudices, perceptions, beliefs, and ways of doing things from their eras. So, not surprisingly, even in the Just City rape victims are still responsible for their rape.

What's odd is that the "masters" -- the teachers who are responsible for the upbringing of these 10080 children -- do not question the notion of justice beyond the Platonic ideal. This ideal was held by a person who lived 2000+ years ago, and much of it doesn't jibe with our modern notion of justice. And many of the masters were from eras historically close to ours, or even beyond ours.

So it's strange that none of the teachers entertain a more modern paradigm of justice, even in the matters of life and death. Such as availability of modern medicine. Athene "imported" something from technologically advanced era (I won't say what, because one of the plot developments hinges on that), so she could have imported advanced medicine as well. And yet they don't treat sick newborns, but "expose" them, i.e. leave them in the wilderness to die. They oddly think it's more humane than to kill them. They do it even to the babies with small birth defects like cleft lip or palate, which are entirely correctable in our times. What about treatment of injuries and illnesses that surely must have occurred among those 10080 children, because of sheer statistical likelihood? Was their medicine as barbaric as the medicine of the ancient times? To be fair, one of the teachers mentions "mold drugs", so apparently they did import the antibiotics from the future. But what about everything else? I would think that realistically this question would have popped up very early in the existence of the city, and I also think that those teachers who came from the more modern times would find it a gross violation of ethics to not provide lifesaving treatments when they could be brought in from the future. And if you are dedicating your whole life to put a vision of justice in reality, then surely you would assign the utmost importance to ethical questions?

In other words, I expect that realistically in such a city there would be never ending debates, serious arguments, maybe even fights over whose ethical system is considered the most just. Yet none of it happens. Everybody leads largely untroubled existences filled with philosophy, music, arts and sports, and nobody runs into ethically ambiguous situations, in which Plato's vision directly contradicts their own internal sense of justice.

To be fair, something similar does start to happen towards the end, but it was a bit too late to make me "buy" into the book. The whole book seemed like one big missed opportunity to get deeply into ambiguities and paradoxes of justice.

Book review: Lauren Beukes "The Shining Girls"

This is a book about a time-travelling serial killer and a woman who survives her own murder attempt and sets out to catch him. The most interesting part is that she doesn't even consider time travel as a possibility (the book is set in the conventional reality), but gradually comes to accept it, based on evidence.

The weakest chapters of the book were the ones written from the killer's point of view. Those parts have a detached, distancing quality. I didn't get any clue as to the killer's motivation. At some point he feels forced by the House itself (a house where he lives that serves as a portal to different eras) to go murder all those women. But he does not respond like an ordinary person would if they felt compelled to murder someone. At the very least s/he would be upset and conflicted about it. Even more so if the urge was planted directly in their mind by a mysterious force. That should make anyone question their own sanity, but the murderer does not seem disturbed. He is very nonchalant about all that.

If the killer had been portrayed in a way that readers could connect with him (and yes, to enjoy a book you have to connect with the villains too; you need to get into their mind and understand why they do what they do, even if you don't find it justifiable), I would have added another star to the review.

It is in the victims' plotlines that the storytelling really picks up. Each of the eight murdered women were interesting, different, and vivid. They made the book worth reading. It quickly became clear why they were called the Shining Girls. Each of them was ahead of her time in some way, breaking the mold of what was expected from women of their time. In that way perhaps the House could be viewed as embodiment of evil reactionary forces of the world. But if so, that metaphor isn't developed in the book very well.

The story really takes off when one of the women survives the attempted murder and gets on the killer's trail; as level-headed as she is, she is eventually forced to accept the evidence that the killer might have traveled in time to commit murders. I really liked that she applies every ounce of skepticism to examine all the other possible explanations, and only after exhausting them settles on the seemingly impossible.

I will not reveal the ending, except to say that it was a quite confusing. Perhaps that was deliberate: time travel stories are very difficult to resolve in a satisfactory and logical manner. Once you start dealing with time paradoxes, there is no good way out. So even though the ending felt handwavingly dismissive and intentionally obscure, it doesn't detract from the story that much; its essence was about the journey, not the destination.

Rating: approximately 3.5 or 4 stars out of 5

Short Fiction You Should Have Read Last Year: ArmadilloCon 2015 panel

For starters, panelists K. B. Rylander (moderator), Eugene Fischer, and Rebecca Schwarz list their favorite short stories of the year.

Rebecca Schwarz. Ken Liu "Cassandra".

K. B. Rylander. Eugie Foster "In the end, he catches her". It was published the day she died, just by coincidence.

Best sources of short stories

Rebecca Schwarz. I listen to a lot of stories. There are lots of great ways to listen to them, such as the podcasts by Clarkesworld, Cast of Wonders (Young Adult fiction), Beneath the Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons. Tor is on and off with their podcasting, but sometimes you can discover great stories there, like Kij Johnson. Escape Pod -- they do a lot of reprints. (It also exists in the print form.) Starship Sofa also does a lot of reprints. Bourbon Penn.

Eugene Fischer. Lightspeed, Strange Horizons. Oddly, the best publication for finding new authors these days is Twitter. Follow authors, they will recommend a lot of stories. This year majority of the stories I found is not because I read Asimov's cover to cover, but because I follow authors, and when they have a story out, they'll tweet a link. You can harness social network effects to curate your reading for you.

Short Stories You Should Have Read This Year panel, left to right: K. B. Rylander (moderator), Eugene Fischer, Rebecca Schwarz. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

K. B. Rylander. When you think about stories you loved, what makes a great story? What makes them stand out?

Eugene Fischer quotes Kevin Brockmeier, who said that every great fiction owes its greatness to fidelity to one of 3 things: fidelity to language, fidelity to lived human experience, or fidelity to authorial obsession. An example of fidelity to language would be Ursula le Guin. An example of fidelity to authorial obsession -- J. G. Ballard. His writing is off the wall, but the images were strongly felt to the author. If a story doesn't bring at least one of those things to the table, says Kevin Brockmeier, then it won't work.

Rebecca Schwarz. I like stories that play with form, such as "Five Stages of Grief After The Alien Invasion" by Caroline Yoachim, who hangs the story on the traditional five stages of grief. Another example would be "Noise Pollution" by Allison Wilgus in Strange Horizons. It's punk as in cyberpunk. It's a young rebellious kid narrator telling a story.

K. B. Rylander. The way I approach story, the story needs to elicit emotion from the reader. Even in hard science fiction there needs to be emotional interest for that reader.

Eugene Fischer. "Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology" by Theodora Goss, published in Lightspeed, resembles Borghes: it's about how reality actually works. Lorrie Moore, in an introduction to "Best American Short Stories", said that a novel comes to us already half-ruined by its length, but in short story we can experience something pristine: a single moment. It is not necessarily in time, but a single esthetic moment. In "Cimmeria", students go to a field study in a country that exists only because they made it up. One of them falls in love with the daughter of a king. In this country there are strange cultural differences that they invented when they designed this country. One of them is, twins are actually the same person. The esthetic moment is, a shift from viewing cultural experience as an outsider, to viewing it as an insider. It's not a moment in time, but a moment in cognition.

K. B. Rylander. A lot of time in a story there is a very visceral emotion that people can relate to: loss, love, revenge. Those strong emotion stories are often ones that become the big stories for the year.

Rebecca Schwarz. Annie Bellet "Goodnight Stars": it was nominated for Hugos, but she withdrew.

Eugene Fischer Sam J. Miller "We are the cloud".

The panelists mention that they've found many notable stories that draw from global mythology, such as Chinese or Pakistani. An example would be Carmen Maria Machado "The Husband Stitch", nominated for the Nebula Award.

Humor stories

Rebecca Schwarz. Daily SF publishes a lot of humor. Also, Alex Shvartsman publishes humor anthologies, Unidentified Funny Objects.

K. B. Rylander. Two flash pieces: "I am Graalnak of the Vroon Empire, Destroyer of Galexies, Supreme Overlord of the Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything." by Laura Pearlman. It's a Reddit with an alien who has came to earth. Oliver Buckram "Half a Conversation, Overheard While Inside An Enormous Sentient Slug".

Eugene Fischer. Alice Sola Kim "Mothers, lock up your daughters because they are terrifying" -- a ghost story of Korean adoptees loking for the biological parents with the help of Cthulhu.

K. B. Rylander. Kris Dikeman "Madhouse on Aisle 12" -- a woman goes to a grocery store, and the food talks to her. It's hilarious.

Great stories that didn't get much attention

K. B. Rylander. What stories were great, but didn't get a lot of attention?

Eugene Fischer. Guernica magazine published a story by Anna Noyes, "Becoming", from a point of view of chimpanzee who grew up in an 1950s experiment of raising a chimp in a human family to see if it grows up like human. It's not going to get attention in genre fiction awards, and there's no such thing as realist fiction awards.

K. B. Rylander. Story by William Ledbetter, "That Other Sea", publsihed on Escape Pod (available in both podcast and text versions). It takes place on Europa, on the theory that there is life under ice on Europa. It's a first contact story from the point of view of the aliens. What drew me into the story is that the alien has overwhelming curiosity about the world, the yearning for what's out there.

Rebecca Schwarz. A story in Strange Horizons, Kate Heartfield, "Limestone, Lye and the Buzzing of Flies". It leans a little literary, it's a little interior. It's a fantastic coming-of-age story with magic elements.

Must-read short story writers

K. B. Rylander. Do you have any must-read writers?

Eugene Fischer. Carmen Maria Machado, Ted Chiang, Alice Sola Kim, Kelly Link, Meghan McCarron.

Rebecca Schwarz. Karen Russell, M. Bernardo (she recommends his story in Beneath the Ceaseless Skies, possibly "The Penitent" or "After Compline, Silence Falls"), Kevin Brockmeier.

K. B. Rylander. Sarah Pinsker, Caroline Yoachim.

Controversial, influential, wave-making stories

K. B. Rylander. What stories do you think were very important to the industry as a whole, that really made waves, that were controversial?

Rebecca Schwarz. Cruel stories well done are just perfect. Chuck Palahniuk wrote a story "Loser" in Neil Gaiman anthology, it's aboujt a guy on The Price is Right, he's tripping on acid, and he gets called on the stage.

Eugene Fischer. Kij Johnson "Spar". Kij Johnson experimented with stripping as much as possible from the story. It produced incredible winners, including "26 Monkeys". Rachel Swirsky "If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love".

Rebecca Schwarz. "Dinosaur" became politicized in the Hugos, and that had nothing to do with the story.

Eugene Fischer. "Dinosaur" became a token, a symbol for people for who stories with emotional load is not sufficient. People who think they have ownership over what the speculative fiction genre should be.

Trends in short fiction

K. B. Rylander. Do you want to talk about any trends in short fiction? Do you see it evolving recently?

Eugene Fischer. Last year it shifted to digital publication. Print is fully an afterthought. Charlie Finley's new regime in Fantasy and Science Fiction produces very good stuff. Print venues are continuing to do good job, but the critical mass of attention has shifted online.

Rebecca Schwarz. I'm seeing more diversity. Ken Liu has now translated several short stories from Chinese.

Eugene Fischer. Chris Brown two years ago co-edited an anthology "3 messages and a warning" of Mexican science fiction stories translated into English.

Then Eugene Fischer asks the other two panelists: What's out there that people should read of yours?

Rebecca Schwarz. "Black Friday". It is a story of a future dystopic Thanksgiving that has become codified, football game to the death, in a big box store, that everybody watches. It is in Devilfish Review.

K. B. Rylander. "We Fly", about trying to find life in Alpha Centauri system. It's based on real science. The story opens when an uploaded human mind, a woman, wakes up in a spaceship. She wakes up, and something is completely wrong, but there is no external damage. It's her trying to work through these things.

The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance: an ArmadilloCon 2015 panel

It's not too much overstatement that blood was expected to flow on "The Hugo Award's Struggle for Relevance", a.k.a. the Sad Puppies debacle, panel at the ArmadilloCon. But the discussion was instead polite and even funny at times. Here are the main points of the discussion. (Pretty much everything is paraphrased.)

The panelists were Lou Antonelli, Justin Landon, Michelle Muenzler (moderator), Marguerite Reed, and Jacob Weisman.

The discussion opened with moderator Michelle Muenzler asking who exactly the Hugo Awards represent. A lot of fandom claims they don't represent them.

On one hand, Hugo Awards are the only science-fiction and fantasy genre awards that the general public (at least the portion that reads those genres) has at least heard about. But upon closer look, Justin Landon said, only a very small part of the SF/F-reading population has heard of Hugos, cares about Hugos, or lets Hugo Awards influence what authors they read. At the end of the day, it only represents the Worldcon voters. Marguerite Reed agreed that people who vote on Hugos are a small percentage of SF/F readers. Jacob Weisman too agreed with everyone else that this award represents mainly, or only, the fans who bought memberships to Worldcon.

Left to right: Michelle Muenzler, Jacob Weisman, Lou Antonelli, Marguerite Reed, Justin Landon. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

If that's really the case, why are we worried about what the future of Hugo Awards means for the future of the speculative fiction genre?

I could say that there was a brief argument as to whether the fans who bought WorldCon supporting memberships were "true fans". But in reality, none of the panelists were presumptuous enough to divide the fans into "true" and "false", so it was more like a meta-argument, a survey of popular arguments. For example, one could say that the "true fan" would be considered someone who buys Worldcon memberships and votes for Hugos year after year. But the panelists agreed that the definition of a fan can't be as restrictive as that. Marguerite Reed said that she didn't believe that everyone who bought supporting membership was a true fan, and that no doubt some people bought it for questionable reasons, such as to put Sad Puppy nominated authors on the Hugo ballot; but she is willing to welcome all those people into the science fiction community. She hopes that they will like it enough to stay. Jacob Weisman said that, on the contrary, it might bring such a deep divide that people will opt out, as happened to the Nebula Awards a few years ago.

Justin Landon had very harsh words to anyone who likes to divide fans (even the politically-motivated Hugo voters) into true geeks and not true geeks. He, too, has been accused at conventions of being a fake geek. "When we see someone to come into our community, how screwed up it is to say, you're not one of us, get out, just because you're a conservative?" he said.

Left to right: Michelle Muenzler, Jacob Weisman, Lou Antonelli. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

All this discussion or meta-discussion about true vs. fake fans/geeks seemed a bit pointless to me. The notion of being a science fiction fan or geek is so subjective, it's not like there could ever be a test administered who is and isn't a true fan or geek.

Lou Antonelli, who was nominated for Hugos by the Sad Puppies, said that he regretted how it turned out, and that he didn't want the Hugo ballot to be full of authors nominated purely based on political agenda.

Lou Antonelli. Whenever you have a system with laws, you chug along until someone finds a loophole, and then you rectify it. So maybe this year we will introduce some provisions. I think people should have fewer nominations than there are places on the ballot, to assure that there won't be a slate. It is ridiculous when someone is nominated more than once in the same category. I hope some reforms will come out of it. I got nominations, but I'm not happy with the way it turned out.

Naturally, other panelists asked Lou why he is not happy with the way it turned out (especially since, according to Marguerite Reed, Lou in his blog called current science fiction "dystopian slipstream pornography", or something like that); and more importantly, why he didn't recuse himself from the Hugo ballot, like so many people had. He said that he stood on it as a matter of principle, to not give in to the abuse that people heaped on the nominated authors.

Lou Antonelli. I think Letters from Gardner was good enough for Hugo nomination, good enough to make it on the ballot otherwise. But I said, I didn't need two nominations. And then ... I refused to be bullied and insulted. So I stayed the course. The first short story was withdrawn by the nominee, Annie Bellet, because she couldn't take the heat. When she went down, I decided I wasn't going to let that happen to me.

Justin Landon pointed out that while some nominees indeed withdrew because of the bullying they got from "people we would identify as social justice warriors", other nominated writers withdrew themselves without being bullied.

Lou Antonelli. I would rather make a decision that turned out to be wrong, but not bow down just to be popular.

Justin Landon. I have a lot of empathy for people like Lou, who worked in science fiction for many years, and one year they get a chance to get nominated for a Hugo, and I can't imaging being in their position and having to say "no". I don't want to beat up Lou. I don't envy position you are in.

Left to right: Lou Antonelli, Marguerite Reed, and Justin Landon with a glass house in front of him, ready for people to throw stones. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

If, as everybody on the panel agreed, conventions and organizations can run their awards however they see fit, it begs a question, voiced by Marguerite Reed: Why didn't Sad Puppies have their own award? Justin Landon thinks it is because Sad Puppies are intent on destroying the Hugos. So then the question is, what are we going to do about it? Justin Landon thinks we should still vote. Not voting would be worse for Hugo Awards.

Justin Landon. If you want to vote No Award in some category, go ahead. But if you vote that way in all categories, you are making a statement. But statement-making is what Sad Puppies do. {I think he says, don't do it.} If you don't want to read sad puppies, don't read them. How many people before voting for Hugos, read everything on the ballot? (Nobody in the room raised their hands.) If we vote No Award in every category this year, what will it mean for Hugos next year?

But does it matter if Hugo Awards are destroyed or made irrelevant (which is likely to happen if many people vote for No Award)? Panelists and audience think it does.

Jacob Weisman. Science fiction and fantasy genres are more fragile than realized. More books are published but fewer numbers per title are being sold. Too much acrimony will shrink fandom because of the culture war.

A fan from the audience echoed that concern. "In the past, the science fiction community always healed itself, because there was a sense that it was important to maintain the community. This time, there are many who do not feel the preservation of the community is more important than getting their agenda met. This makes this a far more problematic and "dangerous" time in fandom."

The TL;DR version: the panelists would like you to go and vote for the Hugos no matter what. Find something you like, or at least are not opposed to, in as many categories as you can, and vote, and let the Hugo Awards continue.

ArmadilloCon 2015: What You Should Have Read in 2014-2015

A bunch of authors, editors, critics and booksellers discuss their science fiction, fantasy and horror picks of the year.

Some books got a nod from more than one panelist. This year those were Emily St. John Mandel Station Eleven, Ken Liu Grace of Kings, Kim Stanley Robinson Aurora, and Neal Stephenson Seveneves.

Below are each panelist's recommended books, and his or her comments about why they are worth reading.

John DeNardo recommends

Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. If you don't read short fiction, here are 3 reasons why you should read this collection. 1. "The Regular" by Ken Liu. I made a mistake of starting it late at night. it pulls you in, and you can't wait to find out what happens next. The way he does it, alternating viewpoints. The way he reveals these plot twists. 2. Rachel Swirsky "Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)". A pinocchi'esque story about father and inventor whose daughter has cancer, so he transfers her memories into a lookalike automaton. It is heartbreaking, but not for a reason you think. It is very moody and emotional. 3. Nancy Kress "Yesterday's Kin", also sold as a short novel by Tachyon. A story of first contact -- a ship landed in New York, and has been there for several weeks, and nobody is able to make contact, because the ship is surrounded by a force field. A geneticist is called to make contact. She also has family issues. The aliens affect her family and relationships.

Emily St. John Mandel Station Eleven. It is is a great character study of people. For our muggle friends, who don't like science fiction, this is a very accessible book -- it is something we could share with our friends mainstream readers. (Also recommended by Justin Landon.)

Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, edited by Nisi Shawl & Bill Campbell.

Neal Stephenson Seveneves.

John DeNardo. One of the things I like about science fiction is worldbuidling, and Seveneves is stuffed with it. I even thought there was too much worldbuilding. I never thought I would say it about any SF. But you'll learn about orbital mechanics in a way that you'll never think you are learning about orbital mechanics.

Willie Siros. It is Stephenson's best work since Baroque Cycle. It is Moonfall done right. Bad stuff happens, and mankind doesn't step up to the plate well. It's not really apocalyptic, and it ends with a more hopeful ending than you would think halfway through the book. It is amazingly well-written, very tight, more accessible than his other books.

Andy Weir The Martian. It's all about problem-solving. John DeNardo could especially relate to it because he's an engineer by day, and engineering is all about solving problems. In "The Martian" you don't feel like you're getting a science lesson. And it is very positive, at least for someone who is stuck alone on Mars. The most the character would say is "I'm not feeling up to it today", so you know what he is going through, but it's not in your face.

Justin Landon recommends

Joe Abercrombie Half a King, Half the World and Half a War (forthcoming). Justin Landon is a sworn fanboi of Joe Abercrombie. 'Nuff said.

Bradley P. Beaulieu Twelve Kings in Sharakhai -- Middle Eastern-flavored world; protagonist is 18-year-old woman who is a gladiator and a smuggler.

Becky Chambers The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. It was self-published before it was published traditionally. It's like Firefly, but better. Cleverer, more charming, more real. It is social science fiction about a family living on a spaceship, and how they deal with relationships and xenophobia.

(Forthcoming) Kate Elliott Black Wolves, coming out this fall. It is phenomenal. The protagonist is 70-year-old beaten up woman, well past her prime, and has to figure out a way to protect her father's legacy, king's legacy, her grandson's legacy. Show me another fantasy that shows a capable old woman!

Robin Hobb Fool's Assassin

Rebecca Levene Smiler's Fair. Rebecca Levene used to be a Dr Who writer. It is Night Circus if G. R. R. Martin wrote it.

Sara Lotz The Three. The story is a thriller that may or may not be supernatural -- it is up to you. Four airplanes crash around the world simultaneously. Everybody dies. But on 3 of them, a young child survives. On the fourth there is apparently no such child, but there are rumors that a child might have survived. And so the rumors start that those children are the 4 horsemen of apocalypse. The book is written as a memoir of a woman reporter.

Alex Marshall A Crown for Cold Silver. Epic fantasy but without all the stuff that we hate about epic fantasy: progressive, not sexist, without all the baggage. Very aware of the tropes in the genre, and tries to do something unique.

Michelle Muenzler recommends

Darin Bradley Chimpanzee. In an economic downturn, a professor is in danger of having his education repossessed. So he tries to give it out for free, teaching people in public parks, so he could give it away before it's taken from him. But it's not legal, so he gets caught in a revolution.

Kameron Hurley The Mirror Empire -- great worldbuilding.

John Hornor Jacobs The Incorruptibles is set on an Earth a few dimensions way over there. It has one of the most frightening descriptions of Elves. They take the place of native Americans in this weird version of a western. Is it a terrifying and wonderful story. (Justin Landon added: "And it is not available for purchase in the US, except here in the dealers' room.")

Nicole Kornher-Stace Archivist Wasp is about a girl whose job is to kill ghosts, to make them stop bugging people. But instead she decides to help one of them. She gets pulled into a weird underground world, and learns the real reasons of apocalypse.

Mary Rickert Memory Garden is about old women who may or may not be witches.

Kazuki Sakuraba Red Girls -- three generations of a family, three very engrossing narratives. It spans the time from 1970s to the 2000s.

Willie Siros recommends

Ben Aaronovitch The Hanging Tree

Paolo Bacigalupi Water Knife. Published as a trilogy, but it is not. It has a discussion of the future water wars that are coming to the US as the drought continues. An asssassin arranges for water to go from one place to another, regardless of what the people who think it's their water, think. Texas is such a wasteland that refugees who are trying to get in to Colorado and Oregon, are dismissed as Perry's ramblers.

Author Michelle Muenzler gave out cookies to everyone as a way to combat the midday crash. Next to her, fan guest John DeNardo looks on. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2015 (37) are in my photo gallery.

James S. A. Corey Nemesis Games

(Forthcoming) Julie Czerneda This Gulf of Time and Stars. In this book, Czerneda returns to her main species universe, which was the setting of the books she wrote many years ago.

William Gibson The Peripheral. Willie said that after thinking that Gibson's best work was in the past, he was very pleasantly surprised by The Peripheral.

Peter F. Hamilton The Abyss Beyond Dreams

Robin Hobb Fool's Quest

Stina Leicht Cold Iron

Jack McDevitt Coming Home and Thunderbird (forthcoming)

(Forthcoming) David Mitchell Slade House - a much looked-forward-to novel from the author of Cloud Atlas

Michael Moorcock The Whispering Swarm

Alastair Reynolds Poseidon's Wake is part of Alistair Reynolds series that began with Blue Remembered Earth. It is set in near future and examines how society deals with space travel in various ways. A family is raising elephants to intelligence, and by the end of the third novel it seems like elephants will have surprises for us. It is somewhere between popcorn fiction and serious fiction (the same applies to James S. A. Corey Nemesis Games too).

Kim Stanley Robinson Aurora. It asks: if man in 2000 years only managed to keep things made of stone, that could last 2000 years, how are we going to keep a generation ship going? It is really well done and fabulous. Justin Landon adds: "Aurora is tols form a perspective of a developmentally-challenged person, and Kim Stanley Robinson does a very good job of putting us in this person's head."

Several forthcoming books:

John Scalzi The End of All Things

Charles Stross The Annihilation Score

Michael Swanwick Chasing the Phoenix

Robert Charles Wilson The Affinities

Gene Wolfe A Borrowed Man

Skyler White recommends

Max Barry Lexicon has system of magic that's based on language. If you're a word person, or a magic person, it is so delicious.

Elizabeth Bear Karen Memory. Steampunk-inflected western with a very interesting protagonist. It's set in a bordello. It is Elizabeth Bear's strongest novel yet. It is as conceptually interesting as her other stuff, and also has interesting relationships between people.

Karen Joy Fowler We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

(To tell the truth, the panelists were not completely clear if they were talking about this book -- which came out more than a year ago, so technically it does not qualify for this year's What You Should Have Read -- or about We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory. No one could remember the exact title and author of the book they were thinking of. Then a brief argument broke out whether in Karen Joy Fowler's book there was mention of aliens arriving to Earth's orbit: some of us in the audience who have read it swore up and down that there were no aliens, but one of the panelists claimed that there were maybe a total of 5 lines in the book mentioning the aliens. This made it further confusing which panelists had which book in mind. -- E.)

Max Gladstone Three Parts Dead -- magic is legal-based. There is nothing boring about legal contracts.

Ann Leckie Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy (forthcoming)

Ken Liu Grace of Kings. Incredibly bold, incredibly global, has amazing ability to introduce you to a huge cast of characters, and they are each unique. According to several panelists -- Skyler White, Justin Landon, and Willie Siros -- it has an incredibly unique storytelling structure, a non-traditional, non-western narrative. If you read traditional Chinese novels, it fits into that structure. And if you haven't, it feels completely unique.

Christopher Priest The Adjacent. There is some kind of hop between times, that we don't really understand, but it has powerful applications. It's not hard SF, it is a character study of people who are wrapped up in this event. It is the impending feeling, that things will be terrible, but you don't know why.

Jeff VanderMeer Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy also has creeping dread. It is set in a postapocalyptic future of the American South. This book explores not just conceivable ways in which everything can go terribly wrong, but also impact on survivors, and the ruthlessness of the quarantine. Willingness to sacrifice a few for the good of the many.

Jo Walton The Just City. Jo Walton writes dialogue for Socrates. Just City is a utopian city created by the goddess Athene. They buy enslaved 10-year-olds, who will be become the citizens of that city.

Book review: Helene Wecker, "The Golem And The Jinni"

This was one enjoyable urban fantasy book. It was different from other novels I've read in this genre, though admittedly I haven't read that many, because I got disappointed with the genre soon. There is no Mary Sue heroine here that every werewolf falls in love with; this one has truly interesting, unique characters, rather than the usual assortment of werevolves and vampires.

The title character, a golem, was made by a European Jewish wizard for a man who wanted a custom-made wife; the man took her on a trip to the US, but died along the way. She disembarked in New York not knowing a single soul there, but was befriended by a kind, old rabbi, who quickly guessed who she is. Luckily he is the only human she ever encounters who can see that she is made of clay. Outwardly she is indistinguishable from a human woman.

The jinni, on the other hand, escaped from an ancient flask, accidentally opened by a metalworker in the Little Syria neighborhood of New York. He was trapped in a human form by a sorcerer many centuries ago in a Bedouin desert. While the Golem, who is made of Earth, is an excellent baker, the Jinni, who embodies the fire element, is talented at metalworking. They make their lives in the new country, their paths eventually cross, and they find an unlikely (or maybe likely?) friend in one another, as the only other supernatural creature each has ever met. They are the only ones who can understand what it's like to live in a human shape with all its restrictions, and to have to pass for a human every day. This involves not letting anyone catch on that you don't eat, sleep, breathe, or have a heartbeat.

As much as they try to blend into the society, they naturally create messes in their wake, simply because they are not human beings, and some things they do have unexpected consequences to humans. The Golem cares about it much more than Jinni does, who, at least at first, doesn't give a thought to the broken human lives he leaves in his wake (mostly women, for the handsome Jinni is like catnip for them). The Golem is the opposite: since she was created to serve, she can't help but sense the humans' needs, and feels irresistible urge to help them. The Golem's concern for others rubs off on the Jinni, who, after spending time with her, starts viewing his carefree actions in a different light.

But both of them are bound to the powerful forces who made them what they were, and the past comes looking for them. When that happens, ancient wizardry starts to play out in 19th century New York. To avoid spoilers, some tensions get resolved, and some don't, but it seems that the stage gets set for a sequel.

This book alternates between exotic/mystical and cozily mundane settings: the Golem works at a bakery, and the book has a good number of delightful scenes involving challah, strudel, fresh-baked bread, and so on. They are interspersed with scenes of Middle-Eastern and cabalistic magic. The threads of present and past are woven together beautifully, and suspense arises on two levels -- past and present; while the reader suspects that they must be related, you can't easily predict how it will all come together.

Secondary and tertiary characters truly come to life. Each of them is distinct. The characters that seem at first spoiled or airheaded, turn out to have depth. Sometimes the book teeters too far into the realm of "characters who didn't believe in the existence of paranormal suddenly become believers", but there is only a little of that. The scenes set in the ancient Bedouin desert centuries or millennia ago don't seem as strong as the scenes set in the 19th century New York; I'm not sure why, but maybe because they rely too much on clicheed Middle-Eastern setting, whereas the New York setting is detailed and authentic? Then again, this book is based on Middle-Eastern fairytale tropes, so that would be hard to avoid.

In any case, the result is quite original.

Book review: Karen Joy Fowler "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves"

This was one of the most enjoyable books I read recently. This is definitely character-driven fiction, and not just primary, but secondary and tertiary characters too were developed with unparalleled depth and nuance.

The plot revolves around a young woman named Rosemary, who is trying to figure out what happened to her "sister", a chimpanzee named Fern. In their early childhood Rosemary and Fern (who were born just months apart) were raised as siblings; Rosemary's parents treated the chimpanzee as their own child, encouraging her to do everything Rosemary did. Then, when Rosemary was five years old, Fern suddenly disappeared from the household, and Rosemary never fully recovered from the loss of her sister.

On one hand, it wasn't hard to figure out the mystery of what happened to Fern; it was clear that Rosemary's parents gave Fern away because they just couldn't keep a chimpanzee at home anymore as Fern grew bigger and stronger. Historically, cases of raising a chimp as a human never ended well, because humans were never able to control the chimp's aggressive tendencies; this novel leaves no illusions that this attempt could have been anything else but doomed, and the adult Rosemary understand it very well.

However, there is a twist at the end that makes it particularly ironic -- but by the time it is delivered, we readers are quite skeptical whether we should believe it. That's what makes this book so captivating. As Rosemary tries to piece her past into a coherent narrative, it becomes increasingly clear that none of the characters' versions of events can ever be trusted. Rosemary herself doesn't trust her memory, believing that many of her vividly remembered childhood episodes never could have happened. But we also find out that throughout Rosemary's childhood her parents and older brother Lowell manipulated her, feeding her various lies, fictions, and non-answers to avoid accept responsibility for their actions. So later in the book, when Lowell delivers a key "revelation" to the now-adult Rosemary, there is no reason to think that he isn't manipulating her even then.

This book reveals, in an understated way (because Rosemary is never bitter or angry towards her family) how even highly functional, seemingly caring parents can be subtly cruel towards their children. They raised Fern among humans, knowing that she won't be able to live with them indefinitely, yet making it very hard for her to adapt to a life among chimpanzees. It was just as bad that Rosemary's father, a psychologist, treated not just Fern but Rosemary too as an experiment. While she and Fern were together, they were both studied by graduate students in her father's lab. Everything Rosemary said was interesting to them, but only because she was part of the human-chimp speech acquisition experiment. With Fern was gone, nothing Rosemary said interested them anymore, and her endless chatter became a nuisance.

What I liked best about this book was endless observations about the nature and unreliability of memory, about theory of mind, about animal rights, and the way those meditations were wrapped into suspenseful plot arc.

Book Review: James Cambias "A Darkling Sea"

This book was praised by more than one of my acquaintances who are not writers. It is an important distinction. I have been increasingly disappointed by new books recommended by science fiction or fantasy writers, and have come to suspect that those books are hyped because of something other than good storytelling. But I know that if my nonwriter friends enjoy a book, it must have an engaging plot and characters; and if they are techies, it probably has well thought-out, science-based (or at least systematic, even if magic-based) worldbuilding.

"A Darkling Sea" has a lot of that. The worldbuilding is superb, and it has plenty of intrigue, as its human protagonists deal with not just one, but two very different alien races. Yet I was ambivalent about this book. It left me with a strange feeling that the majority of the plot was just the setup for something that didn't quite happen. But it is not true, of course: the plot arch arched satisfactorily, and was properly resolved in the last couple of chapters. So it must be that my expectations were different.

While this book shows a clash between two technologically advanced races, it is positively NOT a space opera. The action is carried out guerilla-style at the bottom of the sea on a distant planet. There, a group of human researchers observe Ilmatarans -- underwater, bottom-dwelling intelligent beings -- until another alien race, Sholen, tells them to quit or else. It is really about a conflict between human and alien psychology. But it rather lacks intensity and sharpness of psychological conflicts that such a claustrophobic setting could -- or should -- provide. Then again, my measuring stick for similar themes -- humans living in close quarters, isolated from civilization, facing the unknown -- is Peter Watts' "Blindsight". Few novels live up to the intensity of "Blindsight", so perhaps it's not fair to measure "A Darkling Sea" against it.

Still, when the driving force of the plot is a conflict between human and alien mentality, the book needs better characterization. As it is, the characters in it (the humans at least) are likeable, but bland. There aren't any strong, quirky characters through which such a conflict could manifest.

The worldbuilding in this novel, however, is excellent. It's not an easy feat to create two credible, different, nonhumanoid races, but this novel did just that. Between the Ilmatarans and the Sholen, Ilmatarans are definitely a more completely fleshed-out civilization. The name Ilmatarans is the only thing incongruous about it, because this name brings to mind J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. That's unfortunate, because the lobster-like, underwater-dwelling Ilmatarans couldn't be more unlike Tolkien's elves. Other than that, their culture, mentality, customs, even speech idioms follow from the physical conditions of their world. Living at the bottom of the ocean, they don't have eyes (which would be of no use in the perpetual darkness), and instead perceive the world and communicate via echolocation and taste. As with every alien species, a writer has to straddle a careful line between making them boringly human-like, and making them too alien for us to understand. With Ilmatarans, the author fell back on a tried-and-true method of making them a pre-industrial race, akin to a medieval, feudal society on Earth; they were starting to engage with the world scientifically, but their societal structures were quite primitive. That way, as alien as they are, they are still simple enough for us to understand.

What especially intrigued me about Ilmatarans was their number-speech. They assigned non-obvious semantics to numbers, and considered not just factorization of a number, but also its decomposition into a sum of integers; from that they inferred something about a person's character. Too bad it didn't play a big part in the book; I would have liked to know more about that. Even though there is no scientific basis for such a cabbalistic approach, it could tell us a lot about a culture.

But an even more interesting race was Sholen, the spacefaring civilization that clashed with humans over the sphere of influence. They were a spaghetti ball of intriguing contradictions. They had a self-proclaimed "hands-off-the-universe" attitude, which meant they wanted uncontacted alien races to remain so, and especially to stay free of influence of humans -- yet they enforced their peace philosophy rather aggressively. Their social structures and modes of interaction were a bit like bonobos', but they were nothing like the friendly, frolicky apes. My impression of them was more like hulking, menacing, six-limbed monsters. Despite all that, Sholen did not seem to be a poorly thought-out heap of inconsistencies, but a complex race with its own internal logic.

While the novel was enjoyable, it wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and that's why I will only give it 4 stars. I like to reserve 5 stars for books that do something innovative, such as develop an original scientific or philosophical idea. (Yes, like Peter Watts "Blindsight"). The setup, storytelling, mood, and characters of "A Darkling Sea" strongly resemble classical science fiction. An comparison that comes to mind is "Dragon's Egg", which also has primitive but smart creatures living in an extreme environment (super-high gravity of a neutron star). It is classical in the sense that science and technological resourcefulness takes precedence over character depth; the human characters in the book are not especially interesting. But the book is at least modern in the sense that female and male characters are equal in skill and courage.

I also have one minor beef with this book. The ending reveals a surprise whose impact can only be fully understood if you kept track of tiny, insignificant pieces of information scattered throughout the book. At least that's my guess. When I read the last sentence, I thought "huh"? What's that have to do with anything? Is the object mentioned in there referenced anywhere earlier in the book? If it was, I quickly forgot it (it was no more than a minor detail), and I don't even know how far back I would have to go in the book to find earlier references. Or is there an implication that this object could only have been left behind by yet another, ancient, long-lost civilization? If so, it must be a setup for a sequel, because this object played no role in the book that I could tell. Luckily, the plot had already been wrapped up at that point, so the ending was just a bonus "huh".

ArmadilloCon 2014 interview with Ted Chiang

Jayme Lynn Blaschke interviewed Ted Chiang, one of the two ArmadilloCon 2014 writer Guests of Honor. They talked about linguistics and time travel, story length and starting from the end, and obsolete scientific theories as story material. Here is a condensed version of the interview.

Why, despite the plans to make "The Story Of Your Life" into a movie, Ted Chiang does not consider himself a Hollywood bigshot.

Until the cameras start rolling, there is no guarantee that the movie will get made: many movies had been canceled at the last minute.

About the process of writing "The Story of Your Life"

Originally Ted Chiang wanted to write a story about someone who knew the future, but was unable to change it. What sort of emotions that person might experience, knowing that both good things and bad things were going to happen, and not able to do anything about it? Linguistics came into the story later, as Ted Chiang tried to figure out how to grant this protagonist ability to know the future. Meditation or mind-altering drugs didn't seem very interesting possibilities. Then he remembered Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language determines our perception of the world. The notion of being able to know the future by learning an alien language seemed very interesting, and only then the story became about linguistics.

At that time he didn't know a lot about linguistics, so he spend the next several years reading books about it and working on his writing, so as to become a good enough writer to tackle this story.

More about his writing process

He first comes up with the ending for a story, and works backward from there to determine what needs to happen. That way the stories don't "get away" from him like they do for many other writers who work without a plan.

About story length, and the [un]likelihood of writing a novel

Though he turned down a Hugo award for the story "Liking What You See" because it was too rushed (under the publisher's deadline he could not expand that story into the length he originally wanted it to be), Ted Chiang is content with how it turned out, and has no plans to rewrite it. He doesn't write novels, because each of his stories takes up only as much length as is required to develop the idea of the story. That's not to say he wouldn't write a novel if he ever got a novel-length idea; it just hasn't happened.

And while some audience members thanked Ted Chiang for "resurrecting" short story, he doesn't think short story is on the way to become a commercially viable art form. Though e-readers enable people to read in short bursts, they haven't lead to short story renaissance.

Ted Chiang (left) and Jayme Lynn Blaschke. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2014 are in my photo gallery.

About Ted Chiang's early writing days

His first story, written at the age 15, was an disaster-in-space story about an attempted rescue of astronauts in a spaceship. Even so, the adventure stories he wrote were science-based. One of them involved research the wavelength of gamma ray emitted when electrons collided with positrons. In other words, as Jayme Lynn Blaschke pointed out, he was writing for Analog.

What influences helped his transition from adventure stories to more philosophical ones?

John Crowley, Gene Wolf, and Ed Bryant. Ted Chiang highly praised Ed Bryant as a currently forgotten author who won a couple of Nebula awards in the 80s for his science fiction short stories. He especially recommended Bryant's story collection "Particle Theory". Ted Chiang credits him for opening his eyes to the ways you could use science as a metaphor for human experience.

Ted Chiang's story "72 Letters" where the concept of preformation, meaning that all living beings contain microscopic, but fully-formed versions of their future children, happens to be true. What appeal do obsolete, discredited scientific theories hold for Ted Chiang, at least as story potential?

People believed in those ideas because they were not self-evidently false: it required some experimental results for them to be discredited. So you could imagine a universe where they were true. As far as preformation goes, a human being or any organism is incredibly complicated, so it's not obvious that it could come from a single cell like an ovum. We still don't completely understand the details of how a fertilized egg becomes a human being. So a theory that we are fully formed on a scale too small to see is not unreasonable; though if you take it to its logical conclusion, that Adam and Eve's sperm and ova contained the entire human race in them, it starts to seem less plausible. In any case, you have to perform the right kinds of experiments to determine that it's wrong.

Ted Chiang is also interested in what are the things we take for granted now, not knowing that they are based on an incorrect scientific theory.

Michael Bishop "Close Encounters With The Deity": book review

Encounters with mystical, supernatural, or otherwise incomprehensible beings and forces are the topic of Michael Bishop's story collection "Close Encounters With The Deity". Some of those beings are gods, some are aliens, and some are not even creatures, but metaphysical notions. The results are... mixed. These stories might cause you feel a little let down by lack of satisfying endings, but they might also stay with you long after you finished them. They make a good case that a solid ending isn't necessary for a story to have lasting power.

These are not plot-driven stories: in many of them, the main thing that happens is the protagonist's inner transformation. An exception is the story about people who are forced to watch movies, which has a lively plot. Sometimes an inner transformation is accompanied by an outer one, like the story Dogs' Lives. The incomprehensible, mystifying being in it is the protagonist itself, or rather who/what he becomes in the course of his life. His life is shown through his memories of various dogs he shared it with; so in other words, it's about dogs' encounters with a (semi-)deity. Perhaps they were a thread connecting him to the humanity as he became transhuman.

But most commonly the characters do nothing but talk (or merely think) about inexplicable things that are happening to them. Yes, they feel profoundly affected, but they don't take any action. In fact, many times they let themselves be lead "off a cliff" by mysterious forces, at which point the story falls off the cliff as well. The protagonist does not understand, let alone accomplish, anything. Such are the stories Alien Graffiti, and A Spy in The Domain Of Arnheim. In the latter, a guy wakes up in a 19th century hotel room without knowing who he is, and starts taking orders from a voice coming from a gramophone. In some other stories, like Voices, the protagonist's adventure culminates in an encounter with a deity, but hardly anything changes for the protagonist. Well, he may become a tiny bit different inside. Maybe he wanted to meet a deity, and he got it. But what of it? No epiphany follows.

Yet even those stories are interesting in a way, because the characters are interesting people, and their adventures, though disappointing the end, can be intriguing while they last. Nevertheless, both I and the other person who attended the book club where we discussed this book (yes, this was a sparsely-attended meeting) thought the most enjoyable stories were those that delivered a payoff at the end. The examples are:

-- the puzzlingly titled Storming The Bijou, Mon Amour: a story about people who are forced to spend their own lives watching movies. If they dare not pay attention, their souls are erased when law enforcers take a picture of them. The protagonist sets out to investigate what or who is behind the movie projector.

-- A Gift From The Graylanders: a story revolving around childhood nightmares and a threat of nuclear annihilation. As a side note, nuclear annihilation or its possibility is a common thread in this whole collection. That's not surprising, considering the era they it was written in.

-- And The Marlin Spoke. The last one contains both a personal transformation AND a plot. The plot does not tell us what exactly happened, but the suspense in it is resolved so nicely, and the protagonist's quest is achieved in such a fulfilling way that I didn't feel let down.

The last story in the book, "The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis", deserves a separate mention -- we spent more time discussing it than any other story. It was singled out in the foreword as a kind of tale that might seem risky for an editor to publish, as it might alienate the audience; but that nevertheless needs to be published, because religion shouldn't be beyond criticism or examination. This novella mimics the Bible in its format, down to numbering of the verses; only the savior this time is an insectoid, female alien named Mantikhoras. She acquires four disciples, and they go about spreading her religious teachings much like Jesus and his apostles.

But... like many stories in this book, it leaves you wondering both what was the point of this particular messiah's coming, and of writing a "remake" of the Bible. It wasn't written for the shock value, because it's told in a sympathetic, non-parodying way. Nor does it say, here is how things would be different if a messiah were an insectoid and the event was set in modern times; nor does it make a compelling case that things would always play out the same. Basically, this story does not try to make any point. I'd say that if you are offering your take on a universally known story, you kind of need a point.

On the other hand, most of these stories are best enjoyed if you don't expect them to have a point. (Love's Heresy may be the only one with a clear message, and the only one that takes a clear stance on religious matters.) Mostly they just show humanity's wish for divine revelations as if in a warped mirror; humans assume that supernatural forces have certain agendas, perhaps to teach a moral lesson, to enact what their holy books say they should enact, but inevitably those forces act in ways that are often cruel, pointless, and incomprehensible to us -- perhaps because there is no secret meaning to comprehend.

I would recommend this collection to a reader who does not expect a plot, but enjoys a different, puzzlingly skewed view of religious and supernatural matters. The stories are highly atmospheric, and the characters really come to life. An example of that is Bob Dylan in The Bob Dylan Tambourine Software story. The image of Bob Dylan that comes through in this story is much like an image of Bob Dylan one can glimpse from his song lyrics (I never heard him speak, so I don't know if there is any correlation with the real person). In this imaginary, alternate-universe interview he explains his motivation for quitting music and instead writing software to facilitate people's religious experiences.

So: peculiar mood, bizarrely imagined situations, well-drawn characters, a view of religion that does not judge or take sides, but calmly observes how weird people's religious leanings can be, to what counterintuitive places they may lead -- all of those are reasons to read this book.

Center For Inquiry fiction book club fall 2012-spring 2013 reading list

Update: we will have a meeting in November 2012 -- see below.

Here is the list of books we'll be discussing in the next few months in the CFI Austin fiction book club.

October 2012: Nancy Kress "Steal Across The Sky"

From amazon.com:

"The aliens appeared one day, built a base on the moon, and put an ad on the internet:

"We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity profoundly. We cannot undo what has been done, but we wish humanity to understand it. Therefore we request twenty-one volunteers to visit seven planets to Witness for us. We will convey each volunteer there and back in complete safety. Volunteers must speak English. Send requests for electronic applications to witness@Atoners.com."

At first, everyone thought it was a joke. But it wasn't.

This is the story of three of those volunteers, and what they found on Kular A and Kular B."

November 2012: Mark Twain "Mysterious Stranger". In this Mark Twain's last, unfinished novel, a young Satan comes to a remote Austrian village. He claims to be able to foresee the future and informs the group of unfortunate events that will soon befall those they care about. The boys don't believe Satan's claims until one of his predictions comes true.

December 2012: Octavia Butler "Parable of the Sower"

From amazon.com: "When unattended environmental and economic crises lead to social chaos, not even gated communities are safe. In a night of fire and death Lauren Olamina, a minister's young daughter, loses her family and home and ventures out into the unprotected American landscape. But what begins as a flight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling vision of human destiny... and the birth of a new faith."

January 2012: Michael Bishop "Close Encounters with a Deity" - a story collection.

From amazon.com: "The book's unifying theme is man's concept of the Deity. Bishop's stories intermingle humor, horror, and awe in a manner similar to Vonnegut."

February 2012: Jonathan Strahan, editor, "Godlike Machines"

From goodreads.com: "In science fiction, nothing says sensawunda like a Big Dumb Object--a colossal, extremely powerful machine of unknown purpose and origin. It's that feeling that editor Jonathan Strahan was after when he asked six of today's finest authors to write for Godlike Machines. And they succeed brilliantly!"

March 2012: Greg Egan "Clockwork Rocket"

From amazon.com:

"Set in another universe where light does not travel at a constant speed but instead has a velocity that depends on its wavelength, Clockwork Rocket recounts the personal life journey of an inhabitant in this fictional universe."

"Alongside a taut and well imagined story set in a very alien world - complete with a sympathetic range of characters and a well imagined society - Greg Egan develops an entire alternative physics. This isn't just done in a hand waving way, it is properly worked out. The story of Yalda, the scientist who is the main protagonist, is also the story of the discovery of "rotational physics" in her universe, of the implications of that, good and bad, for her planet, and finally - in the construction of the rocket of the title - the story of the action she takes to safeguard that world."

Book review: Charles Yu "How To Live Safely In A Science-Fictional Universe"

seudo science fiction with a certain melancholy beauty -- that's what we concluded about Charles Yu "How To Live Safely In A Science-Fictional Universe" at the Center For Inquiry book club discussion. It is pseudo science fiction, because while it has science fiction trappings, most of it is author's exploration of how he feels about things. It felt self-indulgent, and for a good reason: the protagonist is the author himself, or at least his namesake. That's not to say that many of us wouldn't be able to identify with the protagonist sometimes. He is a technician who travels in a time machine, and attends the most heartbreaking moments of people's lives. It also means that he doesn't spend almost any time in the present -- most of his life is spent outside time, and he is a stranger in his own era. His capsule, barely big enough to stretch out, is completely bland and featureless. I was all the more surprised that I found its description compelling. Something about it resonated with me. Could it be because many of us spend most of our days in similar blank rooms, a.k.a. office cubicles, performing actions that are, in a way, outside of time? Their impact on other people is softened by many layers of infrastructure, depersonalized, not traceable directly to us. So it's not hard to identify with the protagonist's alienation. I found his father, a quietly brilliant, stoic, underappreciated Asian engineer, to be a more vivid character than the protagonist himself. But that may be just because I identify with an immigrant engineer's experience. That said, the explorations of the character's psyche did not make up for plot shortfalls. It seemed that the author intended for the time-travel mechanism to make sense (it wasn't just a vessel for psychological exploration), but in that sense it failed. At the end, we are expected to believe that the protagonist resolved a deadly time loop he accidentally created. But the ending is so ambiguous that we didn't understand what was going on. It's as if the author tried to hand-wave over the fact that no real resolution was possible. This book has a few interesting science-fictional tidbits, which I can't really call ideas, since they are way too undeveloped. For example, what does it mean to time-travel by grammatical tenses? Or what does it mean to live in a universe that's only 93% installed? Each of those ideas could be tantalizingly interested, if properly developed, but in the book they are just throwaway sentences. One of the book club members said that while he enjoyed the book enough, he wouldn't recommend it except to someone who really wanted a "different" kind of science fiction. This book may be best enjoyed for its melancholy mood, an exploration of a father-son relationship, and a tragedy of a brilliant, but modest person without an ability to sell himself well (the father). That last plotline is where the book really shines.

ArmadilloCon 2012: What You Should Have Read in 2011 - 2012

A bunch of authors, editors, critics and booksellers discuss their science fiction, fantasy and horror picks of the year.

It's worth noting which of the books or authors got a nod from more than one panelist. This year those were N. K. Jemisin The Kingdom Of Gods, Kameron Hurley God's War and Infidel, Will Macintosh Soft Apocalypse, and anthology Welcome to Bordertown.

Below are each panelist's recommended books, and his or her comments about why they are worth reading.

Willie Siros's recommended books

Margaret Atwood In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

N. K. Jemisin The Kingdom Of Gods and The Killing Moon. -- N. K. Jemisin is one of the most amazing new writers. She has strong ties to Africa, and writes in non-Western ways. The structure of her novels are so amazingly different than what you find in American fantasy.

Ian McDonald Planesrunner -- When someone decides, after a lifetime of writing hard SF, to write a teen novel, it's interesting to see how he's trying not to talk down to the reader. We, adult readers, have seen many science fiction and fantasy tropes, such as alternate realities, but teens might have not seen them yet, and require a different approach.

Neal Stephenson REAMDE".

Bruce Sterling Gothic High-Tech -- short story collection.

Francis Spufford Red Plenty -- Willie called it "my epic fail of the year", though it wasn't clear to me why, because his comments about this book were quite flattering. It's a novel about Soviet space race, and it's not clear whether it's science fiction -- maybe not, says Willie. It could be secret history. In any case, having lived through American space era, it's very interesting to read the same events from the other side. We in the US thought American space program got it wrong, but Russians also thought THEY got it wrong, and had to go back to the roots of Marxism to start over.

Terry Bison Any Day Now is another big secret history novel. It starts out with the usual version of the 1960s, but then you discover that Kennedy doesn't die, and the story drifts just further and further from our history. Willie says that he was amazed by Terry Bison's sense of inertia in history. It's hist best novel since Talking Man.

Laird Barron The Croning -- a horror novel.

James S. A. Corey space series Caliban's War -- American writers trying to retake space opera from Alastair Reynolds and Peter F. Hamilton and other Brits.

Kim Stanley Robinson 2312. You can see it as a sequel to Mars trilogy, or not, as you wish. But, according to Willie, it is Robinson best novel since Mars.

Charles Stross Apocalypse Codex is the 4th Laundry novel, and it's as strong as the 1st one. Much stronger than the 2nd and 3rd.

Jeremy Lassen's recommended books

Lauren Beukes Zoo City -- She is an amazing writer from South Africa. She got a handle on the non-western-European future science fiction.

Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns -- Really weird fantasy series. The setting makes it unique.

N. K. Jemisin The Kingdom Of Gods, and the rest of her The Inheritance trilogy.

Jo Walton Among Others.

Michael Swanwick Dancing With Bears

Greg Egan Clockwork Rocket, a start of a new trilogy, and no, it's not steampunk.

Kameron Hurley God's War -- another real science-fiction book. Incredibly unique setting, a cast of characters that features strong women taking control of their hyperviolent world. The wold is ruled by a Queen, all men are sent off to war. So it's just old men, and women, and children running this world.

Will Macintosh Soft Apocalypse -- very depressing, a gut punch of a book. It looks at Apocalypse as something that happens not with explosions, but with lowered expectations, something that happens when unemployment reches 40% and Walmart runs out of stuff. The protagonist's life just gets grimmer and grimmer. It's a hard book to read.

Rob Ziegler Seed. It's similar to Paolo Bacigalupi's "Windup Girl", but with faster pacing, and with more likeable protagonist. Rob and Paolo live in the same small town, so it's an interesting bit of serendipity.

As an aside, someone from the audience recommends Paolo Bacigalupi's Shipbreaker as being much better and with nicer characters than Windup Girl.

Rudy Rucker Jim and the Flims, in which Rudy Rucker comes to terms with his own mortality.

Geoff Ryman Paradise Tales, short story collection from Small Beer Press.

Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, ed. Welcome to Bordertown, an anthology. They rebooted the Bordertown anthologies, which were urban fantasy before urban fantasy was created, and got a whole new cast of writers.

Jeremy Lassen, Bill Parker, Willie Siros, Michelle Muenzler, and Bev Hale on What You Should Have Read in 2011 - 2012 panel. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 are in my photo gallery.

Bill Parker's recommended books

Ernest Cline Ready, Player One. Ernest Cline is native to Austin. This science fiction novel is set in 2044, and society has changed quite a lot. One character is a game designer from the 80s, and there are lots of references to 80s music, movies, and culture. It takes you through the game industry in little bits and pieces that are plugged into the story. By 2044 a game company has shut down, and opened up with a new product they called Oasis -- a virtual reality world. Kids don't go to school anymore -- they study in the Oasis. People don't go to the office, they work in the Oasis. One character lives in a trailer park, where trailers are stacked 30-high. The gist of the story is that the creator of Oasis has died, and left 3 Easter eggs for people. Who finds them, becomes rich. The story is about people who are looking for eggs, while an evil corporation wants to find them and make everyone pay for Oasis (which is currently free).

Some readers from the audience mentioned that there are also 3 Easter eggs in the book, and whoever finds them can win a prize.

Michelle Muenzler's recommended books

Haruki Murakami 1Q84 -- a very long and intricate story, that's very Murakami in the sense that every detail in it is very important. You can't just skip over chunks of text, because every detail is needed in order to understand what happens.

Johnathan L. Howard Johannes Cabal The Detective.

Ayize Jama-Everett The Liminal People -- a novel about underworld people who have powers, but you wouldn't consider it a superhero novel. It's a bit more gritty, realistic than most superhero novels Michelle has read. The protagonist's daughter disappears, he tries to track her down, and gets entangled with people with horrible powers.

J. M. McDermott When We Were Executioners

Martha Wells The Serpent Sea and The Cloud Roads -- very creative, vast world-building. Exploration of crazy-ass alien cultures clashing and interacting.

Jason Heller Taft 2012 -- hilarious, brilliant book. President Taft disappears, and 100 years later he wakes up on the White House lawn. The book is extremely fast-paced. It has Twitter conversations discussing his political views.

Kameron Hurley Infidel

Will Macintosh Soft Apocalypse

John Love Faith -- a massive battle, a dance between two spaceships, really fun.

Stina Leicht And Blue Skies from Pain

Rose Lemberg, ed. The Moment of Change -- a speculative poetry anthology. Very story-oriented poetry, resembles Year's Best SF anthologies.

Bev Hale's recommended books

Kage Baker Best of Kage Baker.

Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, ed. Welcome to Bordertown.

Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris Phoenix Rising -- steampunk.

Jim Butcher Ghost Story.

Rachel Caine Bite Club and Last Breath -- the last of her two Morganville Vampires books.

Gail Carriger Heartless

Kendare Blake Anna Dressed in Blood

Laura Anne Gilman Pack of Lies

Laurie R. King The Pirate King

Seanan Mcguire Discount Armageddon

Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of the D'Urbervilles -- a spin-off of "Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" series, where Sherlock Holmes got retired, got married, and still doing stuff. This book has Professor Moriarty as protagonist.

Tim Powers Hide Me Among The Graves

Cherie Priest Hellbent

Ransom Riggs Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

John Scalzi Fuzzy Nation and Redshirts -- Bev Hale liked Fuzzy Nationbetter than she liked Redshirts, though both were fun.

F. Paul Wilson Nightworld

George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, ed. Down these Strange Streets -- an anthology.

Willie's recommendations of books that are very new, or are yet to come out

Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and a couple of other authors The Mongoliad -- because Neal Stephenson has an obsession with swords.

Mark Teppo Sinner: A Prequel to the Mongoliad, and Earth First

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter The Long Earth. Someone said it would be funny if Terry Pratchett wrote the science in that book, and Stephen Baxter the characters.

Iain Banks Stonemouth and Hydrogen Sonata. The latter revels bits and pieces from the beginning of the Culture.

Robin Maxwell Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan -- a Tarzan novel written from Jane's point of view. Burroughs estate gave Robin Maxwell, an award winning historical writer, access to Burroughs notes about Tarzan's backstory.

Center For Inquiry fiction book club selections for the first half of 2012

April 2012

H. G. Wells "The Sleeper Awakes" -- a short novel about a nineteen century Englishman who falls in a deep sleep only to awake over two hundred years later.

May 2012

Nnedi Okorafor "Who Fears Death"

-- "The young sorceress Onyesonwu -- whose name means Who fears death? -- was born Ewu, bearing a mixture of her mother's features and those of the man who raped her mother and left her for dead in the desert. As Onyesonwu grows into her powers, it becomes clear that her fate is mingled with the fate of her people, the oppressed Okeke, and that to achieve her destiny, she must die. Okorafor examines a host of evils in her chillingly realistic tale'gender and racial inequality share top billing, along with female genital mutilation and complacency in the face of destructive tradition -- and winds these disparate concepts together into a fantastical, magical blend of grand storytelling." -- a review from amazon.com

June 2012

James Blish "A Case of Conscience"

-- "The citizens of the planet Lithia are some of the most ethical sentient beings Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez has ever encountered. True, they have no literature, no fine arts, and don't understand the concept of recreation, but neither do they understand the concepts of greed, envy, lust, or any of the sins and vices that plague humankind. Their world seems darned near perfect. And that is just what disturbs the good Father."

-- "A fast-paced, intelligent story that offers plenty of action while at the same time explores complex questions of values and ethics. In this case, Blish has taken on the age-old battle of good vs. evil. Lithia poses a theological question that lies at the heart of this book: is God necessary for a moral society?" -- reviews from amazon.com

July 2012

Brandon Sanderson "Mistborn"

A description of this novel on amazon.com calls it a mystico-metallurgical fantasy. I heard it has an unusual and well thought-out magic system. An attempt to create a "scientific" magic system might make this book of interest to CFI readers who like fantasy.

August 2012

Philip K. Dick "VALIS"

-- "When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy, or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world."

-- "From the cancer ward of a bay area hospital to the ranch of a fraudulent charismatic religious figure who turns out to have a direct com link with God, Dick leads us down the twisted paths of Gnostic belief, mixed with his own bizarre and compelling philosophy." -- reviews from amazon.com

ArmadilloCon 2011: What You Should Have Read

A bunch of authors, editors, critics and booksellers discuss their science fiction, fantasy and horror picks of the year. Willie Siros usually presents his list of notable genre books that came out in the last year or two, but he forgot the list at home. So he recalled from memory five recent books that left the biggest impression to him. Here they are.

Willie's five most recommended genre books of the year

China Mieville "Embassy Town"

Greg Egan "Clockwork Rocket"

Robert Charles Wilson "Vortex"

Charles Stross "Rule 34"

Gene Wolf "Home Fires"

Willie's less memorable, but still good novels of the year

James Corey (Daniel Abraham's pen name) "Leviathan Wakes"

Greg Bear "Hull Zero Three"

Charles Stross "Scratch Monkey", his very first novel that has been unpublished until now. Willie Siros thinks it was good for Stross' career that his debut novel was "Singularity Sky", and not "Scratch Monkey". But now it has been published by NESFA. (I wonder, then, if this novel is only good in the "look how far this author has come!" sense.)

John Scalzi "Fuzzy Nation"

Rudy Rucker "Jim and the Flims"

Novels that inspired a discussion

Nnedi Okorafor "Who Fears Death"

Elizabeth Bear, Michelle Muenzler, and Willie Siros. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

This book was highly praised by Michelle Muenzler and Martin Wagner. Martin recalled that one of its critics didn't think the future world in this novel was very well explained, at least not in a typical hard SF fan manner. Martin said that was because the world in which the narrator is living is not very clear to the people living in them. In the post-apocalyptic future Sudan, its inhabitants know only a little bit about our present day from some book, but most of the human history is lost to them. What is interesting is the narrator's personal journey. She is a product of weaponized rape, and an outcast in her society. This enables her to go on a journey she goes on. Martin characterized this book as an interesting hybrid that couples African mysticism with some very contemporary politics.

Willie Siros said that even though Nnedi Okorafor grew up America (she is of Nigerian origin), she has an interesting post-colonial view. He compared her to Ian McDonald, who is having "a lot of fun postulating future Brazil and India"

Hannu Rajaniemi "Quantum Thief"

Thomas M. (Martin) Wagner and Elizabeth Bear. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Martin Wagner wasn't quite disappointed by this book, but despite being a wonderful exercise in imagination, it didn't live up to the hype. Elizabeth Bear agreed: among other things, it is an uploaded brain book, a book on skinning reality, on being able to tune your reality in the "I don't like you, so you won't exist for me anymore" sense. But the author doesn't warm the water up for you, he throws you right in. Martin said he was processing the information so much that the story didn't hold any suspense for him. The premise of the book is like nothing he has ever seen: there's a city that walks around the surface of Mars. Time is currency there. After living for a while, its citizens become impersonal drones who work to support the walking city. Despite the imaginative setting, only one scene in the whole story has any heart on it: the hero brings a girl, the secondary protagonist, to a bar where she sings, because it's her hobby. Martin thinks this book had potential, but it will take the author 2-3 books to fully establish emotional connection with the reader.

Elizabeth Bear too said she didn't connect with that book. She felt distanced from the characters. It also does not testify to the author's writerly skills that when we meet a lesbian character for a first time, she is having sex. There are other ways to tell us she's a lesbian, says Elizabeth Bear.

John Scalzi "Fuzzy Nation"

Willie Siros counts this book in his "memorable, but not Top 5" category, but Martin Wagner was extremely impressed by it. Scalzi's take on that world was very faithful to H. Beam Piper (the author who originally thought up the fuzzies), but also uniquely his own. Martin liked a contemporary take on that particular story.

Mary Robinette Kowal "Shades of Milk and Honey" was another debut novel Willie was impressed with, and Martin liked it too. It's a Jane Austen pastiche.

Michelle Muenzler recommends

Darren Bradley "Noise"

Connie Willis "Blackout" and "All Clear" (a two-part novel, 2011 Hugo Award winner)

Michelle's most interesting fantasy books were all by Nightshade this year. "God's War" by Kameron Hurley has an interesting heroine who craps on everything, including herself. "No Hero" by Jonathan Wood is Lovecraft with the sense of humor. Michelle is a really big fan of Jonathan Woods voice. It's classic funny British, and if you ever talk to this author, you'll find he has the same kind of voice. You can imagine him in this book, talking with that voice.

Martha Wells "Cloud Roads". Though Michelle Muenzler strongly dislikes fantasy that has 5 million characters, "Cloud Roads" pulls it off. Every town has a new species. It has an ant culture mixed in with flying creatures. What Martha Wells did with different cultures is really fascinating.

Martin Wagner recommends

A whiteboard with the list of the recommended science fiction, fantasy and horror books of 2010-2011. Scott Lynch did the honors of writing it all down. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Joe Abercrombie "The Heroes". It's about how war teaches people who they are. Characters discover that what they wanted out of life wasn't necessarily what they thought. Heroism doesn't mean the same things to the same people. Abercrombie has an amazing way to convey battle scenes. Everything comes from the POV of the person in front of you. It's all filtered through the character you are relating to. It's like the Omaha battle scene in Saving Private Ryan. That's what makes it not just mindless violent fantasy writing.

Stina Leicht "Of Blood and Honey", a novel about a young man who finds out who he is in the times of the Troubles in Ireland. Fantasy elements are so subtly intervowen into this story that for hundreds of pages you don't realize you're reading fantasy. It's Martin's favorite fantasy debut this year.

Dan Abnett "Embedded", a military science fiction novel that appealed to Martin even though he's not a fan of that genre. The main character is a journalist, whose mind is going to piggyback on the mind of a grunt in a battlefield. The problem is, the soldier he's piggybacking on is immediately killed when he gets out in the field. So the journalist's awareness, his consciousness has to take over, and help to bring this soldier home, so he could tell the truth of what's going on out there. Martin described this book as trenchant satire about how politics and media come together to justify what we do at the time of war.

Under the radar book: "Enigmatic Pilot" by Kris Saknussem, whose style Martin compared to Mark Twain.

Elizabeth Bear recommends

Gemma Files "Book of Tongues", a very high grit fantasy western with hexslingers and ancient gods. The characters are terrible human beings who do terrible things for terrible reasons, but they really still care about each other. This keeps it from being a depressing book. And it has interesting worldbuilding.

Genevieve Valentine "Mechanique" is Elizabeth Bear's favorite debut is. It's a novel about a circus of people who had parts of themselves replaced by clocks and machines. Circus performers are competing for the role fo a ringmaster, who committed suicide. It's a wonderfully creepy, atmospheric, surreal little book. Willie Siros agrees that this one was on his list of favorite first novels, with not many lapses into first-time-writer'ness.

Disappointing Books

Martin said he has read two very, very, very long books by Patrick Rothfuss, and still waits for them to be about something. The last 1000-page book was about a kid "who goes here and does some stuff, and goes there and does some stuff, and gets into an argument with his girlfriend, does more stuff and goes home".

Brandon Sanderson "Way of Kings" was a bit disappointing too.

The book that takes a cake in this category (according to Martin) was "Hellhole" by Bryan Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. It has magic aliens.

Willie Siros' most dispaointing book of the year was "Magician King" by Lev Grossman. To tell the truth, Willie was also critical of its predecessor "The Magicians". "You have a magic school, and magicians who graduate, but they don't do anything. They sit around with their trust funds and piddle. Students go off, have adventures, and then give up on anything difficult. What's the point of learning something if you don't do anything that's hard? I didn't like any characters," says Willie. "So I said, OK, I'll see what happens in his Narnia (called Fillory in the book -- E.), where they become a king of an alternate world. And that didn't go anywhere. They haven't learned anything how to survive as an adult."

>Willie was not impressed by George R. R. Martin's long awaited "Dance With Dragons" was very impressive either.

Audience recommends

Several members of the audience recommended these books:

Iain Banks "Surface Detail" has fabulous ideas, fabulous writing, says a guy in the audience.

Alyx Dellamonica "Indigo Springs".

Ian Macdonald "Dervish House" should have won a Hugo, says an audience member.

Pictures from Armadillocon 2011 are in my photo gallery.