How to use this Page

Mark Tavani will join Penguin Random House’s G.P. Putnam’s Sons imprint as vice president and executive editor.

Just prior to to Tavani’s hiring, he served as the editorial director for fiction at Ballantine Bantam Dell. In the past, he has worked with several renowned writers including Justin Cronin, China Miéville, and Steve Berry.

According to the press release, Tavani will report to Sally Kim, a vice president and editorial director. His start date has been set for Feb. 08, 2016.

I read my first China Miéville book a couple years ago, The City and the City. Imagine two cities with different cultures and architecture existing in the same space. So, for instance, you live in one city but your next door neighbor lives in the other city. You see each other coming and going but you live in two different cities and you are not allowed to even acknowledge you see one another or the government will come and take you away for reconditioning. But that is not what the book is about, that is just the setting. The book is actually a police procedural. Trippy, right?

So when I sat down to read my second ever Miéville, Perdido Street Station, I was prepared to be plunged into something richly imagined but I had no idea what. The thing I like about reading Miéville is that you do just plunge in. He has created an incredibly detailed world with geography and beings of different races each with their own history and cultures but he doesn’t just tell you about it, he lets you experience it in the context of the story. This makes the beginning of his novels both exciting (you never know what you might discover) and hard going (you have no idea what is going on). If you are going to read Miéville, you have to be okay with total immersion and the confusion and uncertainty that goes along with it. Eventually you will know everything you need to know, you just have to wait and pay attention.

And so at the beginning of Perdido Street Station we find ourselves arriving by boat on a filthy river with a stranger to a city called New Crobuzon. And then the narrative shifts to Isaac and Lin and we don’t know who this stranger is for a number of chapters. But we don’t know who Isaac and Lin are either. Through the story we learn Isaac is human and Lin is Khepri, a humanoid woman body with an insectoid head, and the pair are lovers. Prejudice against inter-species love abound and so we start to think that this is going to be a love story of sorts about breaking through boundaries. And it is that, but that does not turn out to be the main story.

The main story congeals around Isaac a scientist semi-attached to the university but no longer really welcome there because his research is just too far out of the realm of what anyone believes is possible. Except it isn’t. And his far out research ends up in a breakthrough that eventually saves the entire city of New Corbuzon from being destroyed by slake moths, nightmare creatures escaped from government control that suck the consciousness out of sentient beings leaving them as living vegetables.

The book manages to be a romance, a thriller, science fiction, and horror all rolled into one. And it works. It really works. Miéville is always in control and no matter how weird the story gets or uncertain the reader might start to feel about making sense of it all, you can trust Miéville and so relax and enjoy the ride. This is speculative science fiction at its best, a substantial story, complex and intricately told. His vocabulary is one that sent me to the dictionary again and again. It’s smart and makes demands of the reader. And as alien as the world and the story turn out to be, it is all so richly detailed with such a sense of depth to it that it feels real and you believe in the places and peoples and histories and cultures. It really is astonishing.

If you don’t read a lot of science fiction, I wouldn’t recommend this book to you, however, if you are an avid SF fan or even read it now and then and feel comfortable in an SF world, definitely give this book a try. It is worth all the effort you will have to put into it.

The nominees for this year’s Nebula Awards have been revealed, and we’ve collected free samples of all the nominees below–the best science fiction books of 2012.

Many of these stories are available to read for free online. These are marked “COMPLETE” among the links.  Here’s more about the awards:

The Nebula Awards are voted on, and presented by, active members of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. Founded as the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1965 by Damon Knight, the organization began with a charter membership of 78 writers; it now has over 1,500 members, among them many of the leading writers of science fiction and fantasy.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Just when I think I have got my book juggling act under control I suddenly find more books being slipped into the mix. Who is doing this? It can’t be me, can it? I’m sure it isn’t. I am sure there are evil book gnomes at my house, I can hear their gleeful evil laughter as they scurry back into the shadows after leaving yet another good book for me to read. As for the library books that keep arriving for me, I think the evil book gnomes have hacked into my library’s computer system and are manipulating the hold request queue so the books I thought I wouldn’t get for months suddenly all start coming to me at the same time. Stupid evil book gnomes.

Nonetheless, the growing pile is composed of books I am really excited to read. One book I actually bought, pre-ordered two months ago. That book is The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It has many of the same characters in it as Shadow of the Wind and supposedly includes threads from that book as well as Angel’s Game. It is only 278 pages so relatively short. I also received a copy from the publisher that will become a blog giveaway soon.

I thought China Mieville’s YA book Railsea would be the first book of his I ended up reading. I also thought I wouldn’t get my turn for it until September at the earliest. After finishing Clash of Kings I decided I wanted to read Mieville now and began The City and the City. So far it is delightfully strange. And of course I just received notice from the library that my turn for Railsea is now and not in September. It has people in line for it behind me so I can’t dilly-dally.

A book that I just got from the library that I am especially excited to read is My Poets by Maureen McLane. It is being called a book of “experimental criticism” and is part criticism part personal memoir – a hybrid sort of book – about McLanes’s life and poets that have been important to her for various reasons. It sounds so delicious and I have high expectations. I hope it doesn’t disappoint.

Arriving in the mail is a biography of Clarice Lispector, Why This World by Benjamin Moser. I’ve been wanting to read Lispector for ages and know nothing about her. I assumed she was American but then caught on that she wasn’t. So I thought maybe she was French and wrote books like those of Maguerite Duras. But it turns out she is Brazilian and wrote in Portuguese. Oxford University Press is the publisher of the biography and they also sent some excerpts of her novels. However, I requested The Hour of the Star from the library, a novella, so I can have more than a sample.

Of course these books are in addition to all the books I am already in the middle of. Looking at my outstanding library requests it also appears it will shortly be my turn for A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava. Yikes! I am going to need another vacation with several long plane rides in order to get through all these. How are your own book piles doing? Do you also seem to have an infestation of evil book gnomes?

Jane Rogers has won the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel, The Testament of Jessie Lamb.

Below, we’ve embedded free samples of all the books on the shortlist for the UK’s prestigious science fiction prize.

Here’s more from Tom Hunter, the Prize director: “”It wasn’t an obvious Arthur C Clarke winner – it’s not from a science fiction publisher but from a small Scottish press … It offers a route into dealing with quite serious issues, about science, about maternity and about making choices.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

To this day, I often hear people on the left talk about "utopian, hopeful, progressive science fiction"--as if these are the same terms. Sometimes, "hopeful" fiction can be among the most reactionary. Sometimes, the "grimmest" and most depressive fiction might be really, really radical--or it might not, but it might be fantastic fiction.

Obviously, there's a question of taste. If you don't like "grim books," you probably won't like some of my books. That's fine--that's taste.

And you might well construct a political critique where you say, "The bleakness of these books is reactionary for the following reasons." That's fine. That's an analysis, and I might argue back. But to simply put out there that the books are in some way either lacking and/or politically reprehensible because they're downbeat is crazy.

My favorite example about this, within genre, would be Night of the Living Dead because--spoiler alert--Night of the Living Dead is a fantastically bleak film, and a very politically interesting film. The idea that somehow it would have been more radical had it had a happy ending is so crazy. In that particular instance, it's the unrelenting bleakness of it and the way it's done that make it such a powerful political film.

L. Lee Lowe just sent me a great link to a podcast interview with China Miéville for a new series called "The Books that Made Me".  Lee and I share an interest in the writings of Dambudzo Marechera, and I had known, but forgotten, that China also shares this interest.  One of the six books he lists as fundamentally formative in his life is Marechera's Mindblast.  Of Marechera's published work, Mindblast is the hardest to get a copy of, having been published only, to my knowledge, in Zimbabwe.  (I've managed over the years to at least find library copies of all of his other books, but not that one.)

Miéville has talked about Marechera and Mindblast before, and in a fascinating 2003 interview with Joan Gordon he said

I first read [Marechera] a decade ago, but came back to him recently and read all his published work. He’s quite astonishing. His influences are radically different from the folklorist tradition that one often associates with African literature. He writes in the tradition of the Beats, the Surrealists, the Symbolists, and he marshals their tools to talk about the freedom struggle, the iniquities of post-independence Zimbabwe, racism, loneliness, and so on. His poetry and prose are almost painfully intense and suffer from all the problems you’d imagine—the writing can be prolix and clunky—but the way he constantly wrestles with English (which wasn’t his first language) is extraordinary. He demands sustained effort from the reader, so that the work is almost interactive—reading it is an active process of collaboration with the writer—and the metaphors are simultaneously so unclichéd and so apt that he reinvigorates the language.

Thomas Bernhard "is often accused of writing novels that feel like cruel jokes. So dark, so difficult, and so misunderstood..." so writes Jessica Ferri (many thanks to Dave Lull for the link):

Bernhard offered me a language for these nascent, creeping feelings of misanthropy and also relief from them, with his melodrama and humour. I can't think of a writer who better captures the intensity and ridiculousness of big-city living. Bernhard's books are the only ones I want to open on the subway. He managed to capture the most beautiful aspects of life using the most wretched, miserable situations and characters. Such glimmers of humanity are similar to those brief moments of serenity that can be found on a crowded subway station, if one looks closely enough.

I have finally made my way through the 3,000 emails that had accumulated in the mumpsimus at gmail account during my absence from checking it. Thank you to everyone for bearing with me on that. If you need a response of some sort to something, and I haven't yet replied, please send me another note, because I think I have responded to everything that seemed to need a response.

There are some sites and items I discovered from the mail, including:

• The First Book, a site created by Scott William Carter to provide interviews with and information about authors of first novels. Scott was my roommate at the very first science fiction convention I went to, and he's not only a tremendous nice guy, but has developed a great career with lots of short stories published in a wide variety of markets and now a novel that is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2010.
  
  
• Noticing my comments on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Henry Farrell let me know about a conversation with China Miéville about The Road that he had a year ago. I completely missed this when it was first posted (probably because I'd just gotten back from Kenya), and regret that, because it's very much worth reading.
  
  
• Starship Sofa is a science fiction podcast with a great selection of material -- right now there's a podcast (mp3) about the life and career of the much-too-neglected John Sladek, and past shows have included readings of stories by Pat Murphy, Bruce Sterling, David Brin, and others.
  
  
• This isn't from the mail, but I'll add it here anyway: A thoughtful review of the soon-to-be-released Criterion Collection DVD of Alex Cox's Walker. This is an extraordinary movie, and I'm looking forward to seeing the DVD very much, because I've only ever watched it on an old videotape I got a few years ago, and the image quality on the tape is awful. I first got interested in Walker after I returned from a trip to Nicaragua and started reading up on Central American history -- and one of the stories that most captured my attention was that of William Walker, who took a ragged band of ruffians down to Nicaragua and declared himself president. Cox turned the story into a bizarre movie, and when I first watched it my reaction was basically, "Huh?" But a second viewing endeared the movie to me, and Ed Harris's performance as Walker is extraordinary -- he's one of the best actors out there, but seldom gets a chance to really show what he can do to the extent he got with Walker. The film is a political satire, an over-the-top historical epic, a chaotic mix of anomalies and goofiness, a sad and affecting tale of American capitalism and imperialism. Other films were made in '80s about Nicaragua -- Under Fire and Latino come to mind -- but Walker has more depth and nuance (even amidst its blustery weirdness) than its more straightforward and painfully earnest cousins, and it has withstood the passing of time all the better for it.

Richard, over at The Existence Machine, tackles Thomas Bernhard's Frost:

For those of us who care about such things, the publication last year, for the first time in English (translated from the German by Michael Hoffmann), of Bernhard's first novel, Frost, was a major literary event -- of significantly more importance than most of what seems to set the book world atwitter. Frost was originally published in 1963, twelve years before Correction (which is the earliest of the other Bernhard novels I own). Flipping through the book, right away differences are apparent: actual paragraph breaks! Rarely a paragraph longer than two pages! And, at 342 pages, the book is considerably longer than his other fiction (100-150 pages longer than Correction and The Loser, more than twice as long as both Old Masters and Concrete). In other ways, however, it quickly becomes clear that Bernhard's concerns in this novel were of a piece with his later fiction, though he had not yet refined his methods.