Winners of the 2009 Locus Awards were announced at a ceremony and banquet June 27, 2009 in Seattle WA during the Science Fiction Awards Weekend.

Here they are:

Science Fiction Novel: Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow)

Fantasy Novel: Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt)

First Novel: Singularity's Ring, Paul Melko (Tor)

Young-Adult Book: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, Bloomsbury)

Novella: Pretty Monsters, Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters)

Novelette: Pump Six, Paolo Bacigalupi (Pump Six and Other Stories)

Short Story: Exhalation, Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)

Anthology: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin's)

Collection: Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)

Non-Fiction/Art Book: P. Craig Russell, Coraline: The Graphic Novel, Neil Gaiman, adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell (HarperCollins)

Editor: Ellen Datlow

Artist: Michael Whelan

Magazine: F&SF

Publisher: Tor

Congratulations for the winners!

I won´t waste your precious times (nor mine) whining about how things are hectic here. Hell, things are hectic pretty much for everyone out there - all there it takes is for you to be alive and the going gets tough already. So, I´m changing strategies here.

Yes, you will still see MANY mirrored posts from FBC - after all, I live there as well. But I´m also starting anew here, reviewing books and interviewing authors for this blog only, plus some extra features. And you can expect major design changes in the next few weeks as well.

I´m also prone to do some personal writing here. So far, I only did that in my Brazilian blog, but let´s just say I find much more conducive to talk and write in English since last year, so I also intend to change the focus of that other blog (I´m already doing that) into a more academic venue, only writing about SF now and then.

But not here. Post-Weird Thoughts is my redoubt. This blog it still the place where I can muse, think, and say whatever I want. Maybe I should do that more, and more often. Maybe I should try harder. And, as Samuel Beckett said, fail better. Yes. Maybe I should. Maybe I will.

Avatar will be released in December 18th.

Fast Forward 2 is an above average anthology. So far, it has collected a fair share of rave reviews -- and nominations: some of its stories, like Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow´s True Names and Paolo Bacigalupi´s The Gambler, were nominated for this year´s Hugo Award. FF2 is also the sole anthology running this year for the PKD Award.

Though I´m not familiar with the nomination criteria for the PKDs, my guess is that FF2 was chosen because of its variety. This is not a theme-oriented anthology, like Ann and Jeff VanderMeer´s The New Weird and Steampunk, for example, two other excellent anthologies, but what it would possibly lacks in focus it more than compensates for in strength and quality. Am I being too vague? Ok, then let´s move to the stories. I assure you they are everything but vague.

The anthology opens with a steampunk space adventure. In Catherine Drewe, Paul Cornell tells the story of Hamilton, a seasoned Irish Major in the service of the British Empire, who is comissioned to do an out-of-uniform job. He must go to Mars and kill revolutionary Catherine Drewe, who is working with Russian mercenaries to take over the red planet from the Czar and topple down the domination of the House of Savoy in the Solar System. It´s an intriguing story, in part because of its kind of "counter-steampunk" style: technology here has advanced to cloning and nanotech, though mores and fashion are pretty much Victorian/Edwardian. Maybe not likely, but what the hell! It is appealing, it is beaufitul, and it is believable on the page. It can´t get much better than this.

Kay Kenyon´s Cyto Couture also reminds us of a steampunk-ish setting, but not enough to make us yawn and think, oh, same stuff again? Definitely not. Nat is a trash boy who, after his mom´s death, goes to work in the plantation great house. He is going to be servant to the astonishingly beautiful Lorelei, first daughter of the plantation and designer of haute couture. She makes garments of living tissue, and gives Nat a job taking care of the mitos, somers, and golgi, basically pillars of synthetic flesh bathed in nutrients and that exsude clothing. But he treats them so well that he creates a bonding with them, and, together with fat, ugly Deri, second daughter of the plantation, he will (though in spite of himself, for he´s dumb as a doorknob) change things there forever.

In The Sun Also Explodes, Chris Nakashima-Brown pays a beautiful homage to Ernest Hemingway, telling the story of an impotent man in a far future of posthuman beings where everybody can be (and have) whatever he/she/it desires, and shows that size (not even performance) matters after all - but to be master of your own desires is the most important thing in the all-too-real end. The scenery and the endless, movable posthuman feasts are a treat to the eyes, to the palate, and to the imagination. Nakashima-Brown does a beautiful job with words in this story.

The Kindness of Strangers is one more reason why I love Nancy Kress. She has the ability of telling a story as if it was a real, daily affair - even though it involved major posthuman genetic mutations (Beggars in Spain) or strange alien invasions (the novel Steal Across The Sky, which I just read and it´s soon to be reviewed here). In this story, Kress tells us the end of mankind as we know it. One day, suddenly, every major city in the world is vaporized. Aliens in human form arrive and treat the survivors with exceeding kindness, offering food and shelter. Humans, of course, despise them, and even try to kill them, but they are indestructible (if they are holograms of if they have powerful force fields, it´s far beyond our understanding). Jenny, a woman in one of the refugee camps, caught in the middle of all this pain, suffering, and confusion, must cope with the growing anger of his lover, Eric, who left wife and child to die in Chicago only to make peace with her after a breakup. Jenny must keep her head straight and do all her best to help when things start hitting the fan and people start getting hurt. The Kindness... reads like a classic, top-notch Twilight Zone episode. And I´m a huge fan of the classic series.

Along with David Marusek, Jack Skillingstead is one of the most intriguing authors I have met in the past few years via the pages of Asimov´s. Alone with an Inconvenient Companion is almost a slipstream story, but it keeps nagging at you with that strange feeling you have only know for real when you have known too many hotels in unknown cities (I have); Douglas Fulcher is in a hotel bar, supposedly for a convention, minding his own business, when he is approached by a much younger woman from another convention who just wants to make conversation. He´s not much in the mood, but complies all the same. And, when he starts talking to her about his fervent belief in a sort of "cyborg conspiracy" among us, well, you can´t blame him. If the story was just about that, we would call it a slipstream and that would be that. But there is more (with Skillingstead, as with Marusek, there´s always more). Nothing too fancy, nothing too miraculous. But it´s definitely something that keeps disturbing us long after we finished reading the story.

True Names, by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow, is, along with Chris Nakashima-Brown´s story, another major feat of the written word. In the extremely far future, a being called Beebe (who apparently contains inside herself - the use of the pronoun here is arbitrary, obviously - a plethora of information, a veritable universe of it) is threatened by a former version of herself, who calls himself Brobdignag. It´s a cosmic, eternal (from human POV) battle for dominance. This battle, as we watch the dialogue of Nadja and Alonso (both non-human filters), have already happened many times before - epic apocalypses in a post-human continuum of a very far (and uncomprehensible) future. Cory Doctorow is one of the best names of his generation. He is one the very few writers who knows how to conjure words of technique and make them real, because they are, and them integrate them in science-fictional systems. He pulls a sort of Greg-Eganism, only without all the math and quantum mechanics - or with all of it, but wrapped in a different package. True Names mixes hard sf, mythopoetics, opera (and space opera, to an extent) and a flavor of the 19th Century with a Modernist language - something akin to what the Dada and the Surrealists did, but with a sense. It also has a taste of the French feuilletons of old, like The Count of Monte Cristo - with sockpuppets! References are also apparently abundant: characters like Nadia reminded me of André Breton´s classic Surrealist novel, and wouldn´t Alonzo be a tribute to famous mathematician Alonzo Church? A complex, multilayered story, which should be read not one, but several times.

In the short Molly's Kids, Jack McDevitt plays deliciously with the Frankenstein Complex (or it would be the Hal Complex?), throwing us in the middle of a story (the launching of the first AI probe to a distant system) where not everything is what it seems to be, for the probe happens to be a very reluctant one and must be coaxed in a very convincingly way in order to get off. Ok, maybe all of you will think, "oh, I been down this road before. It´s something Matrix-like, right? No, it´s not. And it´s not the Wachoswki Brothers, it´s Jack McDevitt. Respect! This story, short as it was, gave me the creeps and made me think of Harlan Ellison and his classic I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Molly's Kids gave me what every short story should give his/her readers: awe.

Paul McAuley´s Adventure is a welcome respite after the emotional rollercoasters of the previous two stories. It is a very short piece featuring some years in the life of Ian Brown, a British guy whose family was killed in the Third World War and who won a ticket in the emigration lottery, a place in one of the arks to the colony world First Foot. He was no hero, but simply a civil servant, who wanted to live an easy, cozy life. Soon after arriving at the planet, he married an American woman he met on the ark, and they settled down, for a quite tranquil, adventureless life. So adventureless that, seven years later, Brown looks around and sees that his life has amounted for nothing. Will he be able to change it? Will he have time yet?

Not Quite Alone in the Dream Quarter is a Mike Resnick and Pat Cadigan collaboration. It´s a kind of noir story with elements of Outer Limits/Twilight Zone. Apparently it´s a typical murder scenario: a man wakes up with a dead body and he has no remembrance of who the dead is. But he knows one thing: it is not a human being: it is a Dream. For this is a world in which Dreams have substance, and they inhabit it along with "normal" humans, who has no jurisdiction over them. They look like humans, they bleed like humans, they can be killed like humans, but other than that they are very alien.
All in all, a good, a bit terrifying story, but it lacks something in the end. It´s as if if - maybe just as the Dreams themselves - they lackes resolution, and also closure.

In Eligible Boy, Ian McDonald returns to his Future India setting of stories like Sanjeev and Robotwallah with this homage (at least in its title) to Vikram Seth´s A Suitable Boy, McDonald tells the exploits of shallow Jasbir Dayal, a boy whose only thought is to be beautiful in 21st Century India. He must take an exceedingly good care of himself and his body, for in a Delhi of twenty million people, "and a middle class with four times as many males as females", things are tough, and if he wants to find the wife of his dreams, then he must fight for her with all his weapons. His parents will go even to the trouble to hire him a matchmaker, but this is only not too disgraceful too him, but also unfashionable, and for Jasbir, as for all Eligible Boys, fashion is of the essence. What Jasbir couldn´t expect is that his housemate, Sujay, also an artificial-intelligence designer for Indian soap-operas, would create just for him a persona to help him winning the hearts of a suitable girl. The aeai "Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace, and Gentlemanliness" will then teach etiquette, discipline, and even Tango lessons to Jasbir. And then he meets Shulka, a very interesting girl with whom he starts a game of seduction - with some interesting, clever twists. It´s a very nice story, with only the appearance of shallowness and suddenly an almost bottomless pit opening from beneath the reader´s feet right at the end.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch´s SeniorSource is an old-fashioned detective story - and old means old. SeniorSource is a Moon-based company which outsources "all kinds of highly skilled jobs, from laser surgery to art restoration. Even detective work, with its combination of interrogation, observation, and forensic skills, could
succeed from a distance." And it did: the no-name protagonist, one of the younger elderly workers for the company (because that´s what SeniorSource is all about: hiring retirees who nobody wants anymore on Earth, because they would be literally dead weight down there), finds a corpse - a little boy, son of Shane Proctor, head of the largest mining company on the Moon. The thing is: he has to be not only a detective but also an expert scientist, a lawyer, and an authority on the Moon in just a few short hours - for his own sake, for the tiniest mistake in determining the causa mortis of the kid could mean his being sent back to Earth. And, after five years living on the Moon, that would mean certain death to him. SeniorSource is an intriguing, well-told story not only on whodunits and forensics, but most of all on ethics and morality.

Karl Schroeder and Tobias S. Buckell´s Mitigation takes the ecological proactive approach the hard way. Almost in a Kim-Stanley-Robinson fashion (that´s a compliment, by the way), they tell the story of two men, a Caribbean and an Inuit, caught in the middle of greedy companies, ecoterrorists, and UN regulations in the middle of a now ravaged Arctic Ocean and trying to make a difference - but not necessarily being the good guys: they associate with a scientist plus the Russian mafia to steal some patented DNA samples of extinct grains so they can thrive far from the greedy claws of these corporations. But, naturally, things never are what they seem to be: Mitigation reads like a mix of James Bond plus Indiana Jones story. Fast-pacing, action-packed, choose your high-octane adjective and there you go. A hell of an adventure tale.

In Long Eyes, Jeff Carlson reminded me of Anne McCaffrey´s The Ship Who Sang, but only in its basic idea: a spaceship directly connected to the brain of its pilot. All else differs: Clara, the pilot, still a homo sapiens despite being "a human-shaped component in a cradle of gel and splice-wire", was in fact a failed experiment, "grown ex utero, originally gene-crafted to be an asteroid mining dock controller". Then she convinces her creators to let her go, and they fit her into a ram ship, where she become a sort of USS Enterprise of one, boldly going where no one has gone before, in a mission that is already six hundred years old at the beginning of the story. Eventually she gets in touch with human colonies, but she never seems quite to fit, preferring to stay apart - until she finds the wreckage of a ship in an habitable planet, but its survivors, or their descendants, were reduced to the condition of savages, becoming, in a way, less human than her. This is a quite common trope in science fiction, a classical one indeed, but Carlson does a very nice job here, and his portrayal of Clara is so credible that sometimes we tend to forget she´s a post-human entity.

The volume closes with Paolo Bacigalupi´s The Gambler. The story takes place in the near future America, where Ong, a exile from Laos, must use all his gambling skills (inherited from his father) to survive as a journalist interested in feature really interesting ecological and poltical stories. The question is - is the people, so much into popularity, "karma points" and such, still buying human interest stories? Ong will compromise to get what he wants and interview Kulaap, a famous actress from his country who is the talk of the town - and who he despises. But he will play the game - even though, and that´s the supreme irony of the story - he is no gambler at all. And that´s what makes this story a pungent one.

The reason I took so long to review this anthology is that I wanted to read it at least twice so I could review all of their stories the way they deserved to be reviewed. Lou Anders has outdone himself as an editor, and all that I have to say is that I´m looking forward to FF 3.

When I first heard that filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan´s Labyrinth) was joining forces with Hammett-Award winning author Chuck Hogan to write a horror trilogy, no less, I admit I didn´t pay much attention. I´m not much of a fanboy. And also, you know, there´s absolutely no guarantee at all that an accomplished professional in one medium will be successul in another.

So good to know I was wrong.

When I picked up The Strain, the first book of The Strain Trilogy, it was all I could do to let it go. Even if it tells us a rather plain, simple story and you already know much of it from heart, you feel compelled to turn the pages and check for yourself what is really going on in there. (Then you remember that the apparent simplicity trick is the territory of masters like Stephen King, and you have a better understanding of it all.)

The first pages reminded me of the pilot episode of Fringe: a flight from Berlin to New York land at JFK International Airport with apparently no problem whatsoever - until the plane comes to a stop in the tarmac. Then all lights in the airship goes off. And everybody aboard die instantly.

Or do they?

Ephraim "Eph" Goodweather, an epidemiologist with the Canary Project, a rapid-response team with the CDC, is called to find out what happened - and he simply can´t. It´s as if they all had simply turned off. They died peacefully, eyes opened. At the same time, which should be impossible.

After a more thorough examination of the plane, however, they find four barely living passengers: a lawyer, a Marilyn-Manson-like singer, a middle-class engineer, and the pilot. They are taken to a hospital immediately, but the lawyer gets they out of there as soon as they start to get better - even though that´s just on the outside. Inside, they are suffering a major body change. They are turning into vampires.

As well as all the other dead passengers in the morgue - even the already autopsied ones. In the first night after the incident, all the bodies just disappear: they are trying to come back to their homes and families. What they don´t know is that they´re vectors of a disease - an fatal, uncurable disease which threatens all humankind.

The only person who has any clue to what´s going on is an old Armenian Jew, a retired professor-turned-pawnbroker shop owner, Abraham Setrakian. He has met this same thing before, in the extermination camp of Treblinka, in Poland. He is a survivor and he has been waiting all this time to put all his extensive knowledge to use. All he needs is to convince Eph and his partner Nora that he is not crazy...

So far, we all have seen this before, more than we would like to admit, right? The Strain is admittedly a vampire novel.

But The Strain isn´t your regular vampire novel. The Strain is no Twilight. Not at all.

Take away all the Gothic wrapping of almost all vampire stories (even stylish ones, like Underworld, which, even with all its excessive Matrix-like black leather glamour, is a rather entertaining one), and we have a fairly commonplace story of New Yorkers going about their businesses. Eph is going through a messy divorce and is fighting for the custody of his 11-year-old son Zack. Even the four survivors, though we don´t necessarily like all of them, are human beings (to a point, that is) and we can empathize with their personal daily affairs.

Until the going gets tough. Then things start turning into not a del Toro movie, as incredible as it may sound, but as a Tarantino film, or (to mention another very good Spanish filmmaker) an Alex de La Iglesia film: blood, gore, white plasma, violence, nail guns and vampire zombies with tentacled tongues. It can´t be much better than that, can it?

The Strain literally drinks in the same fountain of references in which Bram Stoker drank to write Dracula. And in which Richard Matheson to write I Am Legend (but please, please, forget the movie versions, especially the Will Smith one - I´m talking of the book here); The Strain, at least this first volume, could almost be considered a sort of prequel to Matheson´s classic novel. But enough: more than that and I´ll be really giving very unwanted spoilers.

The Strain is a very well-balanced mix of Dracula with I Am Legend for the 21st Century sensibilities, not without a certain wry humor (I mean with that a slight tip of the hat to Philip K. Dick - one of the villains´s name is Eldritch Palmer, for crying out loud! They had the balls to do it!) - and that´s just the first volume of the trilogy, mind you.

The literary debut of Guillermo del Toro exceeded my expectations. Not that I didn´t expected a good story from the creator of the sad and extremely beautiful Pan´s Labyrinth (one of my favorite movies in recent years). I just didn´t expect it to be that good. I devoured the book and I will be awaiting eagerly for the next two ones.

Below, a (rotten?) candy eye: some short pro filmes made especially to promote the book. Good stuff, but (unfortunately) not directed by del Toro (on a second thought, maybe this is just an appetizer... Maybe, after The Hobbit, he will...)

The First Trailer

The Dog Shed Scene

The Jail Scene

Apparently, he died of a stroke - the same thing that, in 2007, took the life of his wife, Leigh Eddings, with whom he had written several of his books. He never recovered from her loss.

Though I never read any of his books (yet), I was saddened by the news and pays my respects to his family.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics group has been set up by a consortium of authors, co-ordinated by Andy Remic, who wish to celebrate the good side of the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres. By that, we don't just mean media with a positive theme - no, we're into violence, sex, drugs and rock 'n roll like every other monkey - but that our outlook and content will be geared towards the positive.

The site will include reviews, articles and interviews, which is pretty standard across the industry, but also several exciting new angles - such as collaborative stories written by the professional authors therein, and "Viewpoint" articles where writers can collectively wax lyrical on a certain topic.

The official line runs thus:

"Our mission is to celebrate everything positive, funky and exciting in the Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror Universe! The SFFE is a core platform, a hub of authors who have banded together with the aim of celebrating all that is positive in genre fiction. We aim to leave cynicism and negativity at the door, and concentrate on what makes us smile, what entertains us, and what brings light and joy to our SF, fantasy and horror universe. That's not to say there is no place for criticism--- there's plenty bad in the world. However, this little digital corner is a place for positive progression, somewhere you will (hopefully) come if you want to smile."

So far, a considerable number of industry figures have signed up to take part, and many more are currently in negotiation! The SFFE currently enjoys: Tony Ballantyne, Eric Brown, Mark Chadbourn, David Devereux, Ian Graham, Paul Kearney, Tim Lebbon, James Lovegrove, Gail Z. Martin, James Maxey, Juliet E. Mckenna, Mark Morris, Sarah Pinborough, Andy Remic, James Swallow, Jeffrey Thomas, Jetse de Vries, Danie Ware and Conrad Williams. A healthy dollop of literary roughage, we're sure you'll agree!

Check out:

www.sffeth.blogspot.com

Love, kisses and chainsaws--

Andy Remic.

And, guess what: the site opened officially TODAY! And yours truly is going to be one of the Core Writers of the SFFE Army, meaning that I´ll be writing reviews and articles for them as well. But don´t fret: I´ll still be writing both here and for Fantasy Book Critic as well, and doing everything slowly, of course, because I´m writing my own stories now as well (right now, I´m writing a novelette for a collection, a short story and two flash fictions - not counting the novel-in-progress, which is progressing very slowly.)

YouTube user jaronpitts couldn´t wait: he created his own fan trailer, using plenty of scenes from other movies (you will easily recognize which ones; jaronpitts himself lists all of them in his YouTube page, which doesn´t do anything to spoil the surprise you´ll have with the high quality of the job) and recreating in CG classic lanterns as Kilowog. Enjoy!

Very good stuff. Go check it out. And keep an eye on Fantasy Book Critic for my upcoming series of reviews of the nominees.

The second is the trailer to the upcoming Guy Ritchie movie. Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law are very good, credible (as credible as one can be in a trailer) and funny. If this film is half as good as the trailer, then I´ll have as much fun as I did with Star Trek this month. Check it out:

So now you have it here. I want to thank Liviu, Cindy, Jacques, and David, my co-editors and friends from Fantasy Book Critic, who have been very supportive of me and my fiction. I also want to thank Nathan Lilly, Ron Warren, Mihir Wanchoo, Jeff Carlson, Mihai "Dark Wolf" Adascalitei, Larry Nolen, Jetse de Vries, Jeffrey Thomas, and Jeff Vandermeer, for the incentive. Thank you very much, guys.

Check the excellent trailers in the official site. (Embedding in YouTube turned off, sorry.)

And don´t miss my review of Alan Dean Foster´s excellent novelization of the movie at Fantasy Book Critic.

This was perhaps the most eagerly awaited novel by the SF/Fantasy community in 2009.

It was worth the wait.

China Miéville´s The City and The City may very well be his best novel since his classic Perdido Street Station.

The story does not take place in his Bas-Lag Universe, home of Perdido and also of The Scar and Iron Council, although the name of the fictitious city reminds us a little of it: Beszel, a Eastern Europe country not unlike Hungary, in fact, so similar in names and language that it could be almost a parallel one.

Aside from this "small" detail, this is a modern-day world, where people use computers, MySpace, cellphones, and well-known references abound (David Beckham and Star Wars are just a couple of them). This could very well be our world, for all that we know. But, as in any masterful work of literary imagination, can we say that the "real" world of The City... would be by any chance our world?

Miéville creates a very credible city and then some - this "some" is another city whose borders not so much touch as clash with Beszel: Ul Qoma. Both cities are separated by a grand, twisted building, strangely called Copula Hall. Like (and at the same time unlike) the old Berlin Wall, Copula Hall is the only legal way station between the cities.

Which can be a little disturbing to unaccustomed foreigners who can´t ignore the fact that both cities coexist in the same space.

Beszel and Ul Qoma are one and the same, intertwined. The denizens of one city must learn since childhood the hard and high art of unseeing buildings and people from the other, for not to incur in penalties from this and perhaps other world: as if all the laws forbidding contact between cities without proper permits weren´t enough, there is also another thing to be concerned at all times: the Breach.

Nobody knows exactly what the Breach is. But everyone knows very well what it does: it fixes things. It may return a stray person to his/her original city, for example. (It will probably do it to a foreigner person - even the Breach seems to want to avoid diplomatic incidents) Or it may take the person away. For good.

When Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad of Beszel, finds the body of a cruelly murdered foreign girl in the outskirts of the city, it looks like she was a victim of an assault - but soon enough the evidences begin to point to conspiracies involving radical political groups and end up leading him to the other city: Ul Qoma.

As if all of this were not enough, Borlú must also deal with what lies (or what some people thinks that lies, which, when you deal with mad people and conspiracy theory types, sometimes can be the same thing) between the city and the city: a third city. Orciny. An entire territory which is an urban legend in itself. A myth ancient and at the same time invisible, even more unseeable than the inhabitants of Beszel to those of Ul Qoma and vice-versa - but it also may be the key to the murder of the girl. And Borlú becomes too much involved in this to turn back now. He must find Orciny at all costs, even if it doesn´t exist.

The details of the narrative are a must; Miéville specially crafted a bad English for the writings of Inspector Borlú, a very intelligent man who just happens to not know English enough to be a master of style, but who can translate quite well his thoughts. (Though it´s strange even for me, a non-native speaker; I wonder what kind of estrangement you, my Anglo reader, will feel then?)

As far as strangeness go, we don´t get to see anything as flamboyant as the Remades of the Bas-Lag Universe, for instance, but on the other hand, we learn of the existence of the insiles, exiles inside the cities, between them. And what about the topolgangers - doppelganger places, zones that are the same for the denizens of both cities, but that each see in a different mindset?

If Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (2666, The Savage Detectives) were alive, he would be a serious candidate to be the Julio Cortazar of the XXI Century. China Miéville is on the same league, but in a slightly different key: he may as well be a Borges for the XXI Century. The City & The City is not to be missed.

DAVID LOUIS EDELMAN'S BUSINESS SCIENCE FICTION SAGA THAT BEGAN WITH INFOQUAKE AND MULTIREAL COMES TO A STUNNING CONCLUSION WITH GEOSYNCHRON, THE LAST BOOK OF THE JUMP 225 TRILOGY.

The Defense and Wellness Council is enmeshed in full-scale civil war between Len Borda and the mysterious Magan Kai Lee. Quell has escaped from prison and is stirring up rebellion in the Islands with the aid of a brash young leader named Josiah. Jara and the apprentices of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp still find themselves fighting off legal attacks from their competitors and from Margaret Surina's unscrupulous heirs -- even though MultiReal has completely vanished.

The quest for the truth will lead to the edges of civilization, from the tumultuous society of the Pacific Islands to the lawless orbital colony of 49th Heaven; and through the deeps of time, from the hidden agenda of the Surina family to the real truth behind the Autonomous Revolt that devastated humanity hundreds of years ago.

Meanwhile, Natch has awakened in a windowless prison with nothing but a haze of memory to clue him in as to how he got there. He's still receiving strange hallucinatory messages from Margaret Surina and the nature of reality is buckling all around him. When the smoke clears, Natch must make the ultimate decision -- whether to save a world that has scorned and discarded him, or to save the only person he has ever loved: himself.

The cover is by the genial Hugo award-winning artist Stephan Martiniere, who also made the covers of the first two (excellent) books of the trilogy, Infoquake and Multireal. (Here, you will find a MEGA-review I did of both novels last January.)

Geosynchron is due only to 2010. I´m already eager for it.

Online and free. Here. Now.