Following my serialized review of The Solaris Book of New Fantasy, there are four more short stories reviewed today. For those who missed it, part one is here.

The fifth story is The Prince of End Times by Hal Duncan. It tells the story of the Darkartist, member of a court of similar nobles titled after their roles, in the eve of his tattoing/coronation as the Lightprince, a role held by his recently deceased brother. We follow his anguish, as he clearly doesn't want this burden, searching for "a way out".

The story is about the nature of names and how they change reality in micro and macro scales. The Darkartist begins the story researching on a book which text is written with a living ink, the bitmites of his Vellum/Ink books, and that even narrate part of the story. Unable to find the answer he wants, the Darkartist must face his coronation and a final riddle from the former Lightprince.

The story seems to be a direct sequence to his The Tower of Morning's Bones, from Paper Cities, and uses much the same non-linear structure present in almost all of Duncan's fiction: highly poetic, dense and so full of subtext that it needs several readings to capture. Part of the fun here is to ride on Duncan's neologisms, fusions and wordplay. Another pleasure is to pick literary and mythologigal references scattered over the text. I'll risk and say that it has many things to do with Milton's Paradise Lost. Another great story.

Jeff VanderMeer brings King Tales, a set of three short-short stories about, well, kings. But instead of human sovereigns, Jeff uses animals and makes us remember that fantasy, as we know it, began with fables.

In The Trouble With Bears, a girl is imprisoned and enslaved by the King of Bears, the only bear in the forest, and tries to escape. In The Unreliability of Cats, an ordinary man witnesses the funeral of the King of the Cats and is surprised by the reaction of his own feline pet. Finally, in The Indecisiveness of Birds, a race is the only way to settle the dispute on who's the King of the Birds.

As all fables, the stories have morals within them. Issues about the nature of power, wisdom and the rights to rule are all addressed. Jeff uses a direct and clear prose, so kids actually can read it, or have the stories read for them.

In Between Dreams by Christopher Barzak, is a modern fairy tale. The author tells the story of Ai, a room cleaner girl responsible for an apartment that holds a secret: a man perpetually daydreaming in one of the rooms. Although she's forbidden to make contact, they end up in a blind and deaf friendship. While he talks to her about his memories, without her ever answering, she remembers her own history, which includes a ghost/spirit in a lake.

Something kept telling me that I knew which fairy tale this one was retelling. By the time the very last scene was described I couldn't help but smile. Barzak was able to put a classic story in modern terms and give it his own twist. A story about love, freedom and self-discovery.

Barzak uses the first person and it happened to be the best way to do it. One gets very close to Ai, her motivations, her struggles and fears. The reader is able to feel her change through her memories. A very nice work.

In And Such Small Deer, Chris Roberson tells the strange meeting between Abraham Van Helsing and Dr. Moreau in an island north of Sumatra. Something is killing workers in the tobacco fields, which leads Van Helsing to a short expedition to kill the supposed beast.

I still can't say if I liked the story or not. Sure it is well-written and funny, so I guess I could say I did. But being in a fantasy anthology, I was somewhat disappointed by the fact that the story's only supernatural element is the possibility of Dracula's existence, far away in Europe. He's not even mentioned, but one assumes that, if Van Helsing exists, so does his nemesis. On the other hand, it was quite nice to see these classical characters meeting.

Roberson alternates Moreaus's letters with Van Helsing's journal entries with simple, but formal prose. I´d definitely like to read another story in the same setting, but I feel much more amused by Roberson´s Celestial Empire stories.

The Accidental Time Machine is a kind of adult, dystopian version of Back to The Future (a mix of Parts I and II), with the same high-octane action of the movies but also with the criticism that is a trademark of Haldeman´s works.

The premise is very simple, actually: graduate student Matt Fuller is working as an assistant to Dr. Marsh, a Physics professor at MIT. When Matt does some fine tuning in a graviton generator calibrator, the machine suddenly disappears, reappearing almost instantaneously back in place. After several tests, Matt finds out that (1) he´s not seeing things, and (2) the machine travels in time, and (3) each travel advances it approximately twelve times longer. So the very first time it happened, it wasn´t more than a blur - but after a few more button-pushings, the machine will make it possible for him to travel to the far future.

First he has to find a way to travel along - for the machine is the size of a shoe-box, and, even if he tries to keep his finger on the button, the machine travels without him. After he manages to jerry-rig a structure to contain him with the machine, he starts traveling to the future. Then it will be up to him:

"The next time he pushed the button - if the simple linear relationship held true - the thing would be gone for over three days. Next time, over a month; then over a year. Then fifteen years, and ´way into the future after that."

Of course Matt will go all the way - in the beginning for curiosity´s sake, and then just to escape from a future more and more somber. From his first live experience, three days into the future (a future already unpromising, for he just finds out he has been fired of his petty job as lab assistant), to two centuries hence, in a time when MIT becomes, in a plot twist reminiscent of A Canticle for Leibowitz (and also of Idiocracy), the Massachussetts Institute of Theosophy, due to a fundamentalist religious revolution in habits and mores.

And it only gets worse.

Together with Martha, his assistant, Matt now is forced to adjust to life in a extremely intolerant society. His only way out is away into the future - this time more than 2000 years away. But, even though things appear to have improved greatly, this is not Matt Fuller´s Earth anymore. Matt will end in the far future, in search of a way back to his time. The end, which I won´t disclose here, is reminiscent of A. E. Van Vogt´s Far Centaurus (one of the best time-travel stories of all time).

Such is the burden of the time traveler, as all those great stories of the past have already taught us. The Accidental Time Machine is no exception, and that´s good.

The Accidental.... is at the same level with The Hemingway Hoax, one of Haldeman´s best work to date. It´s a very good - and scary - book. And also, paradoxical as it may seem, a breeze to read. Highly recommended entertainment by a master of the business.

Of course that, in a first moment, we can´t possibly label Gentlemen... as New Weird (nor would we want to do that), but this return to the Old Weird, so to speak, is symptomatic - but, as George Canguilhem (and probably Jacques Lacan) would say, not every symptom is necessarily bad. For instance, this is no "sword and sorcery" story, but, as Chabon himself says in the afterword, a "swords-and-horses" tale. And is takes place in our reality - if we can it so, for more than a thousand years have passed since that age. This is the weird element of the story that appeals so much to me - the inherent weirdness of the far past.

The illustrations by Gary Gianni are a treat - he´s currently drawing Prince Valiant comic strips, so you can see (and also through the example above) the high quality of his work.

Gentlemen of the Road is one of the fortunately now-not-so-rare novels which brings back the old without being too much nostalgic and at the same time without doing the sometimes tiresome revampings that are common today. It is weird, it is old, and it is also new. And, most of all, it is really good.

Thanks to Dr. Jeff Vandermeer for sending me this priceless guide.

Due to their very nature, anthologies are a pain to review. They end up huge, but shallow, since each story gets only a paragraph of hurried comments. Worst of all, by the time you end the book you must come back to every title to remember what the story`s about.

So I've decided to try another method. Beginning today, I'll review anthologies on a three-by-three (or four) stories a day. That lets me cover a full antho in a week and gives me space to dig into each writer's work.

The chosen for this first installment's The Solaris Book of New Fantasy, edited by George Mann and published by Solaris Books. The book has sixteen stories from old fantasists like T.A. Pratt and Steven Erikson, and newer writers like Jay Lake, Hal Duncan and Mark Chadbourn.

And it´s precisely Mark Chadbourn who opens the book with Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast, a story in which Will Swyfte, a secret agent working for Queen Elizabeth, must rescue the Queen's favourite poet and prevent the final blow in the cold war between England and the Faerie kingdom: the return of the once captive Faerie Queen to her people on the eve of 1598's Christmas.

Chadbourn tells a story that begins as a spy story. Swyfte's an archetypical character. An Elizabethan James Bond mixed with Sherlock Holmes, even with some gadgets and a sidekick. But things get a lot tenser when the faeries begin storming the house in which the party takes place. Chadbourn doesn't give the Unseelie Court a clear face, instead he keeps them on the threshold of both the house and the humans' sanity. Speaking of which, attacks on the weak minded is a preferred tactic giving some good horror scenes. In the end, though, Chadbourne presents a love story. Of an alien Queen to his doomed poet, and of a great spy to his memories. The moments in which both speak of their loves is a touching moment.

Though Chadbourne's prose is straightforward, he manages to give rhythm and elegance to the text. For the concept, the action, the horror and love scenes, the story does a very good job presenting the antho.

The second story is Janny Wurts' Reins of Destiny, a much more traditional take on fantasy. The story takes place in a medieval-like setting, where Kayjon, the king's horsemaster, is asked by a clansman to prepare some of his horses, including a mare, to be taken to the war against the Mistwraith. Of course, things are not what they seem. First because the story seemed to have something to do with horses and second that it doesn't deliver the premise.

Wurts begins the tale with a short prologue telling the reader of unrecorded heroes of the war. The story was supposed to be about these two heroes, Kayjon and the clansman, as they will do some heroic deeds in the name of their fallen king. The problem is that they don´t actually do anything but meet each other. The story is, in itself, a prologue to a bigger tale. In fact, this short piece is part of Wurts' War of Light and Shadows series and suffers a lot from that.

The second problem I had with the story was characterization and motivations. Kayjon is clever, well-mannered, patriotic and compassionate enough that he discovers the lie, forgives the lier and treats his wounds, and finally throws himself in a journey to save the kingdom. But some hours earlier Kayjon was just sleeping in the hay barn, oblivious and not caring for this big war. The rest of the world is only briefly mentioned: the existence centaurs, wizard-knights and the Wraithmist itself are written once or twice. Though Wurts' prose and word choices are interesting and appropriate, that alone couldn't make the story work for me.

Next title is Tornado of Sparks by James Maxey, another short story that reads like a prologue to his Bitterwood / Dragonforge novels. In it, Maxey tells the story of Vandevorex, a sky-dragon trying to get himself employed by king Albekizan, himself a huge sun-dragon that rules a kingdom in which mankind are little more than pets. The thing is that Vendevorex is selling himself as a powerful wizard, but not only he's not telling the truth about his powers but will have to demonstrate them in a way that will change some lives, his own included.

Although Maxey's story is a prelude, or part of his Dragon Age books, it works as a stand alone piece, and a quite entertaining one, as well as an intro for Maxey's books. Among hints of the Dragon Age setting, like gods, kingdoms and magics, the personalities and ethics of Vandevorex and the sun-dragon Zanzeroth, one of the king's counselors.

Maxey's prose is quite functional, but his dialogues read very believable and every character has his own voice. A good story that made me curious about his novels.

T.A. Pratt's Grander Than the Sea reads like a comic book. An excellent comic book mixing John Constantine and the villains from Batman. It's a story about detective Marla Mason, the chief sorcerer and prime investigator of a secret agency dealing with magical terrorists in the city of Felport. In this case, Marla has to stop a mad sorcerer, who's about to summon a sort of Elder God that will drown the city. The problem is, the summoner is both arrested in an asylum and free on the streets and nobody knows his identity or where he'll attack.

Despite the heavy theme, Pratt's story is light in tone and many times funny. Characters are very interesting and three-dimensional, with even a minor one shining with interesting elements. There's a clear homage to Lovecraft's work, specially in the monster's name: Xorgotthua. The way Marla managed to deal with the mad sorcerers, both great antagonists, is absurd, hilarious and positively unconventional for a fantasy story.

In the very end, though, Pratt surprises the reader with a sad little story about one of the characters. Some few pages that could have been another story entirely, but that fits perfectly in some of the story's central themes: allegiances, duty and love.

I had read both Jumper and Reflex before watching the movie. I liked both - not greatly, but I found both definitely fun, entertaining, intriguing stories.

And then I watched the movie.

I use to say that I´m as close an ideal moviegoer as Hollywood wants: I leave my brain outside the theater before entering. I´m not saying I can watch absolutely EVERYTHING and like it or accept it. It´s just that I love to be entertained, so I´m not the kind of person who tries, for example, to find out what´s going to happen next. Me, I prefer going with the flow and see where it takes me - and be amazed by it. (on the other side, my wife is a genius when it comes to discover evey plot twist of a film way before they happen; she´s a veritable Dr. House at that)

Jumper, the movie, alas, seems one of the cases where my pocket-brain (which I keep in my shirt pocket as a kind of pen-drive, backup device) started to beep like crazy. Not because it´s a dumb movie (it is, alas), but because the movie doesn´t make sense at all. Have you had the same feeling I did? As much as I respect Gould´s fiction and know that adaptations are a messy business, the adaptation in question simply changed the whole point of the book (the wonder, and the solitude, of being the only human capable of teleportation) and turned it into another Highlander-movie-based-in-the-TV-series: David Rice is the old McCloud who finds out that 1) he´s not the only one; 2) there´s an organization/sect that exists since times immemorial and which is dedicated to kill all the "jumpers" because they are an abomination. (Of course, there´s a few deviations of the Highlander-standard-plot, but you catch my drift, don´t you? ;-)

I´m not crazy about canon, far from it. I watched Star Trek: TOS as a kid in the 60s/70s and I accepted without prejudice the changes in the canon (most of them massive, we all know that), and I seem to be one of the very few Brazilian fans who really loved Star Trek: Enterprise and wanted that the series could go on. But a canon change can only go so far, and someone has to know where to draw the line. In Jumper´s case, the magic goes away entirely, and the story is deflated of all its important content.

I even bought the latest Gould´s Jumper-related book, Griffin´s story, though I haven´t read it yet, because I wanted to see what Gould could make of the adaptation and if he could make it good somehow. But, all the same, it will be good to read a story base in the original idea, and not a mixed-up story, which tends to be confusing and boring in the end.

And you? What do you think about it? (Both Jumper and the canonical forms in general)

As I explain in the introduction to the chapter, it's no longer a "canonical" part of the OMW universe, because it's from an iteration of the story I chose not to use, but I kept it as a reference point for a number of characters in the story, and later strip-mined it, not only for the final version of The Last Colony, but also for scenes and characters in Zoe's Tale as well. And I also take a couple of whacks at Fermi's Paradox, which annoys me for various reasons. In any event, it's a fun and informative read, and I hope you check it out.

According to Scalzi, even our apparent failures may still have some value in the end:

This is one reason way, whenever I chop out a significant chunk of text from a book I'm writing, I don't simply delete it: I cut it and paste it into an "excisions" document that I keep handy. That way I can go back to that material for reference, or to drop a line or an idea into the final version, perhaps in a completely different context, but where it will do some real good. This is what I do, and it's worked for me so far.

Via Enter the Octopus.

Bought in the last two weeks:

Zima Blue, Alastair Reynolds
The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, Robert E. Howard
Year´s Best SF 13, ed. by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
Babylon Babies, Maurice G. Dantec
A Separate War & Other Stories, Joe Haldeman
End of the World Blues, Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Elric - To Rescue Tanelorn (Chronicles of the Last Emperor of Melniboné: Volume 2), Michael Moorcock

Books received:

The Ghost in Love, Jonathan Carroll
2666, Roberto Bolaño
Predator: South China Sea, Jeff Vandermeer
(for reviewing both here and in Fantast Book Critic)

For those right above, thanks to Krystin Overstreet, publicity coordinator for Dark Horse Comics, and to Kathy Daneman, Publicity Manager for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Having said that, I must also apologize for another thing - as I hadn´t finished reading all the novellas before the end of the convention (and I just plainly forgot to save the pages) I couldn´t read Lucius Shepard´s Stars Seen Through Stone because The SF Site removed it just after Denvention. Sorry about that. The other novellas, though, are being reviewed here.

Let´s start with The Fountain of Age, by Nancy Kress. The story takes place almost a century from now, when a fortuitous accident (the discovery of a spontaneously modified kind of tumor in a woman´s brain) makes possible for people to interrupt the aging process. The D-Treatment (the D is for Daria, formerly a prostitute from Cyprus who married a British billionaire-financier) is seeked by a big number of people, specially nobility and celebrities.

Not only because this treatment if obscenely expensive, but also because there is a catch: the D-Treatment doesn´t make you live longer, on the contrary - every single person who takes it dies exactly twenty years after, no matter what your age or your health.

But that doesn´t matter for old people. Specially for Max Feder, a former soldier who fought in The Mid-East War and had a love affair with Daria. Today, an eighty-six year-old Max lives of his memories, and all he want to do is to see Daria (the only person who, due to her tumors, still retains the same age after more than half a century) one more time.

He is also a rich man (ironically, thanks to her, who, just after the brain surgery who made the breakthrough, gave him money and the tip to buy shares of her husband´s company. Peter Morton Cleary had offered to be the first subject to receive the D-Treatment. Evidently, he died after twenty years. But, even so, people still kept searching for this illusion of immortality. His company, LifeLong, Inc. reorganized financially, renamed itself Sequene, and moved out of London to a Greek island. Even the death of the King of England, the Sultan of Bahrain and a famous actress made no difference whatsoever. People kept coming to Sequene.

In time, terrorist attacks made Sequene go orbital, and that´s where Daria lives now. After a lifetime refusing to take the treatment, he finally decides to go for it - but because he wants to see her. Not because of their love (for time has move on inexorably, and she doesn´t love him anymore), but because she gave him a locket with strands of her hair and a kiss on a paper - and he lost it.

It seems a futile reason? Let´s hear what Max himself has to say about it:

"Stevan, it's like this: To be old, in the way I'm old, this is to live in a war zone. Zap zap zap--who falls next? You don't know, but you see them fall, the people all around you, the people you know. The bullets are going to keep coming, you know this, and the next one could just as well take you. Eventually it will take you. So you cherish any little thing you still care about, anything that says you're still among the living. Anything that matters to you."

When he´s up there, he finally manages to see Daria, but things didn´t go according to his plan (best laid plans...), but, taking the D-Treatment, he will at last have part of her inside him, and that´s have to be enough for him.

It´s a very interesting story - simple and straightforward in its main theme, even if the narrative is convoluted (as a good plan should be).

Kristine Kathryn Rusch´s Recovering Apollo 8 is a curious story. In an alternate Earth where Apollo 8 didn´t make it back, a man is obsessed with recovering the module and bringing back to Earth the astronauts Lovell, Borman, and Anders.

The story is curious because the failure of Apollo 8 not only did not hinder the progress of the NASA space program as it apparently boosted it - probably because the astronauts themselves pleaded for it before they died:

What worried him--what frightened him--was that this failure of the space program would end the program. It worried the astronauts as well. They made a joint appeal with what would be damn close to their last breath.

(I don´t know it that was supposed to be an emotional moment. Maybe for the American people. But that´s funny in a weird way, because, as a "foreigner", I watched the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in 69 from my aunt´s color TV in Rio de Janeiro, and, even as a child, I had the feeling that we were living in what McLuhan called a global village, for it simply didn´t matter to me (then and now) that the first man on the moon was an American. He was a human being, and that was the thing we should keep in mind all the time - Kim Stanley Robinson did a superb job at that with the First Hundred in his Martian Trilogy)

Be that as it may, the fact is that humankind not only established a beachhead on the Moon, but it has a colony in Mars as well. And the obsessed man, Richard Johansenn studied astronomy in university, did his post-grad studies in aeronautics and engineering and had just started the company that would make him the country's first billionaire by 2007 (hiring a pretty good geek to help him, a certain Bill Gates). And so he will try to get the capsule back.

All his plans, all his hopes (....), were based on the theory (the certainty) that the astronauts were dead. And that Apollo 8 would survive again and return.

The ships he had built, the missions he had planned during those years, were based on the idea that he was going after a death ship, a bit of history. He was going to recover Apollo 8, the way an archeologist would resurrect a tomb from the sand or a deep-sea explorer would record the remains of famous ships like the Titanic.

Richard had spent much of his fortune and most of his life finding ways to greet Apollo 8 on its next near-Earth return.

He sends a big ship, the Carpathia, with a docking bay huge enough to cradle the capsule. And he finally does it --

-- to find that there is no one in the capsule.

He had waited a lifetime for that moment. And would spent almost another one to figure what happened to the astrounauts (they had boldly decided not to die crammed in a sardine can and got out of it for themselves to die in the vastness of space - a thing that doesn´t look like very easy to do, even if you are a hero, but let´s accept the suspension of disbelief here). And he will spent the rest of his life trying to recover their bodies.

From that point on, the story seems to stretch itself almost to the point of boredom (which is fine by astronomical standards, because those things take time, but not in a story). In 2018 he manages to find the first lost astronaut, Jim Lovell.

Surprisingly, due to a deal with the Chinese government (much to Richard´s dismay) It´ll take just two years for him to find the second astronaut. But Richard does not get so lucky with the third: he will only find him in 2068, near the newly opened Mars colony - but that´s there our leap of faith in the story becomes a huge effort, for suddenly the gap turns out to be a canyon - first, Richard just happens to look through the on-deck telescope of the ship that is taking him to Mars... and finds the last astronaut!! AND HE MANAGES TO BE THE GUY WHO (even though, Rusch herself tells us, he is "108 and frail") GETS TO RESCUE THE BODY!!

Sorry, but there´s a limit to everything. I love space colonization stories and the story of the Apollo program, but Recovering Apollo 8 didn´t succeed - at least, not beyond the patriotic appeal (which I respect, but don´t feel moved by it).

On the other hand, in All Seated on the Ground, Connie Willis contrives a plot worthy of Fredric Brown when it comes to strange aliens. The beings from Altair simply land their spaceship in Denver, in the middle of the DU campus, and marched ("well, actually marched is the wrong word; the Altairi's method of locomotion is somewhere between a glide and a waddle") straight up to the front door of University Hall in classic "Take me to your leader" fashion:

They (there were six of them) didn't say, "Take us to your leader!" or "One small step for aliens, one giant leap for alienkind," or even, "Earthmen, hand over your females." Or your planet. They just stood there.

And stood there.

And stood there.

Most of the story is focused in the useless and pathetic attempts of humans to establish contact with them.

They continued to stand there for the next three weeks, through an endless series of welcoming speeches by scientists, State Department officials, foreign dignitaries, and church and business leaders, and an assortment of weather, including a late April snowstorm that broke branches and power lines. If it hadn't been for the expressions on their faces, everybody would have assumed the Altairi were plants.

It starts to look funny - as if it was all a good prank on the aliens part.

But it´s not as if they didn´t move anything at all - they made faces. Disapproval faces. Faces that make the narrator, Meg Yates, who is recruited to replace one of the language experts, remember her Aunt Judith, a very uptight woman who was always complaining about manners.

Evidently, Yates can´t find anything useful - until she finds by accident that they respond to music. Along with a girl´s choir director, Calvin Ledbetter, she strives to find the rationale behind their responses. But the answer, as we´ll find later in the story, has much more to do with her Aunt Judith than with the music.

The big thing of All Seated on the Ground is the principle that the Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia calls "the secret story", that is, the undercurrent story behind the main plot. The end comes as a surprise, but not so, because only then you see that the tips were scattered along the story. But Willis keeps us interested all the time. And that´s one of the most important things where narratives are concerned: to keep the reader´s attention. An excellent story - no wonder it won the Hugo.

The last novella reviewed here is Gene Wolfe´s Memorare - which, sadly, is not online anymore, but can be easily found now that it was just published in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer´s Year´s Best SF 13.

Memorare is a very intriguing story set in a not too distant future, but where mankind not only created orbital habitats as also space memoriais scattered through most of the solar system. Some of them simple shrines to pay tribute to a single person or entire families - but some also places where strange cults thrive.

All this attracts the attention of March Wildspring, an old-fashioned filmmaker who is making a documentary called "Vaults in the Void". He is particularly interested in the weird aspects of the memorials:

"There are at least five sects and cults whose members believe the deceased will be served though all eternity by those who lose their lives at his or her memorial. Some claim to be offshoots of major faiths. Some are openly satanic. We haven't seen enough to identify the bunch that built this one, and frankly I doubt we will."

Wildspring and his partner, Kit, are trying to investigate one of the most intriguing memorials, when they receive a help signal - which happens to be a plea from Wildspring´s ex-wife, who is running away from her current husband, a wife-beater. Now Wildspring must contend with both and at the same time try to explore the strange memorial.

When he finally gets in there, he is received not only by the regular memorial holograms, but by an entire community of people living in peace, beauty, and harmony - or are they? Wildspring must fight to make sure that everything he is experiencing is really what there is, or if there is someone (or something) messing up with his mind.

Memorare is an action-packed space adventure with echos of Zardoz, old ST:TOS episodes - mementos of a kind of SF that one doesn´t see much these days. And that Wolfe manages to work very well, as it is to be expected. It´s the space-age side of Wolfe, a side that we don´t see much these days; a very welcome and refreshing return to SF after the retelling of myths of The Wizard Knight dualogy.

Nuff said.

(Via Bowing to the Future)

a) Until tomorrow, I´ll be posting the final Hugo review on the novellas (which are almost all written up);

b) I will not review the last novel of the batch. Instead of reviewing [b]The Last Colony[/b], I´ll be doing a MEGA-Review of the entire Old Man´s War Trilogy - including Zoe´s Tale and The Sagan Diary. An interview with John Scalzi is also due in a few weeks.

c) Right after that, the following reviews are on queue, just waiting for a final editing before going online: Joe Haldeman´s The Accidental Time Machine, Eric Brown´s Kéthani, China Miéville´s Un Lun Dun, Daivd Louis Edelman´s Infoquake and MultiReal.

d) Not mentioning the Fantasy books we´ll start reviewing pretty soon to Fantasy Book Critic (more on that soon).

More than we can handle, you think? Stay tuned: paraphrasing the immortal John Paul Jones, we have not yet begun to fight! ;-)

And Jonathan McCalmont calls for an end to sci fi tribalism.

Unashamedly copied from Enter the Octopus, a must-read reference with its Bookosphere. Thank you, Matt!

In the meantime, check out Hal Duncan's blog. He's been writing a series of essays about strange fiction. Someone should publish his non-fiction too!

He will, however, continue posting monthly spotlights, press releases, news and hosting giveaways if possible. Additionally, he asked Liviu C. Suciu and David Craddock to continue writing book reviews for Fantasy Book Critic - but he still needed manpower.

So me and Jacques stepped up and offered to help. We are very glad to say that he accepted, and we will soon be writing fantasy reviews for FBC (but we will still keep writing here in Post-Weird, don´t fret!).

We wish to thank Robert for the opportunity and tell we are very happy to be of help.

Let´s go, then:

Top 48 SF Movies Based on a Novel

Copy the list below.
Mark in bold the movie titles for which you read the book.
Italicize the ones that you've watched.
Tag 5 people to perpetuate the meme. (You may of course play along anyway - this last comment I took from Larry. ;-)

1. Jurassic Park
2. War of the Worlds
3. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
4. I, Robot
5. Contact
6. Congo
7. Cocoon
8. The Stepford Wives
9. The Time Machine (1960 version)
10. Starship Troopers
11. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
12. K-PAX
13. 2010
14. The Running Man
15. Sphere
16. The Mothman Prophecies
17. Dreamcatcher
18. Blade Runner(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
19. Dune
20. The Island of Dr. Moreau
21. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
22. The Iron Giant(The Iron Man)
23. Battlefield Earth
24. The Incredible Shrinking Woman
25. Fire in the Sky
26. Altered States
27. Timeline
28. The Postman
29. Freejack(Immortality, Inc.)
30. Solaris
31. Memoirs of an Invisible Man
32. The Thing(Who Goes There?)
33. The Thirteenth Floor
34. Lifeforce(Space Vampires)
35. Deadly Friend
36. The Puppet Masters
37. 1984
38. A Scanner Darkly
39. Creator
40. Monkey Shines
41. Solo(Weapon)
42. The Handmaid's Tale
43. Communion
44. Carnosaur
45. From Beyond
46. Nightflyers
47. Watchers
48. Body Snatchers

I tag Jeffrey Thomas, Jana Lubina, Matt Staggs, Cheryl Morgan, and, obviously, my partner-in-crime, Jacques. Save a meme, people! :-)