For a take on the Hugos from a Biology perspective, you might enjoy these three from Peggy… Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, and Erdmann Nexus by Nancy Kress. Three more stories I need to hunt down and read.
J Michael Straczynski did the best SF TV series ever *, Babylon5. He has now taken on another epic story; he is bringing Lensman to the Big Screen. The brainchild of E.E. “Doc” Smith, Lensman is a huge and complex story, and it couldn’t be in better hands. Besides the many books, part of it has been done as an anime, and of course there are audio book versions available. If you didn’t already know, Lensman is the original Space Opera, inventing the sub-genre. Some claim it was also the very first science fiction series ever written, but with a first story publish date of January 1934, I think Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars** series beat it to print with the February 1912 story Under the Moons of Mars. Which everyone remembers is also being made into a movie now, right?
*: Possibly now eclipsed by the new Battlestar Galactica, but maybe not: I’m going to re-watch both before I decide. You should do the same.
**: Notice how I avoided the whole science-fiction-vs-fantasy category argument for both book series by pretending it didn’t exist. Which it doesn’t when comparing these two works, since both of them would end up on the same side of the argument as voiced by any given debater; which side they ended up on would depend on who was doing the debating.
This weekend saw the presentation of the 2009 Nebula Awards, and some great writers won. Not hard to do when you consider most of the nominees were great writers, of course. That group included Ursula K. Le Guin, Catherine Asaro, John Kessel, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman for best novel, novella, novelette, and short story, in that order. Wall-E got best script, Ysabeau S. Wilce took home the Andre Norton Award, Harry Harrison won the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, and Joss Whedon got the Ray Bradbury Award (and accepted on video). My favorite first-person account of the event comes from Amy Sterling Casil, herself no stranger to quality writing.
You could never tell it from visiting this site (Media files like Movies, TV, and Radio making for so much better sound bytes and out-takes), but I read a lot. And I just read a quote that I agree with on both a real-world, professional level as well as a SciFi Fan level. The quote was given by a Tech in response to a situation he could not believe, because not even a Bean-Counter could possibly be that stupid. To whit:
Didn’t they know that the only Unhackable Computer was is one that’s running a secure Operating System, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armored divisions, and SWITCHED OFF????
Thanks to Charles Stross for that quote, from his story The Concrete Jungle, pub in 2004 in the book the Atrocity Archives.
If you haven’t read Chris Roberson’s The Dragon’s Nine Sons, you can now read the first three chapters online to get you started. I really like the universe he sets this story in; the two superpowers in the space race are the Chinese and Aztec empires, with the split from our timeline coming somewhere around the Black Plague. Both cultures are alien, but the people and motivations are fully fleshed out, believable and sympathetic. While Sayonara Jupiter may have gotten a few bad reviews, and even deserved them, it still contained some of the best special effects ever seen on screen in the 1980s. Like the first Star Trek movie or 2001, the effects also got more screen time than most of the actors. Still, this is a fun movie for space cadets of all variations, and especially those who love a good Godzilla/Gamera flick.
I stopped by the KADOKAWA Anime channel, and the focus is on the new Haruhi Wii game released in Japan on Thursday. Based on the video the game play looks a bit simple, but perhaps that is just level one. Word is that the Kadokawa site will be streaming the first episode of season two of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi-chan at 10PM on February 13th. That is Tokyo time, convert for your local time zone. The group at LITA, the Library and Information Technology Association (part of the American Library Association), has put together a video singing the praises of the Hi-Fi Sci-Fi Library and posted it on Libraryman. Nerdcore at its finest!