Locus, the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, is the paper of record in the science fiction community. Every year the editors and reviewers at Locus publish a recommended reading list which includes novels, YA novels, first novels, anthologies and collections, related non-fiction, art books, and three types of shorter work (
novellas,
novelettes, and short stories). If you are at all interested in the current state of the SF&F genre you can't do better than Locus' yearly effort. The
list for 2010 appears in the February issue.
[more inside]
posted by Justinian
on Feb 18, 2011 -
25 comments
This is all rooted in a vision I had, of William S. Burroughs as a CIA agent, and Philip K. Dick as his young henchman, going head-to-head with notorious gangster and pervert Adolf Hitler somewhere in Hamburg to find out where Hitler is shipping all the computers he can get his hands on. - In another world Charles Stross wrote
this sprawling work of
Alternate History instead of the
Merchant Princes books. Fictional books are of course themselves a common them in Alternative History stories, from The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in
The Man in the High Castle to Adolf Hitlers pulp novel
Lord of the Swastika in
The Iron Dream. Stanisław Lem was particularly enamoured with the idea of the fictional book, and wrote two volumes of reviews and introductions for them, lovingly described
here by Bruce Sterling.
posted by Artw
on Sep 23, 2010 -
87 comments
Good Show Sir - a blog of the worst science fiction and fantasy book covers from the deepest depths of second hand bookstores around the world.
posted by Artw
on Mar 27, 2010 -
67 comments
"
2044 starts where George Orwell’s
1984 left off. The problem isn’t Big Brother and the leviathan government. The problem is Big Brother, Inc., and the all-powerful marketplace."
[more inside]
posted by AceRock
on Jan 11, 2010 -
91 comments
It’s only natural that if you wish to present yourself as a well-read person, a certain degree of complete bullshit is required. There’s no shame in lying about what you’ve read. There’s only shame in getting caught. Then you look like a doofus, and an illiterate one at that... How to lie about books.
posted by Artw
on May 28, 2009 -
73 comments
Like
others before him
Benjamin Rosenbaum is making his debut short story collection,
The Ant King And Other Stories, available from his publishers,
Small Beer, as a
free download. More than this though, he is holding a
competition to find the best derivative work inspired by it. These include "translations, plays, movies, radio plays, audiobooks, flashmob happenings, horticultural installations, visual artworks, slash fanfic epics, robot operas, sequels, webcomics, ASCII art, text adventure games, roleplaying campaigns, knitting projects, handmade shoes, or anything else you feel like."
[more inside]
posted by ninebelow
on Sep 19, 2008 -
19 comments
"We were treated like rock stars. I was told there were female Trekkies who kept lists of all the cast members with whom they'd slept. I was told this!"
Extracts from 'Up To Now', the autobiography of
William Shatner... from his time on
Star Trek, where he comes over as the colossal jerk of legend, to his poignant recollections of the death of his third wife.
posted by fearfulsymmetry
on May 12, 2008 -
75 comments
Free,
good science fiction for download, some you might have seen, some new, all are worth the time. If you have only a few minutes, Michael Swanick's
Science Fiction Table of the Elements features 108 short short stories. If you have a little more time, Kelly Link, called by Neil Gaiman "the best short story writer currently out there" has released her much-praised collection
Stranger Things Happen. For longer reads, Charlie Stross has made available his cyberpunk novel
Accelerando and his Lovecraftish
Colder War. The creepier
Peter Watts has posted the New York Times Notable Book
Starfish, and its sequels as well
[previously]. If you haven't had enough, you should check out the
Baen Free Library, with books by everyone from Andre Norton to Larry Niven, as well as a large amount of right-of-center combat-oriented stuff by David Weber and friends. Also, the Science Fiction Channel has made available
many well-known classic short stories as well as
a lot of contemporary Hugo and World Fantasy Award winners
[previously]. Finally, you probably
already know that Cory Doctorow has
four novels available under creative commons. Happy reading!
posted by blahblahblah
on Sep 19, 2005 -
59 comments
50 Most Significant Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books. Not sure what their criteria was, but this is a nice list. Lots of obvious, gotta-be-on-such-a-list choices, but also some surprises that should have people buying some books they might not have thought of before. (The URL is rather cumbersome, but that's the only one I could find).
posted by sassone
on Mar 5, 2003 -
105 comments
Parallel universes Alternate universes may exist besides our own in some ghostly manner. Various science-fiction series explore
parallel universes, but what do serious physicists think? Hugh Everett III's doctoral thesis outlines a controversial theory in which the universe at every instant branches into
countless parallel worlds. Physicist Andrei Linde's theory of
self-reproducing universes implies that new universes are being created all the time through a budding process. Stephen Hawking's
quantum cosmology also suggests the possibility of other universes connected by wormholes. Some scientists feel that the famous photon
double slit experiments proves the existence of parallel universes in which a photon from one universe interacts with a photon from another. Black hole theory suggests that black holes may be portals to
parallel universes.
Science-fiction stories about parallel universes always delight the mind. Two of my favorite SF novels on parallel universes are Heinlein's
Job and
Number of the Beast. Several others intrigue me, such as
The Neoreality Series,
Diaspora, and
Parallelities. Science books on the subject include a
famous book by David Deutsch.
Do you have any favorite books on parallel universes or parallel realities, fiction or nonfiction?
What do you think? No doubt, scientists and
science-fiction authors will continue to explore the concept in the decades to come.
posted by Morphic
on Oct 21, 2002 -
64 comments
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