An Overview of International Science Fiction/Fantasy in 2009

Compiled by Jeff VanderMeer at Locus Magazine

Although my year’s best selections included some international fiction, I thought it would be of use to compile a few “core samples” of work mostly in other languages that my contacts found of particular interest in 2009. Except for the books from places like Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, these titles are not yet available in English. It’s worth noting, too, that the term “International Fiction” or “World SF” requires further specificity of detail, in the sense that some countries have a stronger tradition of supporting non-realistic fiction than others.

Australia, recommended by writer Deborah Biancotti and editor Alisa Krasnostein

Slice of Life, Paul Haines, pub. The Mayne Press: The cover says it all: a man digging into his own side with a knife. If you’ve never read Haines before, then brace yourself. This book features 17 stories “from the decaying mind” (to quote the blurb) of one of the country’s creepiest writers. All proceeds go to Haines’ cancer fund.

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A nod to coming-of-age novels

Kay Austen at Squamish Chief

On the recommendation of one of the library’s front desk staff, I recently read The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, a young Jewish-Australian writer.

This is a brilliant new novel from the young people’s collection in our library. The Y.P. collection, meant for our 14 to 21 year old patrons, is a veritable goldmine of wonderful classics: coming of age stories, science fiction, fantasy, edgy drugs, sex and rock and roll pieces, war stories, romances, adventure, mysteries, and of course, disguised adult advice.

Many of us who have left our adolescence can remember books that affected us in profound ways. They spoke directly to the circumstances we found ourselves in during those rocky times or they spoke with a voice to which we could relate.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Kidnapped threw us into fantastic rollicking adventures. Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (from which the film The Golden Compass came) and Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time series both take the fantasy road – they discuss developing identity, relating to others and becoming a part of a society.

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The 16 Best Dystopian Books Of All Time

by Tom at Pop Crunch

Dystopian novels—stories of the horrific future—are so common as to be almost forgettable. Here is a compilation of what I believe are the 16 greatest of the genre. I could happily list twice as many that are amazing, but these are the best. From the post-apocalyptic wasteland to deadly viruses to social malaise, all possible bad futures end here.

15. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: Despite her protestations of not writing science fiction, [Atwood's] story of a dystopian future where almost all women are infertile is most assuredly of the genre. Set in a future where disease and radiation have reduced fertility to a minimum, and a fascist military theocracy has taken over America (or at least part of it). Brutal in its critique of evangelist Christianity and their view on women, Handmaid’s Tale is a harrowing read at the best of times. In it, women have essentially been reduced to chattels, and the few fertile ones assigned to high-ranking military men in order to give them children.

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Peter Straub’s A Dark Matter—a literate horror story

Mark Graham at Tor

Since the 1970s Peter Straub has been known as the “literate” horror writer, kind of a modern-day Henry James.  Stephen King, Straub’s sometimes collaborator (The Talisman and Black House), has compared himself to a burger and fries.  Using the same type of allusion, we might refer to Straub as filet mignon and a baked potato with chives.  Maybe the combination of the authors’ styles is what makes their two novels so successful and deliciously frightening. King goes for your jugular; Straub goes for your brain.

Straub’s 16th solo novel reinforces his reputation, but it is also, at times, more visceral in description than most of the author’s recent works.  However, between the few scenes of a college student being torn limb from limb by a disgusting-smelling demon, rather than scream-in-the-night scary, A Dark Matter is pit-of-the-stomach disturbing, a novel that readers will carry with them like a gladstone loaded with bricks.

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Children’s author came to write dark fantasy by ‘crazy career path’

By Jody Seaborn at The Statesman

Carolyn Cohagan didn’t write a children’s book on purpose. Her debut, “The Lost Children,” published last month by Aladdin, came about because of a failed screenplay.

“The Lost Children” is an adventure fantasy about a 12-year-old girl who falls into another world where orphans mysteriously vanish, a couple of bizarre monsters prowl and an evil ruler reigns. Readers will recognize darkly comedic touches straight out of Roald Dahl here and there, and well-crafted surprises heighten the story of loss and reunion.

For decades, writers, parents and librarians have been debating what’s appropriate reading for particular ages — what’s too scary, what reads too old. Though it’s sensitively handled, there are a couple of moments of fleeting violence in “The Lost Children” and an atmosphere of grief and loneliness throughout most of the book. So Cohagan knew that some parents might find her book too dark for its intended audience — ages 8-12.

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I love seeing Sci Fi from other countries; there are different reading trends everywhere, so it’s interesting to see. Although that cover is disturbing. And A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager (I still think it’s awesome).  It was my first experience with Sci Fi. I’ve mentioned that I love dystopian novels before, and I’ve read (or am reading) over half the books on that list. So I’m glad they’re good choices.

Did (or do) you read sci fi or fantasy as a teenager? What got you interested in the genre?

Notes from New Sodom: The Spelunkers of Speculative Fiction

by Hal Duncan at BSC Review

When you watch enough of the daily dogfights down in the SF Café, you can get a bit jaded with it all. It’s science fiction versus Science Fiction versus Sci-Fi versus science fiction versus Fantasy versus fantasy — and all of these labels simply tags on one collar of a single Hydra-headed hound, our rabid Cerberus unbound, trying to rip its own throat(s) open. And all too often it’s the same fight underneath it all; clear away the rhetoric (e.g. “magic” and “science”) and what you find is Romanticism and Rationalism going at it yet again, the ideal of the sublime versus the ideal of the logical.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as they say, and it’s no different here in the SF Café. Those dogfights sometimes take an interesting turn when the sword and the scalpel pair up against the spectacles, or the spectacles and cigarette piar up against the sword. To put a grossly superficial gloss on it, we could say that the two warring clans, the Campbells and the Macdonalds of Science Fiction and Fantasy, sometimes find strange bedfellows in the black sheep of each other’s families. The intellectualists find themselves fighting side-by-side with realists who might hold little faith in Reason, who might have little real respect for the mechanistic process of logic, but who despise the grandiose glamours for perverting honest passion. The sensationalists find themselves fighting back-to-back with surrealists who might hold little faith in Passion, who might have little actual interest in the emotional dynamics of the sublime, but who reject wholesale dogmatic meta-narratives that deny disorder rather than investigating it.

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Two Books by Michael Chabon: review

by Helen Brown at the Telegraph

In his first collection of essays, Maps and Legends, Michael Chabon admits he’s the kind of guy who worries about “whether it’s better to be wrong or pretentious when pronouncing the word ‘genre’”. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist suspects that lovers of “serious literature” feel a similar tension within themselves when it comes to approaching the genre fiction that he loves. “Intelligent people”, he thinks, are drawn to the pleasures of ghost stories, detective fiction, sci-fi trilogies, fantasy adventures and comic book superheroes, but feel the need to handle them “with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs”.

Chabon thinks such superior squeamishness arises from a suspicion of being “entertained”.

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Two Literary Superstars Publishing Science Fiction Novels Soon

By Charlie Jane Anders at io9

The trend of literary authors veering into science fiction shows no sign of slowing down, as science fiction remains the best way to talk about our weird era. Ian McEwan and Rick Moody both have SF books in the pipeline. McEwan’s book, Solar, comes out March 18, and has to do with a new technology that could rescue the environment.

According to the Guardian, McEwan’s main character “discovers a way to fight climate change after managing to derive power from artificial photosynthesis, using light to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.” And Beard is a bit of a dickhead, having gotten himself into trouble by saying publicly that the scarcity of women at the top of the sciences is due to inherent differences between men’s and women’s brains, not sexism. That’s going to make him a hard protagonist for me to sympathize with, to be honest.

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Author Ursula K. Le Guin shares thoughts on book

By Jake Bolitho at Mlive.com

Ursula K. Le Guin has been creating fantasy and science fiction worlds for more than 40 years, and for a month, the Jackson District Library will become one.

As part of the Big Read — an annual event sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts — the library will host a series of events inspired by Le Guin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea.” The novel is often compared to the wizarding tales of Harry Potter but was inked 30 years earlier. The Citizen Patriot conducted the following interview with Le Guin prior to Saturday’s Big Read kickoff:

Citizen Patriot: The world depicted in the “Earthsea” series seems very complex. Did anything inspire its creation, like a part of the world you’ve been to or know of?

Le Guin: No, but after I’d written some of the books, I discovered pieces of Earthsea on Earth. One of them is Trinidad Bay, on the northern California coast. Another is the Scilly Isles, off the coast of south England. Nobody could make up places so fantastic.

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Mervyn Jones 1922-2010

Jo Walton at Tor

I was very sorry to learn of the death of the British novelist Mervyn Jones.

I never met him and don’t know much about his life, but I’ve loved his books for thirty years now. I first started reading him because the title of one of his books was an Auden quote. I was a teenager desperate for books with no discrimination when let loose in the library, which had advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes I got lucky, and this was one of those times. Today the Struggle wasn’t just about the Spanish Civil War as you might expect. It’s about two generations of two families of left wing British people, and how the Spanish Civil War changed their lives. It had great female characters. It had a kind of historical consciousness that you don’t normally see in mainstream fiction, and a class consciousness too, yet it was totally absorbed in its characters and their actions. It was like a family saga written by a communist. It blew my socks off.

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We read a lot here at OBS, and we want to share of favorites with you! So every month, we’re going to share what a few of our staffers are reading (or re-reading). This month we have OBS founder Dawn and staffer Katie’s picks!

Dawn’s picks


Gena Showalter’s  Lords of the Underworld Series #1 The Darkest Night – a fun adult series about the Gods punishing their offspring by tying demons to them. Lots of fun with some steamy sex involved.

Christopher Pike’s  The Last Vampire - I love the first person narration from Alisa as she clinically describes who she is and how she got that way. Pike’s take on vampires is a bit different than the norm, but that’s what makes it so interesting.

Cate Tiernan’s Sweep Series – a series on witches, we follow Morgan as she realizes she’s a blood witch. She learns to control her powers and use them for good. She comes across many obstacles and must carry on through heartache and pain.

Katie’s picks

Kim Harrison – The Rachel Morgan Series (or Hollows) – an action packed series about a witch Rachel Morgan and how she escapes the IS (supernatural FBI) and lives to tell the tale. But not for long. Each books someone new is trying to kill Rachel, but with the help of her friends, Ivy and Jenks, she stays alive….barely. A great series, that never gets boring. Just when you think the book is over and wont have anymore twists. The unthinkable will happen.

Patricia Briggs – Mercy Thompson Series - Mercy is a mechanic who has a secret shes a walker who turns into a coyote. Shifting into a coyote isnt easy when you live in a area full of werewolfs, and the alpha happens to live next door. I love this series, the plots are great and the characters a very well devolped. At the end of every book you feel like the characters could be your best friends.

You can get these books and other staff picks in our Shop

By Scott Timberg at io9: The Perfect Near-Future Novel To Get You Through The Recession

Need a book to get you through another year of unemployment, glacier melts or maybe even another oil crisis? World Made By Hand could do the trick.

The soft-apocalypse novel, by the sometimes kooky upstate New York social critic James Howard Kunstler, was well received when it came out in March 2008 — it drew blurbs from environment guru Bill McKibben, and author Alan Weisman (The World Without Us), who called it “as provocatively convincing novel set in a future possibly as near as tomorrow.”

But even before the paperback was out, this novel about a world that’s wound down and devolved after a few bombs, a tanked economy and a major resource shortage, had taken on a new level of poignance and prophetic power. It describes that world close-up, as it affects an honest man living a kind of post-Fall village life, without the portentuousness of McCarthy’s The Road or the mystical mumbo jumbo of other apocalypse novels. Instead, it’s bluegrass and homemade beer.

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By Francis Moul at Journal Star: ‘Golden City’ rages against technology

John Twelve Hawks is a reclusive author who lives off the grid. That is no surprise, given his trilogy about a universe of parallel realms of life, where the Vast Machine, run by The Brethren, controls the industrial realm that is real to most people. This book is the last of the trio.

Popping in and out of these varied realms are the Travelers, people with unusual powers who lead the resistance against the Vast Machine and their lifetime protectors, the Harlequins, trained in martial arts and armed to the teeth.

The three books are a shout against today’s new technology that, the author believes, surveils everyone and invades their privacy at all times in the real world we live in. Thus, fantasy is approaching reality.

The Golden City is the one realm purported to hold all the answers for resisting the Vast Machine by the Travelers and has long been the treasure sought by them. Two brothers, among the few remaining Travelers, are battling for control. Gabriel is the good guy, leading the resistance, while Michael has abandoned his role and is trying to take over The Brethren. Gabriel’s protecting Harlequin, Maya, is lost in the dark city realm.

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By Patrick Lee at Sci Fi Wire: Coming soon: An underwater futuristic sci-fi Western

Vampire movies, space adventures: What we need is a good underwater sci-fi movie, like The Abyss or Leviathan.

Kidding about Leviathan.

But we are in for another soggy sci-fi tale now that Gotham Group has optioned Dark Life, based on a book by Kat Falls, Variety reports:

Book will be published in May by Scholastic, which won the rights and inked a two-book deal after making a preemptive bid on the manuscript. Foreign publishing rights to the book, which generated considerable buzz in the pub world pre-sale, have been sold in six languages.”Dark Life” is set in a near-future world in which rising ocean levels and natural catastrophes have led some people to homestead on the ocean floor. Story centers on an underwater teenage boy and a surface girl who join forces to uncover a government conspiracy.

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By Alison Flood at the Guardian: World of fantasy: The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

“To Dad. Happy Saturnalia/Birthday/New Year etc. This book is everything it’s cracked up to be. Have a good escape from reality! Love, Nigel. Dec 1990.”

So runs the inscription inside the cover of my copy of Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates, winner of the 1983 Philip K Dick Memorial award and the sixth novel I’ve read as part of my journey through the history of fantasy. Regardless of the fact I’d fallen for Nigel already for wishing his dad a happy Saturnalia, I think he’s got it exactly right. Once I’d started The Anubis Gates I couldn’t put it down until I surfaced, breathless, from a torrential adventure which ranged from 19th-century poets to the gods of ancient Egypt. The story’s fairly complex – it’s one of those books where they don’t even try to summarise it on the back; it’s “a yarn, an adventure novel … a supernatural thriller, a literary mystery, a horror story” – but here goes.

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By Erin M. Evans at BSC: Being a Hack: Writing a Shared-World Novel

At the end of most science fiction and fantasy sections is a shelf that is plastered in logos: Halo, Warhammer 40000, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Warcraft. Shared world fiction. It’s a section that admittedly, I didn’t stray into until my mid-twenties. It seemed daunting, as if one had to be admitted via a complicated test. I certainly never thought I’d see my name on the shelf—that world was an alien one where I didn’t belong. Yet here I am. And while shared world fiction—fiction that uses a pre-created setting—has a lot in common with nonshared world fiction, there are also a lot of ways in which it’s pretty unique.

Like anything, it starts with having an idea. Non-shared world fiction can be sparked by anything really, and the same is true of shared world. However, the best stuff—and the stuff that was easiest to write—is borne out of the world you’re working with.

One analogy I’m fond of is that if writing fiction were like writing poetry, writing tie-in fiction would be like writing a sonnet or a haiku. There are a lot of parameters around what you write, and for some people, that’s just too much and they end up with a jumble of fight scenes and bad metaphors. But for others, much like with poets, those restrictions stir up their creativity in new and interesting ways.

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by Sabrina Rojas Weiss at MTV: ‘Beautiful Creatures’ Puts The Goth In Southern Gothic: The Book Report

So many of us who’ve grown up in small towns can relate to Ethan Wate, the narrator of “Beautiful Creatures.” He’s lived his whole life in Gatlin, South Carolina, as have generations of his family, but he’s been counting the days until he can escape its Civil War-obsessed, small-minded borders. And as much as Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s debut novel, which was optioned by Warner Bros. on the week of its release, is about the new girl with magical powers, it’s also about Ethan’s more common struggle. That’s what sets it apart from the supernatural YA novel of the week.

Ethan is intrigued when he hears there’s a new girl in school — someone from the outside world he longs to join. Lena Duchannes is labeled off-limits by the rest of the kids when they find out she’s the niece of Old Man Ravenwood, who lives shut away in a frightening mansion on the outskirts of town. Still, Ethan is drawn to the beautiful, black-haired girl with sparkling green eyes, and when he comes to her defense against the vicious taunts of the in-crowd, he finds himself an outcast too.

“Beautiful Creatures,” the first in a planned five-part series, is full of deliciously dark, Southern Gothic atmosphere, which Lena matches (or creates?) with her own moody despair. But we readers are saved from doom and gloom by Ethan’s determined pragmatic attitude, and we cling to his hope that that will be enough to save Lena too.

Read the review here

from Patrick Lee at Sci Fi Wire: Firefly to live on in new book of short stories

Joss Whedon’s beloved Firefly/Serenity is long gone, but you can’t stop the signal: Fans can look for more adventures of Capt. Mal Reynolds and the crew of the doughty ship in a series of short stories coming soon from Titan Books.

Writer/producer Jane Espenson—who wrote one episode of the Fox sci-fi series but is a longtime friend and colleague of Whedon’s going back to her days on Buffy the Vampire Slayer—told us that she will be writing one of the stories, centering on the characters of Kaylee and Wash (obviously set in a time period before the events of the movie Serenity).

“I’m writing a short story set in the Firefly universe that someone’s putting together,” Espenson said in an interview on Sunday in Pasadena, Calif., where she was promoting her upcoming Syfy series Caprica. “Titan Books is putting together a collection written by various of the Firefly writers. But [it's a] very short story, … 2,000 words.”

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I’m very excited about the short stories. I tried to read the comic book, but I just can’t get into that style. Short stories would be better. Better still would be if the show got renewed, but it’s Fox so there’s no chance.

What do you think of Beautiful Creatures? Will you read the Firefly short stories?