10 great science fiction novels that have been banned
Source: io9.com
In honor of Banned Books Week, Geekosystem’s Susana Polo looks at 10 great science fiction novels that have been banned, or at least threatened with removal from libraries and schools. Including some major classics of the genre!
These titles are among the most popular and beloved science fiction works of the last century. They’ve told us how bad the future might be before we get there, how free you can be if you don’t follow blind belief, and that children are perfectly capable of digesting some pretty heavy concepts, actually. But they’ve all been banned or threatened with banning.
#10 Shade’s Children by Garth Nix
Shade’s Children is filled with a creeping dread that the computer intelligence that leads the teenage main characters (through the hellish wasteland of our world filled with terrifying robot soldiers with grafted human body parts who fight over territory in a decades long war-game played by three alien tyrants) does not have their best interests in mind.
Yes, all that other stuff is creepy, including the fact that one of the kids didn’t escape the prisoner camps until after he was castrated, but the real slow horror of the book is that eventually Shade is going to betray the children who trust him and learned from him, and no one taught them to think critically enough to see it coming.
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J.K. Rowling Tells Oprah: Another ‘Harry Potter’ Book A Possibility
Source: huffingtonpost.com
Could Harry Potter return to work more magic?
J.K. Rowling is leaving open the possibility. She told Oprah Winfrey in a taped interview airing Friday that she may someday write another novel in the popular series.
Rowling says the characters are still in her head and she “could definitely” write several new books about them. She says: “I’m not going to say I won’t.” For now, she feels she’s moved on to a new phase of her writing.
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Stephen King explains how to make vampires ‘scary again’
Source: guardian.co.uk
“Here’s what vampires shouldn’t be: pallid detectives who drink Bloody Marys and work only at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen; anorexic teenage girls; boy-toys with big dewy eyes,” writes Stephen King in the introduction to his move into original comic book writing, American Vampire. “What should they be? Killers, honey. Stone killers who never get enough of that tasty Type-A. Bad boys and girls. Hunters. In other words, Midnight America. Red, white and blue, accent on the red. Those vamps got hijacked by a lot of soft-focus romance.”
King has clearly got a bit of a thing against the waves of romantically inclined vampires that have been proving so popular in recent years – in the past, he’s hit out particularly at Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books and the yearning teen romance that fills them. “Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good,” he said last year.
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Odds and Ends: My New Top 10 Anticipated Novels From the Rest of 2010 – Updated with Comments
Source: fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com
As another case study in book selection, I will bring forward the original post from May, now that I have almost finished the list; I added comments and review links when available to all the books below. I also made a Goodreads list with my top 25 2010 novels which I plan to keep updating as needed – there are 27 books since I put two combos as below, with #26-27 being the second book of the combo, so the true position is with their “pair”.
As an additional remark, out of the 27 books there, only Passion Play and The Noise Within are books I rated below my top A++ rating, since they are very good and with extraordinary but not-yet-fully-realized potential for the series. All the rest have my top rating and the ranking reflects mostly my priorities as novels go in general and sff in particular, rather than any “objective X is better than Y”; those novels are the cream of the crop of 2010 releases for me so far.
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Oh dear, Mr King. Well, I guess everyone’s entitled to their opinions, right? And everyone is looking for something different in a book.
What do you think of the banned books list? What do you think about the banning of books? Good idea? Not so much?
Join us in the forum to discuss!
