20 Best Science Fiction Books Of The Decade
io9.com: After much mulling and culling, we’ve come up with our list of the twenty best books of the decade. The list is weighted towards science fiction, but does have healthy doses of fantasy and horror. And a few surprises.
Air, Or Have Not Have, by Geoff Ryman (Gollancz)
Air won the Clarke Award and was nominated for a Nebula. Here is what Strange Horizons‘ Geneva Melzack had to say about it:
Chung Mae lives in Kizuldah, a tiny mountain village in the country of Karzistan. The people in Kizuldah live traditional sorts of lives, making a living through farming and migrant manual labour. TV has barely arrived in the village when a national test of Air, a new form of virtual media technology, takes place, badly shaking up Kizuldah’s traditional existence. The person most shaken up is Chung Mae herself, who is involved in an accident in the midst of the test that fuses her, in the virtual world of Air, with her elderly neighbour Old Mrs Tung, killing Mrs Tung in the process. Air tells the story of how Chung Mae learns to adapt to her new situation, and the work she has to do to help the rest of her village similarly adapt to the changes that the test has wrought and the further changes that she knows will come when Air is fully implemented in a year’s time . . . It might be tempting to read Air as a book that is advocating change and the embracing of the new, but there’s more to it than that. Change in Air is simply something that happens. It is inevitable. The future is not necessarily any better than the past, but it is coming nevertheless.
More here
Lecturer pens Star Wars academic book
www.hounslowchronicle.co.uk: If you thought academic studies were all about test tubes and pie charts, then think again – a lecturer at Kingston University has just written the first academic book about cult sci-fi film Star Wars.
Dr Will Brooker’s book is part of the British Film Institute’s Film Classics range, and examines Star Wars episode IV – A New Hope, which was released in 1977, from a fresh angle.
Dr Brooker said: “There is a library’s worth of books written about Star Wars, the extended universe, the fans and the effect on the film industry, but not one serious academic consideration of the film as a text. I felt I should fill that gap.”
He argues that, far from being a simple tale of good versus evil, director George Lucas’s sympathies are torn between the two.
He claims that Lucas identifies with both the dark side, Darth Vader and the Empire, and the heroes of the story, Luke Skywalker and the Rebels, referring back to the director’s experimental short films made while he was at college. He looks into the diverse cinema history that shaped Lucas’ approach and argues that, far from being a departure from his previous work, as Lucas has claimed, it is a continuation of his experiments with sound and image.
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The Time Traveler’s Wife and Harry Potter made the list, that is so great! It’s also interesting to know everthing that has been done surrounding the world of Star Wars. What do yout think?
