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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