Tag Archives: science fiction

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Pan Macmillan caters for the iPhone alpha geeks

iPhoneHey, you – yeah, you with the iPhone. Wanna do something more interesting than pretend to check your mail while you’re on the bus? Genre publishers Pan Macmillan obviously think you do, and have taken the remarkably forward-looking choice of making some of their science fiction and fantasy ebook selection available for the Stanza reader software. [image by William Hook]

At the moment you still have to download the original ebook to your Stanza desktop app and transfer it across, and you can only get an excerpt rather than the whole thing, but apparently the ability to buy direct from your iPhone is in the pipeline. I’ve been waiting to see how the big houses would respond to Oprah’s backing of the Kindle – maybe we’re seeing the first shot in a hardware war yet to come?

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Has science fiction’s sensawunda lost its sense of wonder?

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Tomorrow, The Stars - old science fiction anthology coverEveryone looks for something a little different from their fiction fix, science fiction readers included. But science fiction is also a special case, because it has been traditionally tied to the “sense of wonder” – that gosh-wow feeling engendered by reading about something previously inconceivable. Indeed, sensawunda used to be described by some writers and critics (whether correctly or not) as the core differential between science fiction and ‘regular’ fiction. [image uploaded by Jim Linwood]

But is that still the case? For example, the Mundane SF manifesto would appear to argue against sensawunda’s necessity and relevance to modern readers. And here’s Nancy Kress musing on the Somalian pirates’ tanker hijack:

Maybe the world has gotten too grubby and jaded for “awe.” Or I have. At any rate, a “sense of wonder” is no longer what I look for in fiction, including SF. I don’t want to be dazzled by things I never thought of before, even though often that seems to be what SF values. I want to be emotionally moved, involved at a visceral level with the characters and the situation, not with novelty or landscapes or gadgets or derring-do.

Speaking personally, I’ve no objection to sensawunda in my science fiction, but the older I get and the more I read (fiction or otherwise) the more my tastes seem to align with Nancy’s – I want stories about people first and foremost. Sensawunda is an extra – a side-dish, if you like, or a piquant sauce.

What about you lot? Has reality and endless CGI movies jaded you, too, or do starships and rayguns still flick your switches?

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Friday Free Fiction for 21st November

Here’s a suggestion: don’t read the news. It’ll only make you miserable, and there’s no point wasting emotional energy worrying about stuff that’s way beyond your control.

So why not read some free science fiction instead, eh? That’ll keep you distracted at no cost whatsoever! Get clicking…

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Manybooks has an old-school bit of satire in the form of “The Last American: A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy” by J A Mitchell

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At Apex Online:

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If you’re not yet experiencing a severe case of undead ennui, John Joseph Adams has unleashed some more free stories from his zombie anthology The Living Dead:

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At Subterranean Online:

Noted Steampunk aviatrix Cherie Priest debuts what she calls The Clockwork Century (“Combat dirigibles skulk across the sky and armored vehicles crawl along the land. Military scientists twist the laws of man and nature, and barter their souls for weapons powered by light, fire, and steam.”) in the novelette, “Tanglefoot”, the story of a gentle, tragic mad scientist and his boy assistant.

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Here’s a new free fiction start-up (downloadable PDF rather than in-browser HTML), Arkham Tales:

Presenting Issue #1 of Arkham Tales! 100 pages of the best weird fiction on the market right now, and all free for your reading pleasure!

This issue bears cover artwork by Ivan Green, and contains fiction by Mike W. Barr, Scott Bastedo, Steve Calvert, Robert Masterson, Benjamin W. Olson, Derek Rutherford, Jenny Schwartz, and Jeffery Scott Sims.

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Via Gwyneth Jones:

And now, six weeks before publication, & to celebrate the first sighting of a copy of the printed ARC on ebay, here’s Part 1 of [Jones’s forthcoming novel] Spirit set free again.

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Via Gareth L Powell, and many others:

The November issue of Concept Sci-Fi is now available to download as a free pdf file.

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Via John Jarrold:

Saxon Bullock has put the prologue and opening chapter of his wonderful SF novel, The Hypernova Gambit, up on his website.

Best. Author name. EVAR.

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Via The Scalzi:

The fabulous Sarah Zettel writes to inform me of BookViewCafe.com, a collaborative site filled with lots of fiction and other cool stuff, from a whole bunch of famous/interesting writers including Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre and Anne Harris…

And Futurismic regular Nancy Jane Moore is involved on the organisational side as well, which is a fine thing. BVC has been added to the sidebar of justice, so go take a look.

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Via Paul McAuley:

I recently blogged a six-part illustrated short story, “Edna Sharrow”, here. I’ve now archived the whole story on the web site, under a Creative Commons license… go straight to the first part. Enjoy!

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Via Cheryl Morgan:

Kelley Eskridge has posted the full text of her novella, “Dangerous Space”, on her blog. This is one of her stories about Mars, a character whose gender is never specified. I am in awe of how Kelley manages this. It is also a really good story.

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Here’s a couple of things we’d have missed, but for the ceaseless vigilance and generosity of the gang at SF Signal:

  • The latest edition of Antipodean SF features fiction by Mark Farrugia, Kurt Kurchmeier, Jillian Moffatt, Richard Ridyard, Shaun A Saunders, Greg Wickenhofer, John Craig, PS Cottier, Adrian Gibb, and James C Clar.
  • A now-complete serialised novella from Alan Baxter – A ‘Verse Full of Scum.

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As mentioned earlier in the week, Filipino genre fiction mavens Charles Tan and Mia Tijam have co-edited an entire virtual anthology of speculative fiction written in English by Filipino writers – a great way to expose new writers to an otherwise hard-to-access market.

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Finally, here’s a smattering of Friday Flash Fiction for you: Sarah Ellender displays her quintessential Britishness with “Tea and Vigilance“, while Gareth D Jones considers “The Blue Men”

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That’s all, folks! Don’t forget to hit us up with your plugs, tip-offs and shout-outs. In the meantime, have the best weekend you can.

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TV science-fiction: The origin of ‘Doctor Who’

For those of us who like to know where things came from, the BBC Archive Project has posted some amazing memos and reports revealing the thought processes that led to Doctor Who. Typewritten pages with skeptical scrawls reveal conversations with Brian Aldiss and Kingsley Amis. (Imagine such a consultation today.) Wondering if sf could work on tv at all, the network looked at stories like Poul Anderson’s Guardians of Time and C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” as possible projects. They almost went with “The Troubleshooters,” about a consulting firm that dealt with otherworldly events. The archive also includes the initial proposal for the series, as well as the (mixed) audience reaction for the first episode of the series that (some of us) know and love.

[Story tip: SF Signal; William Hartnell as the first Doctor, BBC]