Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a weekly column co-curated by myself and the marvellous Brit Mandelo, and dedicated to doing exactly what it says in the header: shining a light on the some of the best and most relevant fiction of the aforementioned form.

This week, we’ll be reading through two of the seven Nebula-nominated novelettes, namely “Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente and “Portrait of Lisane de Patagnia” by Rachel Swirsky. I figured it’d be a bit much for me to review “The Finite Canvas” by my aforementioned collaborator, but let it be said that her story is deservedly in contention for the iconic award as well, alongside shorts by Catherine Asaro, Ken Liu, Andy Duncan and Megan McCarron.

So why these two tales above the others? Well, because a single thread connects them: both explore the idea of the image, and the terrible power of the picture of perfection.

[Read more]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a weekly column on Tor.com co-curated by myself and the splendid Brit Mandelo, and dedicated to doing exactly what it says in the header: shining a light on the some of the best and most relevant fiction of the aforementioned form.

In early April, the Editor in Chief of Night Shade Books announced that his struggling company was in the process of being bought out. We won’t dig into the reasons it began hemorrhaging here, nor the well-documented deals offered to its stable of authors since, except to say that however successful Skyhorse and Start’s emergency surgery is—or isn’t—it’s been a bleak few weeks for readers and writers alike. However badly mismanaged said small press was, the books themselves were almost always good.

One of the less visible casualties of Night Shade’s continuing collapse was Eclipse Online, the continuation of the esteemed anthology series pioneered by in print by Jonathan Strahan before the sad realities of purveying short fiction for profit made a fifth volume essentially untenable.

It was with happiness in my heart, then, that I heard Eclipse would live on as a venue along the lines of Subterranean Magazine and Strange Horizons. Unfortunately, it did so under the auspices of an enterprise evidently on its last legs, and just six months on from its launch, in the wake of the aforementioned Night Shade news, Strahan stated that Eclipse Online would “cease publication effective immediately.”

To wit, in tribute to Eclipse, we’ll be reading the first story it published during its brief second lease of life, and saying goodbye with a review of what looks to be its last.

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On the subject of reading as escapism, Tolkien asked C.S. Lewis who was opposed to escape, and answered “Jailers.” Yet seventy-five years after the publication of Tolkien's “On Fairy Stories” where he relates this anecdote, people are still trying to make us feel guilty about our reading.

“What are your guilty reading pleasures?” “Why do you read escapist books?” “Is there any merit to that?” “Is there something wrong with you that you're reading for enjoyment instead of taking your literary vitamins?”

[Read more: I love reading]

John Brunner wrote four major novels, each of them set fifty years ahead of the date when he was writing. In each of them he extrapolated different social and scientific trends and problems he could see in the world of the time in which he was writing and projected theml forward. In Stand on Zanzibar (1968) it’s overpopulation, in The Jagged Orbit (1969) it’s race relations and violence, in The Sheep Look Up (1972) it’s pollution, and in The Shockwave Rider (1975) it’s society speeding past the point where people can keep up—the title is a direct reference to Toffler’s Future Shock.

What people remember about The Shockwave Rider is that it predicts ubiquitous computing—in 1975—and some of the problems that come with it. It’s pre-cyberpunk, and it’s cyber without the punk. Reading it now, it’s impressive what it got right and what it got wrong.

[Read more]

Samuel Delany was born in New York on April 1st 1942, which makes today his seventy-first birthday. Happy birthday, Chip!

I could write a considered post about Delany’s significance to the field, but I’m just too enthusiastic about his work to do it in a properly calm way. Delany’s just one of the best writers out there, and he always has been, from his emergence with The Jewels of Aptor (1962) and The Fall of the Towers. (1963-5) to last year’s Through The Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His major work—Babel 17 (1966) (post), The Einstein Intersection (1967), Nova (1968) (post), Dhalgren (1974) (post), Tales of Neveryon (1975), Triton (1976) and Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) (post)—is right at the top of what science fiction has ever achieved.

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Accidents... happen. Would that they didn’t, but they do, and that’s the truth.

Every day, mistakes are made—by every one of us, I warrant. Consequences follow; and often, they’re awful, if not absolutely abhorrent. But in time, however hard the hardship, we come to see that what will be will be. After the fact, what torments us is the memory of what was, and is no longer; or the thought of things we would do differently, if only we could go back in time, with the benefit of hindsight on our side.

Of course we can’t. That’s not how the world works. The past is set in stone, and wishing we could change it won’t get us anywhere. Regret, from a logical perspective, is entirely ineffective. That said, there’s no getting away from it, is there? And it hurts just the same, even if it’s meaningless.

But imagine there was a machine... a machine that could take the pain away, by meddling with your memories. Would you use it? And if you were to, what would you lose?

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My post What’s Reading For? developed a lively comment thread in which the majority endorsed my Epicurean view that “Reading is usually the most fun I can have at any given moment.” But there were some very interesting dissenting voices, and I’d like to have a look at them too. There’s a way in which I do read in all of kinds of different ways, and in which they are interesting ways to think about how and why we read.

[Read more: “What’s reading for, part 2”]

In the comments to my post “Is There a Right Age to Read a Book,” I noticed an odd thing. I’d written it mostly thinking about the comment that you shouldn’t read Jane Eyre until you’re thirty or Middlemarch until you’re forty, and I was thinking about reading pretty much entirely for pleasure. I was talking about spoiling the enjoyment of a book by reading it too early—or too late. In the comments though, people started talking about prescribing childhood reading and talking about books as if they were vitamins that you should take because they’re good for you. There were comments about the immorality of re-reading because it causes you to miss new books, and comments about learning morality from reading. It all became surprisingly Victorian.

I think this may have happened because I had started off discussing classics, and lots of people have these kinds of feelings about classics, as if they’re things you “ought to” read, educational reading, rather than things you read because you want to. And this led me to think about what I read for, and how that might be different from what some other people seem to read for.

[Read more: what I read for]

As a reader, and a reviewer, I like to think that I practice reasonably equal opportunities.

I suppose there are some sub-genres I struggle with, and a select few I have a particular passion for, but by and large, I could care less about categories. The tropes of a certain type of text mean little to me. I wouldn’t even say story is my focus. How a story’s told, on the other hand—and the way in which those tropes are brought forth? Makes all the damn difference.

But perhaps I should explain what this preamble has to do with Karen Lord’s new novel.

Well, take widescreen, galaxy-spanning science fiction. I’m as excited by spectacle as the next person, and assuming they’re astutely put, I can absolutely get behind big ideas to boot. But it’s the little things that I really, truly love, and The Best of All Possible Worlds has an abundance of all of the above. Equal parts tragedy and romance, psychic fantasy and soulful SF, it’s like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms meets a disarmingly charming 2312, as written by someone with a still more impressive sense of perspective.

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Claire of The Captive Reader, one of my favourite book blogs, has a post about reading books before you are ready for them. She quotes Sheila Kaye-Smith on not reading books when you are too young for them and goes on to explain how she read much Great Literature as a teenager without it doing her a lick of harm. It never did me any harm either, and I’ve talked before about starting to read something and realising it’s too old for me and leaving it for later...and how I’m still doing this with E.R. Eddison at the age of forty-eight. It’s a good habit, because it blames myself and not the book when I can’t get into something. It’s quite distinct from thinking “this is awful,” which I think often enough, it’s “this is beyond me right now.”

But is there a right age to read a book?

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It’s hard to see who would really want to read Islands in the Sky today. It was first published in 1954, and republished in 1972 in the spiffy Puffin edition that I still own. It has a new (for 1972) introduction by Patrick Moore, saying in so many words that when Clarke wrote this book it was all far away but now (1972) space stations where kids can vacation and meet emigrants on their way to and from Mars is just around the corner. Well, we’re sending robots out to do it for us, Clarke never imagined that, and we do have a space station and we have astronauts tweeting from it. Which is really pretty cool, even if the station isn’t quite as Clarke pictured it. What’s wrong with Islands in the Sky isn’t that the tech and the history is out of date so much as that it’s a juvenile in which everyone is nice and nothing really happens.

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Hot on the heels of the apocalyptic vision described in his debut, rising star James Smythe returns to genre fiction with a deliciously different book from his first. An introspective time travel novel from which you won’t be able to look away, The Explorer plays out like Moon meets Groundhog Day.

It’s “a pulpy, sci-fi thing about a man who is trapped in a perpetual loop, a time loop, like so many other sci-fi stories wrenched from the back of magazines—there are no original ideas, not any more—but this one is more human, or trying to be.” In this, it succeeds indeed. The various incarnations of Cormac Easton alternate between ecstatic, distracted and tragic, meanwhile the other astronauts on the Ishiguro feel equally real.

Not that they live long enough to make much of an initial impression, because the author knocks the whole lot off in The Explorer’s opening chapter, in what would be a comedy of errors under other circumstances. And our understandably manic protagonist is next: Cormac himself dies soon afterwards, only to open his eyes...and surprise! The spaceship and its crew, including a visibly healthier version of himself, have been miraculously restored around him, as if none of the hell they went through—the very hell they’ll go through again unless our half-crazed narrator can change their fate—had happened.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves already, however this is suspiciously fitting—after all, the beginning of the end is the end of the beginning in Smythe’s superlative second novel, thus the short opening section of The Explorer is ingeniously designed to displace. But you must be wondering who the eponymous explorer is anyway, and what in the world he’s doing in space...so I’ll be kind, and rewind.

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I’ve written quite a bit about Bujold’s Vorkosigan series on this site—start here or here. I’ve recently re-read most of them in rather an odd order in the wake of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance. I had an interesting thought doing this about the contrasting ways Miles and Aral deal with failure. I can’t come anywhere near this without spoilers for pretty much the entire series up to Memory. There are no spoilers for Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance.

[Read more: not only spoilers but an assumption that you’ve read the books]

Gosh I love this book.

I’d say this is my favourite new Vorkosigan book since Komarr.

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance is the promised “Ivan book”, the book in which Miles’s cousin Ivan finds a girl and... well, things happen. It stands alone as well as could possibly be expected for a book so late in the series. I imagine it would work perfectly well if you hadn’t read any of the other books, and I expect there will be people who will start here and like it, but my experience of reading it is inevitably shaded and enhanced by all the expectation I had of it and by the whole rest of the series.

[Read more: only very mild back-of-book type spoilers]

Roger Zelazny erupted onto the science fiction scene in the sixties as part of the New Wave. He wrote beautiful poetic science fiction, often in a wry first person voice. He used mythologies from all over the world in both fantasy and science fiction. He won six Hugos and three Nebulas, many of them for his astonishing short stories. Perhaps his best known work is the Amber books, where the fantasy world of Amber is the ultimate source of all reality and mythology. He died in 1995, so unfortunately there won’t be any more.

What do you read if you want something else like Zelazny?

[Read more: There’s quite a bit, actually]

Lois McMaster Bujold has been nominated for the Hugo Awards eleven times and won five times. Ten of those nominations and four of the wins were for items in the Vorkosigan saga. From Shards of Honor in 1986 to Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, out this week, the series is still going strong. It’s a wide-ranging series, set in the Wormholm Nexus in the twenty-sixth century, exploring issues of genetics, loyalty, family and love.

When I wrote about it here I said:

It’s a series of standalone volumes that you can start almost anywhere, a series where very few of the books are like each other, where the volumes build on other volumes so that you want to read them all but you don’t need to for it to make sense. It’s science fiction, specifically space opera set in societies where the introduction of new technologies is changing everything. Some volumes are military science fiction, some are mysteries, one is a romance (arguably two), some are political and deal with the fates of empires, others are up-close character studies with nothing more (or less) at stake than one person’s integrity. It’s a series with at least three beginnings, and with at least two possible ends, although it is ongoing. Lots of people love it, but others despise it, saying that technologies of birth and death are not technological enough. As a series, it’s constantly surprising, never predictable, almost never what you might expect—which may well be what has kept it fresh and improving for so long.

If you love it and want to fill in the time between volumes, how do you find something else like that?

[Read more: spoilers]

Heinlein was part of the Campbellian revolution that transformed science fiction, and love him or hate him he was a towering figure from the late thirties until his death in the late eighties. He was a SFWA Grand Master, he won four Hugos in his lifetime and two retro-Hugos in 2001. He wrote some of the defining works of science fiction, and one zeitgeist book that helped define a generation. He wrote juveniles and books packed with sex, short stories and big fat volumes. Almost all of his work was set in futures with space colonization, much of it in the same future history. Beginning well ahead of the curve on race and gender issues, over the decades of his career he didn’t change as fast as the world was changing. He’s still controversial and still popular—almost all of his work is in print, a quarter century after his death.

Plenty of people don’t like Heinlein, and that’s perfectly fine. But suppose you do and you want something else like that?

[Read more: Something else like Heinlein?]

When you really like a writer, and you’ve read everything they’ve written, naturally you want more. You have to wait until they write more, and at worst that’s never going to happen. So you ask for recommendations for “something else like...” and people suggest things. The problem is, the things that other people like aren’t always what you like, even when you like the same thing. William Goldman says in Adventures in the Screen Trade that people learned the wrong lesson from Jaws. The public flocked to see a well-written tautly-paced story with excellent characters, and the movie moguls learned from this that people wanted more films with... sharks. I’ve found that all too often what other people see in something is the sharks.

[Read more: Now here’s my plan]

Poul Anderson's The Long Way Home was originally published in 1955 in Astounding, under the title No World of Their Own. It was reprinted in 1978 withour revision but with some cuts Campbell has made restored by the author. I read it from the library in 1978 – I'm not sure in which version. I've had good luck recently picking up Anderson I hadn't read since I was twelve, so when I saw this one at Chicon I grabbed it.

It has an absolutely brilliant premise, but unfortunately the execution doesn't live up to it. When you write more than fifty novels over more than fifty years, the quality is bound to vary. I don't remember what I thought of it when I was twelve. What I remembered about it was the set-up and that there was an alien point of view. It was one of the first alien points of view I came across. (Anderson comes right at the beginning of the alphabet.)

[Read more: An absolutely brilliant premise]