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Reviews and Articles in General Publications
Sunday 13 May 2001

§ Guardian May 13, 2001
Here's an profile and interview of Eoin Colfer, whose Artemis Fowl (Hyperion/Talk Miramax Books) is being positioned as the next Harry Potter.

I met Eoin Colfer in London. He is short, grey and worried. I liked him immediately. He believes in his book, is dazed by its precocious career but sanely points out that publishers can't tell' what will be a bestseller. He fears 'being set up to be knocked off the pedestal'. He believes it nonsensical to compare Artemis to Harry Potter: 'It is like comparing an apple with an orange,' he says. He admires Rowling but has never had any 'interest in emulating her'.

§ New York Times Book Review May 13, 2001
Richard Davenport-Hines reviews Diane Jacobs's Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Simon & Schuster).

§ Washington Post Book World May 13, 2001
A special issue on children's books include a brief profile of artists Leo & Diane Dillon, and a column by Andrea Gollin on several YA fantasies by Paul Zindell and others.

§ January May 2001
Claude Lalumière reviews Linda Nagata's Limit of Vision (Tor)

§ The Age 7 May 2001
A profile of "Australia's leading fantasy writer" Sara Douglass, who lives in a big old house with a ghost named Mrs Hannah Bloomfield.


Wednesday 9 May 2001

§ The New Yorker May 14, 2001
A 'Briefly Noted' review of Jonathan Carroll's The Wooden Sea (Tor) [posted this week only].

Frannie McCabe, a mellowing middle-aged former bad boy who is now the police chief of a Hudson Valley town, opens the trunk of his car to discover the body of the pet pit bull he has just buried. But then things get weird, and not just Carl Hiaasen weird; McCabe finds himself teamed up with his seventeen-year old self in a time-travel fantasy- thriller, set almost entirely in his home town but involving aliens, cold fusion, and a sinister twenty-first-century Dutch entrepreneur. The result is a quirky piece of intelligent pop that is also surprisingly moving.

§ The Onion A.V. Club May 9, 2001
The serious review-arm of the satirical online and print magazine reviews Connie Willis's Passage (Bantam):

In Passage, [Willis] explores a more overtly emotional topic--life after death--with luminous clarity, walking the fine line between science and spiritualism with the confidence that comes from having a solid story and a powerful agenda. ... [A] complex, finely crafted, haunting story that makes the light at the end of the tunnel impossible to take lightly. --Tasha Robinson

§ FEED Magazine May 9, 2001
Steve Johnson talks with Cory Doctorow -- "Chief Evangelist" and "Spokesmodel" for OpenCola -- "about his bid to reinvent the intelligent agent". Here's Doctorow's OpenCola Polemics and Whitepapers.


Monday 7 May 2001

§ Washington Post Book World May 6, 2001
Gregory Feeley reviews Tananarive Due's The Living Blood (Pocket), contrasting it unfavorably to the author's short fiction...

which generates great emotional intensity through understated use of language and dramatic situations. Nothing about The Living Blood is understated, and its themes -- the horror of seeing one's child in danger, and the steps a parent will take to avert this -- are pretty operatic even absent a secret brotherhood of immortals.
Also, Andrew C. Ervin reviews Andrew Crumey's Mr. Mee (Picador), about an octogenarian amateur book collector in search of an obscure encyclopedia via the Internet, with strong parallels to the work of Jorge Luis Borges...
It's the rare novel that makes you want to begin anew as soon as you've finished the last page. When Crumey finally puts the final, unexpected pieces of his puzzle into place and the depth of the story becomes clear, many readers will be tempted to take it apart and start again from scratch. The many surprises and twists uncovered the first time through provide a rare and spectacular reading experience, one that no amount of rereading will capture again. As Borges might have said: You can never step in the same river once, much less twice.

Publishers Weekly [not online]
April 9: Starred review for Tad Williams's Otherland: Sea of Silver Light (DAW):

This stunning finale to the gigantic Otherland tetralogy (City of Golden Shadow, etc.), a brilliant fusion of quest fantasy and technological SF, is sure to please Williams's many fans. ... a major accomplishment.
The April 16 issue has a feature article by Kimberly Winston on SF and religion, "Other Worlds, Suffused with Religion", with comments from Algis Budrys, Pepperdine prof Michael Collings, Greg Bear, Warner Aspect editor Betsy Mitchell, Octavia Butler, Ballantine associate publisher Kuo-yu Liang, Del Rey editor Chris Schluep, and others; and a sidebar about the Mormon SF of Orson Scott Card.


April Field Inspections

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