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SFFH Reviews and Articles in General Publications Thursday 12 June 2003
The world of Faerie turns out to have everything a fantasy fan could desire. But there's a delicious twist, one that elevates "The War of the Flowers" above the vast majority of sword-and-sorcery schlock swamping your local bookstore. For the world of Faerie is plagued by problems that, whoops, are plenty recognizable. Urban decay, power failures, class warfare, prejudice ... this land of make-believe is in big trouble, and there isn't going to be an easy talismanic cure. Heck, the fairy lords even have magic cellphones, which is a kind of evil I really wasn't expecting. Leonard also notes-- In another subversive twist, "The War of the Flowers" turns out not to be the first volume in a multi-epic saga that may never end, or if it does, will require waiting until one's children have grown to the point where they are wondering why Dad reads so much fantasy. This is a stand-alone volume, with all loose ends wrapped up and no cliffhangers taunting the reader.
an engrossing, fast-moving novel, ripe with menacing atmosphere and infused with Shepard's trademark prose-poetry. But Sullivan isn't in tune with Jeff VanderMeer's Album Zutique (Ministry of Whimsy). An anthology of surrealistic fiction, this book on occasion comes dangerously close to self-parody. At other times, it reads like a glorified college literary magazine, as if the writers were stoned on Antonin Artaud plays or South American magical realism.. • Also this week, Michael Dirda reviews a book about the widow of George Orwell.
"The Wee Free Men" is not the equal of "The Amazing Maurice . . .," one of last year's best fantasies for readers of any age. Its jokes are a little broader, the plot a little simpler, the pacing sometimes slightly off. But Pratchett is an old hand at this kind of humorous fantasy, and his latest novel provides the requisite amount of laughs, plot twists and hair-raising escapes. Also, Diana Wynne Jones's The Merlin Conspiracy.. Even for adults, "The Merlin Conspiracy" isn't a particularly easy read. The plot twists, turns and swoops in unpredictable ways, the rules of the alternative worlds are revealed more by implication than by exposition, and the familial and marital relationships among the characters get a little confusing at times. Jones' latest, however, is well worth the effort, and the climactic showdown should satisfy any reader who has given "The Merlin Conspiracy" its full chance to work its considerable literary magic. And a first novel by Jeanne DuPrau, The City of Ember (Random House).. Although the central gimmick of "The City of Ember" may be familiar to those who have read widely in science fiction, DuPrau does a fine job of delineating the claustrophobia and paranoia that might arise in an isolated environment slowly losing its battle with entropy. Thursday 22 May 2003
In undertaking this kind of grandeur [some writers] risk failing grandly, by writing books that are as ungainly and chaotic as the world they have taken as their subject. But Whittemore, with the precision of his prose and is command over the absurd, has left us with a series of novels as powerful and as subtle as they are enormous in scope. Strongbow's history was "unplanned and chaotic and concomitant with nothing"; Harun's birthmark "swirled intermittently...in a restless proclamation of stops and starts." What would otherwise be colorful but senseless digressions are deployed, ordered, and composed so that the nonsense is intelligible and the absence of meaning is meaningful. Using words that could just as well describe the Quartet, a character in Nile Shadows recognizes the "futile purpose" of life but also observes a "mysterious and merciless arrangement of logic."
I am going to stick my neck out and just say it: science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ''L,'' and this is because it inevitably proceeds from premise rather than character. It sacrifices moral and psychological nuance in favor of more conceptual matters, and elevates scenario over sensibility. Some will ask, of course, whether there still is such a thing as ''Literature with a capital 'L.' '' I proceed on the faith that there is. Are there exceptions to my categorical pronouncement? Probably, but I don't think enough of them to overturn it. Birkerts goes on to explain why jazz isn't Music and Los Angeles is not a City--well, no; actually, he discusses Atwood's novel at length, and then returns to apply his opening thesis. We can take in only so many confected scenarios of future life before we crave a complexity of character commensurate with the intelligence of the plot or the confident excellence of the writing.
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New York Times May 13, 2003 Ms. Atwood's brave new world never feels remotely plausible: it is neither fully imagined as a place with its own intractable rules and realities, nor is it a convincing sendup of contemporary life. Instead the book feels laboriously manufactured: a lumbering mutant, part Michael Crichton novel (minus the suspense), part back-to-nature screed against a fake, plastic society in thrall to money and looks.
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The New Yorker Issue of 2003-05-19 The novelist Margaret Atwood has wandered off from us before: once, in 1986, to the mid-twenty-first century, for a feminist dystopia, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” ... But she understands -- later in the review, after mentioning Miller and Le Guin and Vonnegut -- why different kinds of fiction might work toward varying ends. Seventeen years ago, Mary McCarthy, reviewing “The Handmaid’s Tale,” found it unconvincing as a jeremiad... She complained, too, about the weak characterizations, and suggested that the novel’s lack of a new language for its future, such as Orwell had created in “1984,” left its world less than fully imagined. But a dystopian novel is not intended as a literal forecast, or even necessarily as a logical extension of our current world. It is simply, and not so simply, a bad dream of our present time, an exquisitely designed horror show in which things are changed from what we do know to a dream version of what we don’t. Atwood does this well. To ask a novel to do more is to misunderstand its nature.
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Denver Post Sunday, May 18, 2003 "Oryx and Crake" is good, solid, Swiftian science fiction from a writer who, when at the top of her game (as in "Cat's Eye," "The Handmaid's Tale," "Alias Grace" and "The Blind Assassin") is a literary artist par excellence.
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The Onion A.V. Club May 21, 2003 Oryx And Crake is somewhere between a Neal Stephenson future-tech novel and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend: It focuses closely on the day-to-day trivia of life both in a decaying, overcrowded world and in a post-apocalyptic, near-empty one, and it's packed with fascinating ideas. ... Atwood's latest is her most accessible book in years, a gripping, unadorned story that abandons most of her usual opacity and teasing complexity.
In a book whose influences range from science fiction writers like H. G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut and even Tom Clancy to modern scientists, Rees throws every possible calamity into the pot -- some credible, some not. The point is not that any of these particular disasters will befall us, but that something might. And scientists, he suggests, have sometimes been more interested in public relations than in really leveling with the rest of us about the odds we face. Overbye's is a more balanced reading than Ballard's (below). Fortunately -- or unfortunately for his career as a polemicist -- Rees is too good a scientist to be content with telling only one side of the story. He insists on detailing objections to his own arguments. As a result, we don't always know where he finally comes down on some issues. For example, he begins a discussion of global population growth with the news that it will take the resources of three Earths to support the eight billion people who are expected to inhabit the planet by 2050. But then he reports that the population is expected to fall after that, so that a century from now Earth's population could be less than it is today. So is overpopulation a long-term problem or not? I don't know.
Almost every aspect of scientific activity today has its threatening potential. The devastating attack on the Twin Towers depended on reliable but comparatively primitive tools – religious fanaticism and an aviation technology developed in the 1960s. Sadly, far more advanced weapons are being created by scientists today, often unaware that their work may fall into the hands of future Pol Pots or Saddam Husseins.
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Publishers Weekly April 28, 2003 Travel into another dimension is a popular fantasy ploy, but rarely accomplished with such humor, terror and even logic as in this stand-alone by bestseller Williams
He weaves action, romance and science with a rousing plot reflecting the classic SF of Clarke and Herbert and the glossy cinematic influence of Lucas and Spielberg.
calls to mind his adult classic, No Blade of Grass (1956). Thanks to quiet British restraint, the glimpses of increasingly violent wrongness are more disturbing than entire planets being zapped in a routine space opera. The entire review is on Amazon's page. Also starred, nonfiction A Traveler's Guide to Mars by William K. Hartmann (Workman, July) -- review on Amazon. And Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men (HarperCollins) is starred among children's books. Some of the characteristically punny humor may pass over the heads of younger readers, but plenty of other delights will keep them hooked.
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Washington Post Sunday, May 18, 2003
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Guardian Saturday, May 10 2003 Why then the disdain? Our modern world, though infinitely more complex than that of ancient Greece, is also far more superficial. Where the Greeks offered simple psychological training, we live in an age of style and spin in which perceptions of good and evil slither and shift with the political view of the moment. In such an era, the purity of fantasy, with its emphasis on morality, courage, redemption and sacrifice, is considered simplistic - even frivolous - by those who know how the real world works. Tuesday 13 May 2003
Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same, and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to confuse them in Orwell's case. There is a game some critics like to play in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn't "get right". Looking around us at the present moment in the US, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of "law enforcement," familiar to us from countless televised "crime dramas," themselves forms of social control - and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself. The two-way telescreen bears a close enough resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to "interactive" cable systems, circa 2003. News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And so forth. "Wow, the government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?" "Orwellian, dude!" Later passages discuss why Orwell's early "contempt for graphic scenes of violence in fiction" apparently changed, and give Pynchon's explanation for the "scholarly appendix" that concludes the book.
A novel in which a small number of warriors swoop in on rockets and blast every target to smithereens suddenly doesn't seem like fiction anymore. Indeed, Troopers is the only sci-fi novel that's on the reading list of all four service academies. Reflecting on the nuances of of the novel that were lost in the movie version (and regretting the imminent sequel), he continues: Happily, no matter how successful the films are, there's little danger that any of the fictional military triumphalism of Starship Troopers will ooze into non-fictional American life. Heinlein is powerful, but not that powerful. And in the here-and-now Terror War, as opposed to Heinlein's Bug War, the Bush administration has in fact been rather restrained in its military celebrations; as of this writing, there are no plans for a post-Iraq "victory parade." And while the notion of an ultra-elite, ultra-tech military gives rise to some uncomfortable dystopic visions of Sparta-fication in the minds of some - if 125 men can take down a country in Central Asia, what else can such a small force do? - there's no evidence of any cultish militaristic politics on the rise. If anything, the recent bureaucratic smack-down in the Army is a reminder that the civilians are completely in charge.
William Gibson's previous novels, such as Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive, made their splash in the alternate universe of sci-fi, but flew below the radar of literary fiction. That may be about to change. Pattern Recognition is the first of his books to be set in the present rather than the future, and the first in which his characters are allowed to be fully human. He likes the book quite a bit -- For those willing to adjust to Gibson's artificial landscape, there are big rewards. For one thing, he's a distinctive stylist, with a gift for memorable images. Cayce, suffering jet lag in "that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides", imagines her soul being "reeled in on some ghostly umbilical cord down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here". Elsewhere, a waitress disdains Cayce's attempt to speak French, "as though Cayce were a cat bringing up a particularly repellent hairball". -- but is fixated on the idea that the book is good because Gibson has abandoned genre constraints; he concludes Gibson, now 55, has developed a more humane vision for the lost and frightened new millennium.
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The Independent 03 May 2003 William Gibson writes a techno-thriller set in London's advertising community! State it baldly, and it might seem too bathetic to be believable. The creator of the term "cyberspace" – whose books provided a social paradigm shift, with its own mythology – has so run out of juice that he has to find inspiration in the trend-monkeys of the capital's media classes. Has the heir to Arthur C Clarke lost his oracular nerve? Is he trying to lay the ground for a new career in corporate consultancy? Kane thinks Gibson's subject is trivial in light of the true meaning of 9-11. Was the destruction of the World Trade Centre really "an experience outside culture", as Gibson puts it? Or was it the ultimate revenge act against the semiotic dominance of Western consumerism? ... In a novel which tiresomely vaunts its knowledge of signs, Gibson displays not the slightest inkling of the symbolic violence that the West's marketing-blitz wreaks on reticent cultures. As the hijackers note put it, "the time for play is over; the serious time is upon us." And so on, concluding Gibson's tinny designer prose is barely up to the fictional task of rendering this global crisis of meaning; he should stick with the mirror-shaded cyborgs. But whose prose will be?
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The Guardian Sunday May 11, 2003 Despite this rather strained inclusion, Pattern Recognition is essentially a thriller, not perhaps as far as it would like to think from such hi-tech, lo-heart productions as Michael Crichton's Disclosure. That's not to dismiss the skill with which Gibson generates tension without generic melodrama or bursts of violence. But the high quality of his writing still gives the impression of a show home, rather than inhabited premises. He deals more comfortably with 'affect', a technical-sounding word, filtered through therapy, than with actual emotion.
The novels and short stories that he published from the late 1960's through the early 90's have been enormously influential; their focus on character, their innovations of structure, language and theme, have helped raise the genre's literary standards without sacrificing its core ambition to become the imaginative interpreter of the age of science. Also, Joe Haldeman's Guardian (Ace), a "quieter antiwar book" than some of his previous novels. It is hard to imagine this eminently likable book changing anyone's mind about the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. But for those who instinctively recoil from the notion of making peace by killing people, it is nice to hear that someone or something out there concurs. And Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire (Tor), "a literate space opera". Westerfeld's speculations about the rise and fall of civilizations are appealingly quirky -- where would early agricultural empires have been without cats? -- and his action scenes have a breathless realism that does not gloss over the bloody nature of combat. Perhaps most important, his moral calculus never lapses into Q.E.D. ... ''The Risen Empire'' is the first of two volumes. I eagerly anticipate the sequel.
Big, Baggy Book. Or, if you like, her satisfying, long and complex, somewhat mystifyingly plotted, massively constructed epic fantasy with a cast of thousands, most of whom seem to be related to one another or divorced from each other. It offers murder, treachery, conspiracy, sorcery, battles, poison and magical spells. As well as computers, telephones, television and helicopters. And Little People, a Wild Hunt (of sorts), invisible floating people, giant personified cities (including London), King Arthur (for a page or two), a panther, a hunting cat, chickens, hundreds of salamanders, a remarkable goat, a fearsome dragon and a very charming talking elephant.
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Washington Post Sunday, May 11, 2003 Despite its slapstick, wordplay and "Simpsons"-like comedy, The Wee Free Men teaches, slantwise like all good fiction, the importance of trust, kindness, determination and responsibility. And as in any good fantasy tale, the Story ends with nothing changed and everything changed.
An energetic and experienced writer, Stirling has long been a favorite of military sf fans. But with his latest novel, he shows that he is a first-rate entertainer. Also, Brian Herbert's Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert (Tor), which fails to explain how Frank Herbert, after a promising first novel, an unpublishable second novel and a few interesting short stories, could have produced a masterpiece [Dune]. And, Greg Bear's Darwin's Children (Del Rey) -- an "unsuccessful" middle-volume -- and John Varley's Red Thunder (Ace): Varley's great strength is in his characterizations, but in Red Thunder he also shows a strong sense of place. He's clearly in love with Florida and the many quirky and eccentric people who live there. As a result, Red Thunder is a realistic -- and funny -- novel that happens to be set in the future. The novel is also in a sense an elegy: Sf readers have long hoped to travel in outer space, and Varley implies that this will be possible only if we discover something radically different from anything now known to physicists. But if you are willing to simply fantasize about fleeing your office cubicle and becoming a heroic space explorer, this novel will amiably fulfill your wishes.
VanderMeer, author of "City of Saints & Madmen," operates at the borders of science fiction and fantasy, mingling the effects of both genres to create something unsettlingly original. "Veniss Underground" is full of beautiful sentences, black humor and terrible wonders, an audacious riff on the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Despite its brevity, it marks VanderMeer as a novelist to be reckoned with. And Lucius Shepard's Louisiana Breakdown (Golden Gryphon). The novel plays with the stereotypes of swamp gothic -- a luscious and lascivious heroine, an artistically inclined protagonist in over his head, and a Good Gray Man who stalks the bayou -- and gives them its own sly, accomplished spin. And Robert Holdstock's Celtika (Tor). A winner of the World Fantasy award, Holdstock masterfully conflates two great myths of two disparate cultures. The personalities of Jason and Medea are consistent with their legends, but their motivations are revealed with a sure, contemporary astuteness.
Wednesday 30 April 2003
can hold its own against any of the 20th century's most potent dystopias -- Brave New World, 1984, The Space Merchants -- with regard to both dramatic impact and fertility of invention.. The book showcases a nightmare version of the present era of globalization on a globe coming apart at its ecological seams, with temperatures rising, species vanishing into extinction, cities sinking into the ocean, and a conscienceless technological elite trying to engineer the survival of their own eroding advantages. It is a scathing (because bang-on) portrait of the way we live now. And, The peculiar excellence of Oryx and Crake lies in how she fills out those large spans of time between our Now and the dystopian Future that are usually left conveniently blank. We never get to know how England's rule passed from Churchill to Big Brother or how Huxley's Americans decided to be bred in test tubes. Atwood fills in some of her historic blanks with a plausible patchwork of vignettes, none of them nailed down with an actual date, but the lot of them adding up to a virtual reality whose smell could make the strongest stomachs quite queasy by the time all the jokes have led us to the brink of humanity's sure extinction.
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San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, April 27, 2003 Atwood's been down this dystopian road before. But where "The Handmaid's Tale" blamed a horrific future on metastatic fundamentalist Christianity, "Oryx and Crake" fingers genetic engineering and rampant, all-devouring consumerism. What saves Atwood's nightmare vision from didacticism is her gift for the arresting detail, the little rockslides that augur the avalanche: "Boil-water and don't-travel advisories were issued in the first week, handshaking was discouraged. In the same week there was a run on latex gloves and nose-cone filters. About as effective, thought Jimmy, as oranges stuck with cloves during the Black Death."
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The Independent 26 April 2003 Oryx and Crake is Atwood at her best – dark, dry, scabrously witty, yet moving and studded with flashes of pure poetry. Her gloriously inventive brave new world is all the more chilling because of the mirror it holds up to our own. Citizens, be warned.
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The Guardian Saturday April 26, 2003 Margaret Atwood's latest novel, Oryx and Crake, is not, she insists, "science fiction" but "speculative fiction". It is a distinction she has also made about her earlier dystopian book, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), currently being staged as an opera in London.
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Maclean's April 28, 2003 In Atwood's view, every problem we face now is going to get worse, not better. He concludes, Atwood has a nostalgia for a simpler past. But our past included slavery, 50-per-cent infant mortality, abject poverty, epidemics and ignorance. Today is better than yesterday; tomorrow will be even better still. If, as we look into the future, we can't precisely see the wonders yet to come, it's only because there's so much glare from the bright tomorrows ahead.
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Waterstone's Books Quarterly Patrick Gale's review of the new Margaret Atwood admires her 'gleeful inventiveness' in imagining unheard-of wonders like 'rats genetically spliced to snakes' or 'pain-free chickens developed to produce only multiple breasts', yet deftly avoids calling this sc**nce f*ct**n..
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The Guardian Saturday April 26, 2003 One could hardly find a more 1980s image, and Gibson's entire aesthetic is still definitely stuck in that decade. He loves shiny things, matt black things, things that open with a whirr and a click, things that sense human presence and react. The conclusion of Pattern Recognition reenacts the ultimate fantasy ending of 1980s movies - the heroine has lucked out without selling out, has kept her integrity but still ended up filthy rich. As a gesture towards the changed mood of the new millennium, Gibson has Cayce guiltily give the money away. Her gesture doesn't convince; Gibson's soul, sadly, isn't in it.
With its strong character development and gritty, alternate London, this book won't attract fans of Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind, but should hold great appeal to readers who love the more sophisticated fantasy of Michael Swanwick, John Crowley or even China Mieville. Also in this issue, a star for Jane Yolen's YA novel Sword of the Rightful King: A Novel of King Arthur (Harcourt, May). In Yolen's spellbinding twist on the Round Table legend, Morgause feels that her 17-year-old son Gawaine belongs on the throne of England. ... Yolen has explored Arthurian legend before, but her latest foray is a standout in this enormous canon. And a star for The Field Guide, first book in an ages 6-10 series, The Spiderwick Chronicles, by Tony DiTerlizzi & Holly Black (Simon & Schuster, May), about three siblings who discover a handbook to the faerie realm.
Once again, Colfer serves up a high-intensity plot involving cryogenics and a mobster mentality as the action hurtles toward the climactic break-in at Chicago's Spiro Needle... In the March 24 issue, a star for Hilari Bell's The Goblin Wood (Eos, April). Genre fans will relish the combination of a resourceful, determined heroine, densely packed action and thought-provoking themes. Ages 10-up. And in the March 10 issue, a star for Diana Wynne Jones's The Merlin Conspiracy (Greenwillow, April). Whimsy, invention and the chilling sense of a world (multiple worlds, actually) gone topsy-turvy characterize this grandly outsize fantasy... Tuesday 15 April 2003
bemoans the cultural dominance of the sort of "contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory" short story ground out like sausages in MFA programs and written under the zodiac of Chekhov, Joyce and Raymond Carver. Looking back to the stories he loved as a kid, Chabon makes a convincing argument for the epiphany-free stories of every description that regularly appeared in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and "even The New Yorker," horror stories, spy stories, romance stories -- "Stories, in other words, with plots." Hynes, however, likes the stories by the literary contributors better than those by genre writers; his favorite is by Rick Moody, and after that, one by Dave Eggers, which ends, not with risen corpses, monster sharks or the end of the world, but with -- and here's the thrilling part -- an epiphany.
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Village Voice April 4th, 2003 Ironically, the best entries share the same contemporary preoccupation with narrative and temporal displacement that dominate films like Memento, Donnie Darko, and Spider. Fantasy stalwart Michael Moorcock's "The Case of the Nazi Canary," a 1930s murder mystery in which a certain Teutonic megalomaniac makes a career-killing blunder, and Chabon's own "The Martian Agent," which takes place in a 19th-century U.S. that never seceded from British rule, make inventive use of alternate histories. Stephen King's "The Tale of Gray Dick," Nick Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium," and Carol Emshwiller's poignant "The General" mine similar territory. Holcomb also likes Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes", a novel-worthy reflection on collective grief and remembrance that deftly weaves MMToTT's retroactivity with more immediate, all too familiar concerns. Set in New York City after the unexplained nuclear destruction of Lower Manhattan, "Albertine" posits a near future in which a memory-enhancing drug's access to the past offers more incentive to live than the bleak despair of the present. ..
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San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, April 6, 2003 Published under Dave Eggers' local banner and smartly co-opted by Vintage Books, "McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales" reads like a night around the campfire at the starriest writers' workshop ever convened. Authors highbrow and low- take turns trying to spook us and to top each other. If some of the writers evince a certain rustiness as they attempt the short form that probably first drew them to their profession, others take to it like salmon returning to natal streams. Whether they spawn a counterrevolution or just the promised sequel, it's an auspicious and tonic experiment.
"Thou know'st we work by wit and not by witchcraft," says Iago in "Othello," suggesting a fundamental disparity between the two concepts. This would imply that the stories in Witpunk: Stories with Attitude, edited by Marty Halpern and Claude Lalumiere (Four Walls Eight Windows; paperback, $17) and those in Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson (Warner Aspect; paperback, $13.95), are profoundly at odds with each other, and indeed it would be difficult to imagine a story appearing in both anthologies. Also reviewed: collections from M. John Harrison and Howard Waldrop: Things That Never Happen (Night Shade), and Custer's Last Jump and Other Collaborations (Golden Gryphon).
Morgan's vision and craft owe as much to cinema as to literature. Alongside Gibson and James Ellroy, he acknowledges the influence of Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Oliver Stone and Takeshi Kitano, director of Violent Cop. Producer Joel Silver clearly concurs, having paid a sum reported as anything from £350,000 to three times that for the movie option on Altered Carbon. Broken Angels, the second Kovacs adventure, is quite as cinematic as the first, with hard-bitten space marines and rogue nanotech booby-traps that morph to protect themselves against whatever is thrown at them.
Morgan writes with a tough-minded brio, paying equal attention to the procedural and speculative aspects of his hybrid plot and tipping his hat to both Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick. There's plenty of bloodshed and nastily flippant talk, but the science-fiction elements are well integrated into the thriller plot. Morgan allows the story to be a lot more complicated than it really needs to be, but that's not uncommon among mystery writers or first novelists, and the high-octane virtues of "Altered Carbon" outweigh its flaws. He also covers Nancy Kress's Crossfire (Tor) and Jim Knipfel's The Buzzing (Vintage).
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USA Today 3/24/2003 ..author Richard K. Morgan has created a world as cinema-rich as those of Philip K. Dick, whose stories were reborn as movies including Total Recall and Minority Report, and William Gibson's books-turned-to-movies Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic. [...] Altered Carbon plays out like a film in your head. The landscape and vision are gritty and vivid, recalling Blade Runner, another film that was inspired by a Dick story.
In the long and fabulous tradition of British nonsense, Jasper Fforde, though only on his second book, has already earned a place of honor. His delightfully skewed alternate UK is much the same as the one we know, except for time travel, intra-book visitation, Wales's status as an independent communist state, dodos and the unsettling possibility of death by linoleum. If the names Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and even "Doctor Who" come to mind, you're not far off, but Fforde has a distinctive literary wit all his own. Also, John Freeman reviews Jim Knipfel's The Buzzing (Vintage). Jim Knipfel's first novel has its finger on the pulse of America's palpitating heart. True to the times, it sports more conspiracy plots than an Oliver Stone movie, more doom and destruction than a CNN broadcast. To read it is to enter the mind of a wickedly unstable man who is trying desperately to make sense of it all.
Starting with Adams' schooldays and university career, Simpson takes the reader through every stage in Adams' life with a meticulous style that strives for completism without being boring. Almost every aspect of Adams' career is documented in this weighty tome, and Simpson's conversational narrative style carries the reader along smoothly from point to point. In contrast, Susan Mansfield's News.scotsman.com review wishes there were more. One might desire more analysis of the contradictions of Adams: his hatred of the physical act of writing; his impact despite producing only a handful of books, none of them works of literary genius; his contradictory attitude to his fame; his vacillating moods and relationships; the problem of his unproductive later years. However, for anyone who loves his work, this book is an indispensable read. Other reviews: Evening Standard; Telegraph; Time Europe.
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National Review January 3, 2003 Sigh. Okay, yes, it's true. Many of the Orcs (and the super-Orcs) are dark-skinned and have slant-eyes. They are also - how shall I put this? - Orcs! And in Starship Troopers, despite the Nazi-flavoring, giant bugs are just giant bugs. Goldberg discusses metaphors and how Tolkien uses them. The battle lines could not be clearer: Good vs. Evil. But even faced with this obvious fact, Tolkien demonstrates that man is weak. Men make excuses and refuse to look at the reality of a situation. They rationalize, they say "not me," or "this will pass." Hobbits, Elves, Ents, and Dwarves do the same thing too, but these noble creatures, alas, are as unreal as the Orcs; in a sense they too are simply extended metaphors illuminating different aspects of man's nature. Evil knows its intentions and has the will to see them achieved. Good is plagued by doubt.
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Independent 05 April 2003 Everyone born on planet Earth must know by now that J K Rowling is Britain's most famous fantasy writer. But when it comes to choosing the most consistently creative author writing fantasy stories for children during the past 30 years, the answer for most critics will almost certainly be Diana Wynne Jones...
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Publishers Weekly 3/17/2003 Effortlessly rich in adventurous incident, with a huge cast of well-defined characters, this poignant and robust story will appeal to both fantasy lovers and fans of erotic romance. Also starred: Elizabeth Knox's Daylight (Ballantine).
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Publishers Weekly 3/24/2003 [T]he author is back on track with the best Blake yet.
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Publishers Weekly 3/31/2003, 4/7/2003 In this stunning new collection, Campbell builds on his reputation as an inimitable stylist who uses the nuances of language as much as horrific imagery to tell his disturbing tales.
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