The Secret Lair

Let us pretend for a moment that I’m not an Evil Overlord living in a Secret Lair based on an uncharted island somewhere in Lake Erie. Let us further pretend that, instead of plundering secret gold caches and skimming funds from electronic transactions a la Gus Gorman in Superman III, I must hold down a day job. In this day job, hypothetically, I could have a coworker…let’s call him by a name that is charmingly common yet holds the promise of great depth of thought.

The Entirely Hypothetical "Mike"

Let us call this coworker “Mike.”

Now, this Mike is probably a geek of some fashion, else we would not be speaking of him. More, he is probably cultured, but somewhat younger than I am, having come of age just as console gaming was becoming popular and supplanting the Library as a source of mainstream entertainment. Mike knows there are gaps in his Book Geek pedigree, and one day, while having lunch in the hypothetical cafeteria in the hypothetical office, Mike asks me to recommend five good books.

I answer with these:

• [amazon_link id="0553382578" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Foundation [/amazon_link] by Issac Asimov: We start with Asimov, as all good science fiction should. Asimov was a singular mind, and reading these short stories about his psychohistorical Foundation, set to safeguard mankind’s knowledge against the ravages of the Galactic Empire’s fall still rings with that genius. It is fresh, relevant, and still fun to read after 60 years in print.
• [amazon_link id="1585867985" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Deathbird Stories[/amazon_link] by Harlan Ellison: This is Ellison’s collection of short stories about the New Gods, the rough beasts and harrowing creatures that spring to life in the modern age to replace the more archaic gods of thunder and the sea. These stories range from “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” a tale inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese, to “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin” where a young army private learns about transformation the hard way, to “The Deathbird;” a rewrite of Genesis. This is a book that counsels the reader not to read all the stories in one sitting…then lives up to that danger.
• [amazon_link id="0451062833" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Jack of Shadows[/amazon_link] by Roger Zelazny: On a world that is tidally locked so that one side of the planet is always light, and the other is always dark, science rules day, while magic rules the night. Jack, sometimes called Jack Shade, sometimes Shadowjack, is unique in that he draws his power not from the light or the dark but from the shadows themselves. This is an interesting tale of how those who walk between extremes can influence the course of a world. He searches for a lost Key, and finds the Power is not what he thought it was.
• [amazon_link id="0062059882" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]American Gods[/amazon_link] by Neil Gaiman: One of the major touchstones of modern fantastic fiction and some (myself included) would argue Gaiman’s finest work to date. Gaiman, like Ellison, explores the birth of new gods, but Gaiman’s touch is subtle and light where Ellison’s is blunt. Gaiman’s tale of what has become of the old gods in the new world pulls you along as Shadow travels with the odd Mr. Wednesday across the heartland of the United States. There is deep magic here; a tale of wonder, delight, and horror — much like the old mythologies themselves.
• [amazon_link id="0756405890" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]The Name of the Wind[/amazon_link] by Patrick Rothfuss: Rothfuss is one of a handful of authors bringing significant writing talent to fantasy fiction, breathing new life into a stale and moldering genre. His writing is simply so very good, his characters so engaging and realistic that is hard to stop reading once you’ve started. The tale of the sometimes hero, sometimes villain Kvothe as told by the man himself is nothing less than one of the best novels in the last decade.

• 1970: Liquid crystal watches go on market
• 1971: CAT scan
• 1972: Pocket calculator
• 1973: Car airbags
• 1974: Barcodes on supermarket products
• 1975: Birth of the home computer (various now-extinct manufacturers)
• 1976: VHS and Betamax
• 1977: First complete genetic structure of an organism found (Great Britain)
• 1977: First flight of the Space Shuttle
• 1977: First commercial flight of supersonic Concorde between New York, Paris, London
• 1977: USA admits testing Neutron Bomb
• 1977: Trans-Alaska Pipeline starts oil flowing Prudhoe Bay to Valdez
• 1978: Louise Brown born (first In Vitro Fertilization “Test Tube” baby)
• 1979: Graphical User Interface developed at XEROX PARC (led to Macintosh, Windows)

At the Drive-In:

• 1970: Colossus, the Forbin Project
• 1971: A Clockwork Orange
• 1972: Silent Running
• 1973: Soylent Green, West World
• 1974: Young Frnakenstein, Zardoz
• 1975: A Boy and His Dog, Rollberball, The Stepford Wives
• 1976: Logan’s Run, King Kong
• 1977: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Wizards
• 1978: Superman: The Movie, The Lord of the Rings
• 1979: Alien, Mad Max, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Time After Time

On Television:

• 1970: Jon Pertwee becomes the Fourth Third Doctor
• 1971: All in the Family and The Electric Company debut
• 1972: Sanford and Son, Emergency!, M*A*S*H*, and Are You Being Served? debut
• 1973: The Six Million Dollar Man debuts
• 1974: Happy Days, Shazam!, Little House on the Prarie, Chico and the Man, and Nova debut
• 1975: Barney Miller, Welcome Back Kotter, Space: 1999, Fawlty Towers, Wonder Woman, and Saturday Night Live debut
• 1976: The Olympics draw one billion viewers
• 1977: Eight is Enough, The Amazing Spider Man, Soap, CHiPs, and The Love Boat debut
• 1978: Blake’s 7, The Incredible Hulk, Dallas, Battle of the Planets, Taxi, WKRP, Mork & Mindy, and Battlestar Galactica debut
• 1979: The Dukes of Hazzard, You Can’t Do That On Television, The Facts of Life, Benson, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Scooby and Scrappy Doo, Spider-Woman, and This Old House debut

Nebula Award Novels for the 1970s:

• 1970: Ringworld by Larry Niven
• 1971: A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg
• 1972: The Gods Themselves by Issac Asimov
• 1973: Rendezvous with Rama by Arther C. Clarke
• 1974: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
• 1975: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
• 1976: Man Plus by Frederick Pohl
• 1977: Gateway by Frederick Pohl
• 1978: Dreamsnake by Vonda K. McIntrye
• 1979: The Foundations of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

1. The type of perspective made infamous by the Total Perspective Vortex [↩]

Quick! Name three Russian science-fiction writers. Yes, you can count the Strugatsky brothers as two, if you absolutely must, but you shouldn’t have to. You’ve got Lukyanenko (Night Watch, Day Watch), of course, and Gluhkovsky (Metro 2033, basis for the video game of the same name) and Tolstoy (the other one, who wrote The Garin Death Ray instead of Anna Karenina)…the list goes on and on.

Now name three Finnish science-fiction writers.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

No names leaping to mind?

Here’s a little help for you—in the category “Finnish science fiction writers,” Wikipedia lists seven names:

1. Aarne Haapakoski
2. Risto Isomäki
3. Leena Krohn
4. Kimmo Lehtonen
5. Martti Löfberg
6. Hannu Rajaniemi
7. Johanna Sinisalo

Compare that to the category “Russian science fiction writers,” which yields forty-eight names (forty-nine, if you count Arkady and Boris Strugatsky as two people).

It never occurred to me to search for Finnish science fiction writers until the latest in a series of literary conversations with a Russian-American colleague at work. When the topic wandered (as it does) into the realm of science fiction recently, we spoke of Stalker, a 1979 film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (who also directed Polish science fiction author¹ Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris in 1972) and based on the Strugatsky brothers’ novel, Roadside Picnic.

Wait a minute, I thought, after our conversation had come to a close. What about Finnish science fiction?

The Finns are my people; the music that sings in my blood is a kantele, strummed by the eternal bard, Väinämöinen. In nearly thirty-eight years on the planet, it never once occurred to me to seek out Finnish sci-fi. When it did occur to me, I wondered if I might learn that in the great Venn diagram of science-fiction, the circle representing Lapland was empty.

It’s not, of course, but nor is it bursting at the seams;² compared to the rest of what we consider Scandinavia,³ Finland is the most science-fictional (at least according to Wikipedia). The tally for the remainder of Scandinavia is as follows: Denmark, 2; Norway, 4; Sweden, 5.

Finnish science fiction does exist, but there’s slight hurdle that must be overcome before I can actually read any of it: Suomalainen, the Finnish language. Apart from a handful of terms related to misbehaving, sawing lumber and cursing at farm animals, I can neither speak nor read Finnish. In order to experience Finnish science fiction, I’ll either need to learn the language or find English translations.

If you’re expecting me to announce that I plan to learn to speak (or read) Finnish in the short term, don’t hold your breath. It’s something I’d like to do, but it’s not exactly on my short range radar. On the other hand, I’m very well aware that one of the Finnish science fiction writers listed above, Hannu Rajaniemi, has a new novel—The Quantum Thief—that will soon be available in these here United States; in English, no less.⁴ And so my journey into the realm of Finnish science fiction will begin later this year.

Who are the science fiction writers of your nationality? Have you read any of their works? How do they compare with American sci-fi?

1. Poland: 30 science fiction writers. [↩]
2. American science fiction writers: 1,058 [↩]
3. Geography Trivia: Finland is not a part of what is classically considered Scandinavia. [↩]
4. Alas, no Kindle version has been announced. [↩]

It wasn’t until I got my Kindle that I appreciated how screwed the brick-and-mortar bookstores are.

I bought my Kindle a week ago. Since then, I’ve already finished two books on it and have started a third. What Overlord Johnson said in his review holds: the overall convenience and comfort of using the Kindle as a reading device cannot be overstated. Even though this is not my first eReader, this is the first I’ve possessed with WiFi and the ability to purchase directly on the device. That, combined with the pure delight I feel when reading on it has changed the way I shop for books.

I didn’t realize how deeply this affected me until I visited my local Borders store. In the wake of Borders’ bankruptcy, it is closing. Books are thirty percent off or more. I browsed through the store, looking at books that, up until a week ago, I would have purchased. Now I was reluctant.

Why?  Three reasons:

1. Space. At present, I have no bookshelves, hence, books I buy wind up being piled in corners of rooms. They get in the way, and I never read them.
2. Cost. Even at 30% off, I can get some of them  for less online in digital format.
3. Bulk. I like to travel light. While I love to have things to read with me most of the time, carrying them around can be a pain the butt. Buying more things that I need to carry, in an age where I can read either on my Kindle or on my phone, seems silly.

Once I realized these three things, I understood I would never shop for books the same way. In the past, I would go to a bookstore to browse, have a cup of coffee, chill out. Eventually, I’d purchase something. Now I can use my Kindle to browse, even sample chapters before buying. I’m more likely to simply hit a coffeeshop than I am to walk into a physical bookstore. There’s no reason to see the books anymore.

No one is more surprised by this than me. I used to think that I loved books. I don’t. I love reading.  The distinction is surprising to me; it’s one I’ve never made.  I will admit that there is nothing like the smell of a book, a library, an old volume. And yet…this is not why I read. I read for the story.  The medium is unimportant. As it stands, now that I have this device, I always have a book with me. I have the Kindle app on my phone. My Kindle device syncs to the web, meaning that, if I read to page 45 on my Kindle, when I open the book on my phone, I will be on page 45. No paperback to stuff into a pocket or leave in the car or potentially lose.

I’ll be curious to see how bookstores change and adapt with the times. Libraries are facing the same challenges. As it the publishing industry. As we shift from valuing the medium to valuing the idea, the work, and the execution, I wonder what other changes we will see. What do you think?

As anyone who has been paying attention (and cares) has noticed, the publishing date is official for George R. R. Martin‘s latest installment of his Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons. The date is July 12th, 2011, which, rather conspicuously,¹ correlates with the approximate end of the first season (hopefully one of many) of HBO’s adaptation of the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones.

It hurts me to think that those of us who have been continually complaining of the Jets² getting in the way of Martin’s completion of Dragons, have actually had the formation of the series to blame all this time. Sure, as a marketing ploy, it’s genius– those who have been taken in by the series will go to the local bookst— oh, um, that is, go online to Amazon or some such,³ and see a bright and shiny new aSoIaF book on the (shelf) screen, tempting them to not only get the ‘novelization’ of that cool TV series they just watched, but get the whole series thus far up to and including Dragons.

It makes me wonder just how long, though, the book has been completed and lingering in wait for the TV series to arrive. Considering A Feast for Crows was first published in 2005, and was purportedly half of a work that was too large to publish in one volume – thus being split into that and a forthcoming Dragons - five and a half years is a long time to wait for something that was already supposedly well underway.

On the flip side, it’s entirely possible that book 6, with a working title of The Winds of Winter, might just come out sooner than we’d expect. One has to assume that Martin had been keeping himself busy with something other than supervising/consulting the TV series. Seriously, dude, you HAVE still been writing, right? I’m just letting you know that I’m not above buying one of your replica Valyrian weapons and putting it to purpose.⁴

I predict I’ll be getting a well-earned fix come mid April, though. Having watched the latest full trailer for the series, one of the marks of the fact that they ‘got it right’ is that I could clearly spot various characters on sight. So at the very least, the casting is spot on. It saddens me that Jennifer Ehle had to drop out of the project,⁵ because I kinda fell for her in Pride and Prejudice.⁶

The series starts on April 17th. If you have no skills with a search engine, or are just feeling lazy, here’s ‘Inside Game of Thrones’ ala HBO:

Inside ‘Game of Thrones’

1. that was a lot of commas – sorry, Mr. Thurber [↩]
2. the football team, not the band – though now I can’t help but picture Martin getting jiggy to Crush On You [↩]
3. RIP, Borders [↩]
4. ok, not really – replicas don’t hold much of an edge [↩]
5. I’m still fuzzy on exactly why that happened [↩]
6. though not as hard as my wife did for Colin Firth, who is on her List of Five [↩]

Chuck Wendig asked me to buy his book. So I did.

He asked very nicely on Twitter.  He pointed out that it was a collection of his short stories and that it was available on Kindle for $.99 for a short time. He pointed out he would shoot a kitten if I did not.

Okay…he didn’t say that last bit, but if his writing style is any indication, he was probably doing it anyway for fun. This is a compliment, believe it or not. Chuck Wendig’s style is so brash, so in-your-face, so ball-busting that I have no doubt that he eats buffalo-style kitten wings while he’s drinking himself into a stupor.

Again, to be clear: this is praise.  I first discovered Wendig when Jay Lake linked to his  Penmonkey’s Paean. This is a manfiesto about the craft of writing that contains such gems as:

These words march in the order I choose. They are my little bitches, cobbled together of letters and made to carry heavy notions and lofty ideas and character motivations and bad-ass non-stop mad ninja action. In this way they are like ants, carrying more than they should rightfully be able to carry.

They can even be forced into  sentences that no one has ever written before. “Betty Scarpetti can take pictures with her robotic hoo-hah, and those pictures will steal your dreams and sell them to goblins working the Secret Carnival down in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly.” See? Nobody has ever written that before. Every word journey is a Journey West. I am Lewis, and I am Clark. I am not the Donner Party.

These are good words. They made me smile, and they resonated.  I took them to heart, reblogged the link, and promptly forgot the man existed.  I am a fickle audience.

About two weeks ago, someone retweeted Wendig’s plaintive cry. “Buy my book! It is cheap right now!”  Being cheap myself, I thought, “Isn’t that the clever fellow who made me smile? I liked his style. I shall purchase this book and make it my own.”

I’m glad that I did. Wendig’s writing is a bit like watching Harlan Ellison on a three-day-bender possess Neil Gaiman. There are fantastic things, horrible things, beautiful things that happen that sing with myth but suckerpunch you  when you’re not looking. Not one of the short stories in Irregular Creatures was predictable. Not one of them was stale. They are living, hungry beings, and in the best tradition short story crafting, leave you wanting more at the end.

A brief sample of what you can find in Irregular Creatures:

DOG-MAN AND CAT-BIRD (A FLYING CAT STORY)

Joe’s got job woes and family problems, and it’s made all the more complicated by a cat who dies on his porch one night – or, so Joe believes. The cat is not only dead, but it appears to be some kind of improbable mutant: a cat with wings. The cat initially appears to complicate Joe’s life as he hides it from his family, but he soon learns that more may be at stake than he realized. Little does he know, a battle for good and evil, between Heaven and Hell, is about to be fought in his garage.

A RADIOACTIVE MONKEY

That bartender you really like, well, she just whipped up a potent cocktail called a “Radioactive Monkey.” Would you drink it? (Hint: you shouldn’t.)

PRODUCT PLACEMENT

Imagine one morning you wake up and you discover that the world is now home to products you don’t recognize but everyone else does. Flix candy bars? Jack Kenny whiskey? Burrito Hut? Donnie’s never heard of these brands, but those around him say such products are beloved and have been here for years. Donnie’s quest to discover the truth – and prove he’s not nuts – reveals a marketing and advertising scheme not of this dimension.

THE AUCTION

Benjamin’s father shows his son the secret behind his job: he is a buyer and seller of very forbidden things, magical things, objects of a fantastical purview. He takes his son to “The Auction,” a place where anything can be bought and sold: mythological creatures, insane machines, haunted and horrific artifacts. Benjamin is lead astray by a religious man with pious words but sinister intent. When Benjamin encounters a sickly mermaid on the auction block, can the boy step in and avert disaster?

BEWARE OF OWNER

A short story of how father teaches son: Dad teaches the boy that you don’t need to beware of a dog, but you damn well better beware of owner.

To sum up: Chuck Wendig is an author to watch. We have him under surveillance, and look forward to reading his novel, Double Down, when it arrives in November 2011.

About Chuck Wendig

Chuck Wendig is a novelist, a screenwriter, and a freelance penmonkey. He’s written too much. He should probably stop. Give him a wide berth, as he might be drunk and untrustworthy. He currently lives in the wilds of Pennsyltucky with a wonderful wife and two very stupid dogs. He is represented by Stacia Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.

You can find his site at: http://terribleminds.com

Thanks to the fact that I read Mr. John Scalzi’s Blog, I am able to report to you the list of Nebula Award nominees for this year.

The Nebula Awards are voted on, and presented by, active members of SFWA. The awards will be announced at the Nebula Awards Banquet (http://www.sfwa.org/nebula-weekend/) on Saturday evening, May 21, 2011 in the Washington Hilton, in Washington, D.C. Other awards to be presented are the Andre Norton Award for Excellence in Science Fiction or Fantasy for Young Adults, the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the Solstice Award for outstanding contribution to the field.
Short Story

• ‘‘Arvies’’, Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine 8/10)
• ‘‘How Interesting: A Tiny Man’’, Harlan Ellison® (Realms of Fantasy 2/10)
• ‘‘Ponies’’, Kij Johnson (Tor.com 1/17/10)
• ‘‘I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno’’, Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed Magazine 6/10)
• ‘‘The Green Book’’, Amal El-Mohtar (Apex Magazine 11/1/10)
• ‘‘Ghosts of New York’’, Jennifer Pelland (Dark Faith)
• ‘‘Conditional Love’’, Felicity Shoulders (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 1/10)

Novelette

• ‘‘Map of Seventeen’’, Christopher Barzak (The Beastly Bride)
• ‘‘The Jaguar House, in Shadow’’, Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 7/10)
• ‘‘The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard van Oost and Oludara’’, Christopher Kastensmidt (Realms of Fantasy 4/10)
• “Plus or Minus’’, James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine12/10)
• ‘‘Pishaach’’, Shweta Narayan (The Beastly Bride)
• ‘‘That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made’’, Eric James Stone (Analog Science Fiction and Fact 9/10)
• ‘‘Stone Wall Truth’’, Caroline M. Yoachim (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 2/10)

Novella

• The Alchemist, Paolo Bacigalupi (Audible; Subterranean)
• ‘‘Iron Shoes’’, J. Kathleen Cheney (Alembical 2)
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
• ‘‘The Sultan of the Clouds’’, Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 9/10)
• ‘‘Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance’’, Paul Park (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1-2/10)
• ‘‘The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window’’, Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean MagazineSummer ’10)

Novel

• The Native Star, M.K. Hobson (Spectra)
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
• Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
• Echo, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
• Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
• Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)

The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

• Despicable Me, Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud (directors), Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul (screenplay), Sergio Pablos (story) (Illumination Entertainment)
• Doctor Who: ‘‘Vincent and the Doctor’’, Richard Curtis (writer), Jonny Campbell (director)
• How to Train Your Dragon, Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders (directors), William Davies, Dean DeBlois, & Chris Sanders (screenplay) (DreamWorks Animation)
• Inception, Christopher Nolan (director), Christopher Nolan (screenplay) (Warner)
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright (director), Michael Bacall & Edgar Wright (screenplay) (Universal)
• Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich (director), Michael Arndt (screenplay), John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, & Lee Unkrich (story) (Pixar/Disney)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

• Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
• White Cat, Holly Black (McElderry)
• Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press; Scholastic UK)
• Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, Barry Deutsch (Amulet)
• The Boy from Ilysies, Pearl North (Tor Teen)
• I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett (Gollancz; Harper)
• A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner (Greenwillow)
• Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)

For more information, visit http://www.sfwa.org/

And thanks to the twin miracles of Cut and Paste, I did not need to retype any of the above. Marvel at my cleverness, and please…congratulate the nominees. Bravo, all!

Given our track record regarding The Secret Library—not to mention our proclivity for inadvertently altering the time-space continuum—it is entirely possible that we selected Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates for discussion well before the Puritans departed England for the New World. Whether this will have any lasting implications upon the fledgling Massachusetts Bay Colony, only time will tell. In any case, we enclose the aforementioned discussion herein for your examination and (we can only hope) approval. Astute listeners will note that we are joined once again by Madame Overlord Johnson, who is entirely too literate for her own good.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:12 — 31.3MB)

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is the 2010 Locus award winner for Best First Novel. The story takes place in the 22nd century; petroleum is a distant memory and giant agricultural conglomerates fight wars and wipe out local crops with genetically-engineered plagues to create markets for their genehacked grains. Thailand is the last holdout against these Calorie Companies, maintaining a closely-guarded seedbank that contains what may be the last natural food-bearing flora on the planet.

The Calorie Companies want in and the Environment Ministry wants to keep them out. Making matters difficult is the Ministry of Trade, which is doing all it can to loosen border restrictions and open up trade with the rest of the world—in direct conflict with the goal of the Environment Ministry.

In the middle of the mess, and soon to become a far more important part of it than she would ever imagine, is Emiko, a windup girl (genetically engineered “New Person”) whose very presence in Bangkok is illegal. Emiko works in a brothel, a toy for those with more exotic (and perverse) tastes than are easily satisfied by the real girls. She is a prisoner of fear, knowing that the Environment Ministry White Shirts enforcers are kept at bay only by the bribes her patron pays. Should the bribes stop, Emiko would surely be mulched, processed and turned into the methane that provides so much of Bangkok’s energy.

This was, simply put, a fantastic book. The post-petroleum world Bacigalupi created is complex and compelling (a great exploration of what the world might look like after the petroplague in Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason’s Ill Wind or simply the depletion of the world’s oil reserves) and the idea of genehacked grain and a food supply that is largely controlled by companies in Des Moines is fascinating (especially after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan). Then there are the characters: Emiko the windup girl; the White Shirts, Captain Jaidee “The Tiger” Rojjanasukchai and his Lieutenant, Kanya; Anderson Lake, the Calorie Man looking for a way to undermine the Environment Ministry; and Hock Seng, the Yellow Card refugee from a China torn apart by religious conflict. Bacigalupi winds their separate stories together expertly, creating distinct voices for each and making them all sympathetic, even though their motivations often counter one another.

For those of you who missed it in Twitterspace last week, a new science-fiction-oriented magazine has hit the intertubes. It goes by the name Lightspeed, and its editor-in-chief John Joseph Adams describes what sets the magazine apart:

Lightspeed is an online magazine focusing exclusively on science fiction. Here you can expect to see all types of science fiction, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and we encourage our writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.

Each month at Lightspeed, we bring you a mix of originals and reprints, and featuring a variety of authors—from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven’t heard of yet. When you read Lightspeed, it is our hope that you’ll see where science fiction comes from, where it is now, and where it’s going.

I shelled out the $2.99 cover price for two reasons. First, I’m renewing my love affair with science fiction after years of fantasy reading and I loves me a a good SF short story. Second, they offer the magazine in a number of downloadable formats, one of which is ePub. That’s something I want to see more of, and so I chose to vote with my money.

The format of the magazine is an interesting mix of fiction and non-fiction writing. The features run in triplets throughout; first a short story, then an interview with the author about the short story, and finally a non-fiction essay  that is somehow related to the short story.  This pattern was repeated four times in the course of the issue and it made for an absorbing reading experience. I truly enjoyed delving more deeply into what the author was thinking and feeling when they crafted the story and the non-fiction essay was a perfect dessert to the main course. This format of small meals sustained me on a flight from Cleveland to Asheville, NC last week, and I was grateful for it.

I’m looking forward to seeing where the staff of the magazine takes it next, but I want to recommend it. If you like short fiction and also want to learn a little something at the same time, I highly recommend Lightspeed. Go buy a copy. You’ll thank yourself for it.

Bonus: Read John Joseph Adams Editorial or Vylar Kaftan’s “I’m Alive, I Love You, And I’ll See You In Reno” which is the most emotional SF read I’ve absorbed since Mur Lafferty’s “I Look Forward To Remembering You.”