Tuesday, July 29, 2008

David Louis Edelmen Interview & SFFWorld Round Up

We’ve been posting a slew of new stuff up at SFFWorld in the past couple of days. I posted the e-mail interview I recently conducted with David Louis Edelman:

Science Fiction is a language of mirrors by which we (readers and writers) can compare and contrast our own society and its problems. This is clearly the case with the Jump 225 trilogy, so when you created this future history, how necessary do you feel it was to sort of destroy everything and restart?

Wiping the slate clean with an Armageddon scenario five hundred years before the events of Jump 225 was really just a narrative trick. It enabled me to focus on the things I wanted to focus on -- namely, software and business and sociology -- and conveniently ignore the things I didn’t want to talk about. AIs? Boom! They were destroyed in the Autonomous Revolt. Nuclear weapons? Boom! Used in the Revolt and then subsequently abandoned. Cloning and genetic engineering? Same thing.


Mark/Hobbit has churned out some top notch reviews:

The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

The Night Sessions is set in the near future with an intriguing premise: what if the world secularized religion, if the world decided that there was to be a total severance of religion from state and politics, with religion prevented from interfering with state affairs and from controlling government or exercising political power?

The Ten Thousand by Paul Kearney

To their rescue then, we can add Paul Kearney. His latest, The Ten Thousand, is an unusual book that could appear to the reader simultaneously as perversely both contemporary Fantasy and old-fashioned style Fantasy, in the sense that it will appeal to those readers who like the current vogues in the genre (dark, gritty, melancholic) that make Fantasy quite popular

The Mirrored Heavens by David J Williams

Consequently the book is pretty well paced but, unlike the cover may lead you to expect, there is an emphasis on more talk than action, though the action pieces, when they happen, are well done.

Enemy's Son by James Johnson

The Enemy’s Son is a rip-roaring space opera debut novel from new writer and artist James Johnson. It reads pretty much as old-style SF with a modern twist. There are Slan-style mutants, flying cities, old-Venusian-style continental jungles and tales of a lost Erth reminiscent of Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth.

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