I’ve been gone for a while because of various commitments. When I hit tax time I get very, very stressed and tend to drop everything else. Now that I’m pretty much done things are beginning to settle out a bit, which is good. I’m reading for both The New Space Opera (we’re waiting for two or three stories to come in) and for The Jack Vance Treasury (we want a final list in a week or so), waiting to hear back if my YA SF anthology was accepted, doing paperwork, committing acts of poor taste, not watching the World Cup, nagging my travel agent to actually finish up the bookings for the US trip, and actually, by recent standards, winding down. The next few weeks will mostly be filled by doing this stuff, and by getting some proposals out to publishers. If I remember correctly, it won’t be so long till I’ve delivered everything under contract, and I’ve got some new projects I’m excited to get on with after World Fantasy this November.
In the meantime, some quick comments and recommendations:
I just read Charlie Stross’s new novelette “Trunk and Disorderly”, which he mentions here, and which will be published in Asimov’s soon-ish. It’s a funny mid-future SF romp in a very Wodehousian mode. I think a good dollop of the kind of exoticism that you see in Jack Vance could have worked well too, but I think it works very well as it is, and is a good story. It’s also the first in a series of stories, so I’ll be fascinated to see what happens next.
Chris Rowe’s “The Voluntary State” was one of the most interesting SF stories of the year before last. He’s about to show up in the pages of F&SF with a really great story, “Another Word for Map is Faith“. If memory serves it’s part of his “Uncommonwealth” series of stories, and it’s terrific. A doozy. I’ll be stunned if it doesn’t show up in a bunch of year’s bests.
The ever wonderful Sharyn November sent me a care package which arrived two days ago, stuffed with goodies. I’m currently two-thirds of the way through Delia Sherman’s upcoming novel Changeling, and loving it. It’s set in the same world and features some of the characters from her story “CATNYP”,. which I also loved. Check it out.
And what about Aurealis, hmm?
Ah Glenda, you vile fiend. Now I’m rumbled. If I can be forgiven for conflating all of the Aurealis-award winning novels into one group, to date forty-one novels have received an Aurealis Award of one kind or another. Of those, I’ve read just nineteen, or 46% of the winners. I pretty much poop out around 2000, after Aussiecon. Before that, I read pretty much all of the OZ SF/F that was published. These are the ones I’ve missed:
1. Deucalion, Brian Caswell
2. Dragonkeeper, Carole Wilkinson
3. Eye t oEye, Catherine Jinks
4. Fire Angels, Jane Routley
5. Mirror, Mirror, Hillary Bell
6. The Broken Wheel, Kerry Greenwood
7. Greylands, Isobelle Carmody
8. Aramaya, Jane Routley
9. Foreign Devils, Christine Harris
10. Son of the Shadows, Juliet Marillier
11. The Miocene Arrow, Sean McMullen
12. The Resurrectionists, Kim Wilkins
13. Thursday’s Child, Sonya Hartnett
14. Angel of Ruin, Kim Wilkins
15. The Other Face of Janus, Louise Katz
16. The Hand of Glory, Sophie Masson
17. The White Body of Evening, A.L. McCann
18. Transcension, Damien Broderick
19. Born of theSea, Victor Kelleher
20. Fallen Gods, Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman
21. Less Than Human, Maxine McArthur
22. The Black Crusade, Richard Harland
Dreamsnake is pretty good, but the gaping hole is with Zelazny. Glad you intend to fix that soon.
The Speed of Dark, The Healers War, any Delany, and No Enemy But Time are really solid novels.
Perfume by Suskind is a masterpiece.
You can forget most of the others, specifically the Clifton/Riley and any Robert J. Sawyer.