The trade paperback edition of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Seven was published by Night Shade Books back in March. Since then the publishing house has changed hands, with Skyhorse Publishing taking over the print editions of Night Shade’s titles and Start Publishing taking over the ebook editions.
I would expect it to be available from other digital retailers shortly. Â I really appreciate everyone’s patience with this, and hope you enjoy the book!
I sometimes look back at old blog entries to bring back details of little personal things. Not often, but sometimes. Today is the day, future me, when we went out to see Driving Miss Daisy at His Majesty’s Theatre with mum. Can’t tell you if we enjoyed it, because that’s tonight. Jessica turned thirteen this week. We had a family dinner at Villa Da Vinci, and she got more One Direction stuff than any sane human could ever need. Sophie and you sat at one end of the table, Stephen and Barbara at the other, and much pizza and pasta was consumed in what seemed a good night. Tomorrow there’ll be a small family party at the house, with Jessica M and Bella. Hopefully Jessica S will love it.
This week we also continued our way through Switched at Birth, you failed to do much new reading though you did start re-reading Consider Phlebas following the sad news of Iain Banks death. Last week we watched Gremlins for family movie night (a failure) and this week is Jessica’s choice and she seems to want Some Like it Hot. We’ll see how that goes down.
It was also part of your continuing (but hopefully when you read this, long over) period of minor ill-health. Your ears have settled down after a lengthy period of difficulty, as have your teeth (unconnected though that is). Just to make things happy, though, your right eye is acting up and is blurry. Saw the ophthalmologist who explained what was going in. It should be okay. You have, sadly, put most of the weight you lost back on. Still, you’ve identified the recipe for success so hopefully over the coming months that will turn back around. And a look back at old blog posts (11 years worth) shows you usually have the flu around now, but not this year. Yet.
And, finally, we’re a few weeks away from tax time. A favourite. Still, you’re in pretty good shape for it so if all goes to plan the rest of the year should be easier. Â Oh, and Jessica just got up even though it’s 6am, so you tucked her back into bed (she still likes that at thirteen) and she asked if we could go on a family holiday. You should look into that.
I was saddened by the news that Jack Vance passed away a couple of weeks ago. I’d met him once, and I suppose I’d been reading him on and off a little for years. I have a fond memory of being given an Isaac Asimov edited volume of Hugo winners by my dad in the early 1980s. Dad would stop off at the Mt Lawley Bowling Club on his way home from work for a drink or two. The Bowling Club had this shelf of second hand books for sale. He picked up that battered copy of The Hugo Winners for $2 and gave it to me, a way I think of reaching out to my love of science fiction which he’d never really understood. It has “The Last Castle” and “The Dragon Masters” in it.
Even though I loved those stories, I never really followed up with Vance. I remember several rounds of reissues coming out in the ’80s and ’90s from the UK, and being curious. I tried Lyonesse, but I wasn’t really read for it at the time. And Terry Dowling, who I was in frequent contact with at the time, would often recommend him to me, but it was only in the late 1990s I connected. I was in Oakland once and Terry took me up to Jacks’ house in the hills. I met Norma, who was lovely, and then Jack came stomping up from downstairs. He’d been working on Lurulu, I think. We sat and drank coffee and talked about 1930s jazz, which he loved very much, and had a wonderful time. It was and is still a surprise, though, that I ended up working with Terry on eight volumes of Jack’s work for Subterranean Press. I am intensely proud of The Jack Vance Treasury, and hope someone brings it back into print, but reading for the others opened his fictional worlds to me and I confess I’ve come to love them.
That said, nothing has prepared me for how I’d feel about the news today that Iain Banks has died. I started reading science fiction when I was seven and read my way through the classics (and some that were fun but definitely not classics). Banks was the first writer whose work I discovered after I became an adult, and he always felt like one of “mine”. The old guys — Heinlein, Sturgeon and others whose work I’ve loved – came from an earlier time. Not Banks. I find myself deeply saddened, though not devastated – I’d never met him, but I think if I had I would be shattered – that he is gone.
I first met Iain in the pages of Consider Phlebas (always Considerable Phlebitis to me), a book I’d heard about and ended up hunting down in a warehouse on the wrong side of the railway tracks, south of the river. I was swept away by the breadth of imagination, the humour and above all the depth of humanity in his work. I devoured The Player of Games and each of the books that came after. I went back and read The Wasp Factory and The Bridge, and reserve my deepest love for The Crow Road (one of my very favourite books with possibly the greatest opening line I know). Some of the later books were better and some were not, but all of them contained something magnificent. They are all worth reading.
Though our paths never crossed , I felt I had a sense of him too. A larger than life figure who wrote wonderful science fiction, who climbed the outside of hotels for fun, who drank scotch prodigiously and laughed more, and who was always racing across the Highlands in an enormous car. When I think of him, and I shall, it will be aboard the GCU Very Little Gravitas Indeed, sipping a scotch and having a laugh. He will be missed.
Busy days here on Coode Street. Having recorded a new podcast last weekend with Mary Rickert and Christopher Barzak, I’ve been busy with Fearsome Journeys and writing more blog posts than I think I have in the past five years. That’s actually proving sort of fun. And then, in amongst it all I ended up chatting with David Barnett about Australian science fiction for his article “Science fiction and fantasy: the wonderful wizards of Oz” which reports on the two recent amazing UK book deals for Ben Peek and Rjurik Davidson, and then touches on a few points about Australian SF generally.
