This one’s for Jonathan, Gary & Mondy, who have been speculating a lot lately about what are the best books published in 2011 so far, that they should be paying attention to.

These are mine. It’s entirely personal, of course, and based what I’ve actually read (as opposed to the towering To Read pile that will one day cause me major injury) but given that I haven’t done nearly enough this year of reviewing the books I love, I think it’s worth doing.

ADULT FICTION

Jo Walton
Among Others

A wonderful, wonderful book about the reading habits of young girls, with subtle magic and a fabulous theme of iconic SF books. At some point I hope I will write that essay I want to, about my lifelong relationship with Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin and how that book trained me to get the most out of this one despite the fact that I’ve never read Delaney, Zelazny or more than two novels by Heinlein.

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I am loving the Tumblr “A Doctor World” which remixes the odd, philosophical phrases of the art-tragicomic-musing-on-the-universe comic strip A Softer World with images from Doctor Who. These range from funny and romantic to sad and uncomfortable – wonderful stuff.

Also, this week on the internet…

Jo Walton talks about child-markers in the Robert Heinlein juveniles.

An inspiring interview with Hope Powell, England football coach and all-around awesome woman. I was fascinated by honest descriptions of what it was like to be a West Indian girl who loved football in Britain in the 1970′s, and how she made it to the top of her field despite how marginalised women’s football still is.

Tehani and Random Alex are doing a chronological read-along series of posts about Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga – Tehani, like me, is a diehard Bujold fan, and Alex is reading the books (and loving them) for the very first time. I’m excited to follow along! Two posts up so far, Cordelia’s Honor and The Warrior’s Apprentice. NOBODY SPOIL ALEX.

For those of you just joining us, Cheryl does a bang up job of summing up the current gender discussion on the internet, centering around The Guardian, lists, Nicola Griffith and others.

The SF MindMeld, which hasn’t had a brilliant record at addressing gender parity in the past but I believe has been working to improve, reiterates Griffith’s idea of the Russ Pledge and asks What’s The Importance of the Russ Pledge Today? Sadly, while most of the official respondents have the right idea and some interesting things to say, there are many commenters who seem offended at the very concept of giving women writers a fair go.

“Why I won’t be taking the Joanna Russ pledge” by Athena Andreadis. Powerful, important post – I think she is somewhat unfair in her characterisation of the pledge and its usefulness but hard to argue with “I have been implementing it for the last forty-plus years.”

Speaking of gender politics, Gail Simone has publicly commented on the lack of female creators involved in the DC reboot (even fewer than usual in comics) and tried to discuss it on Twitter with her fellow professionals. A warning: the comments on this one are beyond depressing.

A cool piece about the equal male-female balance on the writing team of TV show Community and how it worked out really well for them, though starting as an experiment imposed upon them. While there’s a little bit of ‘wow, we included women writers and they didn’t suck, and actually it meant we had a team that had a wider range of views!’ and I think there is some belittling of the idea that a good racial mix among writers would be just as important, it still feels like a step in the right direction.

“Thinking too hard” about The Hunger Games, why the concept of the first book worked so well, and the subversive message it gives to teens, which goes beyond “be yourself” all the way to “if you have to pretend not to be yourself to anyone, chances are they are out to kill you.”

There’s a new episode up! Grab it from iTunes, by direct download or stream it on the site.

EPISODE 25

In which we hit and run the Locus Recommended Reading List, tackle e-books and piracy, and delve into the knotty issue of religion in science fiction.

News
Locus Recommended Reading List – hot off the press!

Philip K Dick shortlist

First annual Geek Girl Con in Seattle – would this work in Australia?

Cloud-delivered ebooks from Readings/SPUNC
Response to comments on the internet about the Cloud Publishing

“we proudly declare that we stream your ebooks — you don’t have to download them. You can of course download your Booki.sh books for offline access on most devices — you just can’t read them in anything other than Booki.sh.”

SPUNC Response: “Digital publishing presents us with a massive opportunity that has heretofore been unavailable. Namely this: that a publisher can have a book distributed wherever they want, at the click of a button”.

Discussion of ebook piracy
As Jim Hines found out the world is not the USA and the rest of the world does not experience publishing nor this ebook revolution apace with the USA. (Hines’ original post)
Charles Tan presenting the perspective from Elsewhere In the World
Karen Healey: I was wrong and I’m sorry

Weird Tales revamp
Launching new website; editor-in-chief Ann VanderMeer and publisher John Betancourt have raised the pay rate to 5 cents per word; and implemented a new submissions portal for potential contributors. In addition to the announcement late last year of the all female editorial team, for the first time in 88 years of Ann VanderMeer, Paula Guran and Mary Robinette Kowal.

Feedback
Sean, Thoraiya, Niall

Pet Subject
The place of religion in science fiction.
Modern religions, made up religions, machine religions… or no religions? What place can/does/should religion play in sf?
Jo Walton on religion in SF!

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

Karen Joy Fowler writes novels the way Kelly Link writes short stories – painstaking, elaborate, funny, with surprisingly modern sensibilities alongside beautiful language. (the kicker of course is that Karen Joy Fowler also writes short stories like this, but that’s not the point of this review) I’ve read several of Fowler’s novels now, including the hugely successful The Jane Austen Book Club (really must get around to seeing the movie), my favourite being The Sweetheart Season, about the American female baseball league during the war.

Fowler’s novels are eclectic, but each clings fiercely to its themes and subject matter, making for a very satisfying reading experience.

The Case of the Imaginary Detective (published as Wit’s End in some countries, a far better title) wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I knew it was a book in which Fowler interrogated the detective fiction genre, and had even read summaries of the plot, but somehow in my head it was set in the 1930′s or 1940′s, like Jo Walton’s Farthing… but what I got instead was something more akin to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition!

Rima is a wounded soul, having lost her mother, brother and most recently, her father. Needing somewhere to assemble her thoughts, she is staying with her godmother Addison, a famous crime novelist who has not produced a new book in more than two years. The house is full – of dollhouses set up for each of Addison’s literary crime scenes, of dogs, of secrets, of memories of Rima’s father, who may or may not have had an affair with Addison, and most notably of Maxwell Lane, the fictional detective.

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Episode 3 is available for download/live play here, or subscribe to us through iTunes. I’m posting the show notes here as well as some versions of Firefox struggle to load them on the GS page…

Galactic Suburbia Episode 3 – 2 April

News:

Alisa’s live report from Swancon!

Tiptree winners & Honours List including Wives Wives Wives

Arthur C Clarke shortlist

Hugos – largest number of votes ever received. Shortlist out Easter Sunday, UK time:

Launch of new Asif website

Stephenie Meyer to release a novella for free to fans online followed by the hard copy version from June 5.

Shaun Tan’s Eric

k9 to screen on Australian tv tomorrow on Channel 10! [heh this is officially old news now]

Garth Nix and Sean Williams, teaming up with Troubletwisters

What have we been reading?

Tansy - Lifelode, by Jo Walton & Chicks Dig Time Lords

Alisa – The Women Men Don’t See/ What I Didn’t see and commentary, Alice Sheldon’s Biography

Alex – Lord of the Rings, also “To Write like a Woman,” collected essays by Joanna Russ.

Pet Subject: Media Tie-Ins

Kristine Kathryn Rusch, talking about Star Wars – initially in Star Wars on Trial, a BenBella collection

See also http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2010/03/guest-blogger-ari-marmell-on-writing.html

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If you have any feedback or comments for us, please email galacticsuburbia@gmail.com

2 April 2010

This one was recommended to me as ‘domestic fantasy,’ which was intriguing from the start. Also, it was Jo Walton. Say no more. Jo Walton has this amazing knack of writing novels that feel like they would have been written a century ago, if our current genre traditions existed then.

What I wasn’t expecting was a marvellous, complex narrative that entirely messed with my head. Walton uses omniscient narration beautifully, weaving in and out of her characters’ heads, shifting perspective exactly when it needs to be shifted. The narrative is non-linear in many ways, not least because Taveth, the most important of the protagonists, has the ability to see people’s pasts and futures, and views the world through a Doctor Manhattan style haze. Part of the story indeed is the discussion of how to tell the story, between the few people left to tell it, and the narrative makes it clear that this telling is imperfect and unreliable, filtered through the eyes of those who missed much of what was going on. We shift from time period to time period, like flitting through the collective memories of the household, back and forth, until a coherent picture forms. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to read it all over again when you’re done, just to see how she did it.

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After yesterday, I’ve been thinking about how many fantasy novels are truly standalone. Girlie Jones declared on Twitter that she doesn’t read fantasy because she’s not interested in waiting for volumes to be written. It’s a fair cop – if the concept of a journey through an elaborate magical world doesn’t grab you from the outset, it’s hard to find a half-decent gateway drug to introduce you to the genre.

Fantasy certainly lends itself to extended series, either of the to-be-continued type or the ‘many standalone novels set in the same world/based around the same character’ type. One of the pleasures of fantasy is the exploration of a world and the ongoing consequences of changes to that world – but that isn’t all that fantasy has to offer and sometimes there is a deep pleasure in a short burst of magical fiction. It’s also a great way to lure a new reader into the genre. I suspect that his many and varied standalone novels are a big part of why Neil Gaiman, for example, has such a broad fanbase.

Standalone novels are, if you are not Neil Gaiman, mostly a luxury for fantasy writers. They turn up at the very beginning of their careers, in many cases, or sidle in from time to time. The accepted wisdom is that standalones simply don’t sell as well as trilogies or series books, even when by the same author.

I wanted to assemble a list of fantasy books I love that are not only standalone, but continue to be so – they don’t share their world or characters with other books. There are no sequels, sideways or direct. @crankynick pointed out on Twitter that I had set myself a hard task because “it’s a rare writer that doesn’t go back to the well if a book takes off.” This is a cynical but let’s face it, not untrue view of how the publishing world works.

By only including pure solo standalone novels in my list, that means I am excluding many great fantasy novels which share a world or character with one or some other of their author’s works, even though they stand perfectly well on their own: such novels as The Hobbit, Valiant, The Curse of Chalion, Anansi Boys. Even Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell can be excluded on these grounds, I think, as The Ladies of Grace Adieu is very much a sequel and companion volume, while not actually a novel. Thanks to Tehani and Nicole I also learned that Threshold, Sara Douglass’ lovely novel of maths, magic and glassworking is now linked to some of her other novels and no longer counts as a standalone in that pure sense. Damn it! There goes another of my best examples.

So: THE LIST (my top 10 super-solo-unsequelled-standalone fantasy novels) presented below…

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I want to post my review of Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer, but apparently my brain is still sorting that one out (or rather is pushing everything else to the back so it can concentrate on turning stacks of square bracketed pleas of desperation into half-decent fight scenes), so instead I will share some links of other people’s thoughts on writing, and how it relates to meeee. Because right now, NaNo being NaNo, it’s hard to see past the end of the novel on my face.

Did I say novel? I meant nose. But mostly I meant novel.

Jo Walton writes on the fantasy technique of madey-uppy words – when it works to add depth of worldbuilding, and when it makes you look like a tool.

This fills me with due apprehension because I am indeed writing book 3 of a trilogy which does exactly this thing. Only hopefully in the depth of worldbuilding way and not the tool way. I have deliberately pulled a messed up hybrid of French, Italian, Latin and English into play, and have insisted in some cases of using particular words where ordinary English ones would do. In all cases, though, it was when the ordinary English version was not just ordinary, but so overused that it came with far too many connotations.

‘Princess’ for instance. It’s one of those words I can’t write with a straight face any more. Not with Disney’s finest staring out at me from my daughter’s schoolbag every day. I also banished ‘night’ and ‘girl’ because it was the only way, I decided, to avoid using them in every single sentence in the book.

Most of the trilogy, incidentally, takes place at night.

Anyway, I will hug my madey-uppy words to myself and brace myself for the displeasure and judging looks of  girliejones. I solemnly swear I have not added any apostrophes in the middle of names (cough except where grammatically accurate).

Meanwhile, Scott Westerfeld talks about “Passages of Disbelief,” a lovely term to describe that moment when the ordinary people of the familiar world are faced with magic, or aliens, or the Other for the first time. [I have lots of this in my book too, as it's basically urban fantasy that happens to also be otherworld fantasy]

Reading his post my first thought was ‘ooh, Buffy did lots of that, especially that lovely Oz reaction to vampires being real’ and Scott promptly linked to an essay he wrote on those moments in Buffy. The essay is awesome, and makes me want to a) buy the book (damn you, SmartPop, are you never satisfied?) and b) watch all the Buffy. Like I have time for that. Though it might help me with those damned fight scenes…