Posts Tagged: Science Fiction

Feature Article

Article | My Favourite Blogs of 2011

By Aidan Moher January 5th, 2012

Every year, I like to gather together some of my favourite bloggers/fan writers and give them some extra exposure. If you’re voting for the Hugos, consider these bloggers/blogs for the ‘Best Fan Writer’ and ‘Best Fanzine’ awards!

My Favourite Blogs of 2011

Staffer's Musings, edited by Justin Landon

Staffer’s Musings, edited by Justin Landon

Landon’s blog is new to the scene, but in the nine months he’s been around, he’s become one of my favourite voices in the community. He’s funny, but manages to use that sense of humour to eloquently and convincingly articulate his opinions and insights (even if I don’t always agree with him). He seems to post a new review each day, and he’s begun to interview authors. I expect big things of Landon in 2012. Plus, he looks like this.

Some posts of note:

His blog: http://staffersmusings.blogspot.com/
His twitter: @jdiddyesquire
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Feature Article

Article | My Favourite Novels of 2011

By Aidan Moher January 3rd, 2012

Another year, another list of great novels. I don’t read widely enough to declare a ‘best of 2011,’ so instead here is a collection of my favourite novels published in 2011, starting with honourable mentioned (in no order) and capped off with my favourite novel of 2011, which might come as a bit of a surprise.

Enjoy!

Honorable Mentions

Shadowheart by Tad Williams

SHADOWHEART by Tad WilliamsShadowheart is, essentially, one enormous climax. The pacing is frenetic (for a Williams novel…) and the author fills every nook and cranny of the novel with feverish action, enlightening observations on the plot or characters and enough twists and turns to keep fans of the series happy. It’s always bittersweet to see a series come to an end; as fans, we are always eager to find out what happens to our heroes and heroines, but, equally, we don’t want them to ever leave our lives. Perhaps the greatest thing I can say about Shadowheart is that through four long volumes of a story, Williams convinced me to care utterly for his characters and there’s a hole now in my life where they once lived. Few story tellers can do that. Williams does it with alarming regularity.
Read my full review of Shadowheart by Tad Williams.
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Review

Review | READY PLAYER ONE by Ernest Cline

By Aidan Moher December 14th, 2011
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One

By Ernest Cline
Hardcover
Pages: 384 pages
Publisher: Crown
Release Date: 16/08/11
ISBN: 030788743X

EXCERPT

Earlier this year, Ernest Cline made waves among both Science Fiction and geek fandom with the release of his debut novel, Ready Player One, a dystopian tale of a group of MMORPG-playing misfits thrust into a virtual scavenger hunt with enormous stakes: total control of OASIS, a virtual world that makes World of Warcraft look like small beans, and a real-world fortune worth more than Greece’s recent bailout. Cline fills this tale with an almost endless parade of callouts to the mainstays of young geek culture in the late part of the twentieth century that are ultimately either the novel’s biggest strength or weakness.

Ready Player One succeeds on a thematic level with a rather open metaphor for the current and potential crisis that humanity faces as we continue to become more and more ensnared by the ghost in the machine. The plot of the novel is set around Wade Watts, better known as Parzival, low-level gunter, and his efforts to win the day and save OASIS, a videogame/life simulator that looks like Second Life meets The Sims meets World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons and a barrel of HGH, that has ensnared a huge majority of the earth’s population with its promises of a better world drawn in pixels (well, pixels isn’t quite right, since the virtual world is laser-drawn onto the gamers’ eyeballs, but give me the metaphor). Of course, Cline isn’t unaware that the world’s become such a shithole in large part because of this game and his characters take a long journey to this realization as the novel proceeds.

With devices like smartphones and social networking platforms like Facebook taking over the halls of highschools, the concept of direct human communication is becoming more and more foreign to the youths who will one day run this world. Cline never sacrifices fun for this thematic exploration, but it’s clear that he’s also concerned about a future where multiplayer and ‘social’ gaming no longer involves standing side-by-side with your competitor at an arcade cabinet. Hell, these days you no longer even have to be in the same room. Or continent. This evolution of social structure and communication will be one of our generations biggest challenges and Cline’s vision for it’s potential fallout are frightening.

Cline, like the protagonists and all the other OASIS-obsessed millions in his dystopia, seems determined to use Ready Player One as a soapbox to show off the excessive depth and breadth of his deep knowledge of ’80s pop culture and gaming, and to prove that that painfully neon decade meant something beyond Reagan and Gorbachev, Halley’s comet, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Often this results in loaded descriptions that heavy-handedly attempt to appeal the readers’ similar nostalgia. Often, though, the reader is expected to recall their own experience of the called-upon game/movie/song to fill in the blanks of Cline’s world-building or characterizations. Mid-way through the novel, the protagonist, Parzival, visits a small town:

The place reminded me a lot of the town in the movie Footloose. Small, rural, and sparsely populated. The houses all seemed incredibly big and were placed ridiculously far apart. It astounded me that fifty years ago, even lower-income families had an entire house to themselves. The NPC citizens all looked like extras from a John Cougar Mellencamp video. I saw people out raking leaves, walking dogs, and sitting on porches. Out of curiosity, I waved at a few of them and got a friendly wave in return every time.

Cline does a bit of work (“Small, rural and sparsely populated”), but also assumes that the reader has as full of a knowledge of the ‘80s as he does. Don’t know what Bomont looks like? Never seen a John Cougar Mellancamp video? Too bad. So, much of the effectiveness of Ready Player One is stunted if the reader wasn’t born in the ‘70s or very early ‘80s. Being in my mid-twenties, a lot of the references and odes were recognizable to me, but didn’t tug on my heartstrings as Cline intended. Sure, it’s cool when he mentions Tempest or Knight Rider, but what the heck is Ladyhawke? He faces down a boss in what game? For what system?

Don’t know? Oops, game over. Got another credit?

So, these rose-tinted glasses removed, how does the novel stand up as a piece of entertainment? Pretty damn well. Now, don’t get me wrong, the nostalgia is the selling point of the novel, but Ready Player One has all the right elements for a cracking, successful dystopian novel. The story hits high gear within the first handful of pages and doesn’t let up for the entirety of its length; the cast of characters is small, but from the main cast to the minor side characters, they’re all easily recognizable and (almost) equally likeable. For the reader to care about a world where so much has gone wrong with society, they have to recognize admirable qualities in the characters that inhabit it and Cline doesn’t disappoint. The protagonists are all socially-inept, damaged individuals, but they also seem eerily familiar to anyone who’s spent enough time playing World of Warcraft or locked away in a basement on a sunny day deep in a favourite novel. We’ve all been there, and the characters of Ready Player One help seed the idea that there’s some hope in the future, no matter how far down the dumper society might fall.

Ready Player One certainly indicates that Cline is a young author worth watching, but it will be interesting to see if Cline can follow up Ready Player One with a similarly entertaining novel that doesn’t ask its readers to share the same exact geeky heritage as himself, or if we’ll be served with a re-tread that also falls back on its reader’s nostalgia.

If you fall within the age window that Cline is clear writing for (say, late-twenties to mid-thirties) and spent your childhood geeking out to Dungeons of Daggorath and The Breakfast Club, you’re in for a non-stop nostalgia ride that will have you smiling from ear-to-ear for the entirety of its 300-odd pages. If you grew up outside of that golden age of geekdom, there’s still an immensely enjoyable novel there, with a solid exploration of the challenges facing our society as computers and electronic communication continue to consume more and more of our lives, but just be prepared to work a little as you try to wade through Cline’s un-ending love for the ‘80s.

Review

Review | PLANESRUNNER by Ian McDonald

By Aidan Moher December 8th, 2011
PLANESRUNNER by Ian McDonald

Planesrunner

By Ian McDonald
Hardcover
Pages: 296 pages
Publisher: Pyr Books
Release Date: 06/12/11
ISBN: 1616145412

EXCERPT

Ian McDonald, the many times award-nominated author of The Dervish House and Brasyl, has always been on my bucket list. I love near-future Science Fiction. I love speculative works set in cultures foreign to me. I love slim stand-alone novels. McDonald hits on all of these fronts and every time he releases a novel it seems to do a fair round of the awards circuit. Yet, I’d never read any of his work. Part of my hesitancy, I think, was due to McDonald’s reputation for writing labyrinthine, intertwining plots featuring dense prose and asking the reader to work for the story. It takes dedication to read fiction in that manner and, well, I’m often lazy. But when McDonald announced that his next novel, Planesrunner, the first volume in the Everness series, would be a world-hopping Young Adult (YA) novel set in an alternate London full of airships and sky pirates, I knew I finally had an opportunity to give his work a fair shake. And I’m bloody glad I did.

The prose in Planesrunner was simpler than I expected, likely due to the YA audience, but also doesn’t speak down to its younger readers, weaving some wonderful imagery and thoughtful themes through the narrative. Like all literature, the best YA respects its readers and Planesrunner embraces that mentality. In a recent interview, McDonald touches on the nature of YA literature:

I’ve never really called it YA, because it’s targeted at a younger age-group — I believe it’s Middle Grade, in the hair-splitting terminologies of this kind of writing. I had many reasons, all of them honest. Most of all, it was the story that could only be told with these characters, in this way. It was a story I wanted to tell this way, for this age-group. I’d done some research. Boys read pretty damn voraciously until they’re thirteen, then a lot fall off for various reasons — games, peer pressure, too cool for that kind of thing, lack of stuff to read… At the same time, the BBC did some research into who watches Doctor Who — and by that, I mean ‘appointment to view’ — who decides to turn the telly on and watch it, and they found it was fourteen year-old boys. So I thought, can I do something that gives the same eyekicks and the same level of complexity — it’s only adults who whine about plots being difficult because they lack the mental agility and ability to concentrate and be absorbed that kids have — as Doctor Who, in book form. But aim it at that age-gap: 13 year-old boys — not forgetting the girls as well. Make it’s smart, stretch imaginations a little, make it SF because there’s an awful lot of fantasy out there. Make it different and fresh — no, not another dystopia. Introduce the idea of learning how scientists think and look at the world — because it’s very different from what we think.

It’s clear that McDonald put a lot of effort into what really makes an appealing novel for younger readers, and in the process peels back the layers to examine what makes YA so much more enjoyable than a lot of ‘adult’ fiction. Most interesting is the idea that younger readers have an improved mental agility that allows them to jump around the story, absorbing different ideas, concepts and plot strings without needing the constant infodumps and explanations that bog down so much of adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. When a reader trusts the author, as McDonald suggests that younger readers are more capable of doing as compared to older readers, the author is freed up to concentrate on a fun, exciting story that’s able to develop its themes and characters rather than hand-holding its reader through a new world. Often you’re left just having to accept that things fall easily into place for Everett, the titular protagonist, but the reward is McDonald being free to throw him into some sticky situations without the reader losing their sense of reality.
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