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Here is some great news about Terry Pratchett’s next (as yet unpublished novel), UNSEEN ACADEMICALS. It is the “soccer novel” with a “realistic” Romeo and Juliet story woven through. Pratchett on the Romeo and Juliet story:
You have to watch the video interview, the text interview is not about UNSEEN ACADEMICALS. Terry Pratchett from HarperCollins Publishers .  Now this is what I call actual news! From Lois McMaster Bujold, on her own mailing list:
And on the cutting room floor:
A must for Saberhagen completists. I had never read the Swords story (which provides the reasons why the Swords all went missing) or the second Berserker story, which is Saberhagen’s answer to Asimov’s Foundation Series.
Wait, what? sounds like a great big loophole to me …
If this is the real subtitle, it’s bizarre, and, I think, uniquely meta for a serious novel as opposed to an anthology. The book itself is, of course, excellent. Century Rain: Totally Space Opera: Alastair Reynolds: Amazon.co.uk: Books. Now 2/3 through. Definitely going to finish. Mind-bending array of clone families, dangerous AIs, and distributed consciousnesses. (Although Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax thought of the latter twist first …) I hate imagined futures where regular humans are vastly outnumbered by new types of clones and AIs. I don’t get the narcissistic appeal of having millions of versions of myself spanning future time and space. My genome has its good points, but I’d certainly want to take another roll of the dice to see if we can come up without a model that has the severe myopia, the short temper, the designed-to-fail knees, and the recessive alcoholism, depression and hypothyroidism, among other things … #scifi @torbooks Challenge: are the missing books (that didn’t win Hugos and Nebulas) worth more than $116K?
Homo sapiens, the adaptable animal? I grew up reading a lot of science fiction that was written in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and for a variety of reasons (among them, a key editor named John A. Campbell) a very popular “meme” in that era was a rather triumphalist view of man as the most adaptable and successful of all animals (on this planet and any others!) To be sure, this was grossly exaggerated, and I don’t think the writers of that era fully appreciated the relatively short time window in which homo sap has flourished relative to, e.g., the croocodile (250mya). This concept of taking pride in adaptability seems to have disappeared into the cultural trashbin during the 60s and 70s, which is odd since the adaptive pressures on society in the late 60s were among the most intense in recorded histories. It’s also odd that the concept has not become more common again as we appreciate more and more that the human appropriation of net primary productivity is somewhere between 30 and 50% (Imhoff, Haberl). We are nothing if not successful at adapting the environment to our needs! Instead, our dominant reaction to climate change seems to be “change is bad.” Not that there isn’t a lot of bad news, but it’s odd that there isn’t a more balanced perception that it is, in fact, kind of good news that the Arctic Sea is becoming navigable. Generally, navigable seas are viewed as a good thing … My question for the group: is adaptability back? Should we be urging people once more to take pride in human adaptability? via LinkedIn: View Discussion: °AdaptAbility – The Climate Adaptation Network. Long-awaited and eagerly anticipated,a sequel to one of my favorite books of all time, but disappointing. Confusing structure with opening scene running in parallel with a forward running flashback, I don’t see why they didn’t just start with one story or the other. Doesn’t have the same magic as the original Niven & Pournelle INFERNO, and not nearly as good as the recent Niven/Lerner collaborations about the Puppeteers. Nevertheless – a collector’s item that will go on my shelf in a protective cover.
I hope Dexter Filkins had the decency to acknowledge Joe Haldeman’s Hugo and Nebula-award winning science fiction novel with the same theme and the same title. Robert Stone didn’t. Up Front – Talking With Robert Stone – NYTimes.com |
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