Robert Jackson Bennett‘s 2010 debut Mr. Shivers won the Shirley Jackson award as well as the Sydney J. Bounds Newcomer Award. His second novel, The Company Man, is currently nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award as well as an Edgar Award. His third novel, The Troupe, arrives in stores on the 21st of February, 2012. He lives in Austin with his wife and son. He can be found on Twitter at @robertjbennett.
Charles Tan: Hi, thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, how did you get into speculative fiction?
Robert Jackson Bennett: Thanks for having me! I suppose I’d say it’s been something I’ve always read since I was a kid, and it’s the perspective that I’ve always returned to. Speculative fiction allows greater exploration of the abstract than nearly any other fiction perspective – by which I mean the way each breed of fiction examines its subject. In spec fic, the ideals and philosophies that invisibly weigh upon us in our daily lives can become corporeal and tangible, and as we flesh them out we begin to see contradictions and frictions take shape, which tell us more about ourselves and our world.
Speculative fiction is considered a new genre to some, a maturation of science fiction or fantasy fiction, but it’s not, really: for what is Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale besides speculative fiction, of a sort? Read the rest of this entry
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Enormity is the strange tale of an American working in Korea, a lonely young man named Manny Lopes, who is not only physically small (in his own words, he’s a “Creole shrimp”), but his work, his failed marriage, his race, all conspire to make him feel puny and insignificant-the proverbial ninety-eight-pound weakling. Then one day an accident happens, a quantum explosion, and suddenly Manny awakens to discover that he is big-really big. In fact, Manny is enormous, a mile-high colossus! Now there’s no stopping him: he’s a one-man weapon of mass destruction. Yet he means well. Enormity takes some odd turns, featuring characters like surfing gangbangers, elderly terrorists, and a North Korean assassin who thinks she’s Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. There’s also sex, violence, and action galore, with the army throwing everything it has against the rampaging colossus that is Manny Lopes. But there’s only one weapon that has any chance at all of stopping him: his wife.
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Two groups of psions fight in a post-apocalyptic world, unaware of the greater plots being enacted by three men of power.
MY REVIEW: PROS: Lots of psionic action; complex post-apocalyptic world; political intrigue. CONS: Little character development; repetitive. BOTTOM LINE: It’s like X-Men, only more brutal.
An animated short from Russia (adapted from a novel by Kir Bulychev) about space travelers surviving on a strange planet and the journey back to their abandoned ship through a dangerous mountain pass.
7 of the early issues are up right now, including the first six (April 1926 – September 1926) plus one additional issue (December 1926). Minus a few missing page scans, you get all the text, all the ads, all the classic sf goodness…
…And we’re back! I had a couple of columns for Janauary that I’d been working on, and which were subsequently lost to computer problems. To kick off February, friend of SF Signal (and SciFi Songster) John Anealio just released his latest song, “Steampunk Girl”, which struck me as a great topic for this week: Steampunk.
The Geek Mom Blog, hosted over on Wired’s website, has an interesting piece about Steampunk music. What caught my eye however, was this statement: “When a band selects “steampunk” on that drop-down box, what does that say? And what can a listener expect to hear? Anything really. Rap, rock, folk, trance- I’ve sampled quite a few tracks in this new genre.” In my own explorations with Geek Music, that’s very true: there’s a lot of variety out there. Read the rest of this entry
This week’s Mind Meld on interstellar travel gave me a hankering for some good old space based SF, as near to space opera as I can get. It just so happens that Michael Flynn was one of the respondents and the cover to his In The Lion’s Mouth caught my eye. I read The January Dance awhile ago and I remember enjoying quite a bit, much more than John did, but I never saw the second book come out and so forgot about it.
As I was digging through my book shelf for The January Dancer I ran across S. Andrew Swann’s Prophets: Apotheosis Book One. I remember really liking this one (John did, too) and so a quandary presented itself. Which to read? Luckily both series are now at three books each so there’s a lot of Space Opera goodness I can read back to back (to back). I’m going to read both series, probably one after the other, but I’m throwing it open to you, the SF Signal reader, which one should I read first?
If you’ve read either or both, leave a comment and tell me your thoughts about these books!
Myke Cole is a military reservist and writer. Control Point, just out from Ace (Penguin-Putnam), is the first novel in his military fantasy Shadow Ops series.
SF SIGNAL: Hi Myke, thanks for taking a couple of moments to speak with us! The first question that I’ve got is: why military fantasy, over something like Military Science Fiction or superpowers?
Myke Cole: Two reasons, really. The first is that my experience is in the military and that I have been a die-hard traditional fantasy fan (though I also love SF) since my earliest days. It’s a neat combination of the two old axioms “write what you know” and “write what you’d want to read.”
The second reason is that military SF has been, frankly, done to death, as have traditional superhero stories (though more in comics than novels). To the best of my knowledge (and I certainly could be wrong), a modern (and truly modern, by which I mean counterinsurgent focused) military tale blended with high fantasy monsters and magic hasn’t been done as a mass-market novel. I wanted to see if I could push the envelope a little bit. Read the rest of this entry
If you were only skimming today’s tidbits, you may have missed a bit of noteworthy news: Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, the excellent podcast hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, has found a new home at Wired‘s Underwire blog.
I’m happy to see this. It’s a logical match-up and GGG is a wonderful podcast that deserves more exposure. Congrats to John and David!
Their brand new podcast features a great interview with William Gibson. Go give it a listen.
“Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.” – David Foster Wallace
“I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own.” – David Foster Wallace
This week I am going to rove far afield from the meadows and wastelands of fantastika, just for a little while. I am going to conduct a border raid into the realm of Literature which, of course, fantastika is allied to but often kept separate from by boundary disputes and ideological conflicts. Read the rest of this entry
As longtime supporters of the Shared Worlds SF/F Teen Writing Camp at Wofford College, we’re thrilled to see them launch this years camp and associated fund drive.
Here’s the coolest part: Click a creature — read a story. If you like it, donate.
You’ll find fiction by Tobias Buckell, Amal El-Mohtar, Eugie Foster, Neil Gaiman, Lev Grossman, N.K. Jemisin, Karen Lord, Karin Lowachee, Michael Moorcock, Patrick Rothfuss, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Johanna Sinisalo, Lavie Tidhar, Scott Westerfeld, Gene Wolfe and many, many more.
Robert Jackson Bennett‘s 2010 debut Mr. Shivers won the Shirley Jackson award as well as the Sydney J. Bounds Newcomer Award. His second novel, The Company Man, is currently nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award as well as an Edgar Award. His third novel, The Troupe, arrives in stores on the 21st of February, 2012. He lives in Austin with his wife and son. He can be found on Twitter at @robertjbennett.
If you were only skimming today’s tidbits, you may have missed a bit of noteworthy news: 
