SF Tidbits for 4/5/09
By John DeNardo |
Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at
12:08 am
- Interviews and Profiles:
- The latest Book Cave Podcast is a tribute to Philip José Farmer and includes and interview with Mike Croteau (publisher of Farmerphile and webmaster of pjfarmer.com), Win Scott Eckert (Farmer’s co-author on The Evil in Pemberley House), Dennis E. Power (contributor to Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe), and Paul Spiteri (editor of Farmer’s Pearls from Peoria).
- The Genre Files interviews artists Vincent Chong.
- Tor Art Director Irene Gallo rounds up her Tor.com artist interviews.
- Nancy Kress just saw Knowing with Nicholas Cage, which Roger Ebert labeled “intelligent SF”, and “can’t imagine what Roger was drinking at the time.” Go, Nancy, go!
- @Adventures in SciFi Publishing: Brenda Cooper on selling your story.
- Aliette de Bodard talks about writing SF in a foreign language, in her case, English. [via The World SF News Blog]
- Robert Thompson at Fantasy Book Critic passes the baton. Best of luck, Robert!
- Pyr has posted their Fall 2009/Winter 2010 book lineup as an Amazon book list.
- From 2004: Business Week‘s (!) 15 Great Science Fiction Novels.
Related posts:
- SF Tidbits for 3/31/08
- SF Tidbits for 3/3/09
- SF Tidbits for 3/20/07
- SF Tidbits for 6/13/06
- SF Tidbits for 3/10/09
Filed under: Tidbits
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Very interesting list of 15 books from Eric Rabkin. A few of them I’ve been meaning to read (Wells, Zamyatin, Heinlein, Lem); a couple I’ve already read and agree with their inclusion (Miller, Jr., and Le Guin); many I’ve never heard of (the Capek, Wolfe, Delany, Brunner, Pohl, Wilhelm, McHugh, and Powers).
Yet the final novel on the list, Sawyer’s Calculating God, just simply does not belong. It’s really out of place, especially considering Rabkin’s criteria of a combination of “ideas” and “art.” In no way does Sawyer belong sitting next to works such as The Left Hand of Darkness or A Canticle for Leibowitz, purely based on its poor literary execution alone.
I’m sure we can endlessly debate the inclusion and exclusion of works on Rabkin’s list, but Sawyer is truly an off-note here and could be replaced by any other number of more relevant and artful SF novels: i.e., Gibson’s Neuromancer, Simmons’ Hyperion, Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and more I can’t think of right now because it’s far too late.
I wonder if Rabkin has changed his mind in the last five years?