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Every reader holds out for a hero, but be it movies or novels, its the antagonists, the villains, that often bring the heat, spice and power to a piece of work and make it sing.

So we asked this week’s panelists…

Here’s what they said…

.I’ve always had a great admiration for the Lady, from Glen Cook’s Black Company series, with an honorable mention for all of the Ten Who Were Taken that serve her. She’s ruthless but multifaceted, a romantic and tragic figure as well as a provisioner of all the dark arts and fell deeds a reader could desire. As for the Ten, they’re just so fun and iconic, sort of more extroverted Nazgul.

If you’ll allow historical fiction as a cousin to fantasy, I’d also vote for Livia, from Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. Subtle, pitiless, and patient, the deadliest woman (hell, the deadliest person) in a deadly milieu.

Last but not least I’d bring up O’Brien, from George Orwell’s 1984, the chillingly contented ordinary man who patiently explains to Winston what it’s all about… that all the chanting and ideology is a fog, that the politics of Oceania are meaningless, the nature of its wars completely unimportant. The whole point of the crushing pyramid of human misery is to keep a tiny elite with their boots on the throats of the rest of humanity, forever and ever, amen. To conceive that sort of thing, to accept it, to rise and sleep as a happy part of such a brutal mechanism… now that’s villainy.

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Rumors surfaced recently that Amazon is contemplating opening a small brick and mortar store in Seattle to sell their ebook readers and their Amazon branded books. Couple this with Amazon’s recent foray into SF/F publishing and that got us to wondering:

It’s a difficult one to answer. I think Amazon is often seen as being responsible for the change in how books are sold/published, while it would be more accurate to see it as a product of that change. That it is currently the biggest, most successful model does not mean it would be one ten or twenty years from now, nor will it be the only major player.

I think there is plenty of room for traditional publishers, even while they struggle with the changing landscape of bookselling. That we are facing a shrinking presence of physical bookshops is undeniable – the question is where the next big online presence will come from.

I suspect we’ll be seeing partly the emergence of boutique sellers – in genre we can see the buds of such a move with specialist shops like Wizard’s Tower Books and Weightless Books – and at the same time the rise of other giant retail outlets like Amazon. Certainly big publishes are all backed by major corporate players, so we might see something from that direction.

The market is changing so rapidly, I think it’s pretty much everyone’s field at the moment – perhaps already being put into action in someone’s basement – or, alternatively, a boardroom.
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We have a late lost entry from a previous Mind Meld, Which Fantasy Maps Are Your Favorites?…and we here at SF Signal couldn’t resist sharing it with you!

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We have a late entry in a previous Mind Meld, What Was Your Introduction to Fantasy and Science Fiction?…and we here at SF Signal couldn’t resist sharing it with you!

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A lot of recent science fiction appears to take place on Earth, and only a minority of space-based science fiction taking place outside the solar system. Novels and stories involving travel to the stars and interstellar travel seems to be out-of-date or out-of-fashion, and even Hard SF treatments of interstellar travel seem as realistic as Star Wars.

We asked this week’s panelists:

Here’s what they said…

I think that like everything else, fads in science fiction run in cycles, and lately there’s been a big ol’ dystopian wave going on. But it’s not as if deep space science fiction, or SF featuring far-flung space civilizations isn’t still being written. Charlie Stross, Iain Banks, Dan Simmons, Greg Bear, Chris Moriarty, C.J. Cherryh–heck, I’ve written a couple of books dealing with far-flung space travel myself.

If you were to nudge the focus of the question over to whether near-future and near-earth SF has been getting more *awards* attention lately, I think you’d be more accurate.

But there are fads in criticism the same as everything else.

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We’ve covered a lot of topics in our Mind Meld series, from books, to cover art and lots of stuff in between. But we haven’t touched on the topic of music. We attempt to fix that oversight with this week’s question. We asked our panelists:

Here’s what they said…

There’s a couple of science fiction soundtracks that I listen to constantly, and they’ve held up well over the years:

Battlestar Galactica: Seasons 1-4 (Original Television Soundtrack), Bear McCreary: When the show first came out, I loved the unconventional nature of how everything was set up, from the ship all the way to the music used. The soundtrack is a stunning one, and very different from what’s typical in science fiction.

Contagion: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Cliff Martinez: This borders on the line between science fiction and thriller, but I’ll include it. I love Cliff’s music, and this entire soundtrack has an excellent opening theme, with a great sound throughout the rest of the album.
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Where and how people (fans, reviewers and authors alike) were first introduced to genre often gives insight into how they think and write about genre. With that in mind, we asked this week’s panelists…

Here’s what they said…

My dad introduced me to genre. He’d been what I guess you’d call a fan since the 1920s. The specific incident I recall was when he took me to the White Plains (New York) Public Library, back when I was in first or second grade, and we checked out Have Space Suit Will Travel and Sea Siege.

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2012 is an election year in the United States and you can bet we’ll be inundated with all things political. Our question is -

Here’s what they said…

For me, it’s very, very simple: I love a good wish-fulfillment fantasy. One of my favorites is the idea of a female President in a futuristic setting. Battlestar Galactica’s President Laura Roslin ranks right up there at number one.

The concept of a female President defies expectations, invites readers/viewers to question their assumptions about women, and serves up an empowering character.

It’s disheartening to think that in my lifetime, the only place I can experience a female President is in fiction. But I’m grateful that authors and filmmakers have dared to dream and have pushed those characters into the spotlight.
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It’s the beginning of 2012, a time for new beginnings, new vistas, and new resolutions to make the next year a good one.  Resolutions can come in many forms.

So I asked this week’s panelists:

Here is what they said:

‘My genre resolutions are the same as every year – read more, write more.

Oh, and spend less time on the internet.

Having a bit of trouble sticking to that last one…’
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As the calendar rolls over to the beginning of another year, it brings with it the promise of new things and new beginnings. With that in mind, we asked this week’s panelists this question:

Here’s what they said:

I’m sure that most of my favorite opening scenes are from the same classics that many readers would recognize — the gom jabbar test in Dune; Louis Wu’s globe-hopping birthday trip in Ringworld; the introduction of Valentine Michael Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land — so I won’t reiterate them. And while I have a number of favorite opening lines as well — a personal favorite is from Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide: “The bureaucrat fell from the sky” — they’re not quite the same thing as a good first scene, which — if done right — will pull the reader into the book.

A perfect example of both is the beginning of The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon. Here’s the first paragraph:

They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He’d been doing it for years.

Exactly what the kid — whose name is Horty — was doing is not immediately explained. If you’re like most readers, though, you’ve probably got a good idea … particularly when you’re told that his guardians (who are not his parents; they’re introduced later) were just as horrified as the school principal, the teachers, and the other kids. But it’s not until you’re a couple of pages into the book that you discover Horty was…

Eating ants.

So what did you think he was doing? And now that you’ve learned that it’s probably not what you were expecting, aren’t you interested in finding out why an eight-year-old boy was eating ants?

Sturgeon was a master storyteller, and he set up this scene beautifully. It is a textbook example of a perfect narrative hook.

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As this year draws to a close, a new year in genre beckons! We asked this week’s panelists :

Here’s what they said…

2012 is the year of the speculative movie, apparently. I saw the trailer for John Carter of Mars tonight, and…wow. I really hope this isn’t an indicator for what we’re going to be seeing. That being said, I’m a sucker for the pretty action/comic-based movies, and there’s a slew of those coming up: The Avengers, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, Batman 3, Dark Tower, Hellboy 3.

(How seriously can you take my taste in movies? My guilty pleasures are Ice Age 4…The Expendables 2. Yeah, seriously. I’m shameless.)

For books: Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon is something to look forward to, and John Fultz adds to the Sword and Sorcery list with The Seven Princes. A few others I’ve got on my wish list are The Drowning Girl by Caitlyn Kiernan; The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin and The Blinding Light by Brent Weeks.

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As 2011 draws to a close, it’s time for our annual roundup of SF/F consumed during the year! So we asked a gallery of genre people about what they consumed and liked.

Here’s what they said…

[This is Part II. Also see Part I.]

My most unexpected read was “The Hunger Games“. I was turned off by the title until a friend practically hit me over the head with it. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. It reminds me of “Survivor” meets “Fifth Element” with a little “Ender’s Game” thrown in for good measure. I am also on book 8 in The Dresden Files.

My favorite actual science fiction movie this year was “Paul“. The trailers did the movie a disservice as it was actually extremely funny. I am totally the target audience. “Super 8″ and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” were also among my favorite sci-fi films of the year.

As far as my favorite TV shows, I’d have to say “Terra Nova” and “American Horror Story”. “Terra Nova” feels like Star Trek with out space, ships, and a military presence. I absolutely believe that Braga and Echevarria have everything to do with this. It’s one of the reasons I like the show so much. I miss this type of story-telling. It also feels like they all sat in a room and tried to figure out what makes Cat happy. “American Horror Story” is not science fiction per se but I like it because it’s so different from anything on TV today. Every episode has something new and unexpected.

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As 2011 draws to a close, it’s time for our annual roundup of SF/F consumed during the year! So we asked a gallery of genre people about what they consumed and liked.

Here’s what they said…

[This is Part I]

The best books — novels and collections both — include Maureen McHugh’s AFTER THE APOCALYPSE, Jack McDevitt’s FIREBIRD, Ray Bradbury’s FAREWELL, SUMMER, Paolo Bacigalupi’s SHIP BREAKER, and a couple I’d missed when they first came out, Frank Robinson’s WAITING and Rob Sawyer’s ITERATIONS.

I’m not going to name all the hundreds of short stories I read, but the single best — which I missed when it first came out — was Kij Johnson’s “Shroedinger’s Cathouse”.

I haven’t watched a TV series since 1982, so I can’t help you there, and I haven’t been to the movies in over a year, so ditto.

I saw and greatly enjoyed revivals of the following plays, most of which I’d seen in New York the first time around: Stephen Sondheim’s INTO THE WOODS, Samuel Becket’s WAITING FOR GODOT, Gelbart and Coleman’s CITY OF ANGELS, and Sondheim’s ASSASSINS.

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Due to a brain freeze on my part technical issues, I managed to leave a few respondents off of this week’s Mind Meld. As a refresher, here is this week’s question:

Although I don’t seem to have consumed any more than usual, I consumed more first-run genre goodness year this time around than in many years past.

In terms of movies, this was of course the movie year of superheroes, and a lot of other genre movies in general. I watched many of them, found many wanting, but also found some movies I would add to my movie collection. I particularly liked Duncan Jones’ Source Code in the spring, and in the superhero category, it’s a close run race between X-Men: First Class and Captain America. Thor wasn’t bad, either. And I shouldn’t forget to mention Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which was far better than it had any right to be.

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As 2011 draws to a close, it’s time for our annual roundup of SF/F consumed during the year. For this week’s Mind Meld we turned to our ever expanding coterie of SF Signal irregular for their answers. We asked them this question:

Here’s what they said…

I’m hoping to still read a few good SF/F books before the year ends, but I’ve had a remarkably good year for books so I’m going to focus on those. Here, in the order I read them, are the books I enjoyed and recommend:

• The Fallen Blade – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
• Eutopia - David Nickle
• The Dragon’s Path – Daniel Abraham
• O.4/Human.4 – Mike Lancaster
• Trouble and Her Friends – Melissa Scott
• Element Zero – James Knapp
• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs
• The Declaration – Gemma Mallory
• This Perfect Day – Ira Levin
• City of Dreams & Nightmare – Ian Whates
• River Kings’ Road – Liane Merciel
• Tankborn - Karen Sandler
• Germline - T. C. McCarthy
• After the Golden Age – Carrie Vaughan
• Debris - Jo Anderton
• Postmortal - Drew Magary
• Legend - Marie Lu
• The Emperor’s Knife – Mazarkis Williams
• All Men of Genius – Lev A. C. Rosen
• Touch of Power – Maria Snyder
• When She Woke – Hilary Jordan
• Shatter Me – Tahereh Mafi

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November is National Writing Month, the month of Nanowrimo. In celebration, this week’s question involves Nanowrimo and other writing exercises:

Here are the answers from this week’s panelists:

NaNoWriMo makes you stop thinking about writing and start writing. The act of writing regularly and under every kind of condition (inspired, bored, happy, cranky) is what produces good writing in the end. Practise, practise, practise. Trial and error. Imitate the classics, then deviate from the norm. Every kind of cliché comes down to the same thing: keep writing until it stops being awful.

Then, when you’re comfortable with how and what you write, push yourself in another area so it goes back to being awful and work your way out of it once more. And don’t forget to learn to edit.

Find your own challenge. The same one might not work every time. Try a new one. Less letting people tell you how to write and more getting people to tell you how you have written.

The end.

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For the most part, we here at SF Signal focus on the stories in SF and Fantasy. But what about the people behind the stories? Surely there are some interesting biographies and memoirs worth reading? To find out, we asked our panelists this question:

Here’s what they said…

I’d recommend starting with Fred Pohl’s history of the Futurians. It demonstrates that the Golden Age of SF started with a horde of geeky awkward fanboys. I’d also recommend Heinlein’s memoir as well, because of his insights about Alice Dalgliesh and John W. Campbell. After that, I’m afraid that most of us are pretty boring people.

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Science Fiction is better known for technology, sense of wonder, and alien landscapes than fully recognized characters. Some SF that emphasizes character does so without engaging in those core elements of SF.

Here’s what our participants had to say:

Human nature is fairly unchanging and relatively easy to predict. For instance, people were acting like idiots several thousand years ago, and will no doubt continue to do so into the unforeseeable future. This is a good thing, because people doing stupid things is the essence of conflict and drama. Conflict and drama make for good stories.

Technology, on the other hand, is a fickle mistress. Video did not kill the radio star. We have no flying cars or personal jet packs. The space race (for Americans, at least) died.

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Lately, a number of mainstream authors have dipped their toes into the seas of genre. From Lev Grossman to Justin Cronin, mainstream authors are learning the rewards and challenges of writing SF, Fantasy and Horror. But many more authors could, and there are many favorite mainstream authors who haven’t tread into genre that would do well to try their hand in our corner of the reading and writing world.

Genres are marketing categories defined by publishers. Fiction writers have never sat comfortably within them, particularly not the best and most talented writers, who are always keen to try their hand at new kinds of story. Lev Grossman, Justin Cronin, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, Will Self, Iain Banks, David Mitchell and many more are not mainstream writers dipping their toes in genre. They are writers, writing stories, and sometimes using genre as a tool along the way. The best writers use genre, but don’t allow themselves to be trapped by it.

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Authors do a lot of reading for their profession, and often are the best ambassadors for books of all stripes. In this world of fragmented media, book recommendations via word of mouth from authors are worth their weight in gold.

Here are their answers:

The last book I read that converted me to an advocate for the author and all his works was Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory. Despite being a “zombie” novel, this book is by turns touching, hilarious, thoughtful, exciting, philosophical, silly. All of it borders on genius. Set in an alternate reality where the occurrences in Night Of The Living Dead were real and that film was actually a documentary, we trace the growth of a foundling baby who, it turns out, is a zombie, but unlike any undead came before. His story takes us through his childhood and adolescence with a sensitive yet deft hand, toward adulthood and rebellion and finally a kind of martyrdom. Truly an amazing and wonderful book. It takes all the conventions of the zombie genre and turns them on their head, breaks them down and shuffles them about, allowing us to see the subject matter and tropes of the genre in a whole new way.

Like he did with demonic possession before in Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory has crafted in Raising Stony Mayhall a novel that transcends genre and approaches universal themes and questions about the human condition with a mastery of storyform that leaves this author breathless and a little – okay, a lot – jealous.

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Sidekicks. No heroine or hero is complete without Hero Support, the sidekick. So we asked this week’s panelists:

Here are their answers…

In comic books: Robin.

In detective stories: Watson.

In science fiction: R. Daneel Olivaw.

In fantasy: Samwise Gamgee.

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This week’s Mind Meld question was suggested by James K. Thanks, James!

We asked our panelists this question:

Here’s what they said…

I’d have to say Neil Gaiman and Rod Serling.

Neil Gaiman because he brings a texture and richness without it ever seeming forced or contrived, and his characters are quirky without becoming caricatures. (Perhaps like an acrobat he only makes it look easy and there’s a huge amount of time and conscious technique behind the façade, but damn, he does it well.) And the late Rod Serling because he was such a prolific writer and so able to look at the most mundane situations and see the fantastic.

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It’s difficult for writers to get their hands around the idea of the Singularity, be it the Vernor Vinge version or just what happens to society once limitations on scarcity are removed. So the question for the panelists this week is:

Here are their answers…

(Note: This is Part Two of our discussion of our question. Don’t forget to read Part One…)

I don’t think this is an issue confined solely to Post Scarcity or Post Singularity novels. It’s not even confined to SF. There are plenty of unfeasibly rich characters in realist or historical novels, say, just as there are characters who don’t fear death. What motivates them?

The answer to that question speaks to the very meat of our existence, something much more interesting than just following the money.

I pondered this issue (as many writers have) while developing my Geodesica series. It’s set in a deep-space post-human future, one in which humanity has speciated into several quite distinct forms, each of them still regarding themselves as “human”. Given the vast expense of interstellar travel, the highly diffuse nature of interstellar empires and other significant barriers to cultural overlap (and given also that this was intended to be a space opera, with all the splodey goodness that implies) what were my characters going to fight over?

The only thing I could think of was the very idea of being human. None of my characters were so removed from the reader that they felt truly alien, not quite, so it stood to reason that they might regard their common origins as a matter of some importance–that they, specifically, were properly human and therefore best qualified to decide what was best for all humanity.

This ownership of racial identity, warranted or otherwise, seems to me to be the one thing that we might fight over when we (in theory) have everything else at our fingertips. It’s certainly something we’ll fight over in the real world with distressing frequency.

When the characters of Geodesica aren’t squabbling over such lofty stuff, though, they’re worried about interpersonal relationships. Love in other words. Money can’t buy it, and it’s stronger than death (we’re told), so it’s been a prime story generator for about as long as we’ve been telling stories. I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon. We’ll know we’re heading into truly post-human territory when we stop worrying about all the other humans, or even just one of them, and what they think of us in return.

That’s the time, I think, when all stories will end.

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It’s difficult for writers to get their hands around the idea of the Singularity, be it the Vernor Vinge version or just what happens to society once limitations on scarcity are removed. So the question for the panelists this week is:

Here are their answers…

For me, science fiction was always, in one way or other, a literature of immortality. Since Frankenstein, SF authors seem to be concerned with life extension and/or recreation (cloning is ok, since you you able to download your mind to a younger version of yourself and thus extend your lifetime). Of course not all SF masterworks have this theme as its main focal point (but take Dune, for instance, and the war for the *geriatric* spice – in an universe running scarce of many resources, people are more than willing to kill each other for a drug that grants longevity to its users).

In a Post-Scarcity and a Post-Singularity scenario, the search for immortality is the next step. If humankind didn’t attain it yet, it surely will, and it’s doing all it can to reach eternal life or the next best thing. Accelerando, by Charles Stross, is one of the best examples of this century.

What can you give to a man/woman/transgender who has everything? More lifetime so that he/she/everyone can do more of whatever they want to do.

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In Dan Simmons’ novel Flashback. he posits a ‘bookstore’ where flashback users go to experience reading their favorite novels for the first time again. That sounded like an interesting question to ask this week’s panelists.

Here’s what they said…

There are books that I re-read just because I love them so much and to refresh my memory, such as the Chronicles of Narnia. But books I would like to read again for the first time would be ones with such suspense and thrills that re-reading them just wouldn’t be the same. The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins would be on top of that list. The dystopian world was a dark and depressing backdrop, but the intensity of the Hunger Games and Collins’ characters are so rich and vivid that I was completely swallowed up in the story.

I would also love to read for the first time Bob Mayer’s Area 51 series written under the pseudonym Robert Doherty. The Area 51 series was an original science fiction, cleverly linking to Earth’s past and were written like watching an action film.

I also wish I could go back and read all of the (earlier numbered) Star Trek: The Next Generation novels again for the first time. Reading those as a teenager was really what got me hooked on science fiction, and it would be great to relive that wonder and excitement.

And I have to mention one of my earliest childhood memories of reading science fiction: The Girl with the Silver Eyes, by Willo Davis Roberts. The girl could move things with her mind, and as a kid this fascinated me. I don’t remember a lot of what I’ve read over the years, so it says something that the visuals from this book stuck with me. I guess most of what I’d choose to read again for the first time would be books that have sentimental attachments. I’d love to read those stories again with the same wide-eyed wonder I had back then, as opposed to a more jaded and critical view I’d have today.

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