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Book reviews have been as contentious since the days of mimeographed fanzines. In the age of the Internet and an explosion of blogs, Amazon, and more, reviews are more important than ever. But what makes reading and trusting a review worth it?

So we asked this week’s panelists…

Here’s what they said…

Most often where reviewers go astray for me is when they forget their core mission. I’ve read a lot of reviews that were more about the reviewer’s wickedly sharp language skills than about what they were critiquing … it becomes form over substance, and while it may be entertaining, it isn’t informative, and it doesn’t help the reader decide whether or not the book (or film, or music) would be right for their needs.

Every book (or film, or concert, or album) is a personal experience, so it’s fine to talk about how the work moved you, and why. But please, reviewers, if you consistently have a burning, fiery hatred for what you’re seeing in the genre (or medium) you’re reviewing, maybe you’re just burned out, or the style has moved past you …(it does this for writers, too, you’re hardly alone). Rather than just become the surly curmudgeon, find another thing to be passionate about — in another genre maybe. You’ll feel better, and so will your readers.

And on the flip side, if you love everything you read/see/hear, maybe you’re not quite critical *enough.* Being a critic isn’t about making friends, it’s about telling the truth even when it’s a harsh truth. Don’t be faint-hearted. You won’t last long if you are.

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One of the hallmarks of genre is the way we distinguish books by means of awards. So we asked this week’s panelists…

Here’s what they said…

I think awards are valuable in two different ways. In the present tense, they can draw attention to books and writers that deserve more attention — as when China Mountain Zhang was nominated for the Hugo. The Philip K. Dick award manages to find something I like and hadn’t noticed pretty much every year. This is good for readers who pay attention to them, and it can be good for a writer’s career — if they get award notice a publisher might decide to stick with them even though they don’t have great sales.

Secondly, they’re valuable as part of the historical memory of the genre — the awards of a year give a kind of snapshot of what people at the time thought was good. They judgements of awards are not always the judgements of posterity — I certainly saw that when I did my Tor.com “Revisiting the Hugos” series and looked at every year from 1953 until 2000. But they remain interesting. And what’s interesting to me isn’t ever the winner, it’s the shortlist. One book is one datapoint, a shortlist is a spread. The question I asked was not “did the best book win” so much as “do those five books give a good picture of where the genre was in that year”.
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Recently I was talking to a friend who had just finished reading Patrick Lee’s Deep Sky. He commented that the series was so good, it was a shame it had to end. That’s an intriguing statement, which I totally stold and repackaged for this Mind Meld! Here’s what we asked this week’s panelists:

Here’s what they said:

I’m most often happy to finish a series or book; there are so many wonderful authors I want to read, it’s a blessing that good books actually do end so I can move on to the next one. Thank you, great, established authors, for giving newer authors a chance to captivate an audience by not dragging your series out to thirty-plus titles.

That said, if perhaps some lucky soul, while digging through an old and mysterious steam trunk, found the manuscripts to six more Chronicles of Amber books by Roger Zelazny — well, no earthly force could stop me from acquiring them and devouring their contents. As it is, I battle constant temptation to reread the existing 10 books in the giant omnibus collection I picked up in college as a graduation present to myself.

(Heading into spoilers territory here!), I always felt like the second Amber series ended on a bit of a cliffhanger. As a young teen in the 90s reading the books for the first time, the biggest question remaining for me was, what lies on the other side of Corwin’s Pattern? As a writer, this series has influenced me more than anything else, at least in terms of what I want to accomplish. If I can have the effect on some 13 year old kid the way Zelazny did me, then I’ll consider my work a success.

As much as I wish Zelazny had written another sub-series of titles before his death, I have never been tempted to read the prequels. It’s clear from accounts by authors such as George R.R. Martin that Zelazny intended Amber to end with him. But, perhaps, in another Shadow…alas, I have not walked the Pattern, and the way is closed to me.
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Mars! From Percival Lowell to the forthcoming John Carter movie (check out our John Carter Primer!), Mars has been a locus of interest — if not outright fascination — in the general public and especially within the science fiction and fantasy community. So, we asked this week’s panelists…

Here’s what they said…

The appeal of Mars is that it’s real. We can see it in the night sky, and we know it’s the next planet out. And now we know a great deal more about it than that. Its surface looks like parts of Earth, and has huge features, much bigger than equivalent features on Earth (volcanoes, canyons). It’s possible it still harbors bacterial life underground. It’s also possible we could visit it, and set up stations to inhabit and study it.

So: it’s real but empty, beautiful and remote, but within our reach, just barely. It’s this combination of qualities that gives it its appeal. We want to fill that emptiness with stories.

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We missed including Bradley Beaulieu’s response in yesterday’s mind meld…so today we’re passing along his response to this question:

Here’s what he said…
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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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