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News, Reviews, Resources, and Perspectives of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror |
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Tuesday 6 May 2008• Locus Magazine: Cory Doctorow Commentary:
The net is an unending NOW of moments and distractions and wonderments and puzzlements and rages. Asking someone riding its currents to undertake some kind of complex dance before she can hand you her money is a losing proposition.
Monday 5 May 2008• Feature Review:
Howard Waldrop and Lawrence Person review 
Most of my complaints have to do with the nature of the plot, but the direction is first rate, and the first 20 minutes fly along with just the right economy of motion. I also like the fact that Stark is actually shown doing engineering design work. ...Actually, of the recent spate of superhero movies, this is probably better than anything but the first two Spiderman and X-Men films and Batman Begins.
Thursday 24 April 2008• Locus Magazine: Sample Reviews
Russell Letson reviews Greg Egan
A very welcome double shot of Greg Egan — Dark Integers and Other Stories, a collection of five novelettes covering 13 years, and Incandescence, a new novel — demonstrates his range and his consistent focus on philosophical questions enabled by mathematical conjectures and the thought-experimental possibilities of various post-human conditions...
Faren Miller reviews Felix Gilman
The various plot threads lead to a powerful series of denouements that could serve as both endings and beginnings, extending beyond the city and deep into its heart. Whether or not Gilman returns to some of his surviving characters in future work, I don't think we're in danger of any cookie-cutter sequels from this talented new fantasist.
Monday 21 April 2008• Feature Review:
Howard Waldrop and Lawrence Person review 
This was lot better than we expected it to be. Not only does it blow away anything Jackie Chan's done in American films, it's actually as good as one of his middling Hong Kong films, which is high praise indeed. It's a kung fu time-travel movie for the whole family.
Tuesday 1 April 2008• Special Features
Locus Online's roving correspondents report the following developments and breaking news in this busy Spring of 2008...
Friday 28 March 2008• Locus Magazine: Sample Reviews
Faren Miller reviews James Morrow
...Enlightenment notions can have very little relevance in a particularly mad sector of a mad, mad world. Of course Morrow himself knows this all too well, and keeps escalating the weirdness and the mind games that surround his hapless hero until the plot achieves a degree of insane improbability that's the hallmark of Swiftian satire. Call it fantasy, SF, or some mixture of the two, it's perfectly suited to expose humankind's pretense of rationality for the delusion it really is.
Graham Sleight reviews Iain M. Banks
Matter, Banks's first SF novel since The Algebraist, and first Culture novel since Look to Windward, is told by the merry chatterer for most of its length. Indeed, much of its story doesn't feel like SF at all. It has more to do with the dynastic intrigues you might find in the fantasy novels of, say, George R.R. Martin.
Tuesday 18 March 2008• Feature Essay:Gary Westfahl updates his controversial 2003 essay about Columbia and the promises of science fiction in Tunnel Vision and the Unfarmed Sky —
Large numbers of people within the science fiction community apparently still believe that human beings, using only the technology of today, are perfectly capable of doing everything that science fiction said they could be doing in the early twenty-first century, and if hardy farmers aren't planting their crops on the surface of Ganymede in the year 2008, that is simply because we have all been betrayed by a short-sighted public, gutless politicians, inept bureaucrats, and effete academics...
Tuesday 11 March 2008• Feature Review:
The capsule summary of Cj7 on everyone's lips — that it is a Chinese version of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) — is accurate enough. I would also argue that Stephen Chow's effort is, in my expert opinion, a much better film than E.T.
Tuesday 4 March 2008• Locus Magazine: Cory Doctorow Commentary:Put Not Your Faith In Ebook Readers
I'm skeptical about selling ebooks as a business model, but if I had to bet on a future for e-books, I would take long odds against a hardware reader catching on in any meaningful way. Tuesday 26 February 2008• Locus Magazine: Sample Reviews
Gary K. Wolfe reviews Kathleen Duey
Skin Hunger is one of the more accomplished and original fantasy novels of the year, and the trilogy it inaugurates might well constitute a major work (the narrative here is too truncated to claim that quite yet). ... [I]f the remainder of the Resurrection of Magic plays out at this level of intensity, it will easily take its place among those YA trilogies that ought to earn the attention of fantasy readers of any age.
Russell Letson reviews Chris Roberson
Here, as in The Voyage of Night Shining White, character, character relationships, and cultural background are at least as compelling as the melodramatic action in the foreground. In fact, those are the qualities that would have me return to this charming and oddly-retro-feeling alternate future.
Wednesday 20 February 2008• Update: Locus Index to SF Awards
The Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards is now updated with most awards results through the end of 2007, plus 2008 lists so far announced. » Includes the first online listing of the complete 2007 Locus Poll results Monday 18 February 2008• Feature Review:
Pondering why Steven Gould's novel works so well, and why this film doesn't work at all, reveals yet again that the wisest observation ever made about the film industry is, "Nobody knows anything." In this case, with access to delightful source material that might have yielded a charming, low-key movie classic, a small army of Hollywood smart guys made all the right moves and ended up producing a one hundred million dollar mess which, if it is lucky, will earn back enough money to cover its catering bills.
Wednesday 6 February 2008• Feature:Yesterday's Tomorrows: Ray Bradbury Graham Sleight's "Yesterday's Tomorrows" column from Locus Magazine looks at classic works by Ray Bradbury. 
I don't think a critic should go on too much about their own personal experiences, because the point of criticism is after all to get past the personal and find responses to a work that are of more general use. But I can't do that so easily with Bradbury...
Wednesday 30 January 2008• Locus Magazine: Sample Reviews
Gary K. Wolfe reviews Paolo Bacigalupi
If Bacigalupi challenges SF's traditional valorization of reason, he's very much an SF writer in the particulars. One can hear echoes of everyone from Harlan Ellison to David Bunch, Geoff Ryman, and even H.G. Wells here — there are shadows of Morlocks and Eloi all over — but Bacigalupi is mostly the spiritual heir of C.M. Kornbluth, one of the few classic-age SF writers with a similarly grim and mordant view of human nature.
Faren Miller reviews Ekaterina Sedia
With a mix of blunt, colloquial language, wry humor, a generous dollop of psychological traumas, and some fine descriptive passages (whether setting a scene, showing moments of self-understanding, or producing both in one decisive moment), Sedia moves effortlessly from a '90s Moscow where the world seems to have gone "upside-down overnight," to its magical counterpart where weirdness is the norm...
Monday 28 January 2008• Feature Essay:Jeff VanderMeer's 2007: The Best of the Year 
Jeff VanderMeer's surveys the year's best novels, first novels, anthologies, graphic novels, notable reprints, and overlooked books, by Dan Simmons, Michael Cisco, Susan Palwick, Brian Francis Slattery, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, Shaun Tan, K.J. Parker, Kelley Eskridge, and many others.
• Feature Essay:Claude Lalumière's 2007: Recommended Reading 
Claude Lalumière recommends slipstream and cross genre novels, genre collections, associated nonfiction, and comics, highlighting favorites by Nicholas Christopher, Cory Doctorow, Alan Weisman, and Mark Tatulli.
Monday 21 January 2008• Feature Review:
Howard Waldrop and Lawrence Person review 
Split decision on Cloverfield, AKA The Blair Witch Godzilla. Howard thinks it's a noble failure. Despite reservations going in, Lawrence thinks it's one of the most effective, and terrifying, monster movies of recent memory.
Sunday 6 January 2008• Locus Magazine: Cory Doctorow Commentary: Artist Rights
There's one artist's right that's more important than all the rest combined: the right to free expression. No one gives out awards for writers who bring copyright suits — but we do give out awards to the brave writers who publish in the teeth of censorship and state oppression.
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