Reviews and Articles in General Publications

Tuesday 23 January 2001

§ Salon January 23, 2001
Faith L. Justice profiles the career of Ursula K. Le Guin.

... Le Guin admits to a certain amount of calculation in including an interracial relationship in "Lathe." "If you look at my books, you'll find that most of my central characters aren't white. You don't see it on the cover, because they refuse to put people of color on book jackets. But I've always done that deliberately because most people in the world aren't white. Why in the future would we assume they are?"

§ Washington Post Book World January 21, 2001
Gregory Feeley reviews Caleb Carr's Killing Time (Random House).

It is difficult to convey the awfulness of Carr's prose, an unbroken succession of frenetic clichés and inept sentences. ... Killing Time raises issues about government disinformation, ecological damage and cultural imperialism that novelists more adept at writing about the near future, such as Bruce Sterling, have dramatized with élan. But Carr's strengths seem to have abandoned him here, and the result is a shockingly bad book that he should have been dissuaded from publishing.

Monday 22 January 2001

§ New York Times Book Review January 21, 2001
Gerald Jonas's SF column covers Richard Paul Russo's Ship of Fools (Ace), Kage Baker's The Graveyard Game (Harcourt), Ben Bova's Jupiter (Tor), and John M. Ford's The Last Hot Time (Tor). Jonas on Russo:

By deftly fusing two familiar themes -- the self-sufficient starship that has lost its way and first contact with a mysterious alien object -- Russo has carved out a sizable narrative space for his philosophical and spiritual concerns. He is not afraid to take on the question of evil in a divinely ordered universe. And while his vision is darker than the happy-ending bias of most science fiction, he seems in the end to shy away from the implications of his own tale. Still, this is an ambitious novel of ideas that generates considerable suspense while respecting its sources, its characters and, most important, the reader.

On Baker:

If John le Carre wrote science fiction, it might read like ''The Graveyard Game.'' ... Examined too closely, the cumbersome narrative apparatus strains credulity: why weren't all the operatives programmed for undying loyalty? Yet to my surprise, I found myself caring about what happened to these unlucky supermen.

And Ford's story of a ''Chicago rendered all but unrecognizable by a mystifying event that has altered the fabric of reality'' is ''fundamentally a love story, with a deeply satisfying climax (in every sense of the word)''.

§ Rain Taxi Winter 2001
An interview with Samuel R. Delany, conducted by Rudi Dornemann and Eric Lorberer, expanded/uncut from the magazine version.

Also, reviews include one by Rudi Dornemann of Sheree R. Thomas's anthology Dark Matter (Warner Aspect); a review by Thomas P. Kalb of graphic novel Cerebus by Dave Sim; and a review by Eric Lorberer of three graphic novels by Will Eisner.

§ January January 2001
A profile/interview by Linda Richards of George R.R. Martin. Also recently: Claude Lalumière's review of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay calls it "that elusive holy grail, The Great American Novel." And Lalumière's review of J.G. Ballard's Super-Cannes concludes "If Ballard were to end his long, prodigious and prolific writing career with Super-Cannes, this latest novel would be a magnificent capstone."

In December, David Dalgleish reviewed Robert Jordan's Winter's Heart: "It is by no means the greatest fantasy novel, but it is, in a sense, the ultimate fantasy novel: it exhausts the genre."