The Inter-Galactic Playground

Wheelchairs with hidden machine guns: McGann, Oisin (2009). The Wisdom of Dead Men, Corgi.

2009-09-27T02:04:00.000-07:00

Ancient Appetites was one of my favourite YA sf novels and I've been eagerly awaiting the sequel. The Wisdom of Dead Men is a damn good successor. It is not an easy sequel, it has a host of new political directions, and some uncomfortable discoveries.

The Wildernstern clan are unsually long lived and have a special relationship with gold (it heals them) and with the living animals that turn up from time to time. If the share blood with one, it will acknowledge them as its master.

In Ancient Appetites , the family discovered some bog bodies which unfortunately revived and claimed their rights as the eldest of the line. To enforce these rights, they cut a swathe through the family (using the Rites of Accession to support the various assassinations) and were finally done away with by the patriarch's second son Berto and his youngest brother Nate, along with Berto's wife Daisy. None of these people were very happy to find themselves at the head of the family. Furthermore, Berto had been crippled in the fight and as the book opens we find him in a wheelchair.

The Wisdom of Dead Men sees Berto get involved with the shady Knights of Abraham in search of a cure for his paralysis, while Nate and Daisy investigate the apparent spontaneous combustion of local witches, and find themselves digging up poorly buried family skeletons. We find out more about the engimals which roam the countryside and even more about the Wildernstern's blood and the miraculous healing they share with a small number of other families. Irish politics gets murkier and more unsettled.

There is clearly going to be a sequel, and despite being sequel averse, I'm looking forward to it. McGann is not the greatest of writers, there are a lot of clunky sentences, but unlike too many of the sf texts being pushed at kids, his work always has a really fantastic story to tell.

There'll always be a London: Philip Reeve, Fever Crumb (London: Scholastic, 2009).

2009-05-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

Very good indeed. A prequel to Mortal Engines, it only slides into prequel mode very occasionally. Most of the time it is firmly its own book.

Fever Crumb has grown up in the Engineers' house shortly after the collapse of the Scriven rule of London. The Scriven were not quite human, and their inability either to breed true or to breed well with humans eventually led to their downfall and to the Patschkin riots.

On leaving the Engineers for the first time, Fever discovers she herself is at least part Scriven, but this becomes a minor issue as the nomads advance on London, and the archeologists and engineers look for the secret which the Scriven left behind.

Although there are some big themes, this is a slight novel, and most of its pleasures are in the discovery of the run down future London. It's nice to see an sf writer for kids keeping firmly to sf as well, the moment at which the book could have gone all mystic, science and scientific exploration comes firmly to the fore.

Untreasured: Michelle Harrison, 13 Treasures (Simon & Schuster, 2009).

2009-05-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

Harrison, M. (2009). 13 Treasures. London, Simon & Schuster.
A very weak book: Tanya goes to stay with her grandmother because her mother can't cope with her apparently psychotic behaviour. There Tanya meets Fabian and together they unravel the mystery of the girl who went missing 50 years before. Tanya, it turns out, can see fairies, and Morwenna was kidnapped by the fairies many years ago.

The problem is that the book is very badly written, the sentences clunk, and the structure is all wrong. We spend too much time in the build up to figuring out what's going on, and only in the last fifth of the book does Fabian discover the secret Tanya is hiding. Only in the last tenth do we find out that Morwenna went willingly and that everyone is conspiring to protect Tanya. I wish I could say that Tanya figures out how to protect herself, but she is actually saved by Red, a girl who is herself trying to rescue her brother from the fairies--a twist which could have been fascinating but which is handled as a mere side-story. The 13 treasures barely figure.

The two most grating aspects of the book are the newspaper stories which are written as if by someone who has never actually read a newspaper crime report, and the Enid Blyton style wise gypsy woman.

Elliot, Zetta. (2008). A Wish After Midnight. ?, Self-published?

2009-05-06T07:00:00.001-07:00

The easy way to describe A Wish After Midnight is that it's a YA version of Octavia Butler's _Kindred_. I mean that as a compliment by the way.

Genna lives in Brooklyn. In the first half of the novel we see through her eyes all the threats that Black ghetto families face. Under the pressure of poverty and low expectations her family is disintegrating, and Genna's chances of getting up and out are diminished with every attempt she makes to help her mother. Her own confidence however is increased when she meets a Rastafarian boy called Judah.

In the second half, Genna finds herself flung back into 1863 Brookly, badly injured although she can't remember how. She is taken in by free black folk and settles down to the indignities of being Black in America in 1863. Later, Judah arrives, but he has been sold into slavery and is far willing to accept the hard scrabble comfort of freedom. The book ends with the draft riots, and a place for a sequel.

This really is rather a good book: the pre time travel section is too long for my tastes, but it's exploration of Genna's life is complex and demonstrates the degree to which racism is held together by many institutional structures. Once in the past the book really takes off: the racism and prejudice of white northerners is given short shrift, the ways in which white immigrants and blacks are played off against each other is dealt with very well, the compromised expectations of many people are depicted well, and the casual prejudice of the well meaning is displayed.

Sheldon, Dyan (2008). The Difficult Job of Keeping Time. London, Walker Books.

2009-02-22T03:05:00.001-08:00

This is a rather nice time travel fantasy in which a town's old church is about to be obliterated by re-development. One of the things I liked about it is that while Good = preservation and Evil = obliteration of memory, one of the issues is that the redevelopment will not benefit locals but only marginalise them. Of the two protagonists, one is a refugee boy settled in the town, the other the child of a not very reliable single mother with a drink problem. As far as there is a metaphoric arc, it's that they learn to draw on their own resources.

Kiki and Trish meet a lady, of middle age, who sends them back into the past to reclaim some documents. The lady is an avatar, as is her opponent. Both of them will be born, again and again in different forms to face off against each other (each body lives its natural life unless terminated, so killing one's opponent is not always the right way to go, the lady, for example, has in a previous incarnation been locked inb a mental hospital and drugged, to keep her out of play). There is a hint that these are old gods in an old game.

The nineteenth century drawn here is reasonably realistic, with child labour portrayed as just one of those things: all the shock is in Kiki and Trish's experience of it. No one is shown as especially callous, just having different values.

I liked the book a great deal, for its combination of the nicely drawn present, and protagonists with genuine ingenuity.

2009-01-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

Lavender Ratties!!! or Rat Trap by Michael J. Daley from Holiday House, 2008.

2008-07-04T02:40:00.000-07:00

I reviewed Daley's Space Station Rat back here in 2006. It's remained one of my favourites in my collection.

In Rat Trap Daley continues the story, as Rat has to hide from investigators, learns something about ethics and learns how to tempt a computer into sentience.

I love this book. I love that Rat remains always and ever a grown up person who has as much practical to teach the boy as she has to learn. I love the fact that Daley never loses sight of the fact that in a rough, tough universe sentimental messages aren't half as useful as a good set of screwdrivers.

End of the blog.

2008-06-12T23:45:00.000-07:00

Dear All

I may post the odd thing here, but this blog is more or less dead. The book is due sometime next year.

Active and excelellent however is a blog by Susan Fichtelberg who seems to have a firm grasp on what sf for children and teens should be. See here.

Books about computer gaming.

2008-05-20T12:25:00.000-07:00

At the request of Waller Hastings, the members of Child_lit came up with this list, and kindly permitted me to post it here.

Baron, Nick. Virtual Destruction. Previewing a new virtual reality game,
Marc McClaren becomes alarmed when he begins to have strange nightmares
and then his friends begin to die in strange accidents.

Besher, Alexander. Rim: a Novel of Virtual Reality. In the wake of a
mega-earthquake in 2027 Japan, the virtual-reality entertainment empire
Satori Corporation attempts to rescue thousands of people trapped in
virtual worlds.

Bloor, Edward. Crusader. 15-year-old Roberta struggles to separate truth
from virtual reality when she works in her uncle's failing arcade at the
mall in this blend of murder mystery and mall rat culture.

Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. Set in a future where children are
trained for military battle using video games, Ender rises above his peers
to become a commander of a virtual army.

Carpenter, Christopher. The Twilight Realm. Five young people addicted to
a fantasy role-playing game are transformed into characters with
remarkable powers and sent into a strange and dangerous parallel world.

Catran, Ken. Running Dogs.

Catran. The Onager._

Cross, Gillian. New World. Fourteen-year-old Miriam agrees to test a new
computer game in utmost secrecy but finds that it is more than she
bargained for.

Dick, Philip K. Game Players of Titan.

Foy, George. The Shift. Burned-out soap opera writer Alex Munn finds his
life in danger from a serial killer when he plays with new virtual reality
technology.

Gibbons, Alan. Legendeer trilogy. Shadow of the minotaur.

Goldman, E. M. The Night Room. When a group of students uses an
experimental computer program that simulates their tenth high school
reunion, they get an unsettling look at their possible futures.

Hogan, James. Bug Park. Visionary teens Kevin and Taki realize that they
can make millions from Bug Park, a micro mechanical entertainment park
that employs direct neural interfacing, but a murderous saboteur forces
them into a war of physics.

Horowitz, Anthony. Eagle Strike. After a chance encounter with assassin
Yassen Gregorovich, teenage spy Alex Rider investigates a pop star, whose
new video game venture hides sinister motives involving Air Force One,
nuclear missiles, and the drug trade.

Howarth, Lesley. Ultraviolet. We think we are in a post-catastrophe
dystopia but actually we are testing a computer game.

Ipcar, Dahlov. The Warlock of Night. Based on chess.

Kostick, Conor. Epic.

Kostick. Saga.

Landsman, Sandy. The Gadget Factor. Boys build a virtual world that looks
a lot like what we might call Sim Universe, and then war game it to
destruction.

Locke, Joseph. Game Over. When a new video arcade named Hades opens in
town, the students of Dinsmore begin committing bizarre and violent acts.

Lubar, David. Wizards of the Game. RPG fan Mercer wants to bring a gaming
convention to his middle school, but instead attracts four genuine wizards
who are trapped on Earth and want his help in returning to their own
world.

Miyabe, Miyuki. Brave Story. {Tr. Alexander O. Smith} This year's Mildred
L. Batchelder Award winner. Fourteen-year-old Wataru enters the fantasy
world of Vision hoping to change his real-life situation (he is an only
child whose world is falling apart as his parents become estranged) by
relying on the video-game rules with which he is so familiar. but they
don't work. This doorstop of a book (816 pages) is a phenomenon in Japan,
where it is also available as a video game and a multi-volume graphic
novel. The last time I checked, the first 3 volumes of the graphic novel
had been translated into English.

Norman, Roger. Albion’s Dream. Edward's involvement with a mysterious
adventure game leads to a confrontation with his boarding school's
tyrannical headmaster and evil doctor.

Odom, Mel. Crossings (Buffy the Vampire Slayer series). When local video
game players who have been testing a new game begin exhibiting strange
behavior, Anya and Xander investigate, but when Anya disappears into an
alternate demon universe, Buffy must discover how to get her back.

Paulsen, Gary. Rodomonte’s Revenge. Best friends Brett and Tom love the
new virtual reality game, Rodomonte's Revenge, until the computer
infiltrates their minds and transforms the game into something dangerously
real.

Pratchett, Terry. Only You Can Save Mankind. A classic but the gaming
itself becomes something of a metaphor/portal fantasy world by the end.

Pryor, Michael . The Mask of Caliban.

Rubinstein, Gillian. Space Demons. Twelve-year-old Andrew, bored with
life, becomes obsessed with a mysterious new computer game, which has the
power to zap him and his friends into a dangerous world of menacing space
warriors. Andrew M. Butler writes about this in The Lion and the Unicorn,
Vol 28, number 2. There are sequels: Skymaze and Shinkei.

Scott, Michael. Gemini Game. When players of their virtual reality
computer game fall into a coma, Liz and BJ O'Connor, teenage owners of a
computer games company, flee from the police in an attempt to locate a
copy of their game and correct the programming.

Seidler, Tor. Brainboy and the Deathmaster. When the new prototype of his
favorite game, StarMaster, leads him to the laboratory of software guru
Keith Masterly, orphan and computer game genius Darryl Kirby finds his
life plunged into danger when he uncovers Keith's diabolical scheme, which
forces him to confront his painful past.

Simons, Rikki. Reality Check! (Manga) When tenth-grader Collin Meeks is
at school, his cat, Catreece, puts on her owner's virtual reality helmet,
assumes the identity of a cute teenager, and surfs the Virtual Internet
System while Collin is at school. (Graphic Novel)

Skurzynski, Gloria. The Virtual War. In a future world where global
contamination has necessitated limited human contact, three young people
with unique genetically engineered abilities are teamed up to wage a war
in virtual reality.

Sleator, William. Interstellar Pig.

Tangherlini, Arne. Leo@fergusrules.com. Leonora, a teenager of mixed
ancestry, begins to spend most of her time in a virtual reality program
but is lured into computer-generated danger when a boy she likes
disappears.

Townley, Roderick. Into the Labyrinth. A sequel to The Great Good Thing,
about turning a world into hypertext.

Vande Velde, Vivian. Heir Apparent. Giannine is trapped in a flawed
virtual reality game that will kill her unless she beats it.

Vande Velde. User Unfriendly. Arvin Rizalli, his mother, and six of his
friends pirate a computer-generated, interactive video game that plugs
right into the players' brains.

Weiss, D. B. Lucky Wander Boy. Obsessed with creating an encyclopedic
reference of every video game ever played, Adam Pennyman continues to be
frustrated by his attempts to uncover information about "Lucky Wander
Boy," a game that he had loved as a child, until a chance encounter takes
him to Portal Entertainment, which, in turn, leads to the game's creator.

Werlin, Nancy. Locked Inside. When Marnie is kidnapped by a crazed fan of
her late mother's, an Internet gaming friend comes to the rescue in this
mystery/thriller.

Westwood, Chris. Virtual World. Fourteen-year-old Jack North finds himself
literally drawn into the frightening world of what he thinks is a new
virtual reality game.

Wieler, Diana. Ran Van the Defender. Rhan Van uses his success at video
games under the name "RanVan" to see himself as a modern knight and to
cope with life with his grandmother and as an outsider at his Vancouver
high school, with his anger, and with girls.

Wynne Jones, Diana. Homeward Bounders.

Wynne Jones. The Game.

ALSO:
All "The Web" series of which the recommender’s favourites are:
Baxter: Webcrash
Joyce, Spiderbite
MacLeod, Cydonia
Cadigan, Avatar
all from Orion.

While Cathy's Book is not about gaming per se, it was written by someone
who writes games: Jordan Weisman. (Sean Stewart is a coauthor and has also
done stuff with gaming, I believe.) The interactive nature of the book,
along with the reader making choices of how to "read" the additional
information, is gaming influenced.

Not a computer game, but Scott Corbett's The Big Joke Game might fit.
Sort of halfway between Through the Looking-Glass and the computer game
stuff.

For nonfiction, try Masters of Doom: how two guys created an empire and
transformed pop culture, by David Kushner.

Jonathan Strahan, The Starry Rift, New York: Viking Penguin, 2008.

2008-05-15T06:53:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Strahan’s The Starry Rift is a really excellent YA sf collection, for 12 yrs and up. It contains thought provoking stories by some of the best writers in the field and they are all science fiction. There isn’t a fantasy story in the lot. I know that sounds odd, but you'd be surprised at how many sf and fantasy collections for kids I have upstairs which contain very little science fiction.

It’s the best collection of sf for teens that I’ve seen in the past four years. It compares well to what I think of as the gold standard, the Out of this World series, edited by Amabell Williams-Ellis and Mably Owen in the 1960s.

Note: this is not a review it is a critique. If you don’t want to read spoilers, don’t read further.

This is a fabulous collection (and I urge you to go out and buy it now) but I do have some quite strong comments about presentation and ideology, most of which relate to the issues I’m talking about in my book. The stringency of the critique is in part because this was a book I could really enjoy and get my teeth into. I got more out of each of these stories in terms of stuff-to-think-about than all but about twenty of the books on my shelves.

First, I was delighted by the real density of the stories: much of my distress over the YA and children’s sf I’ve read is about how empty they are. In many books children reject knowledge of the world in favour of knowledge of themselves, or demonstrate innate talents that overwhelm adult knowledge. Here the authors know what they are aiming for: Scott Westerfeld delivers a hell of a lot of info about space and the concept of mass. Cory Doctorow gives an intense seminar on sweat shop economics and union organization while Ian McDonald tackles water politics. Stephen Baxter slides in uncertainty theory and Margo Lanagan looks at the structures of poverty economies. There is also a real range of stories, some contemporary, some near future.

My first caveat however, is that none of these stories are allowed to stand as they are. All but one (the Egan, which is also the most transparent story) gets a neat little explanation from the author about what was intended, and here my heart just sank. Almost every one of these explained the “relevance” of the story. Halam talks about children and gaming experience, Doctorow gives us a little lecture about obesity, Goonan explains that her story is about dealing with death. Even the more sf focused author notes such as those from Baxter, Ford and Reynolds seemed to detract from the stories. I wanted the stories to stand alone, for a kid to experience that sense of awe and mystery that the stories on their own generated. I wanted the sf in them to be the most important thing, to be able to read about things not about “me”. I also really didn’t want to be told that a story was “relevant”, because I don’t ever remember a time as a teen when I didn’t resent some adult telling me what was relevant. Which brings me to a story which separated from this book I would have really enjoyed, but which struck me as a serious misfire both for the market this book is intended for and more specifically as an opener for the book, Scott Westerfeld’s “Ass Hat Magic Spider”.

The level on which I love “Ass Hat Magic Spider” is that it functions as a reworking of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” both in terms of the problem it sets, and the fact that a smart kid will realize that it's an ideological set up. In “Ass Hat Magic Spider” a boy has to decide what he will leave behind in order to take a favoured object with him to a colony world. The weight limit is incredibly tight, tight enough that he has shaved off all his hair, starved himself and reduced his water in take for the final weigh in. The discussion of the limits of space flight, of mass-energy calculations etc are very well done indeed. The Godwinesque ideological seal is of course that no one would be daft enough to weigh a 13 yr old boy and then insist that he is not allowed to grow over the next couple of months. For the story to work, you have to assume that no one would have had the common sense to factor in allowance for growth (or simply refuse child colonists). But that’s ok, because it’s a cool thing to have to think about. Where I winced was when we discovered what it was our protagonist was holding out for: a hard copy of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. I’m sorry, but while I can really see adults getting this nostalgia, and I can also really see pre-teens loving that ending, I’m having a really hard time believing that the target audience—12-17—are going to respond. A hard copy book. A mawkish, incredibly sentimental book at that. I know this is personal taste, but that in a sense is my point. As the opening story, that’s one hell of a risk.

There is one other issue relating to the age range I want to raise: this book is aimed at the whole of the YA range, but this is not reflected in the stories. I confess to going looking for this because the plummeting age of Juvenile/YA protagonists has been one of the things I’ve been considering. The short version is that around 1968 there is a revolt against adult protagonists in fiction for teens. By 1975 there are almost no adult protagonists left. I think there are two interconnected reasons for this: first, as the school leaving age climbs, the world of work is increasingly seen as irrelevant to teens; second, the model of desired reader response changes from “protagonists for readers to emulate” to “protagonists for readers to identify with”. I’d like to see both, but there you go. Of the “protagonists to identify with” the story most swamped by this ideology is Kelly Link’s “The Surfer”. A tale of a soccer kid who finds himself in a refugee camp with his Dad, fleeing a flu pandemic and a collapsing US infrastructure. The back story is brilliantly delineated, but in the end the story is about a boy learning to think outside himself, fall in love for the first time, and generally be a teenager. It was one of two stories in which the sf background was far more interesting than the use to which it was put.

In Starry Rift, seven of the sixteen protagonists are adults. Of those five are adults by age and the other two I have granted adult status on the grounds that they are either in the workplace (as in Lanagan’s “An Honest Day’s Work”) or are carrying adult responsibilities (as in Sullivan’s “Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome”). All of the other stories use protagonists who are clearly children or teenagers, but of those only two are what we might think of as coming of age stories (MacDonald and Link) which is a relief. So that the general pitch of the book is (I think) closer to 12 thru 15. An older reader is going to spend a lot of time reading about people younger than him/herself in modes which ask for indentification. There are many readers who do that cheerfully, but if this is an entry gate book, it strikes me as not quite thought through. Ironically, it may be one factor in ensuring that the book is successful with adults. Personally, I long for the days when sf published for teens assumed that what those teens most wanted to be, and to identify with, was adults. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The Inter-Galactic Playground reader survey (see the forthcoming book) suggested it was under 13s who wanted protagonists their own age and recent experience with classroom response suggests the same.

Now on to the stories themselves: briefly, the range of subject matter is huge as is the representativeness of different aspects of the genre and this is very definitely due to Strahan’s skill as an editor in selecting authors. I’m not trying to write a beautiful review so the following should be read as mostly enthusiastic notes.

The two weakest stories for me are Kelly Link’s “The Surfer” and Greg Egan’s “Lost Continent”. Both are as you would expect very well written, but neither need to be sf stories. I’ve already discussed Link’s story in which the future is simply a facilitating device to get the boy out of the house, and confronting his sense of self. Egan’s story is even weaker: it is a very fine piece about how terribly we treat refugees. But there is nothing in it whatsoever that means it needs to be sf. So the refugees come from over a time bridge from a past parallel world. If this is meant to be a metaphor for the fact that refugees come from places that seem to be living in the past with parellel world ideas—well yes. We got that. It might have been more interesting if we saw refugees going back and taking new time with them, but that time bridge is really just another ocean and there is no consequence to it being a time bridge that I can see.

I’ve already written about Westerfeld’s “Ass Hat Magic Spider”, and I just want to reiterate that I like what Westerfeld is trying to do. I haven't reviewed it here, but I recently read his Last Days, an sf vampire novel and enjoyed it very much.

Ann Halam’s “Cheats” is a fantastically well written, disabled child liberated by the web, story. Neil Gaiman offers us a very silly (for highly enjoyable values of silly) story of a teenage sister who uses Mom’s magic bubble recipe to tan her skin and turns into something weird and alien. The story is told in a series of answers to questions we don’t see… a bit like a Locus interview really. Stephen Baxter’s “Repair Kit” offers us a very shaggy dog story fuelled by uncertainty theory of the kind I used to love in the Out of this World series (Ellis and Owens). Jeffrey Ford is at the other end of the spectrum with “The Dismantled Invention of Fate” about the intercourse between a human and alien, their separation and eventual spiritual reconciliation. The story is lyrical, and gently old fashioned, I was reminded rather strongly of Heloise and Abelard.

More serious stories are offered by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ian McDonald and Walter Jon Wiliams. All three of these stories can be seen as coming to terms with adulthood responsibilities, but keep their eyes firmly on “in a different kind of world”. Goonan’s “Sundiver Day” explores the emotional consequences of trying to clone a much loved person, while in “The Dust Assassin”, McDonald tells the story of the last surviving daughter of one of the great water houses of India. Walter Jon Williams “Pinnochio” is very good indeed as it considers the increasing pressure on child stars, but points out that changing technology may increase their ability to take control of their lives.

I long for derring-do and panache in my science fiction, and Al Reynolds, Paul McAuley and Tricia Sullivan all deliver. In “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice” Reynold’s hero escapes from a space station where he has killed a gangster who hurt his sister and signs on as surgeons mate on a ship. The ship turns out to be a pirate ship full of cyborgs and he ends up helping a lobotomised young woman and a star creature destroy the surgeon and the ship. Paul McAuley’s “Incomers” is a classic adventure story in which boys think they’ve found a spy in the aftermath of war (it reminded me strongly of Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner (1929). Like Egan and Link’s stories, it doesn’t have to be sf to work, but the way they spy, and the things they discover are all firmly depedent on futuristic technology and politics. Finally here is Tricia Sullian’s “Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome” in which a girl from the future is fighting a virtual war in 1994 against another side’s champion for control of the Meq, another dmension. Each of them is a map of their own sides resources whch can be knocked out by their injuries. When a third party steps in a feedback loop is created so that each injury they inflict on the other, rebounds on themselves. The story moves as fast as the fighters and while the protagonist is immune to the third party’s political arguments, the readers may not be.

My favourite stories are by Nix, Lanagan and Doctorow. Garth Nix’s “Infestation” is a fairly straightforward story of a vampire hunt, but these vampires are genetically engineered alien war machines. The story is about courage and pride, and about skill, it’s also a lovely demonstration of why sf isn’t about its tropes and icons. Margo Lanagan’s “An Honest Day’s Work” takes a damaged child from a very poor family into his first day’s work in a breaker’s yard, where what is being broken up is some large, live, toxic beast: a dark vision of Lilliput and the way whole nations are treated as if they are Lilliputians. The absolute stand out for me though was Cory Doctorow’s “Anda’s Game”. It’s no secret that I loved Little Brother and this has the same passion and panache: as Anda earns real money and even realler confidence acting as unthinking muscle in virtual reality, she comes up against real world capitalism and discovers that there are sweatshops in the web.

THE STARRY RIFT
table of contents

Contents

Ass-Hat Magic Spider by Scott Westerfeld
Cheats by Ann Halam
Orange by Neil Gaiman
The Surfer by Kelly Link
Repair Kit by Stephen Baxter
The Dismantled Invention of Fate by Jeffrey Ford
Anda’s Game by Cory Doctorow
Sundiver Day by Kathleen Ann Goonan
The Dust Assassin by Ian McDonald
The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice by Alastair Reynolds.
An Honest Day’s Work by Margo Lanagan
Lost Continent by Greg Egan
Incomers by Paul McAuley
Post-Ironic Stress Syndrome by Tricia Sullivan
Infestation by Garth Nix
Pinocchio by Walter Jon Williams.Acknowledgments
About the Editor

Best sf for children and teens 2007.

2008-04-26T23:52:00.000-07:00

Given that sf is getting a very raw deal in the Norton Award, here is my list again.

My top pick has to be Stephen Baxter's The H-Bomb Girl,. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. (parallel worlds, time travel, teens and up).

Runner up: Oisin McGann. Ancient Appetites. London: Random House, 2007. (alternative Ireland, queer protagonist, very strange machines, teen and up).

Other fantastic books:
Bertagna, Julie. Zenith. London: Picador (PanMacMillan), 2007. (post-global warming, pre-teen and up).
Daley, Michael J. Shanghaied to the Moon. New York: Putnam & Sons, 2007. (conspiracy space adventure, pre-teen and up).
Lennon, Joan. Questors. London: Puffin, 2007. (parallel universes, DNA puzzles, conspiracy, queer protagonist, pre-teen and up).
McGann, Oisin. Small Minded Giants. London: Doubleday, 2007. (corporate conspiracy, ice ages, pre-teen and up)
McMullen, Sean. Before the Storm. Melborne, Victoria, Australia: Ford Street Publishing, 2007 (time travel, saving the world, pre-teen and up).
Reeve, Philip. Starcross. London: Bloomsbury, 2007 (steam punk, tale of derring do, pre-teen and up)
Rex, Adam. The True Meaning of Smek Day New York: Hyperion, 2007 (alien invasion, girl and cat save the world, non-white protagonist, pre-teen--unlikely to appeal hugely to older readers).

O.T. Nelson "Award" for insane libertarian sf for kids that has no idea at all how communities really survive in times of trouble:
Pfeffer, Susan Beth. Life as We Knew It. New York: Harcourt Inc., 2006.

Expelled "Award" for telling lies to children about Darwinism:
Coleman, MIchael. The Cure. London and Australia: Orchard Books, 2007.

Andre Norton Award for YA Sf and Fantasy

2008-04-26T23:40:00.000-07:00

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Rowling, J. K. (Scholastic Press, Jul07)

Total nomination list:
Vintage: A Ghost Story, by Steve Berman (Haworth Positronic Press, Mar07)
Into the Wild, by Sarah Beth Durst (Penguin Razorbill, Jun07)
The Shadow Speaker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Jump At The Sun, Sep07)
The True Meaning of Smek Day, by Adam Rex (Hyperion, Oct07)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic Press, Jul07)
Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, by Ysabeau S. Wilce (Harcourt, Jan07)
The Lion Hunter, by Elizabeth Wein (Viking Juvenile, Jun07 (The Mark of Solomon, Book 1))

London calling Neptune: Mansfield, Keith. Johnny Mackintosh. London: Quercus, 2008.

2008-04-25T11:23:00.001-07:00

Fun, but too many ideas. Johnny lives in a children's home. He's fantastic with computers. He gets kidnapped, discovers a sister, is taken off by aliens, given a space ship, sent ack to Atlantis, discovers his mother is something terribly important and is quite obviously going to tun out to be a relative of the Emperor of the galaxy (who looks suspiciously human).

On the other hand the London setting is lovely, the space ships living beings, and some interesting stuff about aliens.

Godzilla in London: Enthoven, S. Tim, Defender of the Earth. London, Random House.

2008-04-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

Tim is a genetically engineered T-Rex. Chris is a fourteen year old boy. Together they will defend the earth against a scientist who has turned himself into nano-machines.

It makes no sense, the science is terrible a T-Rex can't sleep on it's side, and it can't cope with nano machines) and it all ends up very spiritual with Tim inheriting the mantle of Defender of the earth from a Kraken, and Chris discovering that he has to identify with the world in order to save it, but it's still sort of fun and a honest and open homage to Godzilla.

One really irritating thing tho was the idea that no one would want to join the scientist as nanomachines. I can think of several hundred people who'd jump at the chance.

Locus Award Finalists

2008-04-24T00:18:00.001-07:00

YOUNG ADULT BOOK
Extras, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)
The H-Bomb Girl, Stephen Baxter (Faber & Faber)
Magic's Child, Justine Larbalestier (Razorbill)
Powers, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt; Gollancz)
Un Lun Dun, China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

Congratulations to all. But I confess to having my fingers crossed for Baxter

http://www.locusmag.com/2008/LocusAwardsFinalists.html

Karen Traviss on Not Reading

2008-04-24T00:11:00.001-07:00

One of my favourite authors talking about not being a reader.

http://www.karentraviss.com/html/notreading.htm

End of the Line

2008-04-23T23:44:00.001-07:00

I sent the manuscript of the book to a copyeditor yesterday and from there it will go direct to the publisher. This blog is going to remain as an archive resource, and I may occassionally add to it (there will be a post about a new YA collection next month), but I won't be actively searching for books any more. However, from now on, it will be an "open" blog. If you find a cool book you want to talk about, send me a write up (spoiler's allowed) and I'll post it here.

I've listed all the books I consulted over the past five years here: http://young-sf-list.blogspot.com/

If you want to add to the list so that no one ever has to engage in the kind of foraging I've been doing, please send me references. I'll also be maintaining my database so that I can assist with queries, so also give me a short summary and some key words (themes, setting etc).

Thank you all for keeping me company the past few years. Knowing there were people out there has been very reassuring.

Jonathan Strahan (ed) The Starry Rift (New York: Viking, Penguin), 2008.

2008-04-17T23:22:00.000-07:00

British Values Win Out: Ronsson, Robert. Donovan Twins: Olympic Mindgames, Roswell Encounters. Brighton: Pen Press, 2008.

2008-04-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

Sophie is the youngest competitor in the Olympics. Her twin brother Jack is approached by an alien to try and capture another alien. Sophie wins a bronze for the team (no easy victories here), Jack plays bait for the alien. Lots of good stuff like discussion of various scientific and technological information. Lots of silly stuff such as another alien using Jack and grooming him for his role in the capture of the other alien (left a bad taste in the mouth actually). Also, really, really poorly written. But despite that it had the flavour of a Wollheim or a Bova. I'd rather like to get my hands on this chap because there's real potential here.

The Web Series, from Orion.

2008-04-11T02:07:00.000-07:00

The Web, 2027
Baxter, Stephen. Gulliverzone, The Web: 2027. London: Orion Books, 1997.
Bowkett, Stephen. Dreamcastle, The Web: 2027. London: Orion, 1997.
Brown, Eric. Untouchable, The Web. London: Orion, 1997.
Graham, Joyce. Spiderbite, The Web. London: Orion, 1998.
Hamilton, Peter. Lightstorm, The Web. London: Orion, 1998.
Furey, Maggie. Sorceress, The Web. London: Orion, 1998.

The Web, 2028
Baxter, Stephen. Webcrash, Web 2028. London: Orion Books, 1998.
MacLeod, Ken. Cydonia, The Web 2028. London: Orion, 1998.
Lovegrove, James. Computopia, The Web 2028. Computopia: Orion Books, 1998.
Furey, Maggie. Spindrift, The Web 2028. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1999.
Cadigan, Pat. Avatar, The Web 2029. London: Orion Books Ltd, 1999.
Brown, Eric. Walkabout. London: Orion Books Ltd, 1999.

--
These books are quite old now. I read a few of them at the time, but didn;t read them all, and didn't read them in order, so hadn't quite registered that there is a story arc. In the 2027 books the web is threatened by a sorceress, in the 2028 books aliens download themselves into the web, never quite arriving as each book seems to be "wow, aliens have arrived".

The books are uneven and the quality is where you would expect it. The standouts are Baxter, Hamilton, MacLeod and Cadigan, with the Joyce not so hot, but clearly leading towards the really outstanding YA material he has produced more recently. Joyce may actually have suffered here because most of the protagonists are only *just* YA, in one or two cases pre-teen, and his more recent and better works have used older teens. Baxter is also interesting because although his books are excellent in many ways (and I'd hold up Webcrash as one of my favourites because of the intricate advice on how to build a wooden rocket ship with Viking technology) he really doesn't know how to write for kids here: there is too much backfill and info dump. Fascinating to compare this to H-Bomb Girl in which he has the confidence to just let the readers work it out for themselves. MacLeod's Cydonia is a slightly bemusing second read: I hadn't registered the degree to which nothing happens. In this book a boy gets caught up in a conspiracy in the web, set in the consiracy web site Cydonia. Except that there turns out to *be* no conspiracy, except in the mind of a web cop and an observation AI who have both gotten caught up in the paranoia of the web location Cydonia and lost the firmly cynical perspective of its child users.

The best of the lot tho' is Avatar by Pat Cadigan. A boy who has been paralysed and lives in a low tech community gets taken around electronically by a friend. When she accesses the web--against the wishes of the community--she is ejected from her body by an alien. He must go into the web to rescue her. In the end tho' it's the alien he liberates. His friend chooses to stay in the web, and he opts for a prosthetic body. Lots of excellent things about choice, lots of real thought about the possibilities that the web creates for all sorts of people. And fun. Lots of fun.

Boys Will be Boys...: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Tor, 2008.

2008-04-02T07:49:00.001-07:00

There is an explosion in San Francisco. The authorities use it as an excuse to crack down on this city of hippies and queers and other undesirables, and generally speaking, as too many American teens have discovered, just being young makes you undesirable.

There is a full review over at Strange Horizons. Doctorow's Little Brother ticks all my boxes: it's about building seemingly irrelevant skills, because one day they may be necessary, it's about tyranny and the kind of education you need to fight back, it's bouncy, irreverant and a demanding read. The politics are real and so are the technical details. It's a handbook for bringing down your government.

I hope it wins the Prometheus Award. I hope it wins the Andre Norton and the Golden Duck. I know I'll be nominating it for a Hugo next year.

2008-03-12T00:34:00.001-07:00

A group called the Mind_Meld approached me and others on the question, Is Young Adult SF/F to explicit?

The comments are here.

A Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch: The True Meaning of Smek Day by Adam Rex, Hyperion, 2007.

2008-03-09T14:30:00.001-07:00

After my bitter complaint here that there wasn't a single sf book on the initial Norton ballot, miraclously, the final ballot has added one, The True Meaning of Smek Day by Adam Rex.

It's sort of fun, has lots of nice Messages, joins the ranks of the *tiny* number of sf books for kids with a black protagonist (which is not to be sniffed at), and is politically interesting if heavy handed and ruins its own message. It's best feature is that Gratuity is the kind of competent kid protagonist that I treasure. All that apart, it's ordinary as hell.

Gratuity Tucci is eleven and she has been asked to submit a school essay on The True Meaning of Smekday for a time capsule competition. In her first essay she tells of her mother's mole, how her mother is abducted, and her own decision to drive to Florida instead of getting on the rocket. She also explains that the invading Boov have decided that the planet is now theirs and they have signed a treaty "forever" with humans--using as representatives anyone they pick up (the first of the political messages, as this is pretty much how native American "representatives" were chosen). She takes her cat, Pig [which made me smile as I had a cat called Pig] and ends up collecting a rather worried looking Boov. There are adventures.

Part two: Gratuity is told to add more to the essay. She tells of the journey through Florida onto Arizona where the Boov have pushed the humans having decided they want Florida [again reference to history, not very subtle]. Then the Gorg arrive, all clones of a single inhabitant of a planet where the species wiped itself out after fighting non stop for generations--so much for the anti-stereotype messages otherwise running though the book. The Gorg are nicely gruesome and they hate cats.

Gratuity and J-Lo, the Boov, who has been rendered cute by this time with nicely broken English and odd eating habits, finally find Gratuity's mother who is helping to organise one of the Arizona encampments [and there is a discussion on the way all the Americans in Arizona have split into ethnic and ideological groups, a racist is shouted down and a lecture about free speech given.] Gratuity discovers that the Gorg hunt cats because they are allergic. Gratuity and Boov clone and teleport Pig[s]. The Gorg leave the planet, someone else takes the credit, and Gratuity explains this is a good thing because she gets to lead her life as she wants to. There is a coda ninety or so years after.

End of book.

It isn't allegory, but its real message is teaching children to question the colonialist stories told by America and Israel (those being the contemporary examples) and once it's done that, it actually falls back into some of the trite assumptions about "the other" it ostensibly sneers at.

I enjoyed it, it's fun. it will go down well with kids. It has an identical plot to about twenty other books in my collection which it handles with a certain swing. I have nothing bad to say about it. Except it isn't a patch on any of the titles I listed in February in terms of any attempt to introduce kids to any kind of speculation.

It could be so much worse: Shadow Web by N. M. Browne. Bloomsbury, 2008.

2008-03-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

Jess Allendon is bored with her homework so googles herself. She finds another Jessica Allendon who asks for a meet up. Not being stupid she takes her mate Jonno with her when she goes to meet the other Jessica in Waterloo Station, but when she sees a face identical to her own, shock takes over and on automatic pilot she moves forward and takes the other girl's hand.

There is an explosion and when Jess wakes up she is in a different Waterloo Station, one where the floor is made of coloured marble, and young men in purple uniforms are rushing toward her, hustling her out the door as a "Yank poppet". Jess is put in a taxi when they realise she is from a resectable household, and is driven to a grand house not far from Soho. There. she finds herself forced into the role of Jessica, sixteen year old secretary to Mrs. Landsdowne, in a house riven with politics and suspicion.

The world "Jessica" lives in is not just alien to Jess it's horrifying: women appear to have no rights, only those over thirty can vote. Jess is subject to constant sexual harrassment, and if she complains, other women assume it is her own fault. Her employers are oppressive. wages seem to be incredibly low and the workhouse awaits any servant who dares to transgress. Outside there is a low level civil war going on: in a Britain which still holds its colonies and the Black and Indian people she meet seem oddly exotic compared to those of her own world; in which the technology is still analog but an internet exists; in which the manners and mores and industrial politics seem out of the 1910s, someone is planting bombs.

Jess gets pushed from pillar to post, becomes a pawn in a game she never really understands, and falls in love with her best friend's doppleganger. Jess is only in the other world one week but it's a terrifying week in which the threats of the grey suited Security or the dapper black clothed King's Constabulary seem far less frightening than the constant sexual threat. By the time she returns home, she isn't quite the same person.

Browne hands her alternate world with a deftness of touch I've rarely seen in YA sf: she is happy to leave Jess confused and us with her. Although we learn the broad outlines of the society, we don't get to know it, and we never find out how it got that way. We know very little more about alternate London than most of us (Jess included) could describe of our own world. Browne sticks rigidly to Jess's viewpoint and as no one has time to explain the world to her, or even really a place to start explaining from (where would you begin if a stranger landed here?) this other world remains powerfully nebulous.

When Life is Brutal, Nasty and Short, Ask Mother: Remnants by K. A. Applegate. (1998-2003)

2008-02-02T04:41:00.000-08:00

It's been three long years reading, and I still have about a hundred books upstairs to go, but I'm almost at the end of my project. In this post, I want to describe, not necessarily the best written or the most complex of the books I read, but quite simply the one that captured my imagination most, and which I've been evangelising for even when I only owned parts 1-3 (it's taken me ages to secure all 14 and I'm still missing number 8.)

In terms of recommendations, age is not a factor, but you might not want to give these books to anyone who has a propensity for nightmares.

1. "The Mayflower Project"
2. "Destination Unknown"
3. "Them"
4. "Nowhere Land"
5. "Mutation"
6. "Breakdown"
7. "Isolation"
8. "Mother, May I?"
9. "No Place Like Home"
10. "Lost and Found"
11. "Dream Storm"
12. "Aftermath"
13. "Survival"
14. "Begin Again"

To name Remnants series fiction is rather missing the point. It's series fiction the way The Old Curiosity Shop is series fiction. In reading reality there are two books here, divided into parts: the first ends with Book 8, Mother May I, and the second starts with No Place Like Home.

The first book opens as the Earth is about to be destroyed by a huge asteroid. NASA manages to pull together an old shuttle and turn it into an escape ship, with sleep berths for eighty. The ship is filled with Nasa employees and their families, and people who have bought their way on. It's nasty and messy--think the last helicopter out of Saigon. Two of the boys, Jobs and Mo'Steel are woken briefly to help fix the solar sails and witness the death of Earth.

When the ship people wake, over half are dead. Their hibernations have failed, the coffins have been drilled into by worms, or they were holed by meteorites: for the next few books we are with people experiencing serious PTSD; no instant recoveries here.

When the survivors look out of the ship they see black and white on one side, and colour on the other. They turn out not to have landed, but to be in a ship which has raided their databanks to create an environment out of great works of art: this is seriously disorienting and turns out to be threatening as well. Would you want to be inside a Bosch painting? Not only that, but the other inhabitants of the ship aren't too happy that their environments are being messed with. Plus, there is another species--ejected angels--who want to get back on board: once the engineers of the ship they think the ship (Mother) is mad, and want to fix her. There is also a changeling child, born on board ship which seems to have been taken over by a species called the Shipwright, and a boy called Billy, a refugee from Chechnya who has been brought up in Texas. Billy is insane, as anyone would be if their life support had kept them awake but paralysed for 500 years.

This is not a fun adventure: the first eight books proceed a lot like Charlie in the Choclate factory as concieved by Dean Koontz.

Applegate has not just provided setting: her characters are strong and clear. The children in the ship come from a culture in which children and teens rename themselves in accordance with who they think they are. Our two heroes (trans. they make it to the end of the series) are Mo'Steel, the risk taker who thinks he's indestructible, and Jobs, his computer nerd friend. But Jobs is interested in other things than computers and proves brave when it counts, and Mo'Steel is smart and very, very good at maths. Then there is 2Face, with her burned face; Miss Violent Blake, the Jane Austen fan, ultra-femme and art expert. There are others but these are the main four. All are interesting, All use the skills they bring with them. All go beyond the skills they bring with them and by the end of the book the skill set is mutating just as their bodies are mutating. Oh, did I forget to mention mutations? The main characters aren't too keen on them either. Jobs' little brother has chameleon abilities. Several other characters mutate into spider like beings before forming a gestalt. While in the second half of the serie Miss Violet, the gentle, prim, neat and tidy young lady, becomes a vermiform, able to break into healing worms at will (it's disgusting and incredibly painful) ; Tate becomes all mouth when she detects betrayal--and Mother and Billy haven't really got the hang of indigestion tablets).

The first eight books are horrible, terrible, nasty adventures in which everything that can go wrong does, people are tired, wet, hungry, clutching marble statues and totally disoriented. Brilliant in other words. At the end of the eight they have reached some kind of rapprochment with the ship (Billy has become Mother's friend) and with the other inhabitants...

Which is why in Book 9 they get the smart idea to turn it round and see what's happened on Earth: cue really pissed off neighbours, and a lot of divide and rule poltics and 2Face and (President of the USA's son) Yago continue the divide and rule policies they've battled each other with before, and Yago, who has found god and it's him, tries to convert the aliens on board ship to the one true cult of Yago, while negotiating with a very weird threesome in the hold.

They make it to Earth which is a disaster with a very narrow band of survivability, but Yago, and the three in the hold make off with the ship, accidentally taking Tate. Those on Earth meet up with various survivors--some scientists, and some semi-savages and get caught up in the politics there (but it's noticeable that there is still historical memory, none of the artificial cuts offs of other books). More of them die. The book ends when Tate, who has eaten and absorbed the others on ship into her body and mind, turns the ship around and lands on Earth, where Billy uses the crash site to re-create the world although, as Jobs occassionally contemplates, it may well be all an illusion.

Through out all of this the main characters act with sense, competence, not always sanity, but as humans engaged with the world at all levels. There is no inevitability, no destiny, no sense of helplessness even among the poorest of the people they find on Earth. Romance is kept to a minimum by rining the changes on the focus of interest (just as most teens really do). And if I haven't convinced you yet, let me mention one more thing.... In book 10 Jobs, searching for models of what he is trying to do, remembers readng a book by an author called Heinlein when he was ten, Stranger in a Strange Land.