Author Archives: mataglap

Of the 3 major year’s best anthologies, 3 stories made it into two of them: “The Hand Is Quicker”, Elizabeth Bear (The Book of Silverberg) – Horton and Dozois “Shadow Flock”, Greg Egan (Coming Soon Enough) – Strahan and Dozois “Collateral”, Peter Watts (Upgraded) – Horton and Strahan 20 stories from the Locus list were included […]

The novelettes most likely to have been nominated for the 2014 Hugos in a non-puppy year (based on final nominating statistics) are all available online.  The Crosshill, Emrys and Wilson were on the Locus recommended list, and beat out better known authors who mostly were published in print magazines or anthologies.  The Crosshill story is in […]

Read: Work Done for Hire – Joe Haldeman Ancillary Sword – Ann Leckie The Three Body Problem – Cixin Liu Lockstep – Karl Schroeder Reading: The Memory of Sky – Robert Reed Will try to read by year end: Shipstar – Greg Benford & Larry Niven Read the first in the series, Bowl of Heaven The […]

My summer reading goal this year is to get through all 11 of the Larry Niven books published by Ballantine in the mid 70’s.  This includes the Hugo-winning Ringworld, plus a few short story collections.  Everything in these books takes place in his “Known Space” series, a loosely connected set of stories written over a period […]

Asimovs SF, January 2014 It’s a shame this story has such a non-descript title, because there is quite a bit going on in here, it probably would have helped if I had read more of her previous stories as I gather many of them take place in the same universe.  As it is we get […]

There’s a big jump from the submarine potboiler of 21st Century Sub to this book roughly ten years later.  Herbert is firmly entrenched in hard SF, with a generation ship full of hibernating clones setting off from Earth to populate a planet of Tau Ceti.  But the plot isn’t the most significant thing that’s been […]

Here’s an interesting early Herbert story that posits the introduction of a virus that systematically kills the Earth’s entire canine population, not just dogs but wolves, coyotes, etc.  Herbert has been studying up on microbiology and even dabbles a bit in genetic engineering, as the scientist hero, Varley Trent, has to ring up his Vegan […]

My memory of  McHugh’s successful first novel, China Mountain Zhang, is now 20 years in the past, but what I do remember of it includes her resolve to tell a human story amidst an original and interesting mélange of future extrapolation involving foreign countries, future entertainment, and a certain amount of “alienness” right here on […]

Frank Herbert broke into the SF field with “Looking for Something?”,  published in Startling Stories in 1952.  Prior to that he’d been a newspaper writer and was good enough at fiction to have a story published in Esquire in 1945.  The online bibliography is thin, there are references to a couple of other non-genre stories […]

Frank Herbert’s first novel has been published under three different titles.  The least common, “21st Century Sub”, would have given it an SF branding, since it was published in 1956, but its otherwise pretty bland.  This was the title of the first paperback version.  The title “Under Pressure” puts it more in the realm of […]