Mataglap SF

If you’re inclined to despair at the number of YA nominees for best novel in this year’s Hugos, look no further than the annual entry by Charles Stross, which channels the sex and politics of Heinlein with the technology of Asimov into a somewhat entertaining mishmash that is Saturn’s Children. In the future, robots have…

The Ludlum-esque title to the always entertaining Nancy Kress’s latest nominee gives the reader the impression he’s in for some sort of espionage thriller, but in fact what you have is “Physicists in Love”, as she assembles a varied and true-to-life cast of chracters trying to cope with a new phenomenon that is outside what…

The most disturbing statistic from this year’s Hugo ballot is that 3 of the 5 novel nominees were marketed as YA books, with the voters passing up hard SF heavyweights like Baxter, MacLeod, Bear, Egan, Haldeman and Banks in favor of more lightweight fare. Is this cause for concern? Are YA books more appealing now…

Vinge’s previous Hugo-winning books, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky were both full of interesting extrapolations of the future and the future’s view of the present. They were also way too long and equally full of boring characters that were mouthpieces for the aforementioned extrapolations. But people ate them up…

Egan’s double nomination includes this tale in his usual domain of mathematical sf, of which he is the undisputed master and possibly the only participant. Who else would want to come up with stories centered around cool (as opposed to cold) equations and take the added challenge of making them interesting? In this entry, Egan…

Sturgeon was not a novelist, he really excelled with the single worked-out idea, although some ideas took longer than others to work through. This, his most famous novel and maybe his most famous story altogether (unless you want to count “Killdozer”), is really three novellas run together, an expansion of the story “Baby is Three”,…

Say what you will about this story, you can’t deny it’s an original plot. The viewpoint character is a documentary filmmaker named March, although he goes by the nickname “Windy”, who hops around the asteroid belt recording memorials contained within individual asteroids, set up either by the person being remembered or their relatives or followers.…

Wilson turns out another winner with this entry, building on the strengths of his previous novels to tell a story with all the sense of wonder you need, but while the science drives the plot the focus is really on the characters and their own reactions to the world changing around them. The eponymous Spin…

After a string of increasingly incomprehensible books that focused too much on politics at the expense of everything else, MacLeod’s entry this year is something of a throwback, a first contact story, or as the subtitle says, “a scientific romance”. In the future everyone has weird names, from the main human viewpoint character, the young…

Part of the ongoing criticism against the Campbell era in Astounding centers on his insistence on a positive view of space exploration and of man’s undoubted primacy over aliens. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t publish depressing stories, maybe “The Cold Equations” being one of the best known examples. Anderson’s novel is equally bleak, an…