Slashdot Mirror
Nebula Award Winners
jbennetto writes: "The Nebulas are out! The winning novel is A Quantum Rose, a SF/Romance backwater-standalone in a series of six books about an interstellar conflict between human empires. The author, Catherine Asaro, is a physicist. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won best script, and Jack Williamson, Kelly Link, and Severna Park won the short fiction catagories."
Never before has technology (the lingua franca of sci-fi) played such a role as it currently does, IMO.
Robert Heinlein wrote an editorial to John Campbell@Astounding/Analog to this effect circa 1956. It's pretty much been the staple belief of SF fans and writers everywhere, for as long as SF has been published -- with the publication of this series/book/etc, SF will be taken seriously. Next year, people will notice us.
Unfortunately, it hasn't happened, for reasons which probably say more about the people that DON'T take it seriously than it says about anything intrinsic to the genre. There is such an incredible canvas of ideas available to the SF writer, so many ways to interpret or define the human experience that simply are not available to the standard ho-hum fictioneer; I think the general publics ignorance of SF is one of the great tragedies of our age.
Well, maybe next year.
Then again, the fact that the SFWA gave tripe like "Crouching Tiger" a major award makes me a bit ashamed to think these things...
Rev. Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
I have nothing personal against mblase. I don't even necessarily disagree with what he/she/whatever said here.
But I have to just butt in and say that I long for the days before every single story that got posted to Slashdot had one or more highly moderated comments like this one.
Some people prefer to download music rather than buying CDs. Some people prefer to download movies rather than attending them or buying DVDs. Some people prefer to download books rather than buying them or borrowing them from their local library. There are evidently people out there-- although I don't mean to imply that mblase is one of them-- who believe they're entitled to free music, movies, books, and software.
I prefer to believe that these people are in the minority. I prefer to think that the vast majority of people out there believe in working for a living. I prefer to think that most people take pride in their hard work, and reject the ethics of entitlement.
But you wouldn't know it from reading Slashdot. Every damn day we see comments like this one: "It's nice to know that professional literature can still be free."
How about we rephrase this comment. Will all due respect to mblase, I think what you really meant to say was: It's nice to know that these authors have been so generous and cool to release their stories for free on the Internet. They did not have to do this, but they were cool enough to do it anyway. Everybody go download them, and if you like them, buy the author's book.
Try reading some nice "mainstream" books once in a while. I don't mean bestseller/landfill category, but a genuinely good book. The thing you probably will notice that the characters have, well, character.
When you compare this to the usual cut&paste stats in a genre book.. Ouch. Sometimes even genre/mainstream titles by the same writer show that. Try "The Crow road" by Iain M. Banks, you'd hardly believe it was written by the same person as those Culture books. I suppose you have to write a story around your people if you don't have utopia/dystopia/whatever to distract the reader.
There are some very nice SF titles I have read. Usually, but not always, the story could be rewritten in contemporary setting without too much difficulty. Okay, so the 7 samurais was a samurai movie which was inspired by westerns.. And the few good men (or something like that!) was inspired by the 7 samurais.. So you can take the story and stick it into another setting, nothing new in that!
In my opinion, SF setting is more likely to hurt a book rather than help it.
1. Maria could not work in the Amazon as pure albinos are extremely sensitive to sunlight. Skin cancer is the number 1 cause of death for albinos and it affects a majority of them.
2. (related to point 1) It is too convenient that Maria just happens run into the only man on the planet capable of having her child.
3. Maria lets the tribe be taken away too easily. As a result, her sudden urge to chase them down is jarring. From one sentence to the next she seems to change her mind.
4. Maria gets into the secret compund too easily. How did she know to bring wire cutters and there just happens to be an embankment that allows easy access to the building. Also there are no guards watching over the most valuable genetic stock ever encountered.
5. Why do Maria and The Cure almost immediatly have sex? It is especially strange since he regards her as some kind of demi-goddess.
6. Logistics of driving a jeep through the dense jungle for several hours without running out of fuel.
7. The tribe, which has been isolated in the jungle for thousands of years, speaks near-perfect Portuguese.
Overall the story suffered from too many instance of "it-just-so-happened-that" sydrome, in which the plot always supplies an easy path for the character to follow.
And egads! That excerpt!
Ugh! Augh! This stuff won an award? It's so bad it makes me wince.
I couldn't have done worse if I had made a special effort to be cliche. Describing someone with a reflection? "Heart-shaped face?" And that "at the moment," as though intentionally placed to break rhythm. I hadn't realized the Nebula people were so tasteless.