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Locus 2003 Recommended Reading List
Embedded Geek writes "Locus magazine has published its 2003 Recommended Reading List of science fiction, fantasy, and related titles. With nearly 300 entries, it's a safe bet that even the most voracious reader will find something new. Personally, I was delighted to see Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams under non-fiction and the great listing of short fiction (so I can mine my old magazines for the gems). If you're more of a completist, check out Locus'es exhaustive listings (continued here
and here). Definitely worth downloading to your PDA for your next trip to the bookstore."
"SCO's Claim to ownership of Linux"
Looking over the list quickly, there aren't a whole lot of surprises here. The usual crop of perennial big authors are here, (Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson) and even many of the lesser authors are familiar to anyone who even occasionally reads Asimov's or Analog.
The problem here is that the list is so massive, there's actually almost no point to it. There's no plot descriptions whatsoever attached to the list, just a link to elsewhere.
If you're going to recommend a book, I think whoever a book is being recommended to deserves at least a brief explanation of "WHY?" I know that's difficult for a long list like this, but just a sentence or two would be nice, not just a links leading eventually to Amazon.
BTW: I'm finding Greg Bear's latest series a tad scientifically iffy, and his characters unbearably (no pun intended) flat and boring. The new William Gibson book, on the other hand, has enough of his signiture sarcastic view of mass-media to be entertaining, but that's just my humble opinion. Go read your own books.
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
I noticed there were no Baen books on the list - Baen (www.baen.com) has produced several bestsellers recently, including Eric Flint's "1633" (the followup to the wildly successful "1632", which is now free for the download). Baen is one of the few publishing houses to make money recently - and they are the one giving away full-length, top quality novels at their Baen Free Library. ( www.baen.com/library )
They also sell their books through "Webscriptions", which produce non-DRM e-books (They use HTML, RTF, or a variety of 'Reader' formats).
It's more than a little interesting that giving away older product, and selling current product without annoying DRM or other restrictions would produce a *positive* result - but of course the RIAA will probably continue to pay no attention.
I wonder why Locus avoided the whole publishing house? SF publishing has traditionally been a jealous, backbiting world but I don't know if that's a factor in this list, or just the taste of the reviewers.