Sci-Fi Book Review:
Great work of first science fiction:
“Frankenstein”
By Sharon Lee | Excerpt: rednet.cn
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, generally known as Frankenstein, is a novel written by the British author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Shelley started writing Frankenstein when she was 18 and finished when she was 19.
The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition, published in 1831.
The title of the novel refers to a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who learns how to create life and creates a being in the likeness of man, but larger than average and more powerful.
In popular culture, people have tended to refer to the Creature as "Frankenstein", despite this being the name of the scientist.
Frankenstein is infused with some elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement.
It was also a warning against the "over-reaching" of modern man and the Industrial Revolution, alluded to in the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus.
The story has had an influence across literature and popular culture and spawned a complete genre of horror stories and films.
It is often considered the first fully realized science fiction novel due to its pointed, if gruesome, focus on artificial intelligence.
|
|
|
Sci-Fi Book Review: Space Opera Has Come Of Age
But Has It Left Humans Behind?
By Grey_Area | Excerpt: io9.com
May 2009 - Space opera has come a long, galaxy-spanning way since 1941. With a second book in the New Space Opera series out this summer, we examine the genre's origins, and see how the new book compares. Space opera, with its themes of grand adventures, bold heroes, and of course, cool spaceships blowin' stuff up, has been one of Science Fiction most enduring and widely read sub-genres.
Before we see what's new, let's check out where it's been. Its history might surprise some newer fans with the shifts in perspective and attitude towards it in the Science Fiction field. The Lensman stories of E.E. "Doc" Smith are usually revered as the among the first quintessential space opera works, but they were never called that when they first came out.
The term was originally created by science fiction author and hardcore fan Wilson Tucker back in 1941, to describe a type of story in the pulp magazines that was already falling out of favor. Here's that oft-cited quote again: In these hectic days of phrase-coining, we offer one.
|
|
|
Westerns are called "horse operas," the morning housewife tear-jerkers are called "soap operas," For the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving for that matter, we offer "space opera." Ouch. Throughout the 40s and 50s, space opera continued to be a byword for the worst sort of genre writing, reviled for its casual disregard of any real science. The over-the-top melodrama inspired snickering parodies, replete with tentacled BEMs menacing histrionic space-dames. By the 1960s, the New Wave writers like Moorcock, Aldiss, and Ballard dismiss all Science Fiction prior to them as hack space opera.
Science fiction would only develop as Serious Art when juvenile themes about aliens and spaceships in the far future were consigned to the rubbish bin of history. The true destiny of SF as literature was in exploring the near future of society and the inner space of the mind. And there'd be lots of tripping out and freaky sex. Like far out, man! In the next decade, the winds changed and there was a trend, spearheaded by publishers Lester and Judy Lynn DelRey, to embrace the groundling appeal and guilty pleasure of space opera. Screw this literary pretension, let's just bask in the Gee-Whizzery!
The space adventure stories of Leigh Brackett and Poul Anderson were re-labeled as space opera. Authors like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle continue to turn out tales of star-spanning civilizations with current theories of astrophysics and complex cosmopolitics. Meanwhile, the cult followings of a canceled TV show and a new movie from the kid who did American Graffiti were continuing to grow. Like it or not, thanks to Star Trek and Star Wars, to the world at large space opera is Science Fiction.
The 1980s saw David Brin, C.J. Cherryh, Dan Simmons, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Vernor Vinge producing sophisticated works of thrilling adventure and galactic civilizations that never cheated the reader intellectually. In 1987 Iain M. Banks took the UK by storm with Consider Phlebas, his first novel of The Culture. Banks and other British authors such as Ken MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds, and Peter F. Hamilton have caused some to announce an age of New Space Opera, completely shedding the earlier pejorative connotations of the term. I really don't know if any of this is really "new", just maybe a bit more grown up.
|
|
Sci-Fi Book Review: Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Excerpt: elise.com
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card revolves around a young boy, Ender Wiggin, who is selected to train to become a fleet commander to protect earth from an alien invasion.
The training takes place at a distant Battle School in space where the young and brilliant Ender is repeatedly pushed to his limits to mold him into what he is needed to be, to become the next commander and win the war against the invaders.
I've read Ender's Game 5 or 6 times in the last 15 years, and recently listened to the audiobook. I honestly think that Ender's Game is the best piece of science fiction I have ever read. Card is unusual as a science fiction writer in that he delves deeply into the psychology of his main characters and their complex inter-relationships.
Nothing is as black and white as it may seem. There is goodness and honor in Ender's enemies as well as a willingness to manipulate and kill in Ender. Ender is constantly faced with hard choices upon which his survival and the fate of the planet depend.
|
|
|
An important subplot takes place on earth between Ender's good sister Valentine and his sociopathic brother Peter, also young children. The two equally brilliant siblings take advantage of the anonymity of the net to pose as adults and publish opposing politcal articles, building strong followings and ultimately influencing the shape of world government. What is remarkable is that Card first published Ender's Game as a short story in 1985, well before the Internet became publicly available.
In fact, the vision of the Net that Card lays out in Ender's game is just now beginning to be realized, some 20 years later. That two people could move nations by their writings on the web is plausible, whereas when this book was written it was still very much a fantasy. Card related in an interview that he had played around with an early version of Delphi and was inspired by the possibilities he saw.
|
|
Sci-Fi Book Review: The Left Hand of Darkness
Author - Ursula K. Le Guin
Review by Russ Allberry | Excerpt: eyrie.org
Le Guin writes a very intellectual style of science fiction (and fantasy), well suited for critical analysis, and The Left Hand of Darkness is no exception.
One could doubtless find multiple critical essays and analyses of this science fiction classic, going into considerable depth on its themes and implications.
Amidst that background, a simple review seems a bit superficial and crass, but here it is anyway for those curious about my opinion of it as a story.
Le Guin's writing seems quiet and still to me, like focused light, keeping the scenes in front of the reader's attention long enough to allow a comprehensive look. The Left Hand of Darkness, despite being a story of both political intrigue and adventure, is not paced at all like a thriller or adventure story.
It is, instead, a tour, albeit one told as a story, of a society both alien and familiar and a world both beautiful and forbidding.
|
|
|
Winter, the Hainish name for the world on which The Left Hand of Darkness is set and called Gethen by its inhabitants, is still locked in an Ice Age, with short, wet thaws and long, horrible winters, constantly full of snow and ice. It is also a world of otherwise human beings who are neither male nor female except during a short time of the month, during which they can become either sex. It is a long-lost outpost of humanity, left to itself for many thousands of years to develop its own culture, its own traditions, its own government, history, and mythology.
The story is a first contact story, told primarily from the perspective of the Envoy sent from the loosely allied worlds of the galaxy to invite the inhabitants of Winter to join in their coalition. By tradition, this first Envoy is sent down alone, providing the reader with a viewpoint character, a distanced observer who needs to explore the planet's culture and yet finds it different and alien.
Most of the book is told from his first person perspective, mixed with accounts of legends and myth from Winter's mythology and the occasional journal entry from one inhabitant of Winter the Envoy meets. This is not a book to thrill you with intricate technical descriptions, glimpses of far-future technology, or rousing adventure stories. (It has aged remarkably well, in fact, due to the lack of reference to much specific technology.) I found it to be a bit of a change of pace, and it took me a while to become absorbed by the background.
|
|
|
