Paul Di Filippo Reviews Robot Artists & Black Swans: The Italian Fantascienza Stories by Bruce Sterling locusmag.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from locusmag.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Wild Cards cover art by Michael Komarck An adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s long-running Wild Cards superhero series has a new home it’s jumping from Hulu to NBC’s Peacock, according to The Hollywood Reporter. With the move, the show’s producers are now looking for a new writer. While Martin is best known for his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series thanks to HBO’s Game of Thrones, he’s also known for Wild Cards. The project started out in 1983 with a roleplaying game campaign, SuperWorld, that had been gifted to Martin by fellow author Vic Milan. “It triggered a two-year-long role playing orgy that engulfed not only me, but the rest of my Albuquerque gaming circle as well,” Martin wrote for Tor.com back in 2011. “We had great fun while the addiction lasted, but in the end I came to the realization that the game was absorbing too much of my time and creative energies.” He turned those creative energies into writing up some of the stories that he and his fellow gamers had come up with.
George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards TV Show Is Moving to Peacock tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
(Simon & Schuster/Saga 978-1-9821-4806-5, $27.00, 416pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, March 2, 2021) Science fiction thriller about artificial intelligence, sentience, and labor rights in a near future dominated by the gig economy. There’s a great deal going on in Machinehood, from Divya’s sophisticated critique of a post-privacy gig economy to her evident expertise in AI systems, ‘‘weak AI’’ digital assistants, nanotech, and prosthetic body modifications. Individually, none of the tech extrapolations are particularly new, and Divya on occasion lapses into clichéd dialogue (‘‘this is so much bigger than us’’), but the economy she describes is sharply imagined and convincingly detailed, and she artfully balances the cybertech thriller chapters involving Welga and the more character-oriented narrative of Nithya and her family, eventually weaving them together in a conclusion both suspenseful and ingenious, if a bit idealistic given the problems and complexities she’s already saddled us with. But then, idealism might be something we need a bit more of these days.
New & Notable Books, February 2021 locusmag.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from locusmag.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Best of Walter Jon Williams, Walter Jon Williams (Subterranean 978-1-64524-002-0, $45, 616pp, hardcover) February 2021 A writer always feels an instinctive camaraderie with other writers who debuted more or less simultaneously with one’s own beginnings. This does not mean that all writers in a given generation love and admire each other unconditionally, but only that a person recognizes and bonds more readily with other members of their own generation. It’s a realization that our paths are parallel, a shared journey and, with luck, of similar extension. We all kicked off at the same starting line, and we will all finish up around the same time, getting to see entire careers, side by side and from start to finish. We were not present at the commencement of the careers of our elders (although we might have shared their later years), and we will not live to see the whole careers of our juniors. But this particular assortment of scribblers, bound by a chance coincidence of birth well, we’re all stuck in the same span of time, and that’s a potent affiliation.
Transfer Orbit Waking the Leviathan The story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to blockbuster TV series , before Syfy debuted its adaptation of the series in December. I’m reprinting it now with some minor edits. If you enjoy this post, please consider signing up as a subscriber or sharing this post on social media. Image: Alcon It’s March 2015, and I am standing on the bridge of a starship. The crew work stations look worn, the walls are covered with warning signs, and the grated floor looks like something designed to be functional. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that I was standing on a real ship, hurtling through space. Instead, I am on the set of a new television series, a location that, until now, only existed in words on a page.
The Best of Walter Jon Williams, Walter Jon Williams (Subterranean 978-1645240020, $45.00, 610pp, hc). Cover by Lee Moyer. February 2020. Exactly 30 years ago, this column’s lede was “Walter Jon Williams is an interestingly various writer….” The intervening decades have given me no reason to alter that opinion, variations on which I have been repeating just about every time I write about a Williams title. So why should I break the chain now? In 1991, when I drafted that review (of Days of Atonement), Williams had published seven SF novels and a collection of shorter work and was already a fully formed professional with a range stretching from the cyberpunkish and space-operatic, to alien encounters, to crime-caper/comedy-of-manners mashups. (Not counting five historical-nautical adventures as Jon Williams.) Since then, his output has expanded to encompass fantasies, disaster epics, alternate histories, pocket universes, near-future technothrillers, and less-easily-characterized subgeneric collisions, extensions, mutations, and transmogrifications.
2020 is over, huzzah! December was yet another quiet month in lockdown. I read fifteen books. This was recommended to me by a friend, and looked fascinating. It is brilliantly written. Set in Toronto in the 1920s, it’s about a woman who wants to be a scholar, and turns out to be Christian horror. It’s very well done, but gave me nightmares, especially as I had not realised the genre until half way through I assumed the weird cultists were not actually messing around with actual Hell. Perhaps I should have read the blurb. So, excellent book, very good, very not for me.
Two years ago, Walter Jon Williams returned to the setting and subgenre of his ingeniously unconventional Dread Empire’s Fall trilogy with the first of a set of sequels, The Accidental War (now branded A Novel of the Praxis). Though perhaps I should call the series “multi-conventional,” since, while the packaging and promotional language correctly signal “space opera” and “military SF,” the books also include strong elements of romance (if not romantic comedy), novel-of-manners, and even crime/intrigue-thriller. The comparisons I settled on for the first three were to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin wooden-ship naval adventures and Jane Austen’s distinctly non-military novels of manners, money, and marriage. Those comparisons still apply, but in the new novel,