Meanwhile at the Discussion Group: November 2013

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

beyondrealityThe name of this website was inspired by the Beyond Reality discussion group, which has been around for almost two decades in various forms and which I’ve been managing for more than half of that time. Because this site’s name took its inspiration from the group, I try to post monthly updates about the group here, including our Books of the Month, our series discussions, and any other special events like giveaways or author visits.

Please consider this an invitation to join us, if you’re interested in SF&F book discussion. And if book discussions aren’t your thing, maybe you’ll find some additional book recommendations in this monthly feature!

Beyond Reality’s Books of the Month for November are:

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The Sunlit Horse by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

ConservationofShadowsI recently became a patron of the arts! Well, sort of. You see, Yoon Ha Lee (who earlier this year released the utterly brilliant short story collection Conservation of Shadows – here’s my review) decided to raise some money by offering to write flash fiction stories for a small fee. You even get to pick a one or two word writing prompt for your story.

Being a huge fan of the author, I decided to jump on this opportunity. The resulting story, entitled “The Sunlit Horse”, has now been posted on the author’s Dreamwidth blog. You can read it here.

(By the way, the writing prompts I chose for this story are the words “son” and “sander”, and no, this has absolutely nothing to do with Brandon Sanderson at all. Those of you who know me will know why those words are meaningful to me on a very personal level.)

Thanks to Yoon Ha Lee for this beautiful story. And, as of the time I’m writing this, there are still two slots available for your own Yoon Ha Lee flash fiction!

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Debris by Jo Anderton

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

DebrisTanyana is a talented and celebrated architect. She’s one of the elite, someone who can control “pions,” allowing her to manipulate matter with a thought. She’s high up in the air, working on a towering statue, shaping the raw matter around her into art, when suddenly she finds herself under attack by strange, uncontrollable pions. When she regains consciousness after a horrible fall, it becomes clear that she has suffered more than just physical injuries: she’s lost the ability to see pions and can now only see “debris,” a sludgy byproduct of pion manipulation.

In an instant, Tanyana’s charmed life comes to a grinding halt. While unconscious and recovering from her injuries, a tribunal has already found her guilty of negligence. Against her will, she is fitted with a strange powersuit and assigned to a team of debris collectors. Before long, the once-proud architect finds herself reduced to poverty, trudging through the poorest parts of the city with her team to gather the filthy debris in a constant race to make quota. Gradually, she learns more about the true nature of her suit, the history of pions and debris, and the true cause of her fall.

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Fortune’s Pawn by Rachel Bach

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

œF $¿Æ‘$8Òò¤»däå¸R8BIFortune’s Pawn is the story of a talented space mercenary who is addicted to adrenaline, drinks like a fish, sleeps around, and wants nothing more than to become a member of the elite force known as the Devastators.

Thanks to raw talent, a never-ending thirst for action, and a rare, custom-built set of combat armor, this mercenary has successfully climbed the ranks and now has nowhere else to go but a boring desk job. Then, a dangerous and lucrative assignment comes along. It may just prove to be the final stepping stone to that ambitious dream career with the Devastators, so the mercenary drops everything and joins the group of armored badasses applying for the job.

Her name is Devi.

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Burning Paradise by Robert Charles Wilson

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

BurningParadiseAs similar as the reality in Robert Charles Wilson’s new novel Burning Paradise may seem to ours, it’s actually very different. The world is preparing to celebrate a Century of Peace since the 1914 Armistice that ended the Great War. There was no Great Depression or World War II, and  segregation in the US was abolished in the 1930s. The world has become a little safer and wealthier every day.

Most of humanity is unaware that the seemingly benign changes that led to all of this are actually the result of interference by an extraterrestrial intelligence that resides in the Earth’s radiosphere. A small group of scientists—the Correspondence Society—discovered the truth a few years before the start of the novel. As a result, many of them were massacred… and now the alien agents known as “simulacra” are coming for the relatives of those who were murdered.

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Parasite by Mira Grant

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

ParasiteIn Mira Grant’s new novel Parasite, a major new scientific development has transformed the medical world: the Intestinal Bodyguard is a genetically engineered parasite that lives in your bowels and can secrete drugs directly into your digestive tract. It’s nothing short of a medical revolution.

To be absolutely clear here, what we’re talking about is a tapeworm. That’s right: a company developed a benign tapeworm that people voluntarily ingest to stay healthy. It may be just me, but I cannot even begin to fathom the size of the marketing budget a company would need to convince people to voluntarily become hosts to a worm that lives in your gut. (Just for fun, look up some pictures of tapeworms. Look up how they used to be removed, prior to antibiotics. Nightmares. Nightmares, I tell you.)

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Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

RangeofGhostsThis review turned out a bit rambly, but I’m too lazy to self-edit today, so I’m going to cut to the chase and place my overall opinion right up front for anyone who doesn’t feel like reading over a thousand words of enthusiastic rambling: 

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear is the best fantasy novel I’ve read all year, and you should read it too.

The setting of Range of Ghosts is a fantasy version of a place that vaguely resembles Central Asia around the time of the dissolution of the Mongol Empire. Now, there’s a lot more going on than that, and you don’t need any familiarity with that era to read this novel. This is not the “quarter turn to the fantastical” retelling of history you’ll find in the (excellent) novels of Guy Gavriel Kay.

Instead, it’s a fully realized secondary world fantasy, full of magic and magical creatures, that just happens to bear some resemblance to real-world history. Kay uses history as a building block; Elizabeth Bear uses it as a stepping stone towards something that’s purely fantasy and as full of sense-of-wonder as any novel I’ve read in ages.

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The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski

Posted on October 21, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

TheHighestFrontierIt’s been about a decade since Brain Plague, Joan Slonczewski’s last novel, came out, but I’d bet good money that more people remember the author for a novel that’s by now, unbelievably, already 25 years old — the wonderful and memorable A Door into Ocean, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and which Jo Walton wrote about on Tor.com here.

Now, ten years after her last novel, Joan Slonczewski returns with The Highest Frontier, another insightful exploration of hard SF concepts with a thrilling plot and fascinating characters.

Put simply: even after a decade, this book was well worth the wait.

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Jewels in the Dust by Peter Crowther

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

JewelsIntheDustI’d never read anything by Peter Crowther before Jewels in the Dust, a new collection of thirteen stories published between 1996 and 2006 and collected here for the first time. I was, however, very familiar with Crowther’s name, mainly as one of the founders of PS Publishing, the award-winning UK publisher that’s known for high-quality, collectible limited editions of SF and fantasy—somewhat similar to Subterranean Press on the other side of the Atlantic, come to think of it. (Subterranean also happens to be the publisher of this collection.)

Turns out that the person I mainly thought of as a publisher has actually written about half a dozen standalone novels, again as many short story collections, and has edited about twenty anthologies. I’ve got some catching up to do, it seems.

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Lookin’ Good: Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, Eds. Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall

Posted on October 15, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

MothershipMothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond is a new anthology offering a generous 40 pieces of short fiction by such authors as Lauren Beukes, Tobias Buckell, Junot Díaz, Kiini Ibura Salaam, N.K. Jemisin, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Sofia Samatar and Nisi Shawl, just to pick the first few names that jumped out at me in this very exciting and diverse lineup.

The anthology’s goal is to “give ‘space’ some much needed color”. Based on that cover illustration by John Jennings, I’d say “mission accomplished” and then some.

But more seriously, as Bill Campbell, who edited this anthology together with Edward Austin Hall, says: “When we look up at the night sky, space is black as far as the eye can see. Yet, when we read novels about it or watch something on TV or in the movie theater, it is white beyond all comprehension.”

Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond is available from Rosarium Publishing on October 18th, 2013. (The incorrect publication date on Amazon was based on advance copies; the anthology is actually just being released this week.)

I use my “Lookin’ Good” series of posts to highlight books that I haven’t been able to read and review yet but look so promising that I just want to spread the word. This anthology definitely falls in that category. I can’t wait to read it.

The entire (and very impressive) Table of Contents can be found below the cut.

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