Books | Actionsuit Alert!

First up is a roundup of sci-fi publication news.

The online version of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has launched the Beta version, meaning primarily that any number of entries have yet to be fleshed out with content, but the underlying structure is there. Looks great but it seems like they’re trying to reinvent the wiki format and trying to shoehorn it into something that resembles the book when it should be the reverse.
Amazon has announced a new science fiction, fantasy, and horror publishing arm called 47North. They’ve got quite a bit of content coming out in the near future featuring works with Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. Great news but I wish Amazon would ditch the DRM on it’s downloadable books the way they did with music and drop the prices of digital versions to make them more competitive with ‘real’ books.
Vernor Vinge has released the third volume in his Zones of Thought cycle, Children of the Sky, reviewed here on Boing Boing. The first two books in the series, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, are both excellent reads. I remember picking up Fire in an airport on the way to Jamaica and being absorbed by his dense and imaginative world while sipping banana daiquiri’s on the beach.

A couple of gems coming out soon to theater/video:

The animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel Batman: Year One, will be released a week from tomorrow according to I09. Casting includes Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston as Inspector Gordon.
And if you haven’t seen it already, here is the official trailer for The Avengers below. Looks good; Loki is the only bad guy I can really identify.

NPR is now polling to see what the top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy novels are from it’s users. It’s a great little poll I have a few issues with but you should definitely check it out and vote.

I just bristle at the fact works of Fantasy and works of Science Fiction are almost always lumped together in these types of lists by reporters who have not read extensively in either genre. While I admit there are no less than a million ways these two genres can intermingled on the page, each genre is more than fully developed enough to justify keeping them separate. For me I always enjoyed reading Fantasy novels but it was always for the pure pleasure. It was the Science Fiction that I read which made me consider and question myself and the world around me.

Some authors (Philip K Dick for example) have such a depth and breadth of work I’m always hard put to vote for a single work to be recognized. And there’s always the ‘classics’, the obvious choices which I was tasked to read in school rather than discovering them on my own. So here’s my top ten list taken from the choices at NPR:

Neuromancer – Gibson

Man in the High Castle – Dick

Stainless Steel Rat (series) – Harrison (had to have one satiric entry on the list)

Dune – Herbert

Deathbird Stories – Ellison

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Verne

A Clockwork Orange – Burgess

Left Hand of Darkness – LeGuin

Fahrenheit 451 – Bradbury

Solaris – Lem