reviews
Jul 02, 2008
Thanks for the Locus Poll votes!
Queen of Candesce was one of Locus Magazine's readers' favourite books last year
I just got the July, 2008 issue of Locus magazine, and lo and behold the results of the Locus Poll are out. Queen of Candesce got an extremely respectable 830 points worth of votes, which places me in the company of authors like Ian McDonald, Charlie Stross, and Bob Wilson as one of their readers' favourite authors of 2007.
I knew the magazine's reviewers liked that novel--and truth to tell, I've always gotten a great critical reception for my work. But it's hard sometimes to judge how the readers--people who aren't in the book industry in one way or another--feel about my stuff. This is a great boost. To all of you who voted for me... thanks!
And, oh yes, there's only four weeks until Pirate Sun comes out! So there's much more to come.
Jun 17, 2008
Publisher's Weekly on Pirate Sun
Drum roll please...
It's almost here! This is what PW has to say about the third Virga book:
This fast-paced virtuoso exercise in world-building is the third novel (after 2007’s Queen of Candesce) set in Virga, a 5,000-mile wide balloon with a central artificial “sun” and many nations clustered around their own smaller suns. ... Virga is wonderfully imagined, with itinerant gravity sellers, floating farms in nets of dirt, and battles in which one town invades another as buildings smash together and people gather at windows with homemade weapons. The intrigue surrounding a brewing revolution and the threat of invading forces carry readers quickly through this adventure and on to the next installment. (Aug.)
Jun 06, 2008
Review: Floating to Space by John M. Powell
The airship to orbit program in detail--but with some flaws
John M. Powell is the sort of visionary who gets locked up as a madman. But, like the best creative madmen, his ideas resonate with a wild kind of sense that nags constantly at you once you've heard them, until you start asking yourself: what if he's right?
Powell's idea, and the subject of the new Apogee book Floating to Space: The Airship to Orbit Program, is simplicity itself. If zeppelins and balloons can take us to the upper atmosphere--140,000 feet and beyond--why can't they take us further? Namely, all the way to orbit?
The first time you hear this idea you laugh--just the way you no doubt laughed the first time you heard of the space elevator. Yet Powell's logic, when you hear it, is equally simple. Why did the Mir space station reenter and burn up in Earth's atmosphere? Why, because its orbit decayed. But orbits don't 'decay'--not by themselves. No, the actual reason why Mir and other satellites have crashed into the Earth is wind resistance. There is a headwind even three hundred miles above the Earth; the space shuttle feels it when it's orbiting. And if you fired a bullet at a high enough velocity, it could orbit the Earth four feet off the ground, except for that same pesky headwind (and a few obstacles).
Not only is there air in space, there's enough air that a big enough wing would create lift. Powell describes that wing--a classic 'flying wing' in fact--in detail in Floating to Space. Combining the technologies of high-altitude ballooning with ion drive engines and hypersonic airfoils, he proposes a mile-long hydrogen-filled wing, so diaphanous it would be torn apart by the slightest breeze at sea level. But launched from a 'black sky station' at 140,000 feet, this orbital ascender can surf the upper atmosphere, gradually building both altitude and velocity over the space of several days, until it's in orbit. There, it can play with the tenuous headwind to ascend some more, keep station, or descend as gracefully as it rose.
This isn't just literal pie-in-the-sky hand-waving. Powell's company, JP Aerospace, has actually built many of the components of his vision, some under US military contract. He's pursuing a slow but steady experimental program that is intended to pay for itself at every step. His vision is rational and even economically plausible. Financially, I'd be more inclined to invest in it than in the elevator, because even if the final ascender doesn't work, technologies like the black sky station could be huge money-makers.
All this is cool. Unfortunately, as a document Floating to Space needs to be convincing, and it falls short in several key respects. It's well packaged by Apogee, but was apparently never edited: the text is rife with typos, grammatical errors and just plain bad writing. These issues severely weaken the sense of authority that a book proposing something so radical needs to project. I won't fault Powell for this, but I'm definitely slamming Apogee for doing a piss-poor job here.
Also, although Powell does a pretty good job of describing the technologies and solutions that would make his vision possible, he glosses over some potential show-stoppers. For instance, it takes some digging to find out that current supersonic models indicate that his orbital ascender would face impossible levels of drag, rendering the idea dead in the water (or air). This may be a deficiency of the models rather than reality--but Powell needed to address this issue head-on, and give some idea of how big a risk this places on the whole program. His failure to come clean on this one issue makes me suspicious of all the rest of his claims, and therefore creates a serious credibility problem.
I love Powell's ideas, but I can't evaluate their feasibility. I recognize that to some extent he can't either; actual experiments are needed. But if I had a hundred million lying around to invest in something, this book wouldn't make me want to invest it in JP Aerospace. --Neither does the website, incidentally, which looks amateurish. All of which is a shame, because I do think these ideas need to be explored, because at the very least the black sky station--a stable city sitting atop the atmosphere, where the sky is permanently black--is a stunning concept that could become a lucrative tourist and research destination. It deserves investment, and Powell's other ideas deserve some investigation.
Floating to Space deserves to be bought and read, too. It deserves, in fact, better than it's likely to get.
Jun 04, 2008
First review of Pirate Sun
Locus magazine calls my world Virga "one of the most intriguing and enjoyable story-spaces of recent devising."
I always eagerly await my reviews in Locus, but luckily they've been reviewing my Virga series well in advance of the books' arrival. Pirate Sun will be published in August, but in the June, 2008 issue of Locus Russell Letson reveals all. Though there's no easy pull-quotes from his review, it's clear that he really enjoyed the book.
Actually, reading this review made me realize just how byzantine a storyline I've crafted:
Chaison wants to get back to Slipstream, but first he has to hide out in Falcon Formation, which turns out to be threatened with invasion by the neighboring nation of Gretels and to be harboring a resistance movement against its own authoritarian government. Elsewhere, the defeated nation of Aerie... has developed another underground... if that weren't complicated enough, Chaison is being hunted by agents of his own government... an action that has caused turmoil in Slipstream and a crisis in the rule of the Pilot. Oh, and...
Well, it goes on. All I can say is, it seemed pretty simple to me as I was writing it.
As Letson points out (with some glee), Pirate Sun wraps up the main plotlines introduced in Sun of Suns, but doesn't answer all questions. As he puts it, "even three volumes seems much too short a ride for the possibilities offered by Virga"--and I agree. I'm currently putting the finishing touches on The Sunless Countries and (bonus!) I'm writing some Virga short stories and novellas, the first of which should be finished in about a week.
Meanwhile, I'm buoyed up by this first review. It's an auspicious start.
Feb 27, 2008
"Little Brother" pulls no punches. Read it
There is probably no book more likely to be banned this summer than Little Brother. Every kid should read it
Napoleon was denounced as dangerously liberal when he introduced a law forbidding husbands from beating their wives with any wooden implement thicker than their thumb. Even the most hide-bound American conservative is traitorously liberal by the standards of 200 years ago. In fact, the history of these past two centuries could be seen as the record of humanity being dragged, kicking and screaming, out of a nightmare of violence and hatred inconceivable to us now--while at every stage, there's been people desperately trying to drag us back.
This long war--the real long war, and the only one--has its set-backs. It's up to each generation to re-invent civilization, to reaffirm it and to fight once again against fear, prejudice and easy solutions. Often, the weapon of enlightenment for a generation is a book. Sometimes, those books are just so much damned fun to read that you forget, for a while, that their purpose is deadly serious.
Little Brother is huge fun. It's nominally a "young-adult" novel (whatever that means) but it doesn't condescend to its readership. People die in this story. People--good people, whom we cheer for--are tortured. Not everything turns out okay. But there's also triumph here, and it's our triumph, because Little Brother is a novel that is also a resistance-fighter's toolkit, a manual for subversives, and an inspiration. There is probably no book more likely to be banned and burned this summer than Little Brother. Every kid should read it.
Want specifics? Well, the story begins with San Francisco's Bay Bridge being blown up by terrorists. Four thousand people are killed, and a small group of high school students is rounded up in a random sweep by the Department of Homeland Security, and treated very, very badly. One of them, Marcus Yallow, vows revenge when they're released, because his best friend Darryl has not been released. He hasn't even been acknowledged to be missing. He's just gone. (Is this likely? Ask Maher Arar.)
The book is the story of Marcus's (successful) war to take down the DHS. If that were all, Little Brother would still be a great read, a wonderful revenge fantasy against the stupidities of the past eight years. The thing is, that Little Brother doesn't just show Marcus taking down the DHS; it shows how he does it. How you could do it.
This is where Little Brother leaves fictional territory, and becomes the kind of book that gets banned. It teaches kids how to spoof government security measures. It teaches them how to become invisible to the DHS's spying eyes. It unlocks the secrets of cryptography, hacking, and disinformation. It gives all these tools to you. More importantly, it gives all these tools to your kids.
I'm old enough to remember previous salvos in the long war. Back in 1974 Alan Wingard published The Graffiti Gambit, about a TV-signal hacker who scrawls graffiti across the faces of politicians as they're giving speeches on TV. It's a grim book: our hero's arrested, tortured, and eventually lobotomized by the Feds. I was about 12 when I read it, the same age many of Cory's readers are going to be. If you're under 25 today, Little Brother will serve as a good introduction to what's been going on all these years--updated for the 21st century.
If you'd like another perspective on the book, from someone who is under 25, check out Madeline Ashby's review. She's more qualified than me to talk about the impact this novel is going to have. Check out her comments, and then order your copy.