Tor Books are working on a new site and if you sign up to be notified about it you get links to free e-books sent to your e-mail! The last book sent out was John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. I have it sitting in my bookshelf since a while back and it’s actually pretty good. Acccording to Scalzi more books are coming, looking forward to it!
There’s also some really nice free reading available at the Baen free library. I recently re-discovered it and read John Ringo’s “A Hymn Before Battle” and “Gust Front”. Both were pretty decent but a bit to hard-core military for my taste.
Jumper was pretty decent. I have been looking forward to it ever since I saw the trailer the first time and I guess the movie is about as good as the trailer. The concept of a small amount of people having the power to teleport is of course very cool, too bad that they all seem to be pretty egocentric people. I really liked the poke at this from a TV newscast in the movie; you see people being caught up in a disaster and needing to be rescued with a comment like “who will rescue them?” from the reporter.
I would like to have seen more of the background of the war between the Jumpers and the Paladins. The story definitely needs that pretty badly, and also some more insight on why David behaves as he does. I did like the movie though, it was highly entertaining and had nice special effects. The ending did suck, didn’t like it much, but it clearly points toward the rumoured sequel.
Alastair Reynolds has posted an excerpt from this upcoming book House of Suns on his site here. Read it now and if you haven’t read his other books you have been missing out on some great Science Fiction!
I’ve finally watched Cloverfield after dodging spoilers on the web for seemingly forever! After looking forward to it ever since the first enigmatic teaser and I really enjoyed it! I understand that it probably doesn’t have a huge mass-market appeal but JJ Abrams rocks, the basic idea of showing only uncut footage from a video camera found in a disaster area is really cool. A lot of people in the audience tonight really didn’t like the ending, but I love that it stayed true to that core idea and didn’t switch to a voicever/military briefing/collage of newspaper articles and news stories/or whatever you might think of as an explanatory ending.
The 1st person perspective showing us bits and pieces of the whole puzzle instead of relying on the normal formula of cutting back and forth from the scene of the disaster to shots from the Pentagon, the White House, local authorities etc. Things like seeing the authorities’ reaction when they realized that one of the main characters had been bitten but then not showing us more than a glimpse of the consequences is brilliant. Of course I still would like to know more; where did the thing/things come from, what happened to it, what happened to New York etc. I don’t think I would like to see a sequel but something like a novel that expanded on this would be great. To stay with the basic idea of storytelling it could consist of several 1st person accounts from different parts of the government, the military, news journalists and other people caught up in the event.
I won’t speculate on what the monster was, what exactly happened etc, check the entry on IMDb instead and every possible theory is already there.
There are quite a few blogs out there related to Science Fiction. These are the ones from my ’scifi authors’ folder in Google Reader (use it, it’s great)
A month or two ago I devoured Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades. If you haven’t already and you’re at least somewhat into military SF (like I am) make sure to add them to your wish list. I will definitely buy a softcover copy of The Last Colony when it arrives next year!
Make sure you check out these trailers for the upcoming seasons of two of my favorite TV shows: Lost and Battlestar Galactica! Really looking forward to watching new episodes of these!
Charles Stross has a new post on his blog with details of publications of both new books and paperback editions of earlier books here.
The last books of his I read was the excellent Glasshouse and Accelerando , and I’m looking forward to the upcoming ones! Check out his earlier works as well, for instance Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, highly recommended!
Keeping track of publications of paperback editions in general is far from easy considering the difference in both price, format, release dates etc between the UK and US. Some authors books seem to take forever to move from hardcover to softcover, other ones switches so quickly that it might be hard to get hold of the hardcover edition if you don’t keep track. I do tend to by mostly paperbacks since they are easier to store and the lower price also enables me to buy more books than I otherwise could. There are of course exceptions, either books from favorite authors (last one was The Dreaming Void by Peter Hamilton) or hardcover editions on sale.
For people who can read Swedish my favorite resource for information on new books is SF-bokhandeln and I guess there must be similar lists available in English somewhere. I’m afraid I don’t know of any good ones, but that is probably since I haven’t looked hard enough.
