Over the weekend, Radio 4 started its Dangerous Visions season – a series of dramas exploring contemporary takes on future dystopias.

Saturday 15th kicked off with ‘The Sleeper’ by Michael Symmons Roberts, while Sunday 16th saw adaptations of Lord of the Flies by William Golding and The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard. Over the coming days there will be more dystopian goodness (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) including more J.G. Ballard, an adaptation of Jane Rogers‘ 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, and ‘Invasion’ by friend-of-SF Gateway and SF author extraordinaire, Philip Palmer.

You can find the programme here; and we remind you that the Dangerous Visions series of radio plays is unrelated to Harlan Ellison‘s groundbreaking New Wave anthology of the same name, which is available as a recently reprinted SF Masterworks paperback and an SF Gateway eBook.

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It’s possible that we may have mentioned, on occasion, in passing, our huge respect and admiration for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

The SFE is, as every right-thinking sentient being should know by now, the indispensable resource for anyone interested in all aspects of science fiction and related fields. But did you know there are a host of added extras that turn it from being ‘merely’ the most authoritative SF reference work on the planet to a source of surprise and discovery. Take, for instance,  the Random Entry buttons: there’s one to choose an entry at random from the entire database and another to choose randomly from only the recent updates.

We just clicked on the Random button and it brought up Ernest Bramah‘s entry. Who, you may well ask, is Ernest Bramah? I have no idea. Never heard of him – but I now know that he was a British writer of the first half of the twentieth century, ‘best-known for two series, the Max Carrados books about a blind detective, all of whose perceptions (except sight) are enormously enhanced [Daredevil! - Gateway Ed.], and a series of tales in which the Chinese Kai Lung tells stories – often to stave off some unpleasant fate, like Scheherazade.’

Cool isn’t it?

So, what are you waiting for? Go be random . . .

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The World Fantasy Convention comes to the UK in October and – in an act of synchronicity so dazzling one might almost suspect it was premeditated – we will be re-launching the Fantasy Masterworks at the same time, with – if we do say so ourselves – an absolutely stunning new cover style.

Behold!
 

 
The Fantasy Masterworks series will relaunch five titles this year, beginning in October with Tim Powers‘ Last Call, John Crowley‘s Aegypt and Lucius Shepard‘s The Dragon Griaule. November will see the publication of Pat Murphy‘s The Falling Woman and December’s release will be Avram Davidson‘s The Phoenix and the Mirror.

More titles will follow in 2014 – a mix of new books and existing Fantasy Masterworks given the new cover treatment. Enjoy!
 

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Roger Zelazny is probably best-remembered for his other-world fantasy sequence, The Chronicles of Amber, but perhaps his finest work – certainly in the field of SF – is Lord of Light, winner of the Hugo Award for best novel.

Imagine a distant world where gods walk as men, but wield vast and hidden powers. Here they have made the stage on which they build a subtle pattern of alliance, love, and deadly enmity. Are they truly immortal? Who are these gods who rule the destiny of a teeming world?

Their names include Brahma, Kali, Krishna and also he who was called Buddha, the Lord of Light, but who now prefers to be known simply as Sam. The gradual unfolding of the story — how the colonization of another planet became a re-enactment of Eastern mythology — is one of the great imaginative feats of modern science fiction

It is, in George R. R. Martin‘s view, ‘one of the best SF novels ever written’ and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls it:

his most sustained single tale, richly conceived and plotted, exhilarating throughout its considerable length. Some of the crew of a human colony ship, which has deposited its settlers on a livable world, have made use of advanced Technology (including Identity Transfer) to ensconce themselves in the role of gods, selecting their role models from the Hindu pantheon, including a fatally attractive She figure. But where Hinduism flourishes, the Buddha – in the shape of the protagonist Sam – must follow; and his liberation of the humans of the planet, who are mortal descendants of the original settlers, takes on aspects of both Prometheus and Coyote the Trickster. At points, Sam may seem just another of Zelazny’s stable of slangy, raunchy, over-loved immortals; but the end effect of the book is liberating, wise, lucid.

And who are we to argue?

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As we’ve noted before in this very blog, we here at SF Gateway are big fans of NASA‘s excellent Astronomy Picture of the Day site. If there’s a better diurnal dose of delight out there on the internets, then we don’t know where it is.

We are also – as all right-thinking sentient beings are – big fans of the late, great Douglas Adams. So when an opportunity comes round to link them both together, you can count us in!

‘Space . . . is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely  mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen . . .’ and so on.

How big? Well, it’s this big. Take it away, APOD . . .

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The ship didn’t even have a name.

This, believe it or not, is the first line in the first science fiction novel that Iain M. Banks published, Consider Phlebas.  It’s too soon for retrospectives – the wound is too fresh – but I suspect Iain would have appreciated the irony of beginning an SF career that brought new wit and invention to the naming of starships with such a line.

No doubt many words of appreciation will be written over the coming days and weeks, many books re-read and many glasses of whisky raised to his memory. For my part, I think I’ll look not to the past but to the future. Rather than thinking of Iain as ‘gone’, I prefer to think of him as ‘away’ – away on a journey without end, travelling the length and breadth of the Culture, collecting new tales and charming all he meets; standing, no doubt, on the bridge of the GCU Dramatic Exit, Or, Thank you And Goodnight.

No, thank you, Iain.

R.I.P. Iain Banks, taken from us too soon with too much still to say. Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this sad time.

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Our current SF Masterwork of the Week is Connie Willis‘s 1998 time-travel comedy-cum-mystery novel To Say Nothing of the Dog.

Ned Henry is a time-travelling historian who specialises in the mid-20th century – currently engaged in researching the bombed-out Coventry Cathedral. He’s also made so many drops into the past that he’s suffering from a dangerously advanced case of ‘time-lag’.

Unfortunately for Ned, an emergency dash to Victorian England is required and he’s the only available historian. But Ned’s time-lag is so bad that he’s not sure what the errand is – which is bad news since, if he fails, history could unravel around him…

Normally at this point, we’d point out any awards the Masterwork in question has won – and we’d be right to do so, as it’s as objective an indication of quality as one can find; only . . .  well . . . this is Connie Willis; everything she writes wins awards! Lincoln’s Dreams won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Doomsday Book won the Hugo, Nebula and a raft of translation awards, the Blackout/All Clear diptych won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards – and, yes, To Say Nothing of the Dog won the Hugo Award for best novel.

All in all, Connie Willis is the proud owner of no fewer than eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards, was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009, and in 2012 was named a SFWA Grandmaster.

Still need more convincing to read To Say Nothing of the Dog? Then we refer you to Cheryl Morgan‘s excellent review at the SF Mistressworks site . . .

To Say Nothing of the Dog is available as an SF Masterworks paperback and an SF Gateway eBook. You can find Connie Willis‘s books via her author page at the SF Gateway and read more about her in her entry at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

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It was a year ago today that the great Ray Bradbury left us.

We don’t note this as an attempt to do a retrospective; it would be foolish and arrogant to purport to be able to put into context a seventy-year writing career in a singe blog post – indeed, his legacy was established long before he died: he was one of the great writers. Of any genre. Of any period. No, we note the anniversary of his passing because he was a great writer and because we love his books. Here are a few of our favourites: Read more…

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It’s that time of the month again, gentlebeings: time to trawl the analytics and see exactly whose favourite book prompted the most people to click through and see what all the fuss was about.

So, without further ado, we are delighted to announce the results for May and, believe it or not, it’s another tie. And – to further stretch incredulity – it’s another tie that involves Kev McVeigh! (How are you doing this, Kev? Seriously, do we have to change our passwords or something?) Kev’s choice was another Josephine Saxton novel Queen of the States, which he praised as ‘a hilarious, sensual but subtly delightful gem’. And joining him is Nick Larter with his choice of Liege-Killer by Christopher Hinz – ‘A Stunning debut. A brilliantly realised world, two compelling heroes in Nick and Gillian and breathtaking baddies in the Paratwa’.

Congratulations, Kev and Nick, your copies of Eric Frank Russell‘s Wasp and Connie Willis‘s To Say Nothing of the Dog will soon be winging their way to your eager hands.

If you have a personal favourite SF Gateway title that you’d like to see highlighted on the home page, just tweet us, email us or leave a message on the forum, giving us the title and why you love it in no more than 25 words and we’ll add you to the roster of Readers’ Choices.

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‘Where Silverberg goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow’

Isaac Asimov

Reflections is a regular column by multi-award-winning SFWA Grandmaster Robert Silverberg, in which he will offer his thoughts on science fiction, literature and the world at large.

This month: ‘John Frum, He Come’

A pernicious scam – a hoax that might be said to have taken on some aspects of a Messianic cult – spread through the United States during the scorching summer of 2012, when thousands of people convinced themselves that the American government was willing to pay up to one thousand dollars toward their utility bills. East and west, north and south, the joyous news spread across the Internet and by automated telephone calls, by text messages, and even by the quaint old process of stuffing printed fliers into your mailbox. People made haste to tell their friends about it through Facebook and the other social media. . .

You can read the rest of the column here, and find Robert Silverberg’s eBooks here. Please note: each column will remain on the site for one month only.

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