Paul McAuley looks at important works of James Blish

Link.

A few comments on the stories I've read from the Essential James Blish section at the end of his post:

1. I've read 4 of the 5 short stories he mentions, all famous ones: "Beep", "Common Time", "How Beautiful With Banners", "Surface Tension" (download MP3).
   
   First two are essentially about arcane physics & didn't really work for me, but last two are good ones. "Common Time" is one of the very few stories that speculate on time dilation from the point of view of those inside an FTL ship.
2. I've read his space opera fix up, "Cities in Flight". Good adventure, but only after I mentally learned to ignore his space traveling Manhattan magically uprooted from its New York location & with atmosphere, hydrosphere, etc still viable. I could never really develop the suspension of belief needed for uprooted cities, though, at some stage, I began thinking of them as just other magical ships of space opera.

Related: Stories of Paul McAuley, James Blish.

Two classes of disaster stories

From Paul McAuley's "When It Changed":

1. "disaster is so complete and overwhelming, and so sudden, that it forms a distinct and abrupt break with its past (our present)." He lists several examples.
2. "The catastrophe is not caused by one thing but is woven from many causes. And these do not cause an abrupt change and a clean break with the past, but drive a slow and complex process of transformation with an unclear endpoint... They tends towards the satiric mode; lean towards the dystopian but don’t entirely embrace it." Examples: "Bruce Sterling’s Distraction, my own Fairyland."

Related: Stories of Paul McAuley.

Paul McAuley's personal list of essential SF novels

Link. [via James Nicoll]

Related: "best of" lists.

Gary K Wolfe names his last year's pick from normal, revolutionary, & middle ground scifi novels

At Locus Roundtable.

For a "best of" list, his is a slightly unusual post - names 1 novel each that represents the familiar, future, & middle ground:

1. Normal: "Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War. In terms of the familiar literary merits of character, plot, and style, it’s one of his very best novels—but as SF it’s essentially conservative, representing a 23rd-century interplanetary war of the sort we’ve seen often before, but seldom with such attention to current science and such political and psychological acumen."
2. Revolutionary: "Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which may draw on a number of familiar SF tropes, but which seems to violate nearly every principle we’ve inherited about what SF usually is—in terms not only of its massive length, its leisurely pacing (at least in the opening few hundred pages), its language, its humor, its preoccupations with systems, puzzles, and entire philosophical systems for their own sake. Like much revolutionary science, it may take some years for us to realize its full effect on the field, as people actually begin to finish it."
3. Blend: "Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time ... both hauntingly familiar and energetically innovative."

Related: "best of" lists.

* Paul McAuley's "The Passenger" (short story)

Some space farers "rescue" a little girl from an apparently abandoned ship with all dead, & she turns out to be something else (an alien or something, I don't quite recall).

Collected in.

1. Gardner Dozois (Ed)'s "The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection" (2003).
   

Fact sheet.

First published: ...
Rating: B

Note: Why is this post so short?