Iain M. Banks has a new Culture novel coming out in February: “Matter”.

I couldn’t tell you today when I first heard of Iain M. Banks (the “M.” is for science fiction; he writes non-science-fiction without the “M.”) or first read one of his books, but I remember clearly that it was “Player of Games” and that I was immediately hooked.

Banks’ Culture resembled the US as I most often thought of it in the 90’s: large, powerful, its tail sometimes unaware of what its head was doing, able to do great damage simply by shrugging, sufficiently aware of itself to have a sense of guilt.

The Culture is almost an anti-Federation: no laws, machine Minds, hedonistic, guilt-ridden. Very gray.

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Amazon’s trying really hard to get your Harry Potter business. The final book of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is out in a little over a week. As usual, bookstores are planning midnight parties on Friday night, July 20th, to celebrate the release of the book.

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Spring’s publishing schedule is full of science fiction books I’m anxious to read. Here’s the first batch of them… click on the cover or title to check them out on Amazon.com; click on the author’s name to see the author on Amazon.

Robert J. Sawyer’s “Rollback” (3 April 2007)

A few years ago it seemed that many of my favorite writers were suddenly dead - and if they weren’t dead, they were at least not publishing enough to keep me busy. I started picking up more books because the covers looked good or because Amazon told me that I should consume - I mean read - books that it recommended. Robert J. Sawyer was one of the new authors I tried, and I went through quite a few of his books rapidly once I started reading him. Possibly my favorite was “Calculating God”, a story about an alien landing in Toronto whose first words are “Take me to a paleontologist”.

Sawyer’s a decent writer, smart, rational and (as a Canadian) never above taking a few digs at the US. His latest book looks to be a story about the second received message from aliens, with a focus on the woman who decoded the first message, her failed attempt at rejuvenation and her husband’s successful attempt.

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Part of my childhood I grew up in rural Maine, desperate for stimulation. There were a few kids my age nearby and fortunately we became friends pretty quickly, but my mind was hungry. I was all over the map, from learning from Radio Shack electronics kits my father would get me to taking apart calculators and reading Scientific American. I liked electronics, chemistry, math, computers, physics, astronomy and cosmology.

That was long enough ago that my sense of time is skewed. I have to work out when things happened by relating them to other things and deriving the dates and my age. Two of the most important things that I remember learning from are James Burke’s “Connections” and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and without looking them up online and seeing when they aired (Connections was filmed in 1978 but I’m not 100% certain when I saw it, and Cosmos in 1980), I was unsure how old I was when I saw them. It turns out I was older than I thought; I was 16 in 1980. I thought I’d seen them when I was younger… but many of my memories of TV from then are confused; were we living in the country or the city? When did we get cable? When did I see music videos? Were both my parents still there, or one, or none?
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I felt very odd when I first ran across Canadian science fiction author and biologist Peter Watts’ work - “Peter Watts” was the name of a major character, sometimes-hero, sometimes-villain, always mysterious, in my favorite television show ever, “Millennium”. So of course I was surprised when I found that there’s a real person named Peter Watts, writing science fiction.

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Do you have a food lover (and by this I don’t mean McDonald’s addict) in your life who you’d like to get a holiday gift for but haven’t got a clue what to get? Here are ten suggestions for you.
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Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem has apparently died at age 84.

You most likely know Lem from Solaris (hate the new cover!)… he has a long history of writing literary, intellectual science fiction and strange conflict with the US science fiction community (and particularly Philip K. Dick).
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Robert Anton Wilson, o-author of "new">The Illuminatus! Trilogy, former editor for Playboy, lecturer, philosopher, maybe-mystic, model advocate, Korzybski-quoter…

Maybe Logic brought a bit of a tear to my eye. I’ve been fond of Robert Anton Wilson for many years; I haven’t seen much material from him in the last few years. His “Historical Illuminatus! Chronicles” seems to have put several publishers out of business, and I despair of ever seeing the final book. I’ve wondered what’s been up with him… he’s getting older (he’s 74 years old now); his wife Arlen passed away in 1999. I’ve often lovingly and respectfully referred to him as a “dumpy old crackpot”. He’s looking older, crackpot-ier, but less dumpy. He’s also spending most of his time in a wheelchair.
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One happy book discovery I’ve made in the last few years is the Revelation Space series of science fiction books by Alastair Reynolds. The series runs four books and two novellas (collected in a single book).

Technorati Tags: alastairreynolds, book, johnromkey, puppy

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