Common Themes

John Harris is an artist with a very recognizable style; the images here are book covers for Ender’s Game and Speaker For The Dead, both by Orson Scott Card. His website states:

John has now spent thirty years illustrating work by some of the best science fiction writers… Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Frederik Pohl, Orson Scott Card, Samuel R Delany, Ben Bova, Allen Steele, and many more.

Odds are, if you’re an avid science-fiction reader, you’ve seen some of John’s work. Check out his website for more information, and this excellent post for many more images!

I found these great covers here (via Brian.)

Album covers are strange and I don’t dig them up to post here nearly often enough… should I make this a more regular feature? Comments?

Science fiction and spaceflight have great influence on each other, and have done for centuries. (Yes, plural! Some very important fiction came out of the 19th century that had great impact on spaceflight and orbital mechanics.)

One great way to get acquainted with new (and old) authors in the sci-fi genre is to pick up an anthology or two. The book featured here is the 2008 Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology — featuring the best stories published each year, this anthology is consistently good, with a lot of variety in authors and story types. I find it helpful to pick up a Year’s Best every so often, to introduce myself to new authors, or old authors I’ve not come across. If you like a story, you can drop that author’s name into Google or Amazon and see what else they have to offer!

The only downside of this particular anthology is that all the work featured is (as the name implies) very new, so those wishing to familiarize themselves with earlier works or authors gone before will be out of luck. (I’ll be featuring some anthologies that fill in this gap nicely later on this week!)

I was offered a review copy of Mars Life by Ben Bova — it’s the first time I’ve agreed to review something sight-unseen. I don’t read as much hard-sf as space opera, so this will be a bit different than most reviews I plan for future posts, but hey, I’m game….

Mars Life concludes the saga started by Mars and Return to Mars, but explains itself well enough from the start that it can easily be read on its own. As the title suggests, the plot revolves around the controversial discovery of ancient, now-extinct intelligent life on Mars, and how this discovery impacts (and is impacted by) religious and political movements back home. The author earnestly expresses his opinions in the book, and as such, it may not be for all fans. Since the plot deals with very current hot-points, I have a feeling people will either love the religious and political angles, or find them profoundly offensive.

The setting is what I call “plausible future” — respecting physical/natural constraints, technology has clearly advanced, yet nothing mentioned strikes the reader as particularly far-fetched. The Moon is its own nation, with permanent colonies; a base has been established on Mars. The book has a lot of science in it, but doesn’t overload the reader with jargon.

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One of the ways I spend my time is by devouring books whole reading science fiction (and fantasy.) I’ve always leaned toward the space opera camp in sci-fi, and although I’m not finished with it yet (at over 900 pages, I’m sure you’ll forgive me), I can heartily recommend The Space Opera Renaissance, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. This book is a blow-by-blow survey of the development of space opera, what it meant when it started (not what you’d think!), what it means now, and the best examples of every era. What I find unique is that it also includes a few parodies of the sub-genre, like Clive Jackson’s The Swordsmen of Varnis (the ending lives on as a visual gag in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark), commentary on what these authors were going for, and in some cases, how the parody caused a resurgence of interest in space opera.

Stories range from a few pages to over 100 pages in length, and the book offers a broad spectrum of authors, from forefathers of science fiction to present-day greats. It’s a great way to dabble in the sub-genre, and find new authors to read. (There’s also a lovely hardcover edition, if you’re interested.)