A Gathering of Links

News item: Connie Willis was named the 2011 recipient SFWA Grand Master Award. (follow here)

News item: Gene Wolfe will be celebrated with the Fuller Award, a new Chicago-area literary award, and an evening of entertainment. (follow here)

Samuel R. Delany: "I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing.”
-- From a Paris Review interview. (follow here)

William Gibson: “E. M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me -- that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream.”
-- From a Paris Review interview. (follow here)

"He has handed us a map to his own magic doorways." From the New York Times review by Pagan Kennedy of William Gibson’s new book of essays Distrust That Particular Flavor. (follow here)

"At the core of sf lies the experience of science ... The Mars and stars and digital deserts of our best novels are, finally, to be taken as real, as if to say: life isn’t like this, it is this." Gregory Benford on rereading The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998) by Thomas M. Disch (via SanJuanJon). (follow here)

Soviet-era visions of Mars (via BLDGBLOG). (follow here)

"Extra(ordinary) People is my favorite of Russ’s collections, a forceful, beautiful, astounding book that leaves me low on words to compensate for how I respond to it." Brit Mandelo reads Joanna Russ's Extra(ordinary) People (1984). (follow here: part one and part two)

Elizabeth Hand has two novels forthcoming, Available Dark, due February 2012, and Radiant Days, due April 2012. Hand was recently interviewed on The Coode Street Podcast (follow here). Hand writes about six favorite books (follow here).

Jeff VanderMeer's essay on overlooked books from 2011 convinced me to spend cold hard cash for several books that I had managed to miss (follow here).

VanderMeer gives a rundown of the 2011 nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award, in which he calls Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse "a brilliant book." I'm reading it right now and couldn't agree more. (follow here)

William Gibson's Top Ten SF Novels

William Gibson (his new novel, Zero History, is expected this September) has chosen his top ten science fiction novels:

• Tiger! Tiger! (The Stars My Destination) (1956) by Alfred Bester
• The Crystal World (1966) by J.G. Ballard
• Pavane (1968) by Keith Roberts
• 334 (1972) by Thomas M. Disch
• The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman
• Dhalgren (1975) by Samuel R. Delany
• Arslan (1976) by M.J. Engh
• Great Work of Time (1991) by John Crowley
• Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993) by Jack Womack
• Holy Fire (1996) by Bruce Sterling

This is an exceptional list. If you google "top ten science fiction novels" you'll get some pretty low-grade results. Gibson's list looks even better by comparison. Note Gibson's parameters: novels only and the time frame is 1956 to 1996. I've read eight of the ten (not the Ballard or Womack), but I know enough about those two novels to respect their inclusion. I could argue with some of the choices. The list is short on women (Mary Jane Engh is on her own). I would add Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974). If there's only one novel from the 1950s I might favor Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), but I will concede that the Bester novel is just as important. For Crowley, I might have gone with Engine Summer (1979); or for Sterling, I might have chosen Schismatrix (1985). These are minor quibbles. I might have to go back and re-read Great Work of Time. Holy Fire is a favorite of mine and it is probably Sterling's most accomplished novel, but Schismatrix was the first Sterling novel I read and sometimes it is hard to separate my person experience of a novel from my critical view of a novel.

Be sure to read Gibson's brief commentary on each title on his list.