Weekend Update!

Hugo nominations are now being accepted.  If you read something last year that you think deserves recognition, and if you're a member of the 2012, 2013, or 2014 World Science Fiction Convention, you can nominate things for the 2013 ballot.  LoneStarCon 3 is the venue of the World Science Fiction Convention, where the winners will be announced this coming August-September and you can find the rest of the details here.  I think Osama by Lavie Tidhar has my nomination this year.  What do you think?

Warner Bros. announced they're making a new Terminator movie.  What is this, number five or something?  I thought the franchise was adequately concluded with Terminator 2, and went along for Terminator 3 because nothing was better in theaters.  But I never saw Salvation and I have a hard time working up any sort of excitement for numero cinco.

DC has announced its expansion of digital lending to libraries.  That's quite the move and I'm sure one that parents and librarians are going to love (please note the sarcasm in my tone).  While you could make the argument that any reading is good, I beg to differ and suspect that reading at low levels or engaging in prurient fiction will not inspire children toward higher levels of maturity or intelligence.  I'll get off my soapbox now.  Because I love the idea of me.  I'm excited for the opportunity to get my comic fix without having to shell out five bucks an issue.  So go DC.

While I've been saying for a while that on-demand printing is the wave of the future, and with physical book sales dropping nationwide an average of 9%, Penguin finally got wise and has put much of its backlist up for on-demand printing using the Espresso Book Machine.  With the upcoming merger with Random House already in the works, this looks like a seismic shift in the way physical books are distributed and consumed.

And in an effort to improve recognition of great books, the National Book Award will include a longlist in 2013.  Like the Man Booker Award, the National Book Award will choose ten titles (but with a twist, it's ten per category of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young people's literature) for the longlist and then shorten that to the appropriately titled shortlist, which will be announced five weeks later.

NASA got Leonard Nimoy to do the voice-over for a video detailing their Dawn mission, which intends to visit and study two asteroids, named Ceres and Vesta.  Leonord Nimoy, much like Morgan Freeman, could narrate the dictionary.  Check out the video below.

Osama Review . . . Donnie Darko meets L.A. Confidential

Osama, by Lavie Tidhar, is the story of Joe, a surname-less detective hired by a mysterious woman to track down Mike Longshott, author of Osama: Vigilante.  Written in a kind of post-noir Chandler-esque chic, it quickly becomes apparent that Joe inhabits a world markedly different from our own, where certain notable events either never happened, or went off on an oblique.  Tidhar's sense of place is impeccable, from the rain-swept streets of Vientiane to the wilds of London (on both sides of the surreal), to Kabul, where Tidhar evokes ten or more years of bombings compressed into a single instant--the absurdity of this moment,  and others, drawn out by snippets throughout the book.

Absurdity seems to be what this book is about; the absurdly disproportionate response by a superpower against terrorists a world away, the absurdity of a war against terror, the absurdity of men destroying themselves as a last gasp at communicating their own creed.  Mike Longshott is the absurd moniker taken by an Afghan man who glimpses the world beyond the veil, our own world, and attempts to comprehend it absurdity by capturing it in fiction.

On the surface, this is the story of one man's search for Mike Longshott, but classifying this subtle and haunting book as alternative history or science fiction is to miss the point.  Tidhar manages to blur the real and the unreal in such a way that truth and fiction combine in such a way that we're unable to distinguish one from the other.  And maybe that's the point.  Because by the end we're left with a man who's seen beyond the veil of the real into a world of gross surveillance, paranoia, and killing for the sake of terror.  Ultimately, Osama is a haunting soliloquy about this strange new world none of us could have foreseen and hardly any of us understands.

I would recommend this book to a friend.

2012 World Fantasy Award Nominees

Check it out!  The World Fantasy Award Nominees were just announced.   

A Dance with Dragons by G.R.R. Martin made the cut, as did Among Others by Jo Walton.  If you'll recall, both were nominated for the Hugo award this year.

Stephen King makes an appearance, which shouldn't surprise too many people (well, maybe it will because he's not particularly well-known for his fantasy works).

The real surprises are the books that haven't made much of a splash in the genre world.  Osama, by Lavie Tidhar seems like something to keep an eye out for, as well as Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman.  

I'll let you know what I think but until then, post your thoughts in the comments.