1. John Scalzi reads in the U District tonight. Fuzzy Nation is a very buzzed-about sci-fi novel about a space prospecter who comes across a race of small fuzzy bipedal aliens. Scalzi is an excellent author. Unfortunately, his book covers are always crap.
2. Mary Doria Russell is the author of The Sparrow, which a novel that is loved by sci-fi nerds and mainstream bookclubs alike. She’s reading at the downtown branch of the library tonight from her new novel Doc, which is a fictional biography of Doc Holliday.
3. Jim Shepard’s You Think That’s Bad is a new collection of short stories. It includes an especially good story about the making of Godzilla that was published as a novella a short while ago. He’s at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight.
4. For more, check the reading calendar.
Just on the face of it, I think Mr. Scalzi owes Ursula some royalties for ripping off THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST.
I didn’t like The Sparrow. It was creative and had its interesting bits, certainly, but the characters were two-dimensional at best and it was preachy. I might give that Doc Holliday thing a chance, though. Sounds cool.
I fuckin’ adore John Scalzi, though.
I loved the covers for the Old Man’s War books.
They didn’t have much to do with the stories, but they were lovely
Just in case people don’t know this (my guess is that they probably have figured it out, but you never know), authors rarely have control over their cover artwork. Especially genre writers. Old science fiction fanzines are filled with grumpy editorials, LOCs (letters of comment), and columns from writers griping about DAW, etc., making their work look like shit to the consumer. (Of special joy to the authors are the covers assigned to artists who haven’t gotten anywhere near reading the book, and just throw in the kind of shit people expect on SF/fantasy book covers — spaceships and planets on existential new wave experiments about urban struggle; half-clad slave women and macho military dudes on the front of fairly left wing dystopian prophecies involving empaths, etc.)
And you all talk about nerd cred…
C’mon people it’s a Little Fuzzy book!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Fuzz…
H. Beam Piper wrote the first one back in 1962.
Mary Doria Russell’s new book is going to help a wonderful cause! Because Doc Holliday was born with a cleft palate Mary is matching donations from her readers to go to Smile Train , helping the organization to continue their work with cleft palate children around the world! It is such a great charity.. please consider donating
http://www.marydoriarussell.net/2011/11/…