David Weber finally has a proper website, and an extremely nice one at that.  I love an extensive author site, especially one like this that includes a lot of Weber’s own commentary on his books.  It’s unfortunate that more writers don’t have something like this, since books- and especially SF books- are precisely the kind of thing that can be greatly enriched by supplementary information for a look into the thoughts of the creator.

Tobias Buckell has a post about his experience as a lecturer at Shared Worlds camp, a creative writing program for teenagers with a focus on worldbuilding.  It sounds extremely cool, though reading about it brings back some unfortunate childhood memories about my disastrous week at Lutheran summer camp.  (Jason Voorhees is never around when you need him.)

This is a real shame: Jim Baen’s Universe magazine is shutting down next year.  Editor Eric Flint explains here.

Grasping for the Wind is having a second iteration of its popular Book Reviewers Linkup Meme.  If you have a blog about science fiction or fantasy and want to add it, or just want to see what is probably the most exhaustive list of SF blogs ever compiled, check it out.

Author Tobias Buckell has been hospitalized with a possible heart problem.  He’s been blogging on the experience from the hospital, and generally displaying more fortitude than I imagine I would under the circumstances.  Few things suck more than being in a hospital bed day after day, so I hope you’ll go over to his blog and give him your best wishes.

My new column at Diverse Nerd Association is up, with coverage of recent video gaming news, Sean Williams’ Star Wars tie-in novel, the perils of translation software, and wanton substance abuse.  Enjoy.

At Grasping for the Wind, I participated in the latest Ask the Bloggers on the issue of maps in books.

And, finally V&C&U Buckell-o-thon 2008 comes to a triumphant close with part 2 of my interview with Tobias Buckell at Crucial Taunt.

Mr review of Tobias Buckell’s Sly Mongoose is up at FantasyBookSpot.  Have a look.

OK, here’s something I’m pretty excited about.  Part one of my interview with Tobias Buckell is online at Crucial Taunt.  The interview was a good bit bigger longer than my regular Crucial taunt review column, so stay tuned for part two of the interview next week!

Tobias Buckell is an author I became aware of only a few months ago, when I read and greatly enjoyed his debut Crystal Rain. (See my review of that here) Ragamuffin takes place in the same universe, but offers a very different kind of story.

Hundreds of years from now, the mysterious alien Satraps rule an empire of 48 worlds and several subordinate species, linked together by chains of wormholes. Humans occupy the bottom rung of this society; legally emancipated from the servitude they suffered after the invasion of Earth, they remain an impoverished and despised caste, barred from participation in many areas of society and often physically confined to reservations and human ghettos. Earth itself is lost, the wormhole leading there cut off for centuries.

A mysterious human woman named Nashara travels undetected through the Satrapy. She has come from Chimson, another human world that has been cut off from the wormhole network and remains free. Snuck into the Satrapy by a decades-long interstellar journey at slower-than-light speed, she carries technology that could radically upset the status quo. She seeks out the Ragamuffins, human interstellar traders and raiders who share a common heritage with the people of Chimson. The Ragamuffins have their base in a barren system that contains the dead wormhole that once linked to another human world, one once known as New Anegada. To accomplish her mission, Nashara must deal with the Hongguo, human collaborators who help police the human population and its technology on behalf of the Satraps, and the League of Human Affairs, a group that also wants to throw off humanity’s oppressors- and has no problem with trying to conscript Nashara into their plans. The Satraps themselves have grown more brutal, and may have decided that humans are more trouble than they’re worth. And beyond the dead wormhole to New Anegada, something else is stirring…

Ragamuffinis an exciting book and a worthy successor to Crystal Rain that takes the universe of that book and throws it into an interesting new light. Crystal Rain was set on a single world where steam engines, telegraphs, and dirigibles were on the cutting edge of technology, with poorly understood remnants of advanced scientific knowledge scattered about. Ragamuffin expands the scope enormously, with a story that spans an enormously advanced interstellar empire. Some fans of Crystal Rain may dislike the shift to a more space opera feel, but I enjoyed seeing Buckell take the same fictional universe and successfully do a very different story.

The story itself is enjoyable, with a great deal of action and some intriguing revelations about both the nature of events in Crystal Rain and the wider universe shown in Ragamuffin. My only complaint is that, towards the climax, some fairly major events that I would have liked to know more about happen offstage. It doesn’t bother me too much- it was more or less unavoidable, short of creating completely new viewpoint characters unrelated to the main plot- but it was still a bit disappointing to have only secondhand accounts of something that sounded very interesting. The climax Buckell does show directly, however, is nevertheless quite satisfying. The ending is very poignant, especially if you’ve read Crystal Rain.

The setting is interesting and well-done. Much of Satrapy society is built around lamina, omnipresent computer networks that people access via neural implants or hand-held screens that provide vast amounts of data about your surroundings- your location, directions, the identity of people in the vicinity, and even things like comments other people have left about each other- for instance, Nashara uses a lamina screen to look up what customers have said about a street vendor. They also have military applications, such as mentally linking to the controls of a spacecraft. They have a more sinister side, however- lamina implants transmit data by putting it into your field of vision, which means someone who controls the network can control what people see.

The book was a nominee for the Prometheus Award given by the Libertarian Futurist Society, and Buckell’s skillful portrayal of the workings of Satrapy society and the plight of humans within it makes the nomination well-deserved. Much of the domination and impoverishment of humans is achieved through realistically low-key means such as restrictions on human travel and laws that forbid humans or human firms from making certain products themselves. Real-world oppression and exploitation isn’t always as dramatic and shocking as secret police hauling people to the gulag, corpses piled into mass graves, or slaves toiling under the threat of an overseer’s lash, and Buckell does a very good job illustrating this important truth.

I would strongly recommend Ragamuffin to science fiction readers. You’ll get more out of it by reading Crystal Rain first, but it stands quite well on its own. If you liked Crystal Rain, or you enjoy action-adventure stories or space opera with a gritty edge to it, Ragamuffin is well worth reading.

I love the 4^th of July. Growing up, several of my summers revolved principally around the massive horde of illegal fireworks and flammable materials my friend who lived next door possessed, so this is usually a great day for me. Unfortunately, the universe delivered an emotional straight knee directly to my groin earlier this week, so I’m less celebratory than usual. Neither getting a copy of Neal Asher’s Polity Agent from ebay nor spending last night at my local bar getting Phenylethylamine Girl (previously introduced here) to laugh at my goofy childhood anecdotes has been able to lift me out of my bad mood.

On the plus side, I see that Tobias Buckell linked to my Crystal Rain review at Crucial Taunt. Look for the next edition of my column there in a few days, and a new review here as well. Reading Buckell actually helped some poorly organized thoughts I’d been having for a while about race and science fiction to finally congeal, so watch for that too.

My new Crucial Taunt column is up, reviewing Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain. I’m currently reading his second book, Ragamuffin, which is fantastic so far.

I am almost never willing to pay the cost of a new hardcover book. I made one of my rare exceptions recently, however, because Alastair Reynolds’ The Prefect is out in the United States. In the other Revelation Space books we hear a lot about the golden age of Yellowstone and the Glitter Band, but all we ever saw was the decaying wreckage of that society. Writing my post about utopias in science fiction has put me in the mood for this sort of thing. I’m enjoying it quite a bit so far, and it definitely seems to have that Alastair Reynolds weirdness/creepiness I love.

Equally cool- cooler, actually, because it was free- is the ARC of Tobias Buckell’s Sly Mongoose that just came in the mail from FantasyBookSpot. I just recently became a Buckell fan after I read Crystal Rain and loved it, so I’m definitely excited about this one.