This substantial volume, titled Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, is a very impressive piece of work indeed – Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull must be the people knowing most about JRR Tolkien’s works in the world – and now whey share their knowledge with us. If you’ve read all the books in the canon, the Silmarillion, the Lost Tales, the Unfinished Tales, and all the other bits JRR kept just for his reference, and Christopher dredged up and published; and you still want more, then you’ve just hit gold. This the complete view of the texts and the world LOTR plays in that Tolkien never completed.
Let’s go through the sections of the book to give you an idea of what you’re looking at:
The first, short Preface is by the Authors, detailing how their work with the various books and editions, pulling them all together, correcting spelling and setting errors introduced over time, detecting and ironing out timing errors in parallel streams, and a general description of the huge endeavour that lead to the latest, corrected edition of the Tolkien books, and this volume, of course.
The next part is a short History of when Tolkien wrote what, re-wrote what, dealt with with publisher, and what came of it etc. This is followed by a chapter on Chronologies, Calendars, and Moons (no kidding!) across the entire story arc; a section on the various Maps and their origins and variants; the forewords to the 1st and 2nd edition (both by Tolkien), analyzed and commented; and finally a Prologue, anayzing and describing the world the stories play in, their history, flora, fauna, and of course people. This last bit is collected from discourses on the topic across all the books, and must the definitive overview over Middle Earth.
Then we hit the main part of the book, which consists of the Author’s work on the new, corrected edition of LOTR. It follows the 6 books, and details, chapter by chapter, sometimes line by line, the various editions of the text, relevant background information from other Tolkien books outside the LOTR series, and corrections made to wording, sentence structure, timings, moon phases (oh yes!) etc. Fascinating in short bursts, absolutely brain numbing in anything longer.
We are sad to hear that the rather excellent World SF Blog has ceased to publish new content.
For four years Editor-in-Chief Lavie Tidhar, with Associate Editor Charles A. Tan and Fiction Editors Debbie Moorhouse and Sarah Newton brought us information, links, interviews, and both original and re-published short fiction from around the world - as a loud, insistent, and much appreciated voice pointing us towards new, and different SF outside the US/UK-centric publishing world; and we would like to thank them for their efforts.
Worth a visit while the site is still there (I presume it will be for a while), to tide us over whilst we figure out who will fill the void that they leave.
The Ships of Aleph is a Novelette by Jaine Fenn, published as a chapbook by the Birmingham Science Fictino Group, for the occasion of Novacon 42, where Jaine was Guest of Honour.
The cover is, as usual for these Novacon Specials, by the esteemed 'Space Artist' David A Hardy - you can find out more about him and his art on AstroArt.org.
The story follows the viewpoint of a boy, born into a medieval setting, whose intelligence and questioning mind puts him at odds with his environment. He is offered a place on an exploratory ship, which tries to find out what there is outside the ‘current’ which is considered the end of the navigable sea.
The ship sails over the edge of the world, only for the protagonist to discover that there’s more to his environment than he imagined in his wildest dreams. No, I won’t spoil your enjoyment, read it for yourself!
This is an fun and interesting take on a standard trope, with some reversals and twists I didn’t see coming, but which I rather enjoyed.
Recommended reading if you can get your hands on one of the 300 printed copies (no idea if this will become available online at some point)!
The Rapture of the Nerds is the first Novel-length collaboration between Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross after several short stories written together. They say that they enjoy themselves doing so, and the results strongly supports that notion...
The subtitle for the book is A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations. Well, the Singularity has been and gone 46 years ago, and the inner Solar System consists of post-singularity swarming densethinker clades, running in Dyson Spheres of smart matter as part of a Matryoshka Brain. Except for Earth, and the lighthouse-like beam of light from the Sun towards it (what a waste of matter and energy!). Posthumanity mainly lives in the cloud, with the exception of some technology refuseniks like Huw, our main protagonist, and the remains of the US in South Carolina which read like a MacLeod motif (think America Offline, with added Religion): presented with their opportunity in the aftermath of the Geek Rapture, they are happy like evangelical pigs in shit – plenty to rail against, plenty of fossil fuel, plenty of firearms. What more could they possibly need? The Fallen Baptist Congregations and their warped belief systems and fall-back into proto-medieval habits is all too familiar and believable. Yes, the authors poke fun at it, but it's scary nevertheless... Oh, and the Social Situations. Yes, there are, but I did not find them as awkward and cringe-worthy as they could have been. Phew...
Charles Stross has posted a short story called Bit Rot on his blog - apparently this is the missing link between Saturn's Children (review here) and the soon-to-be-released Neptune's Brood (sorry, haven't read it yet).
It's available from his blog (see link above, below, and on the picture to the right) in ePub, Kindle, and HTML format.
The short is entertaining enough if not overly complex, but is, at least for me, screaming for more (and no, I don't think Charlie will find time to flesh this thread out anytime soon).
Here's an old review of Motel of the Mysteries, a not exactly brand new book by David Macaulay - an irresistible SF Archaeology spoof, describing a dig into a late-20th century site, and the interpretation thereof. Thought provoking, side-splitting, and highly readable.
If you’ve ever talked to anyone involved with finding, digging up, and defining things people from the distant past left behind in the ground, then you know there’s a huge chasm of disdain between some of the professions involved in this. Especially, there’s not much love lost between the people who find, dig up, and document the finds (aka the Archaeologists), and the people whose job it is to make sense of what was found, what it is, how it was used, and what it meant to its owner (aka Anthropologists). A stone axe – clear case, usually, unless it’s unused and special, in which case it was ceremonial, indicating its owners’ wealth and special status. A strangely shaped, carefully crafted, obviously expensive and unusual thingamajig? Must be ceremonial (cue drum roll for running gag). Why do I mention this here? Well, this is an SF-Archaeology story, but nearly all the funny bits derive from that dichotomy – and mostly they’re poking fun at the interpretation of what’s being found.
The story plays in the year 4022 AD. This in itself is fairly arbitrarily chosen (read: far in the future), and is, in my opinion, ways too far out for what is being found. But let’s not jump ahead, or have common sense get in the way of a good spoof, ok?. Earth, and specifically North America, where this story plays, encountered an ecological catastrophe in 1985. The book is fairly vague about what happened, and the bits it conveys are not all that believable, but who cares – no impact here (and who says all the theories about meteorites, climate change etc in museums are any better?). 20th century society and ‘culture’, as we know/knew it, was more or less erased. Very few records and memories remain, and society has regressed to some Victorian model, but with more technology it seems.
