January is nearing its end. How’d that happen? I thought…
Anyway, I put a new review up over at My Other Blog, the Proximal Eye, about Joe Haldeman’s latest. Right now, though, I’m reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which has been recommended to me countless times by now and it seems half the people I work with at Left Bank Books are currently reading it. So Friday I finally sat down with it and started and as of this morning I’m halfway through. I’ll tell you what I think of it when I finish, but so far I’m suitably impressed, especially now that I’m into the Skiffy section with the clones.
I used to cringe when someone from the “mainstream” decided to go slumming and write a science fiction novel. They’ve seldom done a good job in the past, but that seems to be changing. It would be easy to say “How could it not?” given the world we live in today. Barring space travel and androids, we live daily with much that was promised us, as exemplified in Star Trek. (When I read about 3-D copiers my hair stood on end, a genuine “shit…” response.) But we moved into it so smoothly, albeit so quickly, no one seemed to notice that we were living in the future!
Maybe more people noticed than I thought. A lot of writers who in the past I would never have expected to do it well have done credible to excellent science fiction or at least SF-related fantasy that my flinch reflex when a new one comes out is relatively small now. Mitchell is handling it very well.
Meantime, I’m just about through with the rearrangement of my office, so much so that I’ve been slacking off and trying to write. I have a couple of short stories in the works that are eluding resolution (one of which is actually called that) and I have a pair of novels to write this coming year.
So it’s the last week of January and I’m having no luck slowing things down time-wise so that I can actually do the work.
Stay tuned. All will be well. Promise.
