" C. S. Lewis' 'Narnia' books and moral fantasy in general." Yep, be there in time and reserve your seats! ->Into the Wardrobe : a C. S. Lewis web site

->Narnia Fans go here...

->The wallpapers that Alex has on his computer at home...

Here is a really nice collection of covers from Covers of American pulp magazine 'Weird Tales'(1923 till 1943)

Here is an article in the New York Times about Microsoft co-founder Paul Allens (so, this is what rich geeks do with all their money!) Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. It looks worthwhile visiting if you're in the area, freaks!

HOT: NEW LINE CINEMA HIRES OSCAR®-WINNING WRITER CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON TO ADAPT JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL

So, the topic of the next meeting (May 3rd) will be "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" by Susanna Clarke.

Bonus-Tracks: -Here is Susanna Clarke's short story, The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse, the downloadable PDF of The Raven from March 9th, 1809 and more

"It's spring training at Carnegie Mellon's MultiRobot Lab. On a 6-by-4-meter, green-felt field, little robot dogs run through drills: shooting, passing, goaltending. Every Wednesday, the Sony AIBOs line up for a full scrimmage, their heads swiveling to find the ball and their rumps pointed to the sky. It's last week's code against this week's code—may the best robots win."

Full story at slate.com : Attack of the Soccer Robots

"Richard Kadrey is one of the original guard of cyberpunk authors; his Metrophage is a classic of the genre. He's just posted the full text of his latest novel, Blind Shrike, to the web as a free PDF download.

The book is titled Blind Shrike. It's not a rotten book, I think. In fact, it's a pretty traditional fantasy quest, just one that, to me, makes sense in George W. Bush's America. The hero of the story is on a quest for his own lost ignorance and innocence. He really doesn't want to know too much because, as many of us have learned, too much information is a soul-sucking pain in the ass. In the book you'll also find magic and monsters, angels and demons, magical swords and forbidden books. And blimps. Every fantasy novel should have at least one blimp.

So, with a last blurt of carnival barking, I now give you Blind Shrike. You might like it or you might hate it. I hope that you download it and enjoy it. But if you don't, tough. It's free. Don't write me any stupid emails. Instead, go write your own damned book."

Get it here!

Found at boingboing.net!

"EarthCore is the world's first podcast-only novel: you can't find it in stores, you can't download the full audio, and the only way to find out what happens is to subscribe to the podcast. This novel is a cross between episodic modern-action fare like "24" and classic sci-fi movies like Predator and Starship Troopers." Get it here!

Special guest: author K. W. Jeter, an old friend of Philip K. Dick who wrote the legendary "Dr. Adder", the sequels to "Blade Runner" and also contributed to the novelisations of Star Wars, Star Trek etc. Food at 8.30 p.m.

kwjeter.com

Bibliography

The K. W. Jeters page at oivas.com has more links!

Sorry, but the voting-modules were all screwed up. Anyway, now they work, but we're having some other technical difficulties here with second votes and memberships that get lost and some problem with new recruits trying to register.....

A knockout event for sf & fantasy authors. Or, a self-help attempt by the SF & Fantasy meeting to inject more debate into monthly conversations*. Or a serious determination by Socratic method of underlying values implicit in SF & Fantasy. Or a piece of fun.

Over the next 6-9 months we'll be arguing our way through one main event and two subsidiaries. You can join in by:

1. Forecasting final results.
2. Voting in the various rounds (in the event of a close result here, non-attendees’ votes count)
3. Following write-ups of the action month-by-month. There will be prizes to a total of €100 for the best comments submitted to the website, to be judged by the International Tournament Committee’s spiritual advisor.

Vast sums have been expended on major prizes for the authors, collectable either from the planet Arisia or the Undying Lands. The local pawnbroker is presently mulling over our offer on some silverware.

*In English only

CRITERIA: All authors entered in the tournament must have written several genre-relevant works. This is a compromise list – the 64 authors competing in this tournament are not intended to constitute a definitive list of “the best 64” writers of science fiction or fantasy, but at least half would appear in any such list. Writers whose major works were written before the 60s have been entered in the Seniors’ Tournament. Writers whose works could under no circumstances be described as ‘major’ have been entered in The Other Competition. In our discussions we'll be focusing on how good a writer a particular author is, how good an SF or fantasy writer, and then ignoring such ratings in the vote. This will be taken on the basis of choosing the author it would give you the most pain not to have read**. Specifically, this should ignore personal historical significance, e.g. if you'd never read Tolkien / Heinlein you wouldn't have gone on to read Mary Gentle or Ian Banks. This means that while the debates themselves may trace historical development and webs of influence and inspiration, the voting process itself should be limited to a reaction to the specific authors purely in the context of the match. We do not pretend to be fair, either in the original selection or in procedures to be followed, though we have at least started with random drawing of opponents.

** This goes for the main event and the seniors competition. For the other competition REVERSE the voting criteria.

HOW TO VOTE ONLINE: Choose a pairing by clicking on the vote-button. You will find a button to go back to the sf-main-page on every results page. We will post an overview of all results as soon as it makes sense. We are aware that there are better technical solutions to count your ways, but this one works without having to fuck around with cgi-bins etc.

Read the form guide for the first round

Go and join the Big Tournament

The Other Competition

The Seniors

1st round - main event:

The following editorial comments are heavily influenced by local bias, and do not reflect the opinions or views of the International Tournament Committee. However, we hope that they will provide starting points for discussion, and fertile soil for off-the-cuff return comments, which will be judged by the ITC’s spiritual advisor, and the best of which will be awarded prizes to a total of €100.

Dick should make it, if only on the grounds of more coherent paranoia. Le Guin and Delany have relatively straightforward draws. Moorcock and Ballard should make it, though Megan Lindholm (aka Robin Hobb) could have some chance of causing an upset. Wolfe and Lem should go through, though arguably against better writers, as should Lee and Cook, though arguably over more interesting thinkers. Ryman vs. Stephenson could be close, but I'll take Ryman’s originality over Stephenson’s technique. Blaylock & Gentle are favoured over two worthy opponents. Powers and McKillip, the latter especially, may be vulnerable to the sentimental vote. The tie of the round is Martin vs. Banks - this is far too close to call. The Strugatskys against Tiptree Jr is just odd, with the latter holding a slight edge. Lafferty must be a favourite to progress. KJ Parker vs. CJ Cherryh is another difficult one. The latter's years of solid, major achievement against the former's Scavenger series, possibly the best fantasy trilogy since Mary Gentle's White Crow: Parker by a nose. In defiance of truth, justice and some good taste, Douglas Adams might upset Angela Carter. Ford vs. Aldiss might be extremely close. Leiber, Vonnegut and Robinson should just make it through. Butler might lose out to Noon, in that she generally inspires respect rather than affection. Yes, this is written by a male (...and typed by a trained monkey!) Jonathan Carroll probably has sufficient intellectual weight to go through, and Russ and Hamilton look reasonably solid, Russ because she’ll get the feminist vote, Hamilton because he’s an unscrupulous crowd-pleaser and weighs in as a Super-Heavyweight with the 3000+ page Night’s Dawn Trilogy. Most of the group have read Geston’s "Mirror to the sky", so I'll expect a clear win against Greg Bear. Egan / Harrison and McAuley / Watson are difficult, partly because of epoch. No clear favourites. Julian May could make it, though partly on sentiment, against G K Kay, whose worthiness may prove a handicap. Coney is a generally underrated author, but I can't see him progressing against Lucius Shephard, whose “psycho-spiritual” depths have already been dredged in the test round.

The Big Tournament

The Seeds

The Seniors

The Other Competition

The seniors competition is bound to be fairly random. No clearent predictions, but would expect both Smiths, Henderson and Vance to do better than might be expected.

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The Big Tournament

The Other Competition

As stated, this is judged by different criteria. We’ll be weighing up the contestants in terms of: banality, lack of humour, just-this-side-of-actionable-plagiarism, didactic propaganda, uninteresting fetishism, disservice to the genre, complacency and sheer bad writing. In a crowded field, LaHaye and Jenkins are probably narrow favourites, with Hubbard close behind.

Terry Brooks versus David Drake is a clash of pure simplemindedness. Or to remind those of you who may have forgotten the joys of these two authors, reading them is like getting mugged by a syphilitic hobbit with a penchant for yelling out the caliber of each bullet he fires into your brain.

So, is Donaldson an abysmal writer with OK ideas, or should he be held responsible for having alienated so many readers from this genre? And would it help if van Vogt understood his own ideas better?

Anthony and Fanthorpe are both charged with industrial-level deforestation.

Salvatore and his legions of rich-kid zombie readers should triumph over Campbell, who, while not only being an exceptionally bad writer, was also a Scientologist.

The evening on Lackey and Weber should be a once-in-a-lifetime display of puerile and sentimental romanticism versus barely-sublimated Victorian reactionary tendencies. We expect a high turnout for this one.

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McCaffrey, by virtue of her legion of acolytes, should defeat the oldster Gernsback.

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The monolith that is Hubbard should have no trouble in defeating the nefariously ubiquitous Anderson…

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…but the real polarizing will occur in the following match, in which we shall bravely traverse the primeval testosterone sludge of John Norman’s Gor books to attain the dizzy Christian dreamlands of C S Lewis.

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Bova’s hard SF is boring to the point of coma-inducing, but Goodkind actually dedicated one of his books post-9/11 to the US intelligence community…

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Weis & Hickman, sires of the viral abomination that is Dragonlance, will probably have no trouble in vanquishing the discipline-fetishes and naval soporifics of Mr. Feintuch.

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The extraordinarily treacle-like consistency of Dennis McKiernan’s prose must indeed be strong of heart to stand up against the solid conceptuals of other authors distantly glimpsed through Piercey’s longeurs.

The true Clash of the Titans, this confrontation should shake many foundations many in a pyromantic display of narrow moral propagandist simplicity.

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While Lumley has done more than any other writer to defile the grave of H P Lovecraft, (the late) Heinlein displays the disconcerting spectacle of an ageing icon vanishing up his own reactionary asshole.

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The earnest plodding of Elizabeth Moon may not give her the necessary impetus to outrace the necrophiliac antics of Frank’s son in this bout.

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Here we have Christian fascists vying for supremacy with works which would normally fail the Turing test.

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De Lint and Pournelle. The beloved crypto-fascist parasite on Niven’s back versus the Prince of Twee.

The Big Tournament

The Seniors

Samuel R. Delany Ursula K LeGuin Philip K. Dick Gene Wolfe Mary Gentle Stanislaw Lem Michael Moorcock Geoff Ryman James Blaylock J. G. Ballard Angela Carter Kurt Vonnegut K. J. Parker George R. R. Martin Glen Cook Tanith Lee

The Big Tournament

The Seniors

The Other Competition

La Maison d'Ailleurs is a little museum in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland which hosts great sf-artshows online and in the real world.

Yep, that's gonna be the topic for the next meeting of the sf-bookclub in June 1st.

Check out these links: Sex and Science Fiction at fact-index.com
Sex and Science Fiction at wikipedia.org

Run to the hills, run for your life! HERCOLUBUS IS APPROACHING EARTH! "And this situation is consequence of the badness of the human being, all the atrocities committed against its your own fellow creatures, the nature, the life and, for this reason, against God." Fuck, this sounds serious. Even the religious right is scared by now!

-"The Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase is an effort to catalog works of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, yearly fiction indexes, and forthcoming books."

-BEAT THAT! OVER SIX THOUSAND LINKS TO WEB SCIENCE FICTION RESOURCES

-FREE SCI-FI CLASSICS -250 Years of Short Science Fiction by Famous Authors

-infinity plus

-Litrix Reading Room Science Fiction

-SciFi Guide

"Isaac Asimov was one of the greatest science fiction writers of the twentieth-century. Many critics, scientists, and educators believe Asimov's greatest talent was for popularizing or, as he called it, 'translating' science for the lay reader. This online display features visuals and descriptions of some of the over 600 books, games, audio recordings, videos, and wall charts included in the West Virginia University Libraries’ Asimov Collection. Digital photography and scanning was used to create images for the exhibit so that Asimovians throughout the world can appreciate the collection ."

Cory Doctorow who also does boingboing.net uploaded his second novel called Eastern Standard Tribe, another fresh take on that historical genre called science fiction and another free e-book for your growing collection of things you wanted to read for a long time, but you never found the time... Since this is the age of changing art you may even remix the book and upload your own version.

Corys first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was a hit in all available in formats. You may still download it for free or buy the hardcopy at amazon..

"He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science fiction needs Cory Doctorow!"

• Bruce Sterling, Author of "The Hacker Crackdown"

Named "new author who might turn out to be a future great" by the Science Fiction Club Kreuzberg (whew!)