DUNE 7 BLOG

Sunday, March 12, 2006

The Reading Shelf

My eyes have been spending all day staring at the HUNTERS OF DUNE manuscript. I've finished my revisions on CRYSTAL DOORS, as described in the previous blog entry, and Rebecca has given me the first 200 pages of HUNTERS. I am reading it in hardcopy, marking with a pen, rather than editing online. For this tenth and final edit, I'm reading it on paper because it has an esoterically different "sense" than staring at a screen. (Besides, that way I get to sit in a comfortable reading chair, rather than at my keyboard.)

However, for at least half an hour each night, I manage to treat myself to a bit of pleasure reading, novels on my shelf that *I* want to read. In addition, because I am working in the science fiction field, I feel it's important to keep in touch with the rest of the genre, to see what other writers are producing. I don't look at them as "competition" -- I want good books to read, too.

Currently I'm in the middle of two fine novels, POLARIS by Jack McDevitt and ALTERED CARBON by Richard Morgan.

I have been a fan of Jack McDevitt's work for years (and I'm proud to call him my friend). He's been nominated several times for the Nebula Award, and POLARIS is nominated for this year's Best Novel. Jack writes solid "old-fashioned" hard SF, with excellent characters, details that leave me in awe, and great stories. His novel MOONFALL is, I think, one of the best disaster novels ever written. He also has a penchant for creating characters you care about, and then throwing them into utterly, maddeningly impossible situations that you can't believe they'll ever get out of. (And yet, they do!) POLARIS is about a space antiquities dealer investigating a half-century-old mystery, like the Marie Celeste, where all the passengers aboard a starship simply disappeared. He's hooked me so far, and I haven't a clue how he's going to resolve it.

ALTERED CARBON is a gritty, far-future hardboiled mystery, with great writing, a fascinating scenario (a resurrected rich man who supposedly committed suicide hires a detective to solve his murder). I met Richard Morgan last year at the San Diego Comic Con, then bumped into him again at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland. (I think he even bought me a beer, so how could I not be amenable to reading the book?) After the convention, Rebecca and I went down to London to do some book signings with fantasy author Terry Brooks. At Forbidden Planet Bookstore in London, the manager chatted with me about what kinds of books I liked. He thrust a copy of ALTERED CARBON in my hands and insisted that I read it. With that kind of recommendation, how could I refuse?

Another week and I'll be completely finished with my last edit of HUNTERS, and then maybe I can catch up on some other reading.

--KJA