Lou Anders's Blog, page 62

Known Space

Via Chris Roberson. Wow.

Bookgasm: 5 Best Sci-Fi Books of 2009

Ryun Patterson of Bookgasm has posted his 5 Best Sci-Fi Books of 2009, and, as in past years, we're very pleased with the number of Pyr books in (and in this case around) the list. Paul McAuley's The Quiet War comes in at Number 5. Note also the honorable mention for Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days, that all three "anticipated" 2010 titles are from Pyr (Geosynchron, Desolation Road,& Ghosts of Manhattan), and the "hypothetical 'Books of the Decade'" that would include Brasyl and River of Gods. Nice!

Podcast: The Dragon Page Cover to Cover

I'm a guest on the Dragon Page Cover to Cover podcast today, episode #389A, talking with Mike & Mike about my two forthcoming anthologies, With Great Power and Swords & Dark Magic. We also talk about a lot of forthcoming Pyr titles, including the much-anticipated Shadows of the Apt series from Adrian Tchaikovsky (which begins with Empire in Black and Gold ) as well as the bittersweetness of concluding two series with Kay Kenyon's Prince of Storms and Mike Resnick's Starship: Flagship .  I'm a l...

Fast Forward 2: #12 on All-Time High for Reviews

Huge thanks to Joe Mallozzi for cluing me in to SFFmeta, a site that cross-references official online reviews of different works in the fields of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction, generates ratings from each, then generates an average score for each book.  Categories include: low and high-scoring titles for 2007 and 2008, low and high-scoring titles over the last 90 days, and, All-Time High and Low-Scoring Titles.

And looking at 2008 High Scores, our own  Joe Abercrombie comes in at the nu...

Swords & Dark Magic - Cover

This has already broken elsewhere, but I've been given the go ahead to show off the cover to my upcoming anthology, Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery, co-edited with Jonathan Strahan. Cover art is by Benjamin Carre.


And once again, the amazing Table of Contents:
Check Your Dark Lord at the Door" — Lou Anders & Jonathan Strahan
Goats of Glory — Steven Erikson
Tides Elba: A Tale of the Black Company — Glen Cook
Bloodsport — Gene Wolfe
The Singing Spear — James Enge
A Wizard of Wiscez...

Stranger than Fiction: Technology And Science Fiction

I'm interviewed today at System-Level Design Community, by the very nice John Blyler, who I got to spend some time with recently in Portland, Oregan at the recent OryCon. We talk about science fiction's role in inspiring science, the effect science developments has on the genre, gaming, the Matrix trilogies, and genetic engineering. It was a long conversation, so he is condensing and paraphrasing some of what I said, but doing a good job of capturing a highly-caffeinated Lou and making sense ...

SFcrowsnest: Top 100 SFF Novels of 2009

SFcrowsnest has released their "top one hundred SFF novels of 2009" as voted for by SFcrowsnest.com's readers. As of this post:

#6 Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days

#11 Mike Resnick's Stalking the Unicorn

#32 Mike Resnick's Stalking the Vampire

#53 Kay Kenyon's City without End


#84 Mike Resnick's Starship: Flagship


Nice. Especially if your name happens to be Resnick.

The Agony Column: A Conversation with Lou Anders : New Fantasy Triangle, Steampunk and Illuxcon II

Artist Dave Seely at Illuxcon II

12-11-09: A Conversation with Lou Anders : New Fantasy Triangle, Steampunk and Illuxcon II

Rick says, "That was, of course, my first question when we started talking. And indeed, I'd tend to agree that the three writers do sort of triangulate on the new aesthetic for fantasy fiction, the post-Perdido world of gritty and weird fiction. But that was only the starting point for our...

Dark Matter and Black Hole Powered Starships

Once upon a time, it was the science fiction authors who believed in the possibility of interstellar voyages and the scientists who were skeptical. These days, so many SF authors have given up on traveling between the stars as a naive and impossible fantasy. So I'm glad to see this piece in the New Scientist, "Dark Power: Grand designs for interstellar travel," in which mathematicians Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland at Kansas State University in Manhattan  propose ways to shorten the trip ...

Matte vs Gloss

Earlier this week, a Canadian bookseller and blogger published "An Open Letter to Trade Publishers," opining that the use of gloss finishes on trade paperback books caused some shoppers to mistakenly assume these titles were self published efforts from vanity press. She writes:

"Dear Trade Publisher or Small Press publisher:

Please do not print trade paperback large format books with flat glossy covers anymore.

As a bookseller, I watch what people pick up and put down. I listen to their...