By now pretty much everyone already knows who the Hugo Awards winners are, but I was in Rio visiting my parents and couldn't blog until today (in fact, for the first time in the past three years, I didn't twitter live the ceremony - couldn't wake in time, alas).

So, via Locus Online, here they are:

Best Novel (tie)

* The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK) - my review here
* The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade) - my review here

Best Novella

* "Palimpsest", Charles Stross (Wireless)

Best Novelette

* "The Island", Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)

Best Short Story

* "Bridesicle", Will McIntosh (Asimov's 1/09)

Best Related Book

* This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is "I"), Jack Vance (Subterranean)

Best Graphic Story

* Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm, written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colours by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

* Moon, screenplay by Nathan Parker; story by Duncan Jones; directed by Duncan Jones (Liberty Films)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

* Doctor Who: "The Waters of Mars", written by Russell T Davies & Phil Ford; directed by Graeme Harper (BBC Wales)

Best Editor, Long Form

* Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Best Editor, Short Form

* Ellen Datlow

Best Professional Artist

* Shaun Tan

Best Semiprozine

* Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, & Cheryl Morgan

Best Fan Writer

* Frederik Pohl

Best Fanzine

* StarShipSofa, edited by Tony C. Smith

Best Fan Artist

* Brad W. Foster

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer [Not a Hugo]

* Seanan McGuire

*(Second year of eligibility)

The Big Heart Award went to Merv Binns.

I read yesterday a post on Jason Sanford's site in which he comments about how this tie is interesting because both novels push the boundaries of the genre (and I agree wholeheartedly), though he doesn't think this is the case for the short fiction, but the Nebula Award excited him very much just because for these categories.

I tend to agree with him on this as well: for me, science fiction is above all sense of wonder. As a reader, I usually like better a piece of fiction (be it SF or mainstream) which surprises me and gives me that good, old cognitive estrangement that Darko Suvin and Viktor Shklovsky wrote so much about. As a writer, I strive constantly to create in the readers those same feelings. In 2010, the Hugo Awards winners in the Best Novel category (Miéville worked more than Bacigalupi to me, but both wrote excellent novels) satisfied me plenty.

And I'm also very happy with the other winners as well, specially Clarkesworld magazine (big fan here) and StarShipSofa, the first podcast magazine ever to win a Hugo - and which published three stories of mine and an interview with me. Congratulations to the brilliant Tony C. Smith for his great work, and to Neil Clarke and his team (among them my friend Cheryl Morgan) at Clarkesworld for their Hugo. Keep up the excellent work!

PS1: If you want to watch the videocast transmission of the Hugos by Tony C. Smith (and his wonderful reaction when he got the news of his award), just go here.

PS2: Jason Sanford published today an interview he did with Neil Clarke about the great submission system of Clarkesworld. Recommended reading.

It's online and it's beautiful. I can't believe it was just a couple of months ago when I was having dinner with Cheryl Morgan and Juliet McKenna in Oxford and Cheryl told me all about her (then) sekrit projekt: a new magazine, in her words, "devoted to the discussion of science fiction, fantasy and other forms of speculative literature."

On that happy occasion, she also invited me to be a part of #1, as one of her first celebrity guests (to be considered by Cheryl Morgan a celebrity in the global SF sphere is in itself an honor, so you can imagine how I felt) to visit The Salon, that is, to participate in her podcast.

The theme of this podcast is The Conversation - Cheryl also invited Gary K. Wolfe and Nnedi Okorafor, and we all engaged in a very lively talk about science fiction today in US, Africa, South America (with some funny asides regarding baseball and soccer), theater, the importance of fanzines, the difference between Hispanic-speaking and Portuguese-speaking Latin American (yes, there are MANY differences; I will return to that in another post) and many other interesting and important issues. No more texting. Listen here.

And, when you're done with the podcast, check the articles by Sam Jordison and Jonathan Clemens and the interviews Cheryl did with China Mieville and Lauren Beukes. What the hell, go read it all - and consider helping the magazine making a donation.

Via The World SF Blog:

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards has announced this year's jurors. They are:

* Terry Harpold, University of Florida, USA (Chair)
* Abhijit Gupta, Jadavpur University, India
* Dale Knickerbocker, East Carolina University, USA
* Leith Morton, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
* Helen Pilinovski, CSU-San Bernardino, USA
* Lisa Raphals, UC-Riverside, USA

Can't argue about the quality of the jury, but I would have liked to see people from Eastern Europe, South America, and Africa among them.

Ye all my faithful readers must have heard of a certain disgusting man who calls himself a necromancer, and not only flaunts his dark knowledge most fearlessly and impudently around. But fret not: I had the utmost honor of being called to duty by Master Inquisitor Matt Staggs. Me and a select group of inquisitors reunited in order to ask this Johannes Cabal a number of questions so we can properly prove his guilt. Inquisitor Staggs has begun the session; please refer to him so you can trace the path of Cabal's inquisition process.

INQUISITOR: How did you come to be in the possession of a dread rod to summon demons, and why did you have the immense hubris to think you were good enough to dismiss its use? Are you also a demon, sir??

JOHANNES CABAL: I was under the impression that each of you great intellectuals would only be asking me three questions, yet you ask three and call it one. No matter. A "dread rod" is a rod that is dreadful only in metaphorical terms; it is not enchanted by the addition of fairy dust or whatever other mechanisms you imagine are applied in magic. The idea is that the demon in question is threatened with the rod, and cowers melodramatically. The whole disgusting performance has an air of the village hall rep about it, and I do not care to indulge it. Thus, I dispensed with the rod because it was not necessary. Besides, I had a very large revolver to hand and, while lead will not kill demons, they are at least as worried about having a great wet hole blown through their midriffs as they are to be lightly tapped about the shoulders with some fatuous "dread rod."

As to whether I am a demon, I gather you have been at the communion wine.

INQUISITOR: Don't you think you might have better served the world, sir, by writing crossword puzzles?

JOHANNES CABAL: Sir, do not be such a 1 Across: "Hola, seer!" (Anag.)

INQUISITOR: Do you think this whole necromancy business is funny, sir?

JOHANNES CABAL: Not nearly as amusing as this inquisition of yours. Several of your predecessors in that chair have already, in the theatrical phrase, "corpsed." You don't believe me? Fine, sir, just over there, down that oubliette. Yes, the one with the dark stains by it. Take a look. Trust me, if I were to say it will make you die laughing, it would be at least a half truth.

----------

This, I'm a bit ashamed to say, was too much for me and I went apoplectic with ire, but my fellow Inquisitors came to help me so I didn't choke in righteous anger, and after a while a new round of questions begun afresh, which you can continue to follow clicking down:

If you really must know anything else about Cabal, you can visit his biographer's electronic address: Jonathan L. Howard, esquire.

And, after hearing this whole inquisition, you really must, refer to that old repository, Amazon.com, to know more about Cabal's nefarious exploits, clicking HERE.

Duty made me come back from retirement, dear reader. Yes, duty. Because one can't help but take action when necromancy and demon worship are involved. A few days ago I was asked by Master Inquisitor Matt Staggs to join his team, with the mission of not proving, but registering the confession of Johannes Cabal. Master Inquisitor Staggs had the honor of beginning this trial and now it's my turn. So here it is.

INQUISITOR BARCIA: Just to have a measure of how diabolical you are, what's the least nefarious, blasphemous thing you've ever done?

JOHANNES CABAL: I had breakfast this morning. It consisted of a poached egg on one slice of lightly buttered toast, accompanied by a cup of Asaam with a drop of milk. The butter was real butter, the milk was full fat, and the bread was white. Yes, I am that evil. Ah, but the egg was free range. So sorry.


INQUISITOR BARCIA: You had to gather 1000 souls just to rescue yours back from the depths of Hell. Do you really think you were worthy so many spirits? Because seriously, for such a blasphemous, nefarious little creature like you I wouldn't give half a rat's excommunicated soul.

JOHANNES CABAL: One hundred souls, not one thousand. I gather your day job is as a government statistician. To address your question such as it is, yes. I am interested that you refer to half a soul. You are therefore aware of the despicable and cruel practice of spiritual bifurcation, so-called "soul maiming"? It leaves the victim as a spiritual void, empty-eyed and pointless, little more than a human wreck for whom death would be a release from the eternal aching torment of incompleteness. You haven't? Stay still a moment. Allow me to demonstrate.

INQUISITOR BARCIA
: It seems you once had a lover. Tell us more about that. Tell us how you used your vile necromancy to turn that poor creature into a zombie-lover. Because I'm sure you did just that!

JOHANNES CABAL: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but this scalpel will really hurt you. It's a Swann-Morton No.22, by the way. Only the best for you, sir.

----

A necromancer and demon-worshiper, no doubt. But since his crimes are even greater, I ask you to keep reading my fellow Inquisitors' interviews.

If that isn't enough, read his confessions and visit his biographer Jonathan L. Howard. But beware. His writings may corrupt you.

Most of my English-language readers probably don't even remember that, but me and my friend Jacques Barcia used to edit a magazine called TERRA INCOGNITA. It was a free monthly online magazine, published in Portuguese only during the year 2008, but with a plan to go bilingual (Portuguese/English) from 2009 on.

Unfortunately, that wasn't to happen. Due to several circunstances beyond our control, the magazine wasn't published in 2009. Jacques told me he couldn't be doing it anymore, because of personal problems; I had my share of tribulations as well, but even so I still wanted to go on. I thought to go bimonthly, or even quarterly.

Then I heard that a good friend of mine, writer and translator Alexandre Mandarino, was starting a project called HYPERPULP. And I found out that he intended to do pretty much the same I had been doing in Terra Incognita - publishing Brazilian and foreign science fiction in Portuguese... but also original fiction in English, as I intended to do but had no chance to.

I've been talking to him for the past few months while he set everything in motion and now I can make the announcement: Terra Incognita has officially folded. I won't be trying to revive it, because so much time has been passed (the last issue was published in December 2008) and my heart is not in it anymore. Many other things to do - pursuing my own writing career included.

That's why, for the past few days, I've been reaching all the authors that sent stories to Terra Incognita and making them the following proposition: if they are ok with it, I'm relaying them to Hyperpulp - Mandarino has a virtually empty slush pile right now and will be more than happy to receive their stories. (If you, my reader, are one of those writers, please just send an e-mail to zeroabsoluto@gmail.com saying if you agree with that and the process will start right away.)

From now on, I will not be accepting more stories for Terra Incognita. I strongly encourage you to send your stories to Hyperpulp - the submission guidelines are here. The first issue is scheduled to launch in October. Believe me, it will be worth it.

This last review of the Hugo Nominees for Best Novel brings us back to the beginning, in a kind of full circle regarding the other nominees.

As in The Windup Girl, the story takes place at the end of the 22nd Century. And, like WWW:Wake, this is an almost didactic story, which takes the reader by the hand, explaining carefully where to tread.

The points in common with the other novels, I'm afraid, end up here. Julian Comstock - A Story of 22nd-Century America is the weakest book of the batch.

This is not the first Robert Charles Wilson book I read and leaves a bitter aftertaste, I must admit. The very first novel of his I read was Memory Wire - and, though the central idea was very much appealing to me (alien artifacts plus cyborg "recording angels" full of implants registering every single thing they saw and heard, without any feelings at all), I found the worldbuilding weak and the characters very cardboard-like.

Well, there is nothing weak about the worldbuilding of Julian Comstock - at least regarding the United States, a nation torn apart after a series of world-shattering events that are referred in the book as the Fall of the Cities, the Plague of Infertility, the False Tribulation and reborn under the flag of the Dominion, the spiritual leadership of the country and also the power behind the President of the United States, now returned to a condition exactly like the 19th Century, down to every detail, including codes of talking, dressing, and behaving - in the year 2172!

But all of that doesn't seem to be really important to the story - remember the title of the novel: Julian Comstock is a kind of Bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel. It is about the nephew of the current President, Deklan Comstock, or Deklan Conqueror, as he is also known, Julian, a well-educated, ethical kid who is educated far from his mother for matters of safety, because his father was considered a traitor and executed, in a powerplay who reminded me very much of Hamlet. The story of Julian and his tribulations is narrated in the first person, not by himself, but by his best friend, poor, humble Adam Hazzard, a boy who gets caught in the midst of the events with Julian and goes along with his friend - from peaceful countryside to the bloody fields of war and to the big cities of 22nd America, which are but pale shadows of today's megalopoles.

Since the story is written through the POV of Adam Hazzard, Julian Comstock's best friend and witness to the birth of a legend, evidently he is excused to tell us in detail what happened to the rest of the world. Maybe it's not necessary for us to know - but I for one would really like to know if Brazil, a country with which the US had gone to war not much before the novel begins, underwent the very same transformations the North Americans had to suffer. And what of Mittelropa? Or Asia? Even with the end of natural resources like oil, I can't find reasonable enough for an entire nation (much less a whole wide world) to simply change back to the 19th Century, including its morals, just because?. Wilson is asking for a lot of suspension of disbelief here.

Maybe this novel works for Americans. It didn't work for me. I would like to know what my readers from USA thought about it.

I'm extremely proud today to announce that I was interviewed by Tony C. Smith, the awesome host of StarShipSofa, and that this interview is already on the site, in the Aural Delights No 147 edition.

I wasn't only interviewed - my story Edgar Can't Stand It, published last December in the New Zealand venue Semaphore Magazine, was turned into a podcast, and brilliantly narrated by Matthew Sanborn Smith (to Matthew, my heartfelt appreciation for the excellent job - pay special attention to what this man can do with Italian and French accents!)

After the interview ended, Tony asked me on the phone if I was okay with doing one of those excellent THEN AND NOW competitions StarShipSofa has been doing for a while now - they put side by side in the same edition of the podcast a classic story by an old master and then they put a story of a new writer for the listeners to vote which they liked best.

By then, however, I was so nervous (because I wasn't sure I had expressed myself right - writing is one thing, as you know, but talking is another thing entirely) that I could barely hear him, so I just said "yes, sure", and I don't even know if he told me who was the master with whom I was to contend. When you get to hear Aural Delights No. 147, you will find out (but I will tell you now anyway) that he's none other than Philip José Farmer, a great author whose novels I just happen to love. It's a great honor indeed to share the same audiospace with one of his stories, They Twinkled Like Jewels. To Captain Tony C. Smith and to all the wonderful crew of the StarShipSofa, thank you. It was indeed a pleasure. And I hope that you who read me now also enjoy listening to it.

Via The World SF Blog:

Best Novel

* Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld (Penguin)
* Liar, Justine Larbalestier (Bloomsbury)
* World Shaker, Richard Harland (Allen & Unwin)
* Slights, Kaaron Warren (Angry Robot Books)
* Life Through Cellophane, Gillian Polack (Eneit Press)

Best Novella or Novelette

* "Siren Beat", Tansy Rayner Roberts (Twelfth Planet Press)
* "Black Water", David Conyers (Jupiter Magazine)
* "After the World: Gravesend", Jason Fischer (Black House Comics)
* "Horn", Peter M. Ball (Twelfth Planet Press)
* "Wives", Paul Haines (X6/Couer de Lion)

Best Short Story

* "The Piece of Ice in Ms Windermere's Heart", Angela Slatter (New Ceres
Nights, Twelfth Planet Press)
* "Six Suicides", Deborah Biancotti (A Book of Endings, Twelfth Planet
Press)
* "Black Peter", Marty Young (Festive Fear, Tasmaniac Publications)
* "Seventeen", Cat Sparks (Masques, CSFG)
* "Tontine Mary", Kaaron Warren (New Ceres Nights, Twelfth Planet Press)
* "Prosperine When it Sizzles", Tansy Rayner Roberts (New Ceres Nights,
Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Collected Work

* The New Space Opera 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois (HarperCollins)
* New Ceres Nights, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Tehani Wessely
(Twelfth Planet Press)
* Slice Of Life, Paul Haines, edited by Geoffrey Maloney (The Mayne
Press)
* A Book of Endings, edited by Deborah Biancotti, Alisa Krasnostein and Ben Payne (Twelfth Planet Press)
* Eclipse Three, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books)

Best Artwork

* Cover art, New Ceres Nights (Twelfth Planet Press), Dion Hamill
* Cover art, The Whale's Tale (Peggy Bright Books), Eleanor Clarke
* Cover art and illustrations, Shards: Short Sharp Tales (Brimstone
Press), Andrew J. McKiernan
* Cover art, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #42, Lewis Morley
* Cover art, "Horn" (Twelfth Planet Press), Dion Hamill
* Cover art, Masques (CSFG), Mik Bennett

Best Fan Writer

* Tansy Rayner Roberts, for body of work
* Chuck McKenzie, for work in Horrorscope
* Robert Hood, for Undead Backbrain (roberthood.net/blog)
* Tehani Wessely, for body of work
* Bruce Gillespie, for work in Steam Engine Time

Best Fan Artist

* Dave Schembri, for work in Midnight Echo
* Kathleen Jennings, for body of work
* Dick Jenssen, for body of work

Best Fan Publication in Any Medium

* Interstellar Ramjet Scoop , edited by Bill Wright
* A Writer Goes on a Journey (awritergoesonajourney.com), edited by
Nyssa Pascoe et al
* ASif! (asif.dreamhosters.com), edited by Alisa Krasnostein, Gene
Melzack et al
* Australian Science Fiction Bullsheet (bullsheet.sf.org.au), edited by
Edwina Harvey and Ted Scribner
* Steam Engine Time , edited by Bruce Gillespie and Janine Stinson

Best Achievement

* Alisa Krasnostein, Liz Grzyb, Tehani Wessely, Cat Sparks and Kate
Williams, for the New Ceres Nights booklaunch
* H. Gibbens, for the Gamers' Quest CGI-animated book trailer
* Ruth Jenkins and Cathy Jenkins-Rutherford, for the children's program
at Conjecture
* Amanda Rainey, for the cover design of Siren Beat/Roadkill (Twelfth
Planet Press)
* Gillian Polack et al, for the Southern Gothic banquet at Conflux

Best New Talent

* Pete Kempshall
* Kathleen Jennings
* Thoraiya Dyer
* Jason Fischer
* Simon Petrie
* Christopher Green
* Peter M. Ball

William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review

* Chuck McKenzie, for "The Dead Walk! ... Into a Bookstore Near You" (Eye
of Fire #1, Brimstone Press)
* Ian Mond, for reviews on his blog (mondyboy.livejournal.com)
* Grant Watson, for reviews and articles for Eiga: Asian Cinema
(www.eigaasiancinema.com)
* Helen Merrick, for The Secret Feminist Cabal: a cultural history of
science fiction feminisms (Aqueduct Press)

Also via Kaaron Warren (double nominated, by the way - congratulations!):

The Ditmar subcommittee are pleased to announce that voting for the Australian SF ("Ditmar") Award for 2010 is now open, and will remain open until one minute before midnight Perth time on Wednesday, 1st of September, 2010 (ie. 11.59pm, GMT+8).

The official ballot paper, including postal address information, may be
downloaded as a PDF format file from:

http://ditmars.sf.org.au/2010/2010_Ditmar_Ballot.pdf

Votes can be sent via email to:

ditmars@sf.org.au

Online voting will be available shortly, at:

http://ditmars.sf.org.au/2010

Congratulations to all the nominees!

Seattle used to be an uncomplicated trading town fed and fattened by gold in Alaska, and then it had dissolved into a nightmare city filled with gas and the walking dead. But people had stayed. People had come back. And they'd adapted.

Steampunk and zombies. It can't get much better than this.

Cherie Priest concocted a story attuned with the zeitgeist - and the zeitgeist is (still is and probably will still be for some time) steampunk.

But Boneshaker isn't your run-of-the-mill machine-and-contraption steampunk story. It's a true Alternate History tale taking place in the times of the American Civil War, which, at the opening of the novel, is still going on after a decade, with no end in sight.

Far from the winds of war, however, the inhabitants of Seattle already have much to worry. For, since the gold rush in the Klondike, their lives changed forever, and it wasn't for the golddiggers: Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a machine that could mine through Alaska's ice. Blue was up to the task, maybe even more so: his Dr. Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine was a gigantic machine whose first test was also its last: the Boneshaker, as it was called, destroyed most of downtown Seattle and unleashed a poisonous gas that turned pretty much anyone that breathed it into a living dead creature - or a rotter, as they call it.

As the story starts, the Blight has plagued Seattle for sixteen years, and Dr. Blue has been killed in the destruction wrought by the Boneshaker, leaving a widow, Briar, and a son, Zeke, who struggle to earn their daily bread in the part of the city unaffected by the gas - downtown Seattle was isolated from the rest of the city by a huge wall, which keeps everybody safe from the Blight and the zombies. But there are rumors that there are still people living there, people who didn't fall prey to the gas and who still thrive in their own old places. Forgotten people.

But Zeke didn't forget anything: even though he was barely an year old when his father died, he can't believe he has brought such destruction to Seattle on purpose - as everyone does, including Briar, who changed back to her maiden name of Wilkes and hold her head high, but has to endure day by day the shame of having been the wife of a killer all the same. Zeke, however, is keen on proving the innocence of his father - even if he must go under the wall, to their old house, to search for some evidence that can clear his name.

Briar ends up going after her son; first she tries to follow on his footsteps going under the wall, via an old water runoff system, but a small quake blocks her passage. So she is forced to seek the help of air pirates, who cross regularly the airways over the wall with the dirigibles. And she begins a journey through a ravaged land, where she will find people with mechanical limbs, a Chinese enclave who took to themselves the mission of filtering the air of the land with a giant system of bellows, and a mysterious inventor called Minnericht, a Phantom-of-the-Opera type who hides his scarred face and, not a few people think, might as well be Leviticus Blue in disguise...

Do you want an interesting image to sum it up? Imagine Escape From New York. In Seattle. In the 19th Century. With zombies.

Boneshaker is a non-stop reading. Pretty much like the wild ride of Briar and Zeke on their separate ways through the forbidden territory under the wall.

The deadline for the 2010 Hugo Awards is tomorrow, but I already cast my ballot today - as Cheryl very wisely put it, Technology is not foolproof, and it would be tragic if your ISP had a major outage on Saturday night that prevented you from voting. So, what are you waiting for? Go vote!

This book already got the 2010 Locus Award for Best First Novel and the Nebula Award for Best Novel, so The Windup Girl may as well be the absolute favorite for this year's Hugo Award for Best Novel.

As I said in an earlier post, this is a good year for the Best Novel Hugos. All the competitors are excellent novels, and this book is no exception, on the contrary. Additionally, Paolo Bacigalupi had already showed us some glimpses of this universe in his collection Pump Six, with the stories The Calorie Man and Yellow Card Man.

The Windup Girl is a post-apocalytical story with lots of biopunk and cyberpunk references. We are taken to the end of the twenty-second century, when, after devastating "calorie plagues" such as blister rust, cibiscosis, and genehack weevil have pretty much exterminated most of vegetable life on Earth, America and other former superpowers are relegated to the background of political and economical power play. In fact, only the US are mentioned in the novel; we can only imagined what is going on with the rest of the so-called First World in a moment when there is no energy left even to power airplanes to cross the world - globalization as we know is over, and with it all global traffic of people and goods.

In this bleak scenario, there are many factions: the Grahamites, an America-based religious group which follows the Holy Scripture focusing mainly on Noah and the Flood, and are against the slow but steadily incoming return of global communication and traffic (this time via dirigibles).

Other group are the generippers, a caste of scientists that are the only ones, in truth, that may be really able to bring about a resurrection of the green. In the past few generations, they have been able to create new animals (as the megodonts, huge elephant-like beasts reminiscent of prehistorical mammoths and very useful as beasts of burden but also very difficult to tame and, therefore, very deadly) and new species of vegetables and fruits, plague-free.

And there is another groups yet, anathema to the entire world except for Japan - the New People, or, as they are usually called, the windups. Artificial human life. Used as soldiers in Vietnam and pleasure dolls in Japan, the windups are Bacigalupi's replicants - more sophisticated on the one hand, even more enslaved on the other (by their programming, which compels them to do their master's bidding and also by their physical needs: they don't sweat, so when in a tropical country they must consume awesome quantities of ice water to survive.)

That is the case of Emiko, who had a relatively good life in Japan working as secretary for her master and is suddenly left to fend for herself in Thailand, where she ends up in prostitution. She must endure the humiliation because she can't even go outside the whorehouse where she lives, because if she does it, she will be destroyed by the white shirts, the petty and corrupty bureaucrats who rule Thailand with an iron hand.

Thailand, by the way, is the country where the action happens in this novel. Everything hangs in the balance there, from generipping to the future of the windups. For instance, Emiko learns from American entrepreneur Anderson Lake that there is a refuge up in the hills for a whole community of rogue windups, and that gives her a reason to live.

Meanwhile, other players in this Great Game of sorts are trying to survive as best as they can. The former Chinese-millionaire-turned-refugee Hock Seng, now employee of Lake, turns against his employer and seeks the dubious help of the Dung Lord, a master of the underworld, in order to sell a much improved kind of kink-springs, a mechanical device invented to replace electrical sources of energy with kinetic power when the Contraction happened generations ago. Seng wants pretty much what Lake, Emiko, and many of the other characters in the novel want: a way out. A way out of Thailand, or a way out of their miseries in a hard world.

Nobody is innocent, no character is a good guy, but at the same time almost nobody of them is necessarily an evil one. The Windup Girl feels like a future Casablanca without the Nazis and with the omnipresent White Shirts, and the menace of the radical Green Headbands, who are always referred to but never really appear, and who destroy mercilessly not only windups, but also "calorie men", that is, scientists, generippers, or pretty much anyone who works for a genetic enhancement company. Paolo Bacigalupi has no mercy whatsoever with his characters: he pushes them to the edge - and that's the way it should be if you want good literature.

I'm in love with this book. Seriously.

Palimpsest is my personal favorite for the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novel. There. I've said it.

I had read the short story version (an excerpt, in fact) in Ekaterina Sedia's Paper Cities a while ago and the force of the words had already amazed me.

Four complete strangers meet in a fortune-teller's shop, an amphibian called Orlande (echoes of Virginia Woolf?). Inside - I quote - are four red chairs with four lustral basins before them, filled with ink, swirling and black. These four strangers will sit in the chairs, strip off their socks and plunge their feet into the basins, holding hands - always under the eyes of the amphibian. She will draw a card for each of them, and - this is for me the most interesting part in the ritual - tie their hands together with red yarn.

This image reminded me, even though very slightly, of certain rituals in Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé, in which sometimes you must tie people with yarns in order to "amarrar o mal" ["have evil tied", in a loose translation], but in this case it was just the imagery that attracted my attention. And not only the imagery, but the consequence:

Wherever you go in Palimpsest, you are bound to these strangers who happened onto Orlande's salon just when you did, and you will go nowhere, eat no capon or dormouse, drink no oversweet port that they do not also taste, and they will visit no whore that you do not also feel beneath you, and until that ink washes from your feet - which, given that Orlande is a creature of the marsh and no stranger to mud, will be some time - you cannot breathe but that they also breathe also.

This will be pleasure and pain for the four strangers, whose lives alternate between dream and the "real" world. For Palimpsest is all too real, but it can only be accessed through dreams, and through sex with someone who had already been there before. The ink, that in Orlande's room was only in the strangers' feet, suffers a weird migration to other parts of the visitors' bodies, where they can be easily mistaken for birthmarks or ink smudges. But these marks are their passports to enter this elusive dreamcity, and at the same time the only bona fide way of recognizing each other outside the dream.

So the plot begins to unravel in front of us, showing the sad lives of blue-haired Amaya Sei, who is so in love of trains that she virtually live in them in Japan, Californian beekeeper November, falls in love with Xiaohui, a woman who already bears the mark and transmits it to her during their lovemaking, Russian locksmith Oleg, who knows every single thing about keys and locks but very little about his own heart, for he has a strange relationship of love and hate with the ghost of his dead sister, Italian bookbinder Ludovico and his quest for his missing wife Lucia, who has already emigrated to Palimpsest and maybe is forever out of his reach, but only if he doesn't know the secret ways and marks by which one can pass through the worlds.

Catherynne M. Valente reminds me of Gene Wolfe in her utter care for the words without at any moment letting go of the story - and what a good story it is! Some of Wolfe's stories as There Are Doors came to my mind while I was reading it, but also short stories like A Cabin on the Coast - sad, moving stories about to have and have not. All is love and loss in Palimpsest; this is a novel that crosses over genres as easily as their characteres do between worlds.

Maybe Palimpsest won't be a winner - who knows? It's all in your hands, Hugo voters - but it surely deserves to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Even though all the finalists are great novels (this year will be one of the hardest for the voters in the recent past), Palimpsest promises, since page one, a wild ride through a city of horrors and wonders - and it delivers, both through imagery and also via elaborate words, words that are a pleasure to read and no doubt were as pleasurable for Catherynne M. Valente to write. She's a writer in love with the written word, and you don't have much of it these days. She's a writer to cherish and treasure.

If the world of science fiction literature were similar to the music industry, Robert J. Sawyer could fit in the label of "easy reading". This is a compliment: just another day I've noticed that Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward's project She & Him is sometimes labeled as "easy listening", even though they are really considered an indie folk band. Maybe the (sometimes) mellow sounds made by Ward and the (quirky but beautiful) voice of Deschanel are so easy to stick in the ear that people who run the lounges of air companies or whoever create these post-reasonable labels end up calling them "easy listening".

It's the same with Sawyer. Read Rollback (which I reviewed here). Read Flashforward. And that's just two examples: The Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy is a pretty good example of an easy reading series: a storyline with one major plot and simple, straightforward characters revolving around it, usually having to deal with the effects with technology gone awfully wrong - or, in some cases, awfully right, which can be the same thing (remember that saying, be careful of what you wish for?)

The Helen Keller epigraph that opens the novel pretty much sets the tone of the story: "What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self." That will be exactly what you will get: a story of a blind person who will find not a teacher, but another self. Then the science fiction enters the stage.

Caitlin is a young Canadian blind girl who gets offered a unique chance from, Kuroda Masayuki, a neuroscientist of the University of Tokyo: to get an implant that could restore her vision working the signal processing in her primary visual cortex. So far, not very impressive as far as science fiction goes, some of you may be thinking. But in her case, the experience goes right - far beyond right, you could say.

Because the experiment wakes up a sentient mind in the implant via the Web - the very first and true artificial intelligence. And that intelligence starts its learning process at the same time Caitlin starts her vision training. The intelligence - which does not have a name, in fact which does not understand the concept of name, but struggles to comprehend it along the novel and even manages to label Caitlin, referring to her as Prime.

It is a long, painstaking - and sometimes even painful - process, for both sides. And for us as readers as well, for we see their POVs alternating, but they never get in touch with each other. Caitlin doesn't even know that this entity exists - although she suspects there is something novel happening, for she can't controle her implant every time she wants. The intelligence is doing that in its way to emergence.

The story ends in a climax, when the intelligence finally manages to reveal itself to Caitlin, with a simple but impossible question for her to answer: "Who am I?" A question that probably will be answered in the next volume of the trilogy, WWW:Watch, but you will have to read it. I haven't.

Just finishing to read the last novels of the Hugo Nominees list - a process my e-readers made a bit speedier (more on that on another post). As you know, I already reviewed China Miéville's The City & The City here. That leaves five other novels to review, namely:

WWW:Wake - later tonight;
Palimpsest - July 27th;
The Windup Girl - July 28th;
Boneshaker - July 29th;
Julian Comstock - July 30th.

I'll be publishing them at that speed for the sake of Supporting and Attending members of Aussiecon 4 who still haven't decided in which novel to vote, because the ballots must be received by 31 July 2010 23:59 PDT.

After that, I intend to post here some comments on other nominees (short stories, novelettes, novellas, non-fiction). In between, something about ebook reading and how Kindle may very well be starting to change my reading speed.

This is a true story.

When I was nineteen, I left the Catholic Church without looking back. I was almost an altar boy in my childhood, and during my teens I was an active member in church groups, volunteering for teaching Portuguese and Math to poor children in slums near my local church, among other activities.

But life can take unexpected turns. I won't bother you with long, boring details here; suffice it to say that I noticed - had been noticed for quite some time, in fact - that not all was good in my church, and I was not happy at all, neither with my priest, nor with my so-called friends, who were far more interested in chatting, gossiping, and leaving the church right after mass to have a drink (we were all from ages varying from 16 to 20 - in Brazil the prohibition to selling drinks apply only to those under 18, but many bars couldn't care less and sell drinks to minors all the same).

I wasn't a saint - very far from it - but I was pretty sure that was not all there was to it. I was searching for something else. I already had read the Bible at least once (and I read the NT regularly), looking for a moral, ethical guidance to my life. Aside from the Bible, I had also read about the life of Saint Francis, who became my spiritual guide at that time, so to speak. I didn't have many material things (even though I lived with my parents and they provided for me) and I only carried in my pockets enough money to pay the bus fare to and from school. Sometimes I didn't even eat during the day (yes, I was a bit radical, but I felt, much as almost every teenager does, that spirituality must also find a physical way to manifest itself, so I was used to short periods of fasting), having only supper when I got home from school, and a hearty breakfast in the next day, of course.

Anyway, at the same time I started studying Drama lessons in school. My teacher had studied the Method, real Stanislavski stuff, and she was great in imparting us discipline but also being generous and kind at the same time. Grace under pressure, you could say.

One of the things she teached us was meditation. To reach a balance inside, she told us.

Meditation did wonders for me. It opened - both literally and metaphorically - a whole new world, where I could, after many years of restlessness, find some peace of mind. After my first meditation session, I immediately asked her where I could learn more of that. She told me that she had learned it all at a Buddhist temple there in Rio. And so a new chapter in my life began.

But, before this post turns into a Bulwer-Lytton novel, let's cut it short and go straight to the point: after all, you must be asking what the hell all this has to do with the first time I read Jorge Luis Borges. It happened like this:

In my first spiritual retreat at the temple, I spent a weekend there, working and meditating. In fact, we meditated all the time, even walking or painting a wall (there are hundreds, even thousands of different meditation techniques so you can pretty much absolutely focus on what you are doing - that is the core of meditation, in a nutshell). We also alternated periods when we could talk with periods of utmost silence, when all we were allowed to do was point at objects if we wanted, say, to ask someone to fetch a broom for us.

It was in a Saturday afternoon, during the silence period of the retreat, just after lunch, that we had a two or three-hour break for ourselves. Some of us decided to explore the area around the temple, a beautiful, dazzling remaining piece of Atlantic Forest right in the middle of Rio de Janeiro. Others simply were too tired, having worked all the morning, and went inside their bunks to take a nap. And I found a library.

It wasn't much more than two small cabinets containing mostly Buddhist tomes in Sanskrit and Pali, with a few others in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, but, to my surprise, I found this book whose simple yet strange title attracted me immediately: Ficções (Fictions).

It was a Brazilian Portuguese translation of Ficciones, by an author called Jorge Luis Borges. Little did I know that that author was from Argentina - Jorge Luis Borges could very well be a Brazilian name. I picked up the slim volume and went outside to enjoy the cold autumn breeze. I sat under a tree near a small artificial pond full of lotus flowers (ok, I know this image is too much clichéd, but it really happened, so what can I do?) and started browsing the book.

I found that Ficções was a short story collection. I looked at the Contents page and saw a title that captured my attention at once: A Biblioteca de Babel (The Library of Babel). I found this title so enticing, so amazingly weird (or so weirdly amazing) that I started reading it at once.

The Library of Babel is a very short story, written almost in the manner of an encyclopedia entry - later in his life, Borges would say that the Encyclopaedia Britannica was one of his very first readings, and his major source of influence in literary style. In fact, he said that when he started writing he was so naive he didn't know it was possible (and even desirable) to write differently. Even so, Borges does not write in a boring, bureaucratical way: every word is carefully chosen, and the description of the strange library that comprises the whole universe is so good that you can feel as if you were lost inside its hexagonal spaces, its strange geometries (Borges was a Lovecraft fan, but he didn't share the fear and hysteria of the latter one in his characters and situations, on the contrary; for him, every situation was normal, or in the very least worthy of analysis and investigation. Borges was quiet in his description of horrors.)

When I finished that story, I was already in love with the blind Argentine writer. And a new chapter in my life began: I already loved sci-fi (I mean sci-fi, from TV and movies, not particularly SF) since childhood, but at that time I didn't care much for it really. I was trying my hand at poetry (badly) and I was also beginning to write for the stage (I was better at that - a few months in the future, I would receive my first award as a playwright), and I wasn't reading any science fiction then. But, when I read Ficções, I strongly felt that I was missing the fantastic in my life. Well, it turned out that I was already experiencing the fantastic in mind and body through Buddhist meditation; why not in art? Then I recalled some good science fiction stories I had read as a child and early teenager (Fredric Brown, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke) and everyhing came back to me again. And never left me since.

UPDATE: This post was inspired by the excellent Borges month Larry Nolen is promoting in his blog. Larry is doing something very few people ever do, be it in the US or even in Brazil, where we love Jorge Luis Borges: to present, as deeply as possible in a blog, as much as he can of one of the greatest writers of all times. I applaud him for that.

I'm an avid enthusiast of ebooks and ereaders (I finally bought a Kindle to myself, and I intend to but an iPad soon - will cover that on another post), but for me there's still nothing like the paper book. Yes, I'm a fetishist all right, an old-fashioned bookworm - after all, you can't really be a bookworm when books go digital, can you? (ok, you can meditate on this post-modern koan later, if that pleases you)

So, when I was last week on London, I naturally went right to Forbidden Planet, my favorite bookstore outside Brazil. There, I found quite a lot of the SF Masterworks collection that Larry and another famed book reviewers are reviewing in a new blog, so how could I resist? Some of these novels are even supposedly out of print, according to Amazon.com:

Lord of Light - I once had this Zelazny classic in a shabby, tattered-cover, dusty, musty pocket. Never read it. (The awful truth is that I'm getting allergic to dustmotes and everything dust-related with age.) But now, oh, joy!

The Rediscovery of Man - A few months ago, I bought When the People Fell, a volume which comprises all Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality stories. All I needed was his only Instrumentality novel - and now I have it. Expect a review for Tor.com as soon as possible.

Man Plus - Already had this one in the distant past. I had almost all the books that Mr. Fred Pohl had written, including some rare non-SF gems like Presidential Year, written with C. M. Kornbluth in 1956. Unfortunately, I lost most of those books in a storage cellar with humidity in excess. No use crying: I must at least buy whatever I can find and that's that.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus - I never read this one. I love all Gene Wolfe's stories - so far there hasn't been a single one I didn't like. Somehow I don't think this novel will be the exception to the rule.

The Centauri Device - My M. John Harrison bibliography is almost complete now. When I can get The Pastel City, I'll be satisfied.

Roadside Picnic - Have you seen Andrei Tarkovsky's great movie Stalker? If you have, then you must read this novel.

Stand on Zanzibar - THAT is the novel I've been searching for a while now. My friend Cheryl Morgan even did me the huge favor of looking for it for me in the Bristol's used bookstores, to no avail, alas. But I found what was apparently the very last copy of this 1995 edition at the London Forbidden Planet. So, what should I have done? I bought it, of course. And I WILL review this one - even if it takes a while, because it's a long, hard (but extremely good) narrative.

Speaking of dusty and musty old pockets, I couldn't resist buying those above at a Charing Cross used bookstore. But such is my lot; I had never even heard of these two Timothy Zahn's novels (his very first ones, as it happens), so, I thought, I must have them! Then, about the Joe Haldeman, I was aware that it was the last one of a trilogy, but, what the hell, I can buy the other two - or borrow from a friend of mine here in Rio who has a complete Haldemania; James White brought sweet memories to my mind - along with Fred Pohl and Frank Herbert, he was the first author outside the Asimov-Bradbury-Clarke triumviratum every Brazilian fan must read as a neophyte, not so much as a rite of passage, but because there aren't that many SF books translated in Brazil, alas (but that was in the 70s and in the 80s; today this changed a bit - now we also have Ursula K. LeGuin, LOTS of PKDick and William Gibson - and reprints of Asimov and Clarke. [Surprisingly enough, we will have Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville translated until 2011, but that's, as far as I know, is an exception.]) Lois McMaster Bujold: never read her, but I've been hearing a lot of Miles Vorkosigan, so I decided to give it a try. What the hell, it should be fun, right? Right? And Bob Shaw - I love the writer who gave us the slow glass and novels as The Ragged Astronauts, so I figured I'd also not wasting my time on him. And, if all goes wrong due to my allergies (but I'll clean those books well enough before reading them, believe me), I'll give them to my nephew Gabriel, who's starting to read and enjoy SF.

The pile above shows a mix of books bought in Forbidden Planet, Charing Cross and Waterstone's.

War With the Newts - I have a Brazilian Portuguese translation of this Karel Capek's classic, but I had always wanted to read an English translation. Since this is an all-new job, I found it a great opportunity to buy a copy - and the new Penguin Modern Classics edition is gorgeous!

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders - Vítezslav Nesval - I never heard neither of this novel nor of its author, and that's a shame, since it seems to be a very interesting reading. More on that later.

Vast Alchemies - The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake - What a wonderful finding! I'm just preparing myself to start reading the Gormenghast trilogy after the WorldCon - and now I can do so with a biography of Mervyn Peake to go with it as well! I don't believe in coincidences - this book was waiting for me all the time, right there on that hidden spot under a few toppled books.

253 - This is also something I was looking for: the paper version of this hypertext created by Geoff Ryman years ago. Unfortunately Geoff had a last-minute appointment, so he couldn't be at my meeting with Cheryl and Juliet in Oxford, because I very much wanted to meet him in person and tell him how much I like his work - and also tell him I teach hypertext in the university using 253 as one of the guidelines to my students. It's an interactive narrative with content - something you don't see every day.

When It Changed - I must confess I had no idea that anthology existed. Edited by Geoff Ryman, it focus on genuine scientific thinking in science fiction stories, and it presents original stories by the likes of Justina Robson, Paul Cornell, Kit Reed, Adam Roberts, Simon Ings and many others, with afterwords by scientists explaining the science behind the concepts in the stories. It was really exciting to me.

I also had old pockets of some Iain M.Banks' Culture novels - but you can't go wrong with these marvelous covers of the new Orbit edition. I bought Use of Weapons (the first Culture novel - and the first Banks' novel I've ever read - love at first reading) and The Player of Games. Have most of the rest of the collection now, two of three lacking, something that will be corrected soon enough.

As for Mr. China Miéville's Kraken - I was looking for it sure enough! Even bought a second copy for my good friend Jacques Barcia, who will be here in São Paulo for a conference next week and will be able to let himself be wrapped in the tentacles of the beast. I, for one, already am.... but I'm also into Red Planets - Marxism and Science Fiction, edited by Miéville and Mark Bould. I was already interested in this essay for quite a while now, and it's not disappointing at all. More on that later.

I also was pretty keen on buying John Meaney's Absorption - but now that I bought it, I'm in doubt if I should read it now (apparently there's no problem in doing so), but it's a story set in the same universe of To Hold Infinity and The Nulapeiron Sequence, which, of course, I haven't get to read yet, and I always had a kind of a problem reading stories out of chronological order. Is that information even right? What do you, my readers, recommend me in this case?

I couldn't go to Oxford, of all places, and not buy The Cosmic Trilogy of C.S.Lewis. C'mon, who needs Narnia? You have science fiction and angels, for crying out loud!! Never read it, must do it immediately.

Also bought The Starry Rift - Tales of New Tomorrows, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Been wanting to buy this antho for a while now, grabbed it at Blackwell's in Oxford as soon as I saw it.

These last Japanese novels are a incognita to me. I bought them mostly because I want to see foreign SF in English translation, and to help Nick Mamatas's Haikasoru publishing venue to grow up and thrive. (Also, because Cheryl Morgan told me these are great novels indeed, so I ended up buying them without fear.) I already browsed through them and - guess what? - they seemed pretty good indeed. So I guess I'll be having a good read with them.

All in all, excellent acquisitions. Can't complain at all. And I didn't even mention the huge George Orwell book of Essays and Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun (one of my favorite plays ever) I bought at a Blackwell's in Oxford.

I've been recently to London and Oxford (expect one or more posts about it soon) and I had the huge pleasure to meet my friend Cheryl Morgan personally at last. We had dinner with fantasy author Juliet McKenna and after that a beer in a nice pub (where she got me green with envy upon showing her iPad, a great media for comics, by the way).

We talked a lot about publishing markets in America, Brazil, and Europe, and she told me of a secret project that she would disclose this Saturday at Finncon. Well, today is Saturday, and she already has spilled the beans in her own blog: she is creating a new publishing house AND a new magazine at the same time. As she said herself in her blog, that's a giant leap - but a leap that only a few people in the SF world can do succesfully. And Cheryl Morgan is one of them.

After years as a publisher of the hugely-successful, award-winning Emerald City, Cheryl stopped working directly in venues of her own, but was never outside the field, on the contrary: she's non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld Magazine and got the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer (much deserverdly, that goes without saying).

Now, however, she decided to go more proactive again and create a new enterprise. But this time we're not talking about Emerald City resurrected: this is much bigger. After all, a non-fiction magazine which will be a paying venue (Salon Futura) and a ebook publishing house (Wizard's Tower Press) are not to be dismissed or even taken lightly.

Want to know more - and submit your material? Go to Cheryl's blog and read it all.

Why can't I buy The Best of Gene Wolfe in the Kindle Edition? It's something that I did? Or is it just that I don't live in the US? And no, please don't give me that copyright/author's rights/whatever's rights crap. I am a costumer. I pay for the service. Country notwithstanding. You don't believe me? Here it is:

With a close-up on the really important part:

The same thing, by the way, had already happened to me a number of times when I tried to download other books, including Dan Simmons's Ilium and Olympus, that surprisingly enough are not even listed in Kindle anymore (well, at least from my side of the line). You should know better by now, Amazon.com.

Via Locus Online, here are the recipients of 2010 Locus Awards:

Best SF Novel:

Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)

Best Fantasy Novel:

The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

Best First Novel:

The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

Best Young Adult Book:

Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)

Best Novella:

The Women of Nell Gwynne's, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

Best Novelette:

''By Moonlight'', Peter S. Beagle (We Never Talk About My Brother)

Best Short Story:

''An Invocation of Incuriosity'', Neil Gaiman (Songs of the Dying Earth)

Best Anthology:

The New Space Opera 2, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos; HarperCollins Australia)

Best Collection:

The Best of Gene Wolfe, Gene Wolfe (Tor); as The Very Best of Gene Wolfe (PS)

Best Non-Fiction Book/Art Book:

Cheek by Jowl, Ursula K. Le Guin (Aqueduct)

Best Artist:

Michael Whelan

Best Editor:

Ellen Datlow

Best Magazine:

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Best Book Publisher:

Tor

Congratulations to all the winners!