Mind Meld was a feature on the website SF Signal, curated by Paul Weimer. For each Mind Meld, Weimer would send a question to several authors and fans, asking for their answers, which would then be published together. This page provides my answer to one of the Mind Melds I participated in, along with a listing of the other authors who responded to that particular question.Question: We asked this week's panelists about series fiction in genre.
Q: Everywhere you go in genre, series seem to predominate over single novels. How do you read a series differently as compared to singletons? Have you ever given up on a series, or returned to one after a long absence?
Here's what they said…
Sally Qwill Janin, Lisa Paitz Spindler, Peggy Hailey, Fábio Fernandes, Brent Bowen, Zachary Jernigan, Alex Ristea, Stefan Raets, Jay Garmon, and Rob Bedford
Steven H Silver, an avid reader and reviewer, has spent a great deal of his non-professional life involved with books. Although as a child he had to store books in his dresser, his library now includes bookshelves with a ladder. In addition to writing stories and poetry (and getting a few of them published), he's edited three anthologies for DAW Books and two collections of Lester del Rey's short fiction for NESFA Press. He launched ISFiC Press and spent eight years as the publisher and editor. Steven also publishes the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus.
Not necessarily “The best,” and not necessarily things that would make my Hugo or Nebula ballot, but a look at some of the books, movies, etc. that I enjoyed over the past year.
This year is a golden time for comic adaptations on television. Not only can one watch Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Arrow, but several new shows have also begun airing, such as Gotham, Constantine, and The Flash. With more promised in the future, it looks like superhero shows will be to the 2010s what Westerns were in the 1960s and cop shows were in the 1970s. While I enjoy Gotham and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., both of those, and Arrow, are a little dark for my taste. The optimism of The Flash tends to speak to me more and I enjoy the interactions between the characters. I'll admit to thinking that star Grant Gustin doesn't quite seem like Barry Allen to me, but supporting cast members Jesse L. Martin, and Carlos Valdes always hit their marks and Danielle Penabaker and Tom Cavanagh handle their roles quite well. The fact that the producers have called back to the 1990's The Flash by casting former Barry Allen John Wesley Shipp as the new Barry Allen's father and Amanda Pays as Tina McGee, the same character she played in the 1990s, is a wonderful Easter Egg for those who enjoyed the earlier series.
While there is little that was released in 2014 that could compare to the big space opera fun of Guardians of the Galaxy or the pure hard science fiction thrill of Interstellar (although throughout it, I found myself seeing the direct “homages” to 2001 and 2010), one of the most intriguing science fiction films of 2014 was small independent movie with a cast of (essentially) three people. The One I Love starred Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss with a short appearance by Ted Danson. It tells the story of a couple sent on a retreat to fix their relationship in a very Twilight Zone situation. While not a perfect film (it would have been better if Moss's character had been the focus rather than Duplass), it raises many questions for the audience to consider long after the conclusion of the film.
Any year that includes new Firefly related materials is a good year, and 2014 was a banner year for Browncoats. Not only did the Whedon empire release the six issue comic miniseries Leaves on the Wind, but the boardgame Firefly: The Game was released (along with two expansions). Once you figured out the game mechanics and could play the game in less than four hours, it is a lot of fun. The card game Firefly: Out of the Black was also released (with two expansions), having a much shorter play time. Finally, Firefly: The Role Playing Game was released, adding the characters and situations from the television show which were missing from the earlier (and now out of print) Serenity: The Role Playing Game. For those who played the earlier version of the game, Margaret Weis Games released bridging materials for the two sets of rules.
Another fun comic miniseries was Mark Evanier's take on Rocky and Bullwinkle, which manages to capture the humor and look of the original television series, including the meta-humorous touches. Sure, the best way to introduce someone to Rocky and Bullwinkle are the old cartoons, but the Evanier's comic is a nice extension.
It has been most of a decade since Katherine Kurtz published the second volume of her Childe Morgan trilogy in the on-going Deryni series, and while the third volume The King's Deryni is to a large extent a book with the primary purpose of getting the characters from the end of Childe Morgan to the places they need to be for the start of the original Deryni trilogy, it is a reminder of what Kurtz has done so well over the entire series, building and chronicling a realistic medieval culture augmented with magic and complex relationships. Not a great place to start reading the series, but a wonderful book for those who have already discovered Kurtz.
For science fiction novels, Jack McDevitt's Coming Home explores and expands the history of his Priscilla Hutchins series with a visit to Earth and the recovery of long lost characters, although unlike the Kurtz novel, McDevitt's book stands well on his own and does provide a good introduction to the character and the universe, as well as McDevitt's strengths as an author.
While the second volume of William H. Patterson's Robert Heinlein biography was published this year (unfortunately, posthumously), another book, also the second volume of a biography, was also published to less fanfare, notably Jonathan R. Eller's Ray Bradbury Unbound, which looks at Bradbury's life from his work on the screen play for Moby Dick through the 1960s, when he was coming to terms with a changing place for himself in the world of literature.
And a humorous novel that I'd like to mention is Christopher Moore's The Serpent of Venice, a mashup of Shakespeare's Othello and The Merchant of Venice as well as a sequel to Moore's own Fool. The mixture of the two plays works quite well and includes Moore's laugh-out-loud humor. And I should probably note that I'm chairing Windycon 42 in 2015 and I've invited Moore to be one of my guests of honor, not least because of the type of writing in this novel and his earlier books.
There were a lot of good anthologies, both original and reprint, but perhaps the most essential for any collection is the massive retrospective edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, The Time Traveler's Almanac, which runs nearly 1,000 pages and includes all of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine as well as seminal works by Gibson, Turtledove, and Willis as well as lesser known, but no less enjoyable, stories by Rosaleen Love, Dean Francis Alfar, and John Chu.
Ken Liu is an author to be aware of, and his story “What I Assume You Shall Assume” from the John Joseph Adams edited anthology Dead Man's Hand is well worth tracking down, as is Catherynne Valente's story “The Quidnunx” from Harvest Season, a collection of stories by the authors of SF Squeecast.
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