The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my reading,
reviewing and thought process for every single science friction story to win or
be nominated for a major award. I wanted to start this blog because, although I
am a massive science fiction fan, I have not read a wide variety of works in
the genera. As I have no desire to read through a large number of bland works,
I decided to read those works that are already recognized as some of the beast.
This should (in theory) cut down the number of books that, although useful in
some way, are not really worth my precious reading time. Reading the books
nominated for major awards should give me a large and diverse field (mostly)
worth my time.
I am defining "major award" as any international,
national or regional award. The qualifications are:
1. If the award
covers books in more than one state in the U.S. or county in Great Britain, it
qualifies for this blog.
a. Method of nomination and selection
doesn't matter, save that it cannot simply be an individual's favorite book.
2. The work is in English.
3. It also has to
be science fiction, not fantasy.
a. I define that as a book written which,
at the time it was written, was seen as something that could happen. I also
include alternate history, as that is an attempt to realistically portray what
could have happened if events had been different.
The plan is to go in chronological order as much as
possible, depending heavily on what's available to me freely, cheaply and
legally. I shall limit myself to stories published in written format. The goal
is to use this blog to motivate myself to read a wide range of well written
science fiction stories, and to actually think about those stories in a
critical way through the worldview of Christianity
The methodology for
this is to provide a short spoiler free review on each work, followed by a
longer, complete review. After that, if I desire to continue to discuss the
reading with more posts, then I will. I will post articles about the awards and
authors themselves as well, in order to enrich understanding of the stories and
provide interesting historical background. One warning: I am not an literature
professor, nor do I claim in any way to be an expert on literary criticism.
These articles are not meant to be peer reviewed articles, but simply my
considered thoughts concerning the works, mainly written for my own enrichment.
I am posting them to stimulate discussion of the works as well, and I welcome
any comments. The planned update schedule is every Wednesday and Saturday,
although that may change.
Guiding Principles
The Guiding Principles underlying this blog are, in the
words of Pliny the Elder as quoted to Pliny the Younger "No book is so bad
as to not have something of use in some part of it.”( Epist. 3,5,10) In accordance
with this statement, and the principal that man is created in the image of God,
I will attempt to give every book a fair read. I do reserve the right to stop
reading a book if there is strongly graphic sexual content, or it is somehow
entirely useless(very unlikely), or I can't discover a copy available to me.
Other than those three reasons I see no purpose in skipping a story. In
addition, as stated above, I will be examining the works based on my Christian
Worldview. I look forward to exploring these works with all of you. Wednesday's
post will provide an overview of the
first major award I am examining, the International Fantasy Award.
