The Purpose of This Blog

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.