Awards. The Nebula Award nominees were announced the other day, Like last year, the novel category is very female-heavy – 4 women, 2 men. (James Nicoll has the full tally.) I’ve read two of the nominees – Jo Walton’s Among Others and N.K. Jemisin’s The Kingdom of Gods, but my completely uneducated guess for a win based on levels of hype I just don’t get is China Miéville’s Embassytown. (I’d vote for Walton.) Surprise me, SFWA!
Releases. Tor has announced that the final Wheel of Time book, A Memory of Light, is scheduled to come out on January 8, 2013. Brandon Sanderson is finishing the series working from Robert Jordan’s notes. Tor will also be re-releasing the other books with new covers, an action I heartily endorse as the original awful, awful covers are the main reason I never read them.
Adaptions. Producers are pitching a TV series based on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series. I’m not so sure this is a great idea – the books have their charms, but they are incredibly dated.
Views. Fantasy Faction takes a look at the changing face of SF/F, while Sherwood Smith remembers Andre Norton.
Star Trek! Jo Walton looks an influential Trek novel, John M. Ford’s The Final Reflection. She says: “…it’s one of those rare tie-in books that’s good even if you’re not a fan of the show and it must be world-shatteringly marvellous if you are.”
Guess this means I should work on getting caught up on the Wheel of Time books… I gave up around book seven or eight (don’t really remember now).
And as for the Darkover thing, that could be… interesting? It’d definitely have to be on something like HBO or Showtime. I just can’t seem them getting away with an adaptation for any other network and still remain true to the story.
Darkover could go either way, really – there’s the ‘boys adventure’ type stuff that’s almost YAish (minus, say, the whole Dyan Ardis situation) and then there’s stuff like The Forbidden Tower which you’d have to go HBO. Darkover is really all over the map. (And the timeline, for that matter.) The Sisterhood of the Sword stuff is so IMMENSELY 70’s, for instance. I think you’d really need to gut and rebuild for an adaption to be sucessful.