Do Bear's Write in The Woods?
An interview with Greg Bear about some of the fascinating ideas contained in his SF novel, Darwin's Children. Human Endogenous Retrovirus anyone?
(AUTHOR INTERVIEWS)

Of Clockwork Men
Artist Tom Abba on winning both the the Ken McIntyre Award and the Paper Tiger Art Award at the UK's Eastercon, plus how he has never considered himself to be a real science fiction artist. Crikes, how did we resist slipping some Nordic pop group jokes into this interview?
(INTERVIEWS)

The Slow Death of Science Fiction Art
The 'Nest's readers respond to Stephen Hunt's plea for decent cover art on SFF novels. Bad covers get named and shamed.
(COMMENT)

Making Merry SF in Melbourne
Australian SFF came under the spotlight, with the recent close of the 2002 Aurealis Awards. Damien Broderick got best novel for 'Transcension' (Tor), which rather begs the question, why's the most popular Ozzie SF coming out of the USA?
(AWARDS NEWS)

The Core: Mark's Thoughts
A spectacular set of disasters and a heroic expedition to save mankind. Some real science and some nonsense mix. If the film does not quite click, it is probably because we have higher standards than we had for science fiction films in their heyday of the 1950s and 1960s.
(FILM REVIEWS)

The Core: Frank's Thoughts
The Core definitely had the making for fascinating SF stimulation. The attempt to turn the scientific discipline of electromagnetism into a robust and cheeky mainstream entertainment seemed quite challenging in concept.
(FILM REVIEWS)

Teknolust
This SF film plays like a throwback to 1960s mod film making. It is every bit as colorful as intended, but not nearly as intelligent. It plays like a college skit but for the digital special effects that allow four Tilda Swintons on the screen at one time.
(FILM REVIEWS)

Sold Down the Riverworld
Philip Jose Farmer's interesting premise of adventures set on a strange life-after-death-world is squandered on a fairly commonplace barbarian-planet story that appears to be the pilot for a most uninteresting and humdrum TV series.
(TV REVIEWS)

Agent Cody Banks
So the likable Malcolm in the Middle pint-sized TV star Frankie Muniz is at it again on the big screen? This time, the movie handlers are trying to package him as a junior James Bond for the kiddie crowd.
(FILM REVIEWS)

Offworld Report for April 2003
Interviews with authors Larry Niven, Whitley Strieber, Christopher Priest, Ted Chiang, Robert Sheckley, Stephen Baxter, as well as the owners of Golden Gryphon Press, not to mention the cast of the movie Bulletproof Monk; plus Christopher Reeve guest stars on Smallville. Nice.
(SITE REVIEWS)

BOOK REVIEWS

Untied Kingdom by James Lovegrove

Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book Of Horror edited by Stephen Jones

Star Trek: Enterprise: Surak’s Soul by JM Dillard

The Mammoth Book Of Future Cops - by Maxim Jakubowski

For Love And Glory by Poul Anderson

Super-State: A Novel Of Future Europe by Brian Aldiss

The Velocity Gospel (Accomplice Book 2) by Steve Aylett

Storm Of Wings (Dragonmaster: Book One) by Chris Bunch

Blood Lust by Rhys Wilson

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Tales Of The Slayer Volume 2

Son Of Man by Robert Silverberg

Smallville: Whodunnit by Dean Wesley Smith

3SF # 3 publisher: Ben Jeapes. editor: Liz Holiday

Star Trek: Nemesis - Novelisation

Sister Alice by Robert Reed

The Assassin’s Edge by Juliet E. McKenna

Kushiel's Dart & Kushiel's Chosen by Jacqueline Carey

The Eyes Of God by John Marco

Morgawr by Terry Brooks

One More For The Road by Ray Bradbury

Foundation: The International Review Of Science Fiction # 86

If Adobe PDF-based magazines are meant to be the future of science fiction magazines, how come they keep on going bust a couple of issues after they've launched?

Would you, dear reader, consider shelling out your hard earned Galactic Groats on a subscription to a magazine that was e-mailed to you as an Adobe PDF file?

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LAST MONTH'S RESULT
In April's issue, we pointed out that science fiction and fantasy authors such as Ursula K. LeGuin, Terry Bisson, Jeffrey Ford, James Patrick Kelly, Ellen Datlow, Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Moorcock, John Kessel, Lisa Goldstein, Kelly Link and many others all signed the Artists and Writers' Petition Against War on Iraq. So we asked what do you, the SFF fans of the world think?

Well, mirroring the divisions among the mundanes, it seems us SFF fans are a house divided too, with 59% supporting action in the Gulf while the remaining 49% believe we should never have gone in.

Do you need to outfit a division of Colonial Marines? Or perhaps you like to dress up in bizarre alien costumes in your spare time? The come on in to the world of the Weird and the Wonderful in this month's Wizard Site Award winner ...

http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/directory/wiz0503.htm

Uncle Geoff declares that every underdog has its day, and warns the professional SFF community that while he's vicious, cruel and mean ... the last word is only an average!.
http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/Holotales/edit.htm

The science fiction that dare not speak its name

Welcome to the 'Nest's May 2003 issue, SFF'izens.

I was perusing my Sunday newspapers yesterday, pipe in hand, my golden retriever Sir Avalon Barks nestled warmly against my feet, when I stumbled across a rather sizable interview with a science fiction author.

The odd thing was, she wasn't billed as a science fiction author.

Perhaps because, as The Sunday Times so kindly pointed out to us, the "science fiction tales in pulp comics" from names such as "HG Wells and John Wyndham" only 'feeds' into her work. Hmmm. Perhaps I missed the issue of 2000AD where HG Wells guest-wrote Judge Dredd Versus the Martian Evil, or indeed that most collectible of X-Men titles where John Wyndham threw Phoenix and Wolverine against the raw vegetable terror of the Triffids.

Indeed, we can count it as a blessing that Margaret Atwood, the Canadian author of The Handmaid's Tale, isn't a science fiction author, because if she was, her fine 1985 novel certainly wouldn't currently be gracing the stage as a play at London's elegant ENO.

The Handmaid's Tale, for those that haven't read it, features the USA as a fundamentalist Christian state in the 21st Century. Her bleak dystopia features too many e-numbers in the food, pollution and general eco-malaise, which has led much of the world's population to become sterile.

The heroine of the novel is still able to breed, and so very unwillingly becomes confiscated government property (while trying to flee to Canada with her children), a 'Handmaiden', assigned to one of the militant Christian Junta officers to father his children, much to the resentment of said mucky-muck's very sterile WASP wife.

Hitting a number of key liberal buttons - evil USA, evil Christians etc. - the Handmaid's Tale was obviously too important to flush down the SFF ghetto, so it was immediately elevated to the position of 'literature', bypassing the tawdry likes of Stephen Baxter, Larry Niven and Bruce Sterling bobbing around in the porcelain basin of our genre.

Atwood's new novel, Oryx and Crake, looks set to gain the same blessing ... for much the same reason. This novel features late 21st century "global devastation, marauding mutants" with "lethal new diseases and the wiping out of most of the human race."

No SF there then.

Luckily, as a Cassandran view of where this hell-damn capitalism-fuelled biotechnology revolution is carrying us, the literati are already lining up to wave on Oryx and Crake past the modern lit checkpoint to join the ranks of real novels.

While our Margaret is basking in the warmth generated by all those liberals pundits at the prescience of her vision of a USA sliding toward a brutal right wing Taliban-like theocracy, she might like to ponder this.

If SARs has a cure, it's probably going to come from the same "sinister gene-splicing" gits in white coats so intent on littering the future of Oryx and Crake with bioengineered monsters.

Stephen Hunt
sfcrowsnest@hotmail.com

One of the nice things about being online is that SFcrowsnest can publish slightly off-the-wall material that would never find a home in a highly targeted advertising-ruled print magazine world. An article we always trot out as an example of this, is Uncle Geoff's piece about what the heck fuel & engine combination the Thunderbirds craft might have used in the classic 1960s TV series of the same name.

Let's face it, you're not going to read the likes of that in SFX, Starlog, Starburst, Interzone or the rest of the print mafia's publications! If there's an article inside you - could be continuity errors in Andromeda, your latest work of short fiction, or just why you think Iain Banks' novels are the greatest SF since a little man called Verne put pen to paper - do drop Geoff a line below.

Contact Uncle Geoff in the rainy English countryside at gfwillmetts@hotmail.com

We still fund this puppy's bandwidth and other miscellaneous expenses out of our own pocket, so the spirit of volunteerism is about the only thing that keeps our happy ship in hyperspace. Any time, articles, stories or reviews you can submit are always appreciated.

Current requirements: May 2003

- short fiction
- articles
- comment pieces
- book reviewers (see below)

BTW, if you're interested in becoming a book or DVD reviewer, we'd really, really (no, really) appreciate it if you were UK-based. Posting out the hundred of goodies we get every week is an expensive business, and extra airmail costs could lead to Geoff, Jessica, Mark and Steve eating dog food in a crazed economy-drive of death. Of course, if you're based in the US, Canada or Australia and you fancy reviewing your own stash of goodies resulting from your science fiction and fantasy addiction, then that okay by us ... but we can't supply you ourselves! Sorry.

Got your own web site? Then increase the traffic to it today!

Thanks to our nifty new syndication engine, you can now add SFcrowsnest.com's monthly news to your own web site for free. It's a lot of work creating dynamic, fresh content to attract visitors back to your science fiction/fantasy web site. Now - with a one-minute cut & paste of two lines of code - you can take some of the effort out of the process ... and give your users another reason to visit your own fab online offering.

You can find full details of this new tool over at ...

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