Anchorage Daily News

Getting to Know You

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Story tools

Comments (0)

E-mail a friend

Print

Share on Facebook

Digg this

Seed Newsvine

Send link via AIM

Follow on Twitter

Font size : A | A | A

By David Marusek (Del Rey Books, $15)

The blurb: "Now, in this collection of 10 short stories, Marusek's fierce imagination and dazzling extrapolative gifts are on full display. Five of the stories, including the Sturgeon Award-winning 'The Wedding Album,' a shattering look at the unintended human consequences of advanced technology, are set in the same future as "Counting Heads." All 10 showcase Marusek's talent for literate, provocative science fiction of the very highest order."

Excerpt: "After a while, the other Anne said, 'Well?' Implicit in this question was a whole standard set of questions that boiled down to -- shall I keep you or delete you now? For sometimes a sim didn't take. Sometimes a sim was cast while Anne was in a mood, and the sim suffered irreconcilable guilt or unassuagable despondency and had to be mercifully destroyed. It was better to do this immediately, or so all the Annes had agreed. And Anne understood the urgency, what with the reception still in progress and the bride and groom, though frazzled, still wearing their finery. They might do another casting if necessary."

Mind Over Ship

By David Marusek (Tom Doherty Associates, $24.95)

The blurb: The year is 2135, and the international program to seed the galaxy with human colonies has stalled as greedy immortal power brokers park their starships in Earth's orbit and begin to convert them into space condos. Ellen Starke's head, rescued from the fiery crash that killed her mother, struggles to regrow a body in time to restore her dead mother's financial empire. And pre-Singularity Als conspire to join the human race just as human clones, such as Mary Skarland and her evangeline sisters, want nothing more than to leave it.

Excerpt: "The proxies faced each other, drifting in an empty space with no up or down. What is this service that's worth a waiver, Myr Starke? Oliver-by-proxy asked. Without preamble, Ellen's proxy said, I want you to find my mother's murderers. And after you find them, I want you to destroy them. The TUG proxies were silent for a long while. Do you need time to discuss this between yourselves? No, that's not necessary, Oliver-by-proxy replied. I am authorized to speak for the charter in matters like this. I'm not sure what has given you the impression that we kill for hire, but even if we did, your request is not that simple."

The Place Where You Go To Listen

By John Luther Adams (Wesleyan University Press, $24.95)

The blurb: Did Alaska create the music of John Luther Adams, or did the music create his Alaska? "The Place Where You Go to Listen" is the composer's largest, most complex work -- a sound and light environment at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska, that gives voice to the cycles of sunlight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the seismic rhythms of the earth and the dance of the aurora borealis. In this new book Adams proposes an ideal of music ecology, tells the story of the day-to-day emergence of "The Place," and explains the musical, technological and scientific dimensions of this "place for hearing the unheard music of the world around us."

Excerpt: "As a composer, I believe that music can contribute to the awakening of our ecological understanding. By deepening our awareness of our connections to the earth, music can provide a sounding model for the renewal of human consciousness and culture. Over the years this belief has led me from music inspired by the songs of birds, to landscape painting with tones, to elemental noise and beyond, in search of an ecology of music. "

ADVERTISEMENT