Big, hardcover science-fiction novels from first-time novelists — which Paul Melko’s Singularity's Ring is — usually get published because a publisher can hang an easy hook on them (with quotes from big-name authors saying “like Neuromancer … on speed!”) and they easily fall into slots in a publisher’s slate. (The Road is really hot right now. We need a post-apocalyptic dystopia stat!”)(By the way, my own review of Singularity's Ring is here.)
The question at hand is: does Patterson have specific works in mind, or is he just making stuff up? (Reviewers do make things up; I've done it myself on occasion.)
We'll first need to get a pool of "big hardcover science-fiction novels from first-time novelists," which may not be easy. I first took a look at Locus's Recommended Reading list for 2007, which lists 9 titles in the "first novels" section. Sadly, as the Great Cham might have said, the ones that are hardcover are not science fiction, and the ones that are science fiction are not hardcover. (I'll leave off trying to define "big" for the moment.)
OK. Further googling led me to Fantasy Debut, a blog I was unaware of before. That blog tries to announce every major-publisher debut book in speculative fiction. Excellent!
So I'll work backward from their posts and build a list of recent candidates. Most of these were published in 2007, with a few in the prior couple of years:
- Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery
- Radio Freefall by Matthew Jarpe
- The Genesis Code by Christopher Forrest
- KOP by Warren Hammond
- Crystal Rain by Tobias S. Buckell
- The Outback Stars by Sandra McDonald
- Old Man's War by John Scalzi
- Elom by William H. Drinkard
- Truancy by Isamu Fukui
What other candidates are out there? Remember -- we're talking about "big," hardcover, SF novels. Blind item #1 is "Neuromancer on speed" and blind item #2 is a post-apocalyptic dystopia reminiscent of The Road. What could these books be?
Update: Novels added due to comments follow, and I expect this will be a growing list.
- Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
- Singularity Sky by Charles Stross
- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
4 comments:
Thanks so much for the link!
As for your list, at first I thought of a handful of other titles, but not with the "in hardcover" stipulation. Tor put out a lot of debuts last year, and right now they dominate my list of debuts.
Would Soon I will Be Invincble be SF by the standards of your question? I believe that was the author's first novel.
It's going back a bit earlier -- to 2003 -- but I think you can credit Ace with publishing my "Singularity Sky" in hardcover (with what I subsequently discovered was a stonking great print run for a first SF novel).
A little older, but what about Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow?
Post a Comment