In 2004 Susanna Clarke published Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury; OverDrive Sample), a moody, lavish literary fantasy novel set in an alternative 19^th century England full of magic.

It was a sensation, reaching number three on The New York Times bestseller list, winning the Hugo Award for best novel, and getting longlisted for the Man Booker.

Still, for all the readers who adored the book, including Neil Gaiman who praised it lavishly, there were others who were not as charmed.

Now the BBC has adapted it into a seven-part mini series, airing on this side of the ocean on BBC America (Saturdays at 10 p.m.) and reaction is split again.

Mary McNamara, writing for The LA Times’s “Jacket Copy” says it is “a deft combination of Dickensian satire, Austenian wit and Gothic anxiety. For those put off by beheadings and orgies and even for those who are not, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a welcome return to literate magical fantasy.”

David Fear, in his Rolling Stone review, calls it “extraordinary” and says that it offers “some of the most fantastic imported TV you’re likely to view this year… the show’s immersive deep dive into the mystic is likely to leave jaws on the living-room floor.”

Dissenters include Mike Hale writing for The New York Times. He calls it “largely unremarkable” and warns “those who enjoyed the best-selling book to temper their expectations.” The highest praise Hale manages is “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is great to look at. It moves along at a gallop, and it’s not boring, even if it’s not exactly engaging either. Most important, it has appealing performances by Bertie Carvel as Strange and particularly by Eddie Marsan as the crabbed and proud Norrell.”

The AV Club, slightly less disappointed, wraps up its review with “The BBC’s first episode demonstrates it can pull off the story, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll pull off the magic.”

Those knocks aside, it seems readers are responding. Holds are at very respectable levels for a book that came out over a decade ago, in some places topping a 3:1 ratio.

For libraries that need new copies, Bloomsbury has released a new TV tie-in edition. Readers’ advisors might want to take note that the audiobook version narrated by Simon Prebble  (Macmillan Audio; CD and downloadable) is well worth suggesting as well.

The trailer for the film adaptation of The Martian by Andy Weir, (RH/Crown) debuted online this week.

Scheduled for release on November 25 [Update: just a few days after we posted this story, 20th Century Fox switched the release date to Oct. 2. The logic? Less competition, according to Deadline ]. Directed by Ridley Scott, it has a killer cast, including Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Donald Glover.

The book began as a self-published science fiction title, later picked up by Random House’s Crown imprint. It appeared on multiple best books lists, was a Feb. 2014 LibraryReads pick, the 2014 RUSA Reading List selection for  Science Fiction, as well as an Alex Award winner.

A tie-in is scheduled for October.

The Martian (Mass Market MTI)
Andy Weir
RH/Broadway; October 13, 2015
Mass Market; $9.99 USD, $12.99 CAD
9781101905005, 110190500X

Is Hollywood taking note of the LibraryReads picks?

Warner Bros. has just won a bidding war for the rights to the LibraryReads #1 Pick for May, Naomi Novik’s Uprooted (RH/Del Rey; OverDrive Sample). Aaccording to The Hollywood Reporter. Ellen DeGeneres will produce. She currently has six TV shows in production, “making this her rare foray into features.”

Lucy Lockley of St. Charles City-County Library (MO) offers this description of the story:

“A young girl is unexpectedly uprooted from her family and becomes involved in a centuries-old battle with The Wood, a malevolent entity which destroys anyone it touches. Fast-paced, with magic, mystery and romance, Novik’s stand-alone novel is a fairy tale for adults.”

Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (Macmillan/FSG; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample), the first title in his Southern Reach trilogy, has won the 2014 Nebula Award (presented in 2015) for best novel.

Along with Authority and Acceptance (books two and three), Annihilation tells the story of Area X, an isolated landscape cut off from human occupation which nature has taken back. Previous expeditions to the area have resulted in nightmare outcomes. Now a new expedition is under way.

When we wrote earlier about the series we quoted Sara Sklaroff’s review in The Washington Post which still stands as a good summary, “Annihilation is successfully creepy, an old-style gothic horror novel set in a not-too-distant future. The best bits turn your mind inside out.”

VanderMeer’s acceptance speech makes note of the Hugo controversy and the need for diverse reading.

This is the first time the very literary-leaning FSG has published a Nebula winning title.

Three other Nebulas are awarded for best novella, novelette, and short story (each based upon word count).

Nancy Kress won the novella category for Yesterday’s Kin (Tachyon Publications; OverDrive Sample) while Ursula Vernon won best short story for “Jackalope Wives.”

Alaya Dawn Johnson won the Novelette category for A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i. She also won The Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy for Love Is the Drug (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Books; Scholastic on Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample). The Andre Norton Award is one of several given alongside the Nebulas.

Another such award, The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, went to Guardians of the Galaxy, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman.

Larry Niven, author of the 1970 Nebula winning Ringworld, won the Damon Knight Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement.

The Nebula Awards are presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and honor outstanding achievement in Science Fiction or Fantasy. Unlike the Hugo Awards, which are based upon membership votes including the votes of fans, only the author-members of the association vote upon the Nebulas. See a  full list of nominated titles here.

   
The first woman to win the British Fantasy Award, Tanith Lee has died at age 67 after a long illness. She won the World Fantasy Award twice and was a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from both the World Fantasy Convention and the Horror Writers Association. Although she never won the Nebula, she was nominated twice.

In an appreciation, the SF web site i09 says Lee “was one of the most prolific and influential authors of fantasy and horror. Everyone seems to know her for something different. Some people are obsessed with The Silver Metal Lover, [RH/Spectra; originally published in 1977] while others devoured her fantasy series.”

But the Guardian notes she “seemed to have fallen out of favour as a writer in recent years, as did many writers who came to prominence in the SF fields in the Seventies.” the author herself said in a 1998 interview, with Locus Magazine “If anyone ever wonders why there’s nothing coming from me, it’s not my fault. I’m doing the work. No, I haven’t deteriorated or gone insane. Suddenly, I just can’t get anything into print.”

As tastes in genre fiction shifted, that problem only continued and now just a handful of her books are in print.

Her debut, The Birthgrave (Penguin/DAW; OverDrive Sample) is being reprinted for its 40^th anniversary next week. The other books in that trilogy are planned for release over the next several months.

The first look at stills from the film adaptation of The Martian by Andy Weir, (RH/Crown) are now on People.com.

Starring Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Donald Glover, and scheduled for release in November, it is directed by Ridley Scott.

The book began as a self-published science fiction title, later picked up by Random House’s Crown imprint. It appeared on multiple best books lists and was a Feb. 2014 LibraryReads pick, the 2014 RUSA Reading List selection for  Science Fiction, as well as an Alex Award winner.

Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (Harper/William Morrow; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample), published yesterday, offers a door-stopper of post-apocalyptic SF and has already reached #24 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

The plot sounds like a winner. The moon explodes for reasons unknown and before scientists can figure out why, they realize it hardly matters as a “hard rain” of debris will soon destroy the Earth. Obviously it is time to leave and a space station is adapted as a global ark, for the very lucky and the very few.

Reviews are mixed for the 880-page tome, however, and holds vary widely.

Both LibraryReads and Amazon picked it as one of the best books of May with Keith Hayes of Wake County Public Libraries, Cary, NC saying:

Stephenson’s back in fine form with this hard science fiction masterpiece, combining the detail of Cryptonomicon with the fast-paced action of Reamde. Fans of Anathem will appreciate Stephenson’s speculation about the possibilities of human evolution. This book is a great follow-up for readers who enjoyed the science of Weir’s The Martian. I heartily recommend Seveneves to SF readers.

Steven Poole writing for The Guardian is less convinced, praising many of Stevenson’s ideas but ending his review with the comment that the book put him to sleep:

…in the novel’s snail-paced last third, there are lots and lots of lavish descriptions of imaginary machines: city-sized orbiting habitats, giant pendulums reaching down into the Earth’s atmosphere, “sky trains”. After scores of pages of this, my eyelids were succumbing to a powerful gravitational force. And I quite like giant space gadgets.

A similar story is playing out in requests for Seveneves across the country. Some libraries are showing heavy holds on modest ordering while others have low queues on light ordering. In Stevenson’s hometown holds are skyrocketing and The Seattle Times offers a strong review.

The Syfy channel recently released the “First Look” trailer for its 12-episode series adapting Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (Plume; Penguin Audio; OverDrive Sample) which will air sometime in 2016.

The series stars Jason Ralph (he has appeared on TV series Madam Secretary and Gossip Girl and in films such as A Most Violent Year) as Quentin Coldwater, a new recruit at the Brakebills College, a school of magic.

As we noted before, the Syfy channel has several book adaptations in the works.

As season one of the Outlander series winds down on Starz (the finale airs May 30), shooting has begun on the next season.

Based on the second novel in the book series, Dragonfly In Amber (RH/Delta; 2001; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample), it follows Jamie and Claire as they escape to France and try to stop the Jacobite rising.

Once again, it spans multiple time periods and also introduces new characters, including Jamie and Claire’s adult daughter Brianna, Fergus, Jamie’s spy and one-day-adopted son, and a young Lord John Grey.

According to the website zap2it, author Diana Gabaldon is pleased with the plans for season 2, saying:

The Parisian stuff is very good, and in fact I’m deeply impressed by the outlines I’ve seen of those scripts … I think they’ve done a wonderful job of pulling out the most important plot elements and arranging them in a convincing way …

Season two is slated to air in the spring of 2016, so fans will have to endure a year-long wait, or as they call it, #Droughtlander.

Emily St. John Mandel has won the Arthur C. Clarke award, recognizing the best in Science Fiction, for her bestselling novel Station Eleven (RH/Knopf; RH & BOT Audio; Thorndike; OverDrive Sample).

The book, a post-apocalyptic tale that weaves back and forth in time as it follows the fate of several characters while also exploring the sustaining power of art, has racked up a litany of accolades.

A finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner, it was picked as one of the Favorite of Favorites by LibraryReads, and made multiple best books of the year lists including Entertainment Weekly’s which selected it as their #1 pick.

As we reported, George R.R. Martin is on the bandwagon too, lobbying fans to support it for the Hugo award.

The genre categorization doesn’t sit well with Mandel. Responding to a review in the Washington Post’s “Science Fiction and Fantasy” column she told Ron Charles,

I was surprised to discover that if you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer … my only objection to these categories is that when you have a book like mine that doesn’t fit neatly into any category, there’s a real risk that readers who only read “literary fiction” won’t pick it up because they think they couldn’t possibly like sci-fi, while sci-fi readers will pick up the book based on the sci-fi categorization, and then be disappointed because the book isn’t sci-fi enough.

On the other hand, this offers readers advisors an opportunity to use Station Eleven to expand both SF and literary readers’ horizons.

Check your holds, they  are heavy in some libraries and trade paperback edition is scheduled for June 2,

The seven-part adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, is finally set to air on BBC America beginning June 13.

The U.S. trailer has just been released:

When the book was published in 2004, it went on to  become a hit, heralded by an profile of the author in the NYT Magazine. In the NYT Sunday Book Review, Gregory Maguire approvingly called it “Hogwarts for Grown-Ups,” saying, “Clarke’s imagination is prodigious, her pacing is masterly and she knows how to employ dry humor in the service of majesty.”

Today, the TV series is being compared to Game of Thrones.

The U.S. tie-in is scheduled for the end of this month.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA, May 26, 2015
9781620409909, 1620409909
Trade Paperback, $18.00 USD, $20.00 CAD

Pilot season is in full swing, with the networks announcing which of the hopefuls will make the transition to full series.

The Syfy channel has picked up Lev Grossman’s fantasy trilogy The Magicians as a 12-episode series. Set to begin shooting in Vancouver in July, it stars Jason Ralph (A Most Violent Year) as Quentin Coldwater.

Syfy has a few other book adaptations in the works. Coming in December, a series based on Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, (RH/De Rey).

Also set to premiere in December is The Expanse, based the series by James S.A. Corey, beginning with Leviathan Wakes, (Hachette/Orbit, 2011).

Coming some time next year, is a thriller series, The Hunters based on Whitley Strieber’s Alien Hunter, (Macmillan/Tor, 2013).

In addition, Syfy recently announced that they are isteaming with Steven Spielberg’s company Amblin TV for a series based on Aldous Huxley’s classic,  Brave New World.

Teasing Americans, BBC One has released a trailer for the seven-part adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which begins in the U.K.in May. It is set to air on BBC America, but the release date has not yet been announced.

Adding to the frustration, The Sunday Times of London says the series “could be magic” because it’s “a perfect fit for the new age of small-screen drama.”

Neil Gaiman writes in The Guardian how he fell under the book’s spell in 2004 and continues to love it to this day. The book’s author Susanna Clarke describes the weird sensation of seeing “my own characters walking about.  A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn’t and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.”

The U.S. tie-in is scheduled for the end of this month.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA, May 26, 2015
9781620409909, 1620409909
Trade Paperback, $18.00 USD, $20.00 CAD

George R.R. Martin says the Hugo Awards are “broken… and I am not sure they can ever be repaired.”

He made the comment after a successful campaign to swamp the nomination process triggered a nasty fight which has now degenerated into an all-out battle over the future of the award. The fallout has been reported widely, by The Atlantic, The Guardian, Slate, and Entertainment Weekly.

The short version is that two online groups posted lists of suggested titles and urged those who agreed with their own decidedly right of center political/cultural leanings to pay the $40 it costs to vote and swamp the nomination process – and they succeeded.

Two authors have responded by withdrawing their nominated works from the awards.

Annie Bellet withdrew her short story “Goodnight Stars,” posting “I am not a ball. I do not want to be a player. This is not what my writing is about.”

Marko Kloos withdrew his novel Lines of Departure (Amazon/47North), “keeping the nomination is not a moral option at this point.”

In response the World Science Fiction Society, which runs the Hugo Awards said,

“This year is the first time in the history of the Hugo Awards that a finalist has withdrawn a work after announcement of the finalist shortlist. Nominees with sufficient nominating votes to make the shortlist have in the past declined nomination as Finalists; however, this has always happened before the shortlist was announced.”

Black Gate, a fanzine, has withdrawn as well although they did so too late to change the ballot.

Connie Willis also withdrew as a presenter at the award ceremony saying,

“I’ve essentially been told to engage in some light-hearted banter with the nominees, give one of them the award, and by my presence–and my silence–lend cover and credibility to winners who got the award through bullying and extortion. Well, I won’t do it. I can’t do it. If I did, I’d be collaborating with them in their scheme.”

Bottom line for librarians: Many Science Fiction and Fantasy fans may see this year’s round of winners as tainted no matter who wins. Unfortunately, an award librarians have relied on for years to highlight the best in two very popular genres is now suspect and, unless a solution can be found, other awards may be vulnerable to similar hijacking.

Just announced, Terry Pratchett’s final novel in the Discworld series will be:

The Shepherd’s Crown
Pratchett, Terry
HarperCollins, 9/15/2015
Hardcover, 9780062429971
Audio, 9780062430557

The 41^st title in the series, it continues the Tiffany Aching sequence that began with The Wee Free Men in 2003 and includes A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, and I Shall Wear Midnight.

According to the announcement on Pratchett’s book site, he completed the novel in 2014, before his death earlier this year. It will be published in hardcover, ebook, and audio formats. NOTE: Some news sources say the publisher is Random House. They are the publisher of the U.K. edition. In the U.S., it will be released by HarperCollins.

The Shepherd’s Crown is not the only book coming from Pratchett. His fourth novel in the Long Earth series with Stephen Baxter, The Long Utopia (Harper; OverDrive Sample), is also due this year, on June 23^rd.