La Biblioteca de Ilium

Recently, I reviewed Karen Lord‘s highly enjoyable novel Redemption in Indigo, a rural fantasy that successfully mixing a modern sensibility and a tradition arising from oral narrative. Next week the spanish edition of her The Best of All Possible Worlds will be published, a very interesting science fiction novel that will soon be reviewed here at the Ilium’s Library. It’s a very different novel from Redemption in Indigo, a science fiction story exploring issues such as the formation  [ Read More ]

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Recently, Francisco García Lorenzana, director of the Literatura Fantastica RBA imprint, interviewed Christopher Priest as a sort of appetizer before the publication, next week, of the spanish translation of his novel The Space Machine in the imprint, with the title La Máquina Espacial and a wonderful cover by Alejandro Colucci. It was a really interesting interview and García Lorenzana has been so kind as to allow me share with all of you the english version  [ Read More ]

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(Disclaimer: English is my second language, so I want to apologize in advance for any possible mistakes in the text below. If you find any, please let me know so that I can correct it. I’d really appreciate it.) The New Weird – A Controversial Label The New Weird is an odd trend among speculative fiction genres. As it’s often the case with subgenres -fortunately, if you ask me-, it’s almost impossible to come up  [ Read More ]

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(Disclaimer: English is my second language, so I want to apologize in advance for there may be mistakes in the text below. If you find any, please let me know so that I can correct it. I’d really appreciate it. Thanks.) ‘I am a storyteller. I travel to collect stories, and I return to tell the stories of one place to the people of another. That is the important part of the trade. You must  [ Read More ]

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‘I am a storyteller. I travel to collect stories, and I return to tell the stories of one place to the people of another. That is the important part of the trade. You must never tell people their own stories. They have no interest in them, or they think they can tell them better themselves. Give them a stranger’s life and then they’re content. Algunos libros nos llevan de regreso a ese territorio de la  [ Read More ]

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I have always enjoyed the Dresden Files novels written by Jim Butcher. They are a guilty pleasure of mine, particularly in their audiobook edition when read by James Marsters and I have reviewed several of them in Catalan in the previous incarnation of this blog. Thus, when his book The Furies of Calderon was published in Spanish as Las Furias de Alera under the Literatura Fantastica imprint by RBA and I had the chance to interview Butcher  [ Read More ]

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“Lord Ladrian,” Steris said as they began eating, “I suggest that we begin compiling a list of conversational topics we can employ when in the company of others. The topics should not touch on politics or religion, yet should be memorable and give us opportunities to appear charming. Do you know any particularly witty sayings or stories that can be our starting point?” “I once shot the tail off a dog by mistake,” Waxillium said  [ Read More ]

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“When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.” Reseñar una novela que te desborda es  [ Read More ]

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Esto parece más propio del Sense of Wonder de Odo que de La Biblioteca de Ilium pero… Después del anuncio de Jonathan Wood de que Nightshade no publicaría la secuela de su divertidísimo No Hero, hoy me entero de que, a lo largo de esta semana, la revista Wired regala No Hero y su continuación, Yesterday’s Hero. El año pasado hablé de No Hero en la encarnación previa de La Biblioteca y le puse un notable bajo. Traduzco partes  [ Read More ]

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“Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and direclty make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreck unbelievable havoc, where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that that in this world there is an administered division of labour, among the magicians them selves and those who coordinate their activities. It’s bureaucratic and also (therefore) chaotic, and it’s full  [ Read More ]

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