I finished off my review of 'The Void Captain's Tale' yesterday.  It was a tough book to review actually, it's kind of difficult to convey just how off the wall the story actually is, compared with how steadfast the writing style is.  I'm really glad that Void Captain got a nomination in 1984, that year and 1983 were fairly traditional years for the Hugo and Nebula.  Almost all the nominees for that year were traditional SF writers at the end of their career.  83 and 84 saw the last nominations for Asimov, Heinlein, and McCaffrey three solid and well known writers.  There were also nominations for Gregory Benford and Jack Vance, some lesser known but still respected SF authors and editors.  These two years also saw nominations for Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun' series, which is just great taken as a whole and the winner of both awards for 1984 was 'Startide Rising' by David Brin, which is more than deserving.  Also there was 'Tea with the Black Dragon' which is just a great little book that I'm glad got nominated otherwise it might be totally forgotten.  Looking at this list of books maybe I'm wrong to say these two years were dull or traditional, they might just look that way because 1985 saw 'Neuromancer' which was a groundbreaking work, and the years prior were still flying high on the craziness of the 70s.

I'm still reading 'Dhalgren' by Delany, and I probably will be for awhile.  It's going to take awhile to finish this one.  I'm going to start setting myself a goal of reviewing two books a week, which will be kind of tough.  I know most people haven't read Void Captain so the review is unlikely to appeal to most people, but I think it's important to bring some of these older books to peoples attention.  A lot of older, less popular SF novels are completely out of print.  Void Captain is one of these, and it's not likely to come back into print any time soon unless Norman Spinrad sees a huge upswing in popularity.  I get a lot of these older novels from online used bookstores like thriftbooks, but the SF publisher Gollancz is doing a lot of cool work with e-books.  They're one of the few places that are working to make sure less recognized work is still available to the public, they have an e-book version of Void Captain available at Amazon, which is pretty cool.  It's a little ridiculous that the e-book costs eight bucks and the used version is only a dollar, but it's nice to know that these books will still be available for years to come.

I won't even try to guess what my next review will be, I'm going to try and stick with my plan of reviewing one older book followed by a more recent novel.  So my next review will be a newer novel, I just don't know what it will be yet.  I'll try and have it up by Friday.