An announcement was made earlier today that the manuscript of the sixth (of a planned seven) books in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has been completed and that the book will be released worldwide on July 16th, 2005. (Desiree will be pleased.)

After hearing about the Ender’s Game adaptation, it struck me that very few books have won the two most prestigous prizes in Fantasy/Sci-Fi literature - the Hugo, given out by the World Science-Fiction Society, and the Nebula, awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

They are:

Dune, Frank Herbert (1965)
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)
Ringworld, Larry Niven (1970)
The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov (1972)
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke (1973)
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman (1975)
Gateway, Frederick Pohl (1977)
Dreamsnake, Vonda McIntyre (1978)
The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke (1979)
Startide Rising, David Brin (1983)
Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (1985)
Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card (1986)
Doomsday Book, Connie Willis (1992)
Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman (1998)

JM Coetzee, a South African writer, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I read some of his work, particularly Dusklands, in a Fiction of Africa course I took in college. I can’t remember this book exactly, but everything we read was incredible.

There is some amazing world literature out there, just waiting to be appreciated. Many of us know Achebe, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg. Go visit your library and check out some of the fiction coming out of Africa and India.

Somehow (probably with all the new Gaiman I’m reading - 1602, Endless Nights, etc.) I missed that Neal Stephenson’s new book, Quicksilver, was just released. Shame on me.

…begins now. Book 5 - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - goes on sale this Saturday.

Many of you were as offended as I was when coming across our first Language Police post.

A new story at CNN reveals more comments by “The Language Police” author Dianne Ravitch.

Most interesting is the observation that “The Old Man and the Sea” only has two words in the title that would be appropriate in text books: “and” and “the”.
Old = ageist
Man = sexist
Sea = not sensitive to people who live inland and “can’t grasp the concept for a large body of water.”

Huh? “Can’t grasp the concept for a large body of water”? This is something we want to condone? We want people to grow up not “grasping the concept of a large body of water”? About 70% of earth is covered in water…but we don’t want them to “grasp the concept”?

I think we need a new continent so that the puritans (and PC maniacs) can once again cross water (can’t say sea!) and get the hell out of here.

What? ……what??!!!

Tell me I’m seeing things.

These two stories make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

First, a judge demands that a school library start carrying the Harry Potter books after they had been banned by the school board.

Second, sounds like a little regret is brewing in France once they saw the outcome of the war. All I can say is….good.

I read this tidbit on Fox News.

The following are some examples of words and phrases banned by major textbook publishers, and their suggested alternatives. They have been compiled into a book called “The Language Police” by Diane Ravitch.

Blind leading the blind, the (banned as handicapism)
Busybody (banned as sexist, demeaning to older women)
Confined to a wheelchair (banned as offensive; replace with “person who is mobility impaired”)
East, Eastern (banned as Eurocentric)
Elderly, the (banned as ageist; replace with “older people”)
Fairy (banned because it suggests homosexuality; replace with “elf”)
Founding Fathers, the (banned as sexist; replace with “the Founders” or “the Framers”)
Huts (banned as ethnocentric; replace with “small houses”)
Jungle (banned; replace with “rain forest”)
Little person (banned as offensive; replace with “person of small stature”)
Lumberjack (banned as sexist; replace with “woodcutter”)
One-man band (banned as sexist; replace with “one-person performance”)
Regatta (banned as elitist)
Mother Russia (banned as sexist; replace with “Russia, vast land of rich harvests”)

The Science Fiction Book Club has authored its list of the 50 most significant fantasy/sci-fi books of the past 50 years.

It’s hard to interpret what is meant by ’significant’, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that these are their take on the books that have had the most impact on their readers and the genre. Approaching it from that angle, it looks pretty reasonable - although, like Rex (whose site alerted me to this first), I do take exception to how lightly the influence of some of the entries (Ender’s Game, Interview with the Vampire) have been regarded. Clearly, if my definition were to hold, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone would move from #26 to somewhere in the top 5 - if for no other reason than the legions of new sci-fi/fantasy book fans it has (and will continue to) create.