I have been reading a few of the Tor collections of Science Fiction, some bought at Amazon for something like 50p a shot, others, like their 5 year compendium, from Tor.com themselves -for free, the latter one. I had already mentioned Elizabeth Bear's story, 'The Faster Gun', a cowboy gunfighter story with historic Far West characters and wrecked starships -which is a very good one, pulling that unlikely combination very successfully, in my opinion.

In another one, more recently, there is another story by Bear which I found compelling, 'The Horrid Glory of its Wings', about a harpy and a disabled orphan girl, which can be read here. She turns out to have a livejournal at matociquala, in which, I'm discovering, apart from pumping her own work (I need to learn to do that..) she has interesting things to say and reviews other people's work, which hopefully may lead me to discover more worlds inside other people's heads.

So far I've liked what I've read of her work, quite a lot. I know pretty much nothing about her, but that is not important. Her work is for me an interesting discovery, like that of Charlie Stross and Chris Beckett, whose 'Dark Eden was one of the best books I read last year.

I'd written a post in my livejournal in Spanish, flavio_matani, about science-fiction and why it resonates in me and I find it important (to me, to me), in response to a discussion with a Venezuelan friend. It is of course in Spanish and I'll have to translate it and elaborate on it (as it is very unfinished) but, just in case, it is here if you want to have a look.

Tags: books, science-fiction