The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

It’s time for the latest in our annual Best of the Year selections and today’s guest, I am delighted to say, is a well-respected author of science fiction novels, screenplays (including some of the better Doctor Who episodes) and comics, as well as a regular at many a convention, it is, of course, the very fine Paul Cornell:

FPI: Can you pick three comics/webcomics/graphic novels which you especially enjoyed over the last twelve months and tell us why you singled them out?

Paul: I’d say:

Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe, because it proved that the series can be poignant and serious as well as great comedy, and because it included one of my favourite ever panels, where Scott is attacked by a small robot.

Secret Six: because the recent storyline about slavery got so hardcore that it I wondered just how much further there was to go in terms of looking into the heart of human evil. But also with great jokes.

Fables: my ongoing favourite title, and I think possibly the height of comic craft.

I’ve missed out lots of friends, and lots of great titles (The Unwritten! Cinderella! Captain America! Phonogram!) but you did say to pick only three.

FPI: Can you pick three books which you especially enjoyed over the last twelve months and tell us why you singled them out?

Paul: Books published this year… hmm…

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts. Okay, so Roberts was grossly insulting to various Hugo award winners and voters this year, in rather an ignorant way, but having said that, this is a great novel, a journey through Soviet Russia to discover an alien invasion of the Stalin era which might be real, might be fiction, or might be a bit of both. I think he and I probably agree that he deserves to be Hugo nominated.

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes. One of those exciting new Bad Robot books, with excellent design. Very near future South Africa, portrayed in a style which feels like cyberpunk with all the arrogance drained out of it. It finds a new use for cyberpunk, in fact, genre crud being wiped away. Four disparate lives interact across the social strata, battered by and taking advantage of technology. Its fun and bleak, and while the politics seem to me to be for people younger than I, it’s entirely a thrill ride.

Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi. (Much as I loved the Neil Gaiman, there can be only three.) I’m a huge fan of Scalzi’s prose style, regarding him as the ‘airport hard SF’ author I was seeking hopelessly for a few years ago. (We have a new Heinlein, now we need a new Clarke.) This is an adjunct to his Old Man’s War series, humane and (I would say liberal, but they’re not, they’re just not right wing either) political war stories that clash cold SF values and care about real people. As with Christopher Priest, I intend to read everything Scalzi has written.

FPI: Can you pick three TV shows and/or movies which you especially enjoyed over the last twelve months and tell us why you singled them out?

Paul: I’ll stick with TV, because everyone’s going to mention the same movies: Stargate Universe is infinitely better than it should have been, with loads of script value achieved by keeping everything very very simple. It’s a bunch of people trapped on a spaceship, and the only enemy is the lack of air, water, power, etc. It’s character in the face of death. I’m bowled over by how it goes for quality and refuses to pander. (And in ‘Time’ it did a Hugo nomination worthy single time paradox episode.)

Flash Forward, similarly, had the most stunning run of five or six episodes of mind-expandingly high quality in script terms, one of which dared to end in a cathartic gunfight to the sound of the Rolling Stones, our need as an audience for release having been built up to the point of deserving that.

And while I think that Lost this year has been shout out loud great too (particularly another time travel classic in ‘The Variable’), that Dollhouse is an incredibly under-appreciated show that shows genuinely daring and SFnal brilliance in the face of an audience that really doesn’t dare face up to it, and that Warehouse 13 is charming, well-made fun, I think a list of only three has to end with Torchwood: Children of Earth, which dared to ground something real and horrifying in jolly old Torchwood. It was like The Monkees suddenly going to Vietnam. Although you know Doctor Who is going to come along and top all of this come Christmas time.

FPI: How did 2009 go for you as a creator? Are you happy with the way you got your work out this year?

Paul: Yeah. I’m loving the comics and TV work, published some short stories I’m very proud of, and hope to have at least one novel out next year. Really, a very good year, that might become even better if everything pays off.

FPI: What can we look forward to from you in 2010?

Paul: I can only say that, and no more! Oh, actually, I’ve got a story in With Great Power, the superhero prose anthology from Pocket Books, and Dark X-Men and Black Widow will both finish their runs, the latter being collected in hardcover. I can only say that, and no more. Except… no, that’s it!

FPI: Anyone you think is a name we should be watching out for next year?

Paul: David Louis Edelman, who’ll complete his near future SF business thriller trilogy next year with Geosynchron, and will one day be a household name. Like Daz.

FPI: And one final, special question – since its not only the end of the year approaching but also the end of the decade, is there any comics work you’d especially pick out as one of the best you’ve read this decade?

Paul: Fables.

Paul Cornell currently has Dark X-Men on the go with his Captain Britain cohort Leonard Kirk, and Black Widow and many other irons in the writing fire; keep up with him via his blog.