- All the Nebula Award-winning novels in haiku. Awesome. (via Gwenda)
- Secret Histories and Con-Artists: a roundtable discussion with John Crowley, Jeffrey Ford, James Morrow, and Tim Powers; part one, part two, part three.
- Abigail Nussbaum writes about “Magic for Beginners” by Kelly Link, so that I don’t have to.
- Heroes is coming to BBC2! All those who think they’ll put it in the weekday 6.45 slot and cut it to ribbons, raise your hand.
- Nicholas Whyte on the Doctor Who novels of Ian Marter.
- Gabe Chouinard has the latest details about forthcoming PS Publishing titles.
- UK SF Book news has a brief interview with the editor of the UK’s newest genre fiction magazine, Hub. Launch party in York on December 8th.
- And it’s finally online: john sutherland IS SHOCKED BY THE STATE OF book-Reviewing on the web. Which title is made more amusing by Rachel Cooke’s emphasis on standards in her response from the Observer. (Both links via the Complete Review, which also takes the time to respond to them more fully.)
And a brief admin note: the latest BSFA mailing (Vector 249 and Matrix 181) should be on its way to members this coming week. Given what happened with the last mailing, though, we don’t want to take anything for granted, so would appreciate confirmations that it’s shown up from as many people as possible, and in particular from people who didn’t receive V248/M180. As usual, when I get my copy I’ll put the TOC for Vector up here.
(Oh, and I’m going to be out tomorrow evening, so I won’t see the last part of The Martians and Us until the repeat on Wednesday. Expect a discussion on Thursday, though.)
vector-bsfa.com 
Do you think “john sutherland IS SHOCKED BY THE STATE OF book-Reviewing on the web” is a deliberate attack by the Telegraph’s website subs?
Not that I had tremendous respect for his position before, but having read Sutherland’s original piece, I’m shocked that he’s treated seriously as a thinker and a reviewer. I can’t remember the last time I encountered an argument this shoddily constructed, this dependent on assumptions and hazy logical leaps.
I mean, how do you start a paragraph by taking an Amazon reviewer to task for not supporting her opinion of a book with examples, and end it by announcing that “Bookbuyers, commercial and individual, consult Amazon to see which way the wind is blowing. Many more than consult, say, the TLS.”?
More importantly, how do you do this and still get published?
Heroes (which really picks up after the first couple of episodes) will get a first UK screening on Sci-Fi – so even if BBC2 do hack it to bits, at least there’ll be somewhere in the UK that will screen it relatively unmolested (http://www.scifiuk.com/hub/webcolumn.asp)
Regarding Vector248 etc., has the notion of sending it as a pdf file to those who missed out been considered? Be a lot cheaper than reprinting and mailing it…
Martin: oh, I hope so.
Paul: That could be arranged, and has been considered, but (a) we’d need to burn it to CDs and post those, since we don’t have email addresses for a lot of those affected, and (b) I suspect a lot of people would feel (not unreasonably) a bit short-changed.
Well, that would be understandable, I guess (the feeling-short-changed thing). But I’m willing to wager that if you offered it as an alternative, a decent number of people would be willing to accept the compromise, in the name of saving the organisation some money (which I imagine it is not exactly awash in). A widespread announcement in the blogosphere might glean a few hitherto ungathered email addresses, through that whole friends-of-friends thing.
As I side note, it probably speaks volumes about my life that I frequently forget that there are people who don’t spend hours on teh intarwebs every day….
The interesting thing about the Sutherland/Hill/alleged and nameless newspaper books editor affair is that the Guardian “pick of the blogs” column refers to Hill’s initial outburst but not to the mystery “You’re Barred!” denouement, which is surely the bit with real news value (I’m afraid I can’t find the link in the online version – I read it in the paper copy). One explanation of that could be that the Guardian doesn’t believe it to be true and has been warned off by the lawyers – but it can’t be that because there’s loads of threads about it on their own blog/comment things. So?
(reposted to the correct venue because I had a brain fade earlier)
Niall (and others) – the mailing house has told me that Vector and Matrix went out yesterday (Monday) afternoon. They will have been sent second class, so should be hitting members’ doormats tomorrow or Thursday.
Paul: To add to what Niall replied to your suggestion of sending out PDFs as replacements, either by email or on CD – it was a good idea (and you aren’t the only person to have suggested it) but it wasn’t going to work this time. About 80 copies of the mailing went missing and we had at most 30 print copies left. We might have managed to contact 10 or 15 members willing to have PDFs instead of print copies – but not 50. And by far the most expensive copy in a short print run is the first. However, in a similar but less bad situation in future, we might well do this.
In the long term — say, eighteen months or so after publication — I have to admit I’m quite tempted by the idea of putting pdfs of back-issues online, free to all. In theory, this could be done (I think) for all of Andrew Butler’s editorial run …
Niall: the idea of putting back-issues online is interesting. I don’t have copies even of all the Vectors I edited, or contributed to. There are articles I wrote that I doubt I still have originals of so an archive resource would be very useful.
“Heroes (which really picks up after the first couple of episodes) will get a first UK screening on Sci-Fi – so even if BBC2 do hack it to bits, at least there’ll be somewhere in the UK that will screen it relatively unmolested.”
True, but maybe if BBC2 can be hypnotised into believing that it’s 1994 (when they didn’t mind running “Quantum Leap” and “The X Files” at 9pm) or that it’s executive produced by Steven Spielberg (anything with his name on it seems to be safe, “Amazing Stories” notwithstanding) we’ll be okay.