I’m in Glasgow for most of this week, for work-related reasons, so posting is likely to be light; but I can at least catch up on my linking.
- Simon Pegg on why zombies shouldn’t run
- Nic Clarke on Temeraire by Naomi Novik
- Alastair Reynolds on The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
- The October Locus is online for your perusal; this issue includes among other things the first installment of Gardner Dozois’ short fiction column, which I have to say I found a little disappointing, a good long column by Rich Horton riffing on Elizabeth Bear’s suggestion that different generations of sf writer don’t read each other, and Graham Sleight on Ursula K. Le Guin
- Brian Francis Slattery discusses fantasy and magic realism
- The new Internet Review of SF has an article on silent SF movies, Nader Elhefnawy on The New Space Opera, and a bunch of other stuff.
- Reviews at Strange Horizons: Martin Lewis on The Knife of Never Letting Go, Roz Kaveney on The Middleman, Gene Melzack on Gareth L. Powell’s collection The Last Reef, and Gwyneth Jones on Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo
- Sam Jordison’s Hugo-reading reaches A Canticle for Leibowitz, which he concludes is an important antecedent of The Road (ObLinks: one, two.)
- John Clute reviews The Ghost in Love by Jonathan Carroll
- Ian Sansom reviews Michel Faber’s new myth-of-Prometheus novella The Fire Gospel
- Shine: “a collection of near-future, optimistic SF stories”, to be edited by Jetse de Vries for Pyr Solaris.
- Paul Kincaid’s latest SF Sceptic column: Genre at the End of Time. And Paul reviews Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time at SF Site.
- Following up her review of Incandescence, Karen Burnham has some more thoughts about that book and characterization in sf
- And not sf-related, strictly speaking, but a fascinating review-essay by Zadie Smith comparing Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
EDIT: I knew I’d forget something. Can anyone work out, based on these reviews, whether 2666 is a work of the fantastic?
vector-bsfa.com 
Thanks for the shoutout, Niall.
One small correction, though: Solaris Books will be publishing Shine, not Pyr SF. Although I would have been honoured to be published by Lou.
Whoops, that’s what I get for typing too fast. Sorry, and corrected.
Having read 2666, it isn’t explicitly a work of the fantastic, but rather a “fevered work,” in which reality itself seems to be amped up, but nothing overtly “magical” or ‘fantastic” occurs. In the sense of “mood” rather than anything of a concrete relationship, Bolaño’s work reminded me in some ways of some of William Faulkner’s work in how the Devil may be more than a metaphor, but that there still isn’t all that quite of an explicit reality about the Devil as well. I thought it was a well-done metaphorical work, but I never would have considered it as a work of the fantastic because Bolaño’s narrative tools are different than those employed by magic realists, for example.
Thanks. The language in those reviews gets pretty fevered too, so I really couldn’t tell … Lethem comparing it to Murakami didn’t help, either.
I haven’t yet read 2666, but I’m struck by the way the Slate review opens:
I must say I’m suspicious of this; and suspicious of it precisely because there’s a part of me that finds it very appealing … the part, of course, that wants to weild it against reviewers who say my books are shapeless, awkward, or perverse. (‘aha, what seems to this reviewer wrong in my writing is exactly what makes me great!’) The problem is that, although once in a blue moon a writer will come along who achieves the kind of radical greatness described here, most books that are (most art that is) ugly and ungainly is ugly and ungainly because it’s not very well done. Nothing is worse for a minor writer, reading a negative review, than dismissing it with: ‘ah but they simply don’t understand my genius.’
Not that this has anything to do with whether 2666 is genre or not.
‘…that wants to wield it …’
Rassnfrassn lack of preview option.