Linkshruba

I’ve really got to get back into the habit of doing these things more regularly. Still:

• Chris Beckett has won the Edge Hill short story prize, beating collections by Anne Enright, Shena Mackay, Ali Smith and Gerard Donovan. Quoth the judges: “I suspect Chris Beckett winning the Edge Hill Prize will be seen as a surprise in the world of books. In fact, though, it was also a bit of surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand.”
• In further award news, Graham Joyce is one of this year’s O Henry Award winners, and picked as a favourite by jurors AS Byatt and Tim O’Brien. There’s an extract from his story, “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen”, here.
• Adam Roberts on structuralist criticism of science fiction and fantasy, and the problems with it. As it happens I just finished Beginning Theory. I suspect I may be closer to being some kind of structuralist narrativist ecocritic than anything else, though I get the impression that may be an unfashionable place to be …
• Paul Kincaid’s talk from the BSFA/SFF AGM last weekend: “Against a Definition of Science Fiction“
• Matthew Davis on “The Adventures of Little Martin in Tomorrowland“, or, Martin Amis’ sf criticism
• Graham Sleight’s novels of the year (halftime report). Of the books he’s read, I agree about Marcher and Journey Into Space; as previously explored, I’m less convinced by The City & The City. Of the books he hasn’t read I can echo the praise for Kit Whitfield’s In Great Waters, and am going to try to write it up in full sooner rather than later. And of the forthcoming books, I am most impatient for Galileo’s Dream. (I’d also add that from a purely UK perspective, Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia is also bound to be one of the books of the year.)
• The top twenty vote-getters for the Gemmell Award. There’s more variation than perhaps anticipated, though I’m perplexed by the person who comments that “the even better part is that I already have most of these on my wishlist (or have them already)!” Personally speaking I like it when awards tell me about good books I don’t already know about.
• Matt Cairnduff on Fritz Leiber’s Swords and Deviltry
• Jeffrey Ford on Philippine Speculative Fiction IV see also the SF Signal Mind Meld on international sf/f, part one and part two
• An interview with the editorial staff of Angry Robot. It probably wasn’t meant to strike fear into my heart…
• And a whole round-table of sf book editors interviewed at Clarkesworld
• Lots of interesting posts at The Mumpsimus recently: on ‘mimetic fiction’; on Up The Walls of the World by James Tiptree Jr; and outtakes from an introduction to The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
• A festschrift for Ursula K Le Guin is planned and seeking contributions
• Everyone’s heard about Alastair Reynolds’ £1million deal, I’m sure; but just in case, here’s an interview in The Guardian, and a discussion featuring Reynolds and Adam Roberts on Today. (The latter link will expire in a couple of days, so listen soon.) See also Reynolds’ blog post on the topic.
• SF Storyworlds: “Edited by Paul March-Russell, this new and exciting book series aims to explore the evolution of Science Fiction (SF) and its impact upon contemporary culture. The series will argue that SF has generated a series of storyworlds: first, in terms of SF’s own internal landscape – the extent to which SF has grown self-referentially – and second, in terms of SF’s external effect – the extent to which SF storyworlds have influenced the vocabulary of political, social and cultural discourse.” Series editor Paul March-Russell; editorial board Andrew M Butler, Rob Latham, Farah Mendlesohn, Helen Merrick, Adam Roberts, Sherryl Vint, and Patricia A Wheeler
• Further discussion of The City & The City: Martin McGrath, Matt Cheney and David Hebblethwaite
• Dan Hartland and Abigail Nussbaum on The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters; see also Scarlett Thomas’ review
• The new IROSF has Gary Westfahl on J. G. Ballard and ‘The Vanished Age of Space’, Nader Elhefnaway on steampunk, Mark Tiedemann on Kay Kenyon’s City Without End, and my own review of Far North by Marcel Theroux, in which I agree with Dan Hartland and therefore not with M John Harrison
• Karen Burnham wants comments and suggestions on some planned research: “Here’s the idea: I feed a whole bunch of science fiction short stories into a pattern recognition algorithm and then see if it can correctly identify the era of origin for a bunch of other short stories.”
• Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula Le Guin, China Mieville, and Michael Moorcock on their favourite real-world fantastical cities
• Michael Moorcock is interviewed at length by readers of Boing Boing
• Catherynne M Valente is interviewed at Bookslut
• Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels causes alarm again; Margo Lanagan responds. [Update: and now, not at all predictably, the Daily Mail is frothing.]
• “A Statistical Study of Locus Online’s “Notable Books”” by Valentin D. Ivanov, which is more an interesting starting point than a complete thesis; it would be interesting to compare these results to, for instance, the subjects of the books actually reviewed in the magazine
• The first discussion at the online women in sf book club is The Female Man by Joanna Russ; another online book club is discussing Graceling by Kristen Cashore
• Fiction:
  • Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her own Making
  • Bone Shop by Tim Pratt
  • Verb Noire’s first title, River’s Daughter by Tasha Campbell
  • A new Chaos Walking story by Patrick Ness
• Hobbit holey-space: a collaborative paper produced at this year’s sff masterclass in sf criticism; see also Paul Kincaid’s reflections on the masterclass
• Other reviews:
  • John Clute on Green by Jay Lake
  • Dan Hartland on stories by Vandana Singh and Ian McDonald
  • Cold Earth by Sarah Moss reviewed by Jane Smiley in The Guardian and Megan Walsh in The Times
  • Adam Roberts on The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún by J. R. R. Tolkien
  • Alan Campbell’s God of Clocks reviewed by Stuart Kelly in Scotland on Sunday and Martin Lewis for Strange Horizons
  • Paul Kincaid on UFO in Her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo
  • Alvaro Zinos-Amaro on Buyout by Alex Irvine
  • Jonathan McCalmont on Genesis by Bernard Beckett; see also Martin McGrath’s take
  • Gary K Wolfe on Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson
  • Faren Miller on Cloud & Ashes by Greer Gilman
  • Frank Cottrell Bryce on Fever Crumb by Phillip Reeve, the prequel to the Mortal Engines quartet
  • Marianne Brace on The Rapture by Liz Jensen
  • Charlie Jane Anders on Transformers 2 as an art movie. I certainly enjoyed the robot fights, but guiltily, because basically Mark Kermode’s is right [.ram file]. (That said, I can’t shake the feeling that he’s going after an easy target there, and would be rather more impressed if he had also criticized, say, Star Trek.)
  • Rich Puchalsky talks to himself about Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts
  • Alex Carnegie on Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton
  • Kyra Smith on Living with Ghosts by Kari Sperring
  • Marcus Gipps on The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
  • David Hebblethwaite on Solo by Rana Dasgupta
  • Dan Hartland on Black Man by Richard Morgan
  • Abigail Nussbaum on Thunderer by Felix Gillman
• And finally: sand sculptures, inspired by Jeffrey Ford’s “The Annals of Eelin-Ok“