Plans

In a week where one blog I read regularly shut up shop (for now? he said, impishly) and another expressed general boredom with the blogosphere, and given that I haven’t been posting much for the last few weeks, I figure it probably wouldn’t hurt to say: I aten’t dead, or bored, I’m just busy.

August was a sufficiently busy month that I managed to read a grand total of three books, and though I’ve done a bit better this month, that’s mostly because I’ve been the sort of busy that allows me to factor in reading time (i.e. train journeys). Between Vector (the next issue of which should be going to the printers in a week or two, which means hitting doormats in about a month) and SH reviews (which I’ve now been running for just over three years — where does the time go?) I’ve not had much time for writing of my own, although I do have a review of Anathem coming up at IROSF, and a review of Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends in the next issue of Fruitless Recursion. I’m also behind on email, so please bear with me if you’re waiting for a response on something. I’ve not even had much time for TV — I haven’t seen Heroes yet, and though I’ve fallen in love with The Middleman I’ve only watched half a dozen episodes.

However, it looks like — famous last words — things might be quietening down a bit, and I’ve got a bunch of stuff in the pipeline for here. I’ve been running a discussion about Flood, which is just waiting for final contributions, and hope to get discussions about Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End and Anathem done soonish. I’m working on a series of posts about Sword & Sorcery/Heroic Fantasy, inspired by the lovely reissues of some of the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks earlier this year. So far I’ve got draft posts about The Broken Sword, Elric, Joanna Russ’s The Adventures of Alyx, and The Steel Remains, all of which need polishing, and some of which need me to do a bit more background reading. I’m also debating adding Lankhmar to the series, although that would delay posting it even longer. (I was originally planning to get them up at the end of August.) I also have a post about Gwyneth Jones’ late-eighties novel Kairos drafted, and posts about Benjamin Rosenbaum’s collection The Ant King and Other Stories and Ian R MacLeod’s new novel Song of Time gestating; the latter may end up combined with thoughts on the book I’m reading now, Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War, given that both have made me think about strategies for describing future history. Or, it may not. Other stuff I want to get to soon or soon-ish: the rest of the October/November F&SF; Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo; and the recent Chris Beckett special issue of Interzone.

Of course, the thing that’s got lost in all this is the Baroque Cycle Reading Group. I have to admit, I don’t know when I’m going to get round to The Confusion; I was sufficiently unenthused by Quicksilver that it’s a matter of making time for it. Liz had nobly volunteered to write the post about it, but I gather she’s had computer woes and probably lost the draft she’d been working on. But if there’s still an appetite for discussion (it had seemed to be dropping off quite dramatically with each installment), I’ll bump it back up the reading stack. Thoughts?

A Panel I Would Like To Attend

As noted here, from the Wiscon schedule:

How Much Is Too Much?
“Unless we’re reading or writing about a utopia, the societies in our fantasy worlds are going to have problems. In fact, a culture without problems invariably comes off as shallow and unrealistic. Does this mean we need to include things like sexism and racism if we want to tell a believable story? And if so, are we, as authors, guilty of perpetuating whatever-ism in the real world?”
Monday, 8:30-9:45 A.M. (Assembly)
M: Sarah Monette, Catherynne M. Valente, Gregory Rihn, Elissa Malcohn, L. Timmel Duchamp

Alas, no Wiscon for me this year, so I’ll have to rely on panel reports from people keen enough to get up for an 8.30 am Monday panel. But it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about off and on since the question came up in the discussion of Martin’s review of Red Seas Under Red Skies last year, and thinking about it this week in particular having just finished Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains, which takes a diametrically opposite position to Lynch.

In other news, I’ve gotten around to doing something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, which is to give Liz the ability to post here. Other additions may follow; this was always meant to be a Vector blog rather than just my blog, after all (Liz, as I’m sure I don’t need to point out for most of you, has been production editor for the last year or so).

Well, that makes life easier

Well, I was mulling the idea of posting a response to all the posts about reviews that popped up in the last day or so, but then Cheryl Morgan wrote a post I almost entirely agree with, so now I don’t need to bother. Hooray! Pretty much all that’s left is for someone to talk about what they like to see in reviews, as opposed to what they don’t like, but as Cheryl points out that varies from person to person and audience to audience, and my preferences are somewhat on the record already, anyway.

So instead I will talk briefly about reading, specifically to say that the first installment of the Baroque Cycle Reading Group will be somewhat delayed. I’ve been racing to meet a couple of review deadlines at the end of the month and, having met them (bar reading the reviews through in a few days, polishing them up and sending them off), I now need to knuckle down and start my Clarke Award shortlist re-read. I plan to keep reading Quicksilver in parallel, but it may be a couple of weeks before I have a post to show for it, now.

Out of interest, if I couldn’t face writing eight posts about the Baroque Cycle myself, would anyone be interested in writing a guest post about one or more of the books? (Remember I’m treating this as a series of eight books collected into three volumes. It’s just too daunting, otherwise.)