• After ten years, Infinity Plus is shutting up shop. There’s plenty of good stuff in their final update, though: an interview with (and two stories by) Paul McAuley, other stories by Jeff VanderMeer, Nicola Griffith, Gareth Lyn Powell and others; and about a dozen new reviews.
• Further to Jeanette Winterson’s comments on sf, Maureen Kincaid Speller thinks about science in fiction as opposed to science fiction. And here’s the first review I’ve seen of The Stone Gods
• Nic Clarke takes an in-depth look at Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
• Gary K. Wolfe reviews Connie Willis’ The Winds From Marble Arch
• Elizabeth Hand reviews Chris Barzak’s One for Sorrow
• New York Times reviews: Jonathan Ames reviews Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, Dave Itzkoff reviews Gibson’s Spook Country
• Michael Swanwick hath a blog; here are his thoughts on interstitial, mundane sf, and the new weird
• Micole on vidding at the Aqueduct blog
• Neil Williamson on juried vs voted awards
• Kit Whitfield responds to Jonathan McAlmont’s discussion of the aesthetics of fantasy; Jonathan follows up and a mammoth discussion ensues
• The cover of Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology, Eclipse; a poll about the names on the cover; the publisher responds
• The website for the forthcoming Wastelands anthology has the full text of M. Rickert’s brilliant story “Bread and Bombs” for you to read. (In a teensy-tiny window.) There are also stories by Cory Doctorow and Richard Kadrey
• And finally: Peter Wilkinson has set up a public friends group to track posts from Worldcon

• Jeanette Winterson on sf: “I hate science fiction. But good writers about science, such as Jim Crace and Margaret Atwood, are great. They take on science because it’s crucial to our world, and they use language to give energy to ideas. Others just borrow from science and it ends up like the emperor’s new clothes, with no understanding of the material. But you shouldn’t fake it because science is too important, it’s the basis for our lives. I expect a lot more science in fiction because science is so rich.” Compare to the description of her new book, The Stone Gods
• New websites for the Hugo Awards and discussion of SF awards in general
• Adam Gopnik writes about Philip K. Dick in The New Yorker; Ed Champion and Jeff VanderMeer comment
• Graham Sleight on Robert Heinlein. Go and argue with him; it’ll make him happy
• Discussions of gender roles in Stardust: one, two, three (via)
• Jonathan McCalmont has reservations about Halting State
• Paul Kincaid has reservations about Map of Dreams
• Elizabeth Bear isn’t too keen on Doris Lessing’s The Cleft
• Kardagan looks at Elizabeth Hull’s remarks about Titan
• Micole on Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Fantasy, and in particular “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter”
• Sarah Monette has been watching Due South
• There’s been a bit of a debate about cover art at The Genre Files
• Guardian reviews: Ben Brown on Ben Okri’s Starbook; Steven Poole on William Gibson’s Spook Country; and Ian Beetlestone on the same in The Observer
• And some notes on Spook Country from Steven Shaviro
• Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist posts about the changing of the guard in epic fantasy; Andrew Wheeler provides a dose of reality
• The Bourne Ultimatum: fun or not?
• And finally: I know the Dozois year’s best is a bit predictable these days, but I can’t help thinking there’s something wrong when a review doesn’t mention a single story title or author.

• Alan DeNiro has released a long speculative poem under a creative commons license: “The Stations“
• More stuff to read: Jeff Ford’s World Fantasy Award-nominated story “The Way He Does It“
• Abigail Nussbaum reviews Hal Duncan’s Book of All Hours
• Nic Clarke reviews Slow River by Nicola Griffith
• Matt Cheney discusses “The Faithful Companion at Forty” by Karen Joy Fowler
• Paul Kincaid reviews Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
• Nader Elhefnawy reviews Burning Chrome by William Gibson
• Yet more on the Campbell Award: Dave Truesdale’s latest column has the text of the presentation and acceptance speeches for Titan (plus an interesting interview with Robert Charles Wilson); and there’s further discussion of the award process here
• And finally: I do love XKCD

No time for proper posts this week, I’m afraid; fortunately, there’s plenty to read elsewhere.

• Matt Ruff has an essay about writing Bad Monkeys
• The Chinese sf blog has moved; update your bookmarks
• Paul Kincaid’s latest column at Bookslut tackles Philip K. Dick’s Voices From the Street
• MKS is writing about The Stolen Child chapter by chapter: here’s chapter one
• John Clute reviews Jay Lake’s Mainspring
• Nic Clarke reviews Anna Kavan’s Ice
• Tim Martin reviews Ian McDonald’s Brasyl; so does Eric Brown
• Tenser, said the Tensor reviews Brave New Words
• Adam Roberts reviews the third season of Doctor Who
• Dan Green reviews Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown
• Roz Kaveney reviews Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; so does Abigail Nussbaum
• Saxon Bullock on various pilots for the US fall TV season: Reaper, The Bionic Woman and The Sarah Connor Chronicles here, and Californication and Pushing Daisies here
• And finally, it’s been declared International Blog Against Racism Week; see also this Boston Globe article about sf and race, and John Scalzi’s discussion of race in his work, and Kameron Hurley’s response
• Oh, and despite the prevailing opinion, I think the Gollancz “Future Classics” are quite pretty. Certainly Fairyland is.

Your daily dose of sf reviewing commentary: in response to that Readercon panel, James Nicoll muses about negative reviews, while Elizabeth Bear suggests we need someone to review the reviewers. I think she’s kidding. Elsewhere, Kameron says (to my mind) spot-on things about the importance of honest reviewing, while Jonathan McCalmont is talking about the son of Scalpel.

Your daily dose of discussion about sf movements: Kathryn Cramer has put up an archive of the New Weird discussion from back in 2003. (The original discussion was lost when TTA press changed their message board system.) And, via Kathryn, here’s Rudy Rucker’s response to the mundane manifesto, which is pretty much what you’d expect. Elsewhere, riffing off Susannah Mandel’s column at Strange Horizons about the sf/mainstream divide, Richard Larson wants “… to figure out how the experience of reading mainstream literature differs from that of reading genre fiction, and what formal factors are contributing to that experience.”

Your daily dose of sf writers talking about their work: Lou Anders points to a great conversation between Ian McDonald and Richard Morgan, recorded at Eastercon. Part 1 starts off with the trouble with trying to call your novel Black Man; Part 2 starts off with the fallacy of sympathetic characters. Much else of interest is discussed. And speaking of Richard Morgan, here’s Nisi Shawl’s review of Black Man; and speaking of Ian McDonald, Adam Balm’s latest column at AICN includes a review of Brasyl — as well as a follow-up to Balm’s boycotting of the Clarke Award earlier this year.

And last but not least, your daily dose of pointless graphs: Hugo and Nebula Best Short Story winners since 1991, by venue of first publication.

(1) … the Campbell Award discussion, Jason Robertson has read Titan:

Titan excels at neither literary or sfnal virtues. It has a dangerously clumsy sense of gender, and is widely outstripped in both literary and sfnal merit by several books among just those nominees I read. The degree to which this win is undefended, and apparently indefensible is a danger to the Campbell’s ability to go forward as an award that bears weight. Losing an award of this age to an anomalous dysfunction would be a blow to the community. There should be a discussion, hopefully including Campbell jurors (who can after all, enlighten us as to the perceived merits of Titan), about how to fix this. And if not how to fix it, than to assert why it is not broken.

As Jason notes, Christopher McKitterick has answered some questions about the Campbell process here, but not others, such as how jurors are selected.

2) … the ongoing discussion of “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, which came up again over the weekend, Kate Nepveu has posted her thoughts on this year’s Hugo nominees for Best Novelette, including Ryman’s story:

I’m okay with the idea that story-Sith needs acknowledge her father’s dead, as she is benefiting from her father’s crimes. […] But this conversation seems to me to be an assertion that Dara the unexceptional, and through him the entire country, isn’t acknowledging its dead and should be. Which seems like a really sweeping thing to say to me, and I am fundamentally uncomfortable with sweeping statements about entire countries.

Actually, it’s two assertions, the other of which is made by the story as a whole, not just this conversation: that all the dead want is acknowledgement. Which is equally sweeping and even more difficult for me, because I don’t know anything about Cambodia today, but I can imagine what those dead of genocide would want, and it’s neither so uniform nor so simple as acknowledgment.

If this had been a secondary-world fantasy, I would consider it a sweet little fable. But it’s not. It’s about real people, a real country, real history, real pain and terror and rage. And putting the two together—simple fable, difficult reality—gives me serious cognitive dissonance.

As I said over on Kate’s blog, her last paragraph made me wonder whether cognitive dissonance was, in fact, the intended effect. I don’t know if it would make the use of Sith/Sitha any more palatable, and it seems slightly at odds with the way The King’s Last Song approaches Cambodia, but that sort of argument against fantasy that dodges its moral implications strikes me as something Ryman might attempt.

• There was a fascinating discussion about Scarlett Thomas’ The End of Mr Y on Newsnight Review last night, with much debate between Jeanette Winterson and Julie Myerson on the one hand, and Tim Lott and Michael Gove on the other, about (among other things) how best to use language to convey ideas. Also, check out two reviews of the book, by Roz Kaveney and Dan Hartland
• Abigail Nussbaum reviews China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun
• Matthew Cheney reviews The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
• See also Abigail Nussbaum’s response to a different review of Chabon’s book, and discussion of politics in fiction in general
• Jonathan McCalmont reviews the latest Interzone
• Paul Kincaid reviews Brave New Words, the Oxford Dictionary of SF
• Andrew Wheeler reviews Gene Wolfe’s forthcoming novel Pirate Freedom
• Night Shade Books hath a sale
• PS Publishing hath a blog
• And TTA Press seems to be preparing to relaunch its short fiction review, The Fix, as a blog
• The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod and HARM by Brian Aldiss as post-9/11 sf
• And finally: a poll about online magazines.

• Three William Gibson-related links: An interview; John Clute reviews Spook Country; and for those in London, an evening with William Gibson, 28th August.
• More on the Campbell Award: a juror speaks. Christopher McKitterick explains the process and his manifesto for science fiction.
• Also, there are lots of interesting comments in the reviewing in the blogosphere thread, if you haven’t seen them.
• The Kirkus SF and fantasy special. [pdf]
• A working canon of slipstream writings, as compiled by panellists at Readercon. Paul Kincaid comments here; Martin Lewis comments here and here.
• Lots of sf interest at Bookslut this month, as well as Paul Kincaid’s column: reviews of The Apocalypse Reader, Best American Fantasy, and Salon Fantastique; and Adrienne Martini tackles Sherri S. Tepper in her column.
• Maureen McHugh on The Road (via).
• Man writes sf novel on phone and self-publishes it on Lulu.com.
• And finally: you find the most useful bits of information hidden in Charles Brown’s “Editorial Matters” column in Locus. For instance, the news that Neal Stephenson’s next novel, which he hopes to finish this year, is “set in the future, on a different planet, and is shorter.” Waterhouse in space, anyone?

• Strange Horizons — which has been bringing you short fiction, poetry, articles, columns, art and reviews, every week, for free, since September 2000 — is having its annual fund drive! Strange Horizons is run entirely by unpaid volunteers (one of whom is me), so all your donations go into paying contributors and the upkeep of the site. And hey, if you donate, you could win a prize.
• The reviews department (which has a feed you can watch; lj version here) has kicked off the month with a set of reviews of John Crowley’s Ægypt sequence. Abigail Nussbaum reviews book one, The Solitudes; Graham Sleight reviews book two, Love & Sleep; Paul Kincaid reviews book three, Dæmonomania; and John Clute reviews book four, Endless Things. (One of the fund drive prizes, as it happens, is a copy of Endless Things.)
• The first chapter of Matt Ruff’s new novel, Bad Monkeys.
• The Fiction Liberation Front: Lew Shiner’s putting his short fiction online for free.
• Christopher Barzak thinks about endings, happy and otherwise.
• Nature hosted a roundtable on biology in sf, with Peter Watts, Ken MacLeod, Paul McAuley, and Joan Slonczewski (pdf; “director’s cut” edition here).
• The results of Instant Fanzine’s Clarke Award polls.
• A conversation with Vandana Singh
• Gary K. Wolfe reviews The New Space Opera.
• William Boyd rereads Lanark.
• Gwyneth Jones on scientific revolutions, feminist sf over the past 15 years, and much else in passing.
• Adam Roberts on The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
• Nic Clarke on The Poison Master by Liz Williams
• Paul Kincaid on Falling Man by Don Delillo
• Martin McGrath and Lou Anders comment on Gareth McLean’s Guardian article on SF TV.
• And I have a feeling I never linked to Martin’s review of Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson.
• And the trade paperback edition of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl is terribly terribly pretty.