• A reminder: the deadline for applications for the Science Fiction Foundation Criticism Masterclass is this Wednesday
• Advance notice: Victoria Hoyle and Nic Clarke will be reviewing the Clarke shortlist at Eve’s Alexandria. Livejournal folks, the feed is here.
• Clive James on Terry Gilliam and Brazil…
• … and Gary K. Wolfe on Ian McDonald’s Brasyl
• John Clute on The Terror by Dan Simmons
• Graham Sleight on Bruce Holland Rogers’ World Fantasy Award-winning collection, The Keyhole Opera
• Adam Roberts on Against the Day: in 25 words (if you accept the hyphenation as valid …), and at slightly greater length
• Matt Cheney on Greybeard by Brian Aldss
• Richard Larson on the stage adaptation of “The Girl Detective” (see also this review)
• And finally:anyone out there not read the original short story of “Blood Music”? Now’s your chance. Or not, since Tor have taken the story down now, for some reason. You could read Paul di Filippo’s “Wikiworld“, instead, or investigate Subterranean Press Magazine’s new online incarnation.

A short links post before I head out to Picocon.

• One of the things I’m going to do there is pick up my copy of Glorifying Terrorism, which has been blogged about by all and sundry (including the Guardian blog) in the past few days
• Paolo Bacigalupi on writing as rebelliion
• Lots of good stuff in the new SF Site: their editors’ picks of the year, an interview with Ken Macleod by Paul Raven, and Matt Cheney’s review of John Crowley’s non-fiction collection In Other Words, for starters
• Happy Birthday Eve’s Alexandria! One year old today. Two recent posts: Nic on A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell, and Victoria takes down The Cleft by Doris Lessing
• Adam Roberts reviews The Fountain
• The Locus Directory list of books organised by editor grows ever bigger
• Tony Keen on why we should bow down before Bruce Gillespie
• There’s an interesting discussion on the author-reader relations post from a couple of days ago, if you haven’t seen it
• And finally: the Today programme segment on “do women write sci-fi?” is pretty much as you’d expect, despite valiant efforts from Liz Williams. But if you want to hear it, you can check the listen again page in a couple of hours.
• EDIT: Summon Author!

Cleaning out a fortnight’s worth of links:

• Go vote in the Locus poll (and if you like, the SF Site Readers’ Choice)
• Two New York Times reviews of Joe Hill’s debut novel Heart-Shaped Box: positive and, uh, less positive
• Is horror the next big thing?
• James Lovegrove on aliens and otherness, taking in Air, Richard Morgan’s Black Man, Ken Macleod’s The Execution Channel, and Ian McDonald’s Brasyl
• Fiction: “A Tranquil Star” by Primo Levi
• The Genre Files is looking for your nominations for genre cover of the month
• Ursula Le Guin reviews The Cleft by Doris Lessing
• Jonathan McCalmont reviews Blindsight and interviews Peter Watts
• Micky DuPree on The Second Coming (following up to a usenet post of mine from four years ago)
• Lucius Shepard reviews The Host and Pan’s Labyrinth
• Whither SF, round 362
• On literary perfection
• SFRevu interviews Simon Spanton (of Gollancz)
• Lablit interviews Kim Stanley Robinson
• One man’s quest to bring Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius to the screen
• A call for papers for The Australian Journal for Critical Review of Speculative Fiction
• And finally: Penguin will be happy with their wiki novel project as long as “it manages to avoid becoming some sort of robotic-zombie-assassins-against-African-ninjas-in-space-narrate d-by-a-Papal-Tiara type of thing.” Wusses!

I was hoping to get something vaguely substantial written this week, but I have unfortunately been clobbered by a bout of plague. So here are some links, instead.

• A conversation about The Road between Henry Farrell and China Mieville.
• Guardian review of Tricia Sullivan’s latest novel, Sound Mind; on the one hand, it has one of those teeth-grinding introductions about how Sullivan “may be nearing escape velocity” from genre, but on the other hand, it sounds like Patrick Ness has read and appreciated plenty of Sullivan’s other novels.
• Gary K. Wolfe reviews Resplendent by Stephen Baxter and Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds. I’ve finally got around to reading the original novella in Resplendent, “The Siege of Earth”, and it’s just as brilliant as Wolfe says it is.
• The Velcro City review of Blindsight
• On reviewing long and/or hyped books.
• Locus Online will be compiling lists of books by editor; along with the wiki of editors, this should make nominating for the Hugos in an informed fashion easier.
• Oscar nominations are out. No nod in “best adapted screenplay” for either The Prestige or A Scanner Darkly? Bah, I say, bah.
• And finally, Tony wants feedback about potentially changing the start time of BSFA London meetings.
• EDIT: I KNEW IT: Did 24 go too far? “The key question is whether the drama is a bit of absurd science fiction, or the projection of a not-so-distant future, not in its particulars, but in its awful core depiction.” (OK, the article is a right-wing rant, but still. I knew 24 was turning into sf, and there’s no better confirmation than someone feeling the need to deny that it’s sf. Spoilers if you haven’t seen the first four episodes of season six.)
• FURTHER EDIT: Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s New Weird anthology, coming in 2008. And whatever else might be said about this project, I do like that cover.

• The discussion about the non-fiction category rumbles on, with a couple of offshoots elsewhere. I’m not sure we’re actually any nearer a solution, but lots of interesting things have been said. Of course, more opinions (even of the “me too” variety) are always welcome.
• Two great posts about The Prestige: Abigail Nussbaum on the film and Nic Clarke on the book.
• Two new websites: one for Farah Mendlesohn’s forthcoming anthology Glorifying Terrorism, and one for The Arthurc C. Clarke Award.
• UK magazine Dreamwatch is ceasing publication; however, as of the 25th January it will continue in an online incarnation at www.dwscifi.com.
• Jeff VanderMeer on some common flaws in the stories he’s been reading for Best American Fantasy.
• The Litblog Co-Op’s latest selection is Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
• A short article on Thomas Pynchon by Gregory Feeley.
• Elizabeth Hand starts a thread about why she doesn’t blog and ends up talking about a group blog with folks like Paul Witcover and Lucius Shepard.
• Dan Martin in The Guardian on Battlestar Galactica season 3. (For a different take on the season from a different Dan, see Strange Horizons tomorrow.)
• I really don’t know what to make of this, except to say that abbreviating “fantasy fiction” to “fanfic” strikes me as having the potential to make parts of the internet implode.
• And finally: the true extent of Vector‘s operations revealed.

(I owe a number of people email. Unfortunately, this situation is not likely to change in the next few days. Sorry, all.)

• Strange Horizons now has a weekly podcast! Get it through iTunes here, or subscribe manually to http://www.strangehorizons.com/podcast.xml.
• The Nebula preliminary ballot. Who knows which items will make the final cut, but I’m glad to see nods for David Marusek’s Counting Heads, Daryl Gregory’s “Second Person, Present Tense”, M. Rickert’s “Anyway” and Theodora Goss’ “Pip and the Fairies“. The novella category looks a bit half-hearted, although it occurs to me that if the jury added “Map of Dreams”, M. Rickert could potentially sweep the short fiction categories. And the oldest item still eligible under the wacky Nebula rules this time? “Little Faces” by Vonda McIntyre, from February 2005.
• There’s a new Internet Review of SF out, although inexplicably the article on worst SF TV episodes ever neglects to mention Torchwood.
• Victoria Hoyle on The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood.
• Jeff Vandermeer offers twelve overlooked books of 2006.
• The dumbest article I’ve seen at Bookslut in a while.
• Jonathan Strahan interviewed about editing and Australian sf.
• The Ninth Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy.
• A website for The No Shows, aka the band from Justina Robson’s Quantum Gravity novel. Complete with hit single, would you believe.
• And finally: the deadline for nominations for the BSFA Awards draws ever closer. Send your votes to BSFA.Awards@gmail.com by midnight tomorrow. You can count on there being another post to remind you before then.

• For those who might be interested (say, those looking for things to nominate for the BSFA Best Artwork Award — one week to the deadline!), the Locus Online Directory of 2006 cover art.
• I am told that this link points to an announcement about an anthology of the short-short Futures from Nature. However, since I don’t have a subscription to Nature, I can’t personally confirm that that is where the link points.
• The ISFDB is now user-editable.
• The first issue of Farrago’s Wainscot is live: fiction from Forest Aguirre, Jay Lake, Nisi Shawl, various other bits and pieces.
• A tourist map of Gotham
• Fictional ruins from fictional worlds.
• Maureen McHugh on the Tiptree biography.
• Michael Moorcock on Against the Day; and more Pynchon discussion at Ed Champion‘s place. And here‘s Michael Wood’s LRB review.
• Jonathan McCalmont on Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box.
• Israeli science fiction is dead!
• What I did over New Year. Mmm, books.
• And finally, here‘s the schedule for BSFA London meetings for 2007:
  

  *24 January: Paul Cornell interviewed by Graham Sleight
  28 February: Robert Holdstock interviewed by Paul Kincaid
  *28-Mar: Hal Duncan interviewed by Tony Keen
  25-Apr: Jon George interviewed by Paul Kincaid
  23-May: Stephen Hunt interviewed by Tom Hunter
  27-Jun: Brian Stableford interviewed by Edward James
  25-Jul: Anne Sudworth, interviewer tba
  *22 August: TBA
  26-Sep: Juliet McKenna interviewed by Pat McMurray
  *24 October: John Clute interviewed by Andrew McKie
  28-Nov Iain M. Banks interviewed by Farah Mendlesohn

  A * means there are five Wednesdays in the month, and reminds you that the meeting is on the fourth Wednesday, not the last Wednesday.

Great news via Mark Kelly:

We’re doing something a bit new here at Locus Online (and Locus Magazine), for which I’ve created a new Blogger blog for ‘Locus Online Features’, and have re-posted the Graham Sleight retrospective review of Arthur C. Clarke and George R. Stewart using that function with a new URL. The point is to more easily enable commenting from readers, which will appear almost-automatically (I did enable comment moderation, which means the comments you post are sent to me via email first, for my approval or rejection, as a means of blocking spam).

Gary Westfahl’s review of Children of Men has been posted the same way.

More sample reviews from Locus Magazine are on the way — Graham Sleight’s columns, as well as one or two reviews from each issue by Gary Wolfe, Faren Miller, and the others. The idea is to drum up interest in subscribing to the magazine! Of course surely anyone reading this blog is already a subscriber.

Whether or not you’re a subscriber, the RSS feed for the Locus Online site, which (it seems) will include new Features posts in the same way it always has, is here (or, on livejournal, here, though I’m not sure that feed’s quite got with the programme yet).

• Dave Itzkoff’s latest target is John Scalzi, who rounds up discussion of the piece here, including his thoughts and Sarah Monette on mainstream reviewing of sf
• Nic on Magic for Beginners
• Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Graham Sleight on Arthur C. Clarke and George R. Stewart
• Ed Champion on Rudy Rucker
• An interview with Peter Watts
• Benjamin Rosenbaum’s original opening to his story “The House Beyond Your Sky“
• Alternate Earths
• The most blatant As Others See Us Moment I’ve come across for a while:
  

  “The Children of Men” is not another of Ms. James’s famed detective novels, and it is not, as it has sometimes sloppily been described, science fiction. It is a trenchant analysis of politics and power that speaks urgently to this social moment

• And on an admin note, thanks largely to a heroic effort by Tony, Vector 250 went to the printers just before Christmas, so the V250/Matrix 182 mailing should be out in mid-to-late January

Ursula Le Guin on why adults should read children’s fantasy.

Also in the New Statesman, Philip Pullman (and a couple of others) on William Blake.

Now All Year’s Bests Until The End, courtesy of Jed Hartman.

Elizabeth Bear objects to her latest novel being described as slash. Sarah Monette queries current usage of the term more generally. Extensive discussion ensues.

Karl Schroeder interviewed at Velcro City.

Matt Cheney interviews Juliet Ulman.

Jonathan Strahan presents the Coode Street Awards.

Not SF, but Making Light links to all of Eddie Izzard’s Mongrel Nation.