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.

• Alastair Reynolds is blogging: Teahouse on the Tracks.
• John Clute reviews The SFWA European Hall of Fame. (Far be it from me to criticise Clute, but I can’t help thinking it would have been nice if he’d talked about the stories a bit more …)
• Farah Mendlesohn reviews Life as we Knew It by Susan Beth Pffefer
• Two reviews of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union from the Guardian (well, one from The Guardian and one from the Observer); Scott Westerfeld takes issue with the latter.
• Graham Sleight on Isaac Asimov.
• Reactions to Saturday’s Doctor Who: one, two, three, four, five. I liked it, but I’m not as rapturous as everyone else.
• Henry Farrell reviews Ian McDonald’s Brasyl.
• Benjamin Rosenbaum has sold a short story collection to Small Beer Press.
• Listen Again (until Sunday) to Weird Tales: The Strange Life of HP Lovecraft, with contributions from Kelly Link, China Mieville, Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman and others.
• In other news, it’s the end of the world.

I am now back in the UK. While I was away, I accumulated quite a lot of links. Here’s a selection, bearing in mind that some of them will be old news:

• John Scalzi is revising his “top 50 personal sf/f blogs” list again, and wants to know if your Technorati ranking is above 50,000. (Every time I check, this place is hovering between 50,000 and 60,000, so no luck for me.) This time round he’s adding a section for group blogs.
• Campbell Award finalists. A good list, but it’s usually a good list with an utterly boneheaded choice for winner; given that I’m expecting Ben Bova to take it.
• Sturgeon Award finalists. A really good list (especially pleased to see a nod for M. Rickert’s “You Have Never Been Here”, which seems to have been overlooked by every Year’s Best anthology).
• Fahrenheit 451 “is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.” Says Ray Bradbury.
• This year’s Readercon programme.
• Locus reviews: Graham Sleight on Endless Things by John Crowley, Gary K. Wolfe on The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod. You can post comments there, you know. Also from Locus, a discussion of horror.
• Paul Witcover interviews Brian Aldiss about his new novel HARM; note that since the interview was conducted the book has found a UK publisher, Duckworth, and will be out over here in August.
• An interview with Iain Banks; on his next sf novel, Matter: ‘”It’s a real shelf-breaker,” he says enthusiastically. “It’s 204,000 words long and the last 4,000 consist of appendices and glossaries. It’s so complicated that even in its complexity it’s complex. I’m not sure the publishers will go for the appendices, but readers will need them.”‘
• Big changes at Bertelsmann’s Book Clubs, including the SF Book Club; see posts by Jonathan Strahan here, here and here.
• Warren Ellis on reviews. (“Sorry about all the italics: I feel like I’m turning into John Clute — a writer I hate for the way he tortures language, like a man trying to dry a wet dog by frying it on the stove.”)
• The Ratbastards will be publishing novellas.
• Joe Hill reviews Chuck Palahniuk’s latest, Rant.
• John Crowley reviews The Pesthouse by Jim Crace.
• Jan Morris reviews Owen Sheers’ debut novel, Resistance.
• John Clute reviews The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.
• Colin Greenland reviews Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan.
• On fantasy: one, two. See also.
• Kit Whitfield on that list of books for boys.
• And last but not least, new fiction by David Mitchell: “Denouement.”

• Aqueduct Press has a new blog (lj feed); posts so far include Nancy Jane Moore on the resurgence of feminist science fiction, conversations with Nisi Shawl and Lesley Hall, and a heads-up that L. Timmel Duchamp will (probably) be discussing Karen Koy Fowler’s story “Always” (April/May Asimov’s) in the near-ish future.
• Lots of good stuff over at the Litblog Co-op this week, including Alan DeNiro on why he writes about spaceships, and Matt Cheney on several of the stories in Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead: “If I Leap“, “Child Assassin“, and the title story
• Maureen McHugh’s plea for strangeness in sf
• Mely’s belated thoughts on the cultural appropriation panel from Wiscon 30
• “In this blizzard of commentary, from blogosphere to talk radio, it’s odd to discover that literary prizes now stand out as a surprisingly reliable guide“
• The genesis of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. And I think this review even beats out that piece on Jim Crace for OTT as-others-see-us-ness: “Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.”
• The birth of the fantastic
• Reviews in The Guardian: M. John Harrison on Chuck Palahniuk’s Rant; Carrie O’Grady on Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World; Kamila Shamsie on Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House; and Josh Lacey on China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun (“for science-fiction fans who don’t mind the lack of characterisation, Un Lun Dun should provide lots of fun”)
• Speaking of Lionel Shriver, here she is writing about reviewing. Or perhaps, more accurately, angsting about reviewing
• Why are most artists liberal?
• And finally: how to (not) talk to girls on buses

Back from Barcelona, cleaning out the links:

• The Eve’s Alexandrians have been continuing their Clarke reading with gusto: here are Nic and Victoria on Gradisil (which they liked), Hav (which they really liked), and End of the World Blues (which they disagreed on, Nic being somewhat more positive than Victoria). For other (quite different) opinions see here.
• An interview with Richard Morgan. There’s been a bit of debate in the comments to Martin Lewis’ review of Morgan’s Black Man. (Other good stuff at Strange Horizons reviews this week: William Mingin on Kipling, and Adam Roberts on Sunshine.)
• Gwyneth Jones in The Guardian on reality catching up with sf, and on her blog on Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean.
• Reviews from Locus: Gary Wolfe on In War Times by Katheleen Ann Goonan and Faren Miller on Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages.
• Compare and contrast: Abigail Nussbaum on the Hugo-nominated short stories, novellettes and novella list, versus SF Signal on all of them in one post. They don’t have opposite views about every story …
• The paintings of Alice B. Sheldon.
• An interesting discussion developed on the De Lint on Mieville post, if you missed that.
• Kelly Link has a young adult collection coming out next year.
• An interesting response to my review of Specimen Days.
• The May/June 2008 Interzone will be a Mundane SF special, guest-edited by Geoff Ryman, Julian Todd and Trent Walters.
• Farah Mendlesohn on Myth, Symbol and Meaning in Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins, She Wrote: the Life of P.L. Travers.
• Martin McGrath on Ascent by Jed Mercurio.
• Jonathan McCalmont on new mass-market sf magazine SciFiNow.
• The Winter Rose and The Snow Queen.
• Richard Larson on The Crying of Lot 49 and paranoia.
• The Locus Award Finalists and Paul’s comments.
• A recent talk by Ken MacLeod.
• And: this review of The Children of Hurin was actually doing ok until the last paragraph.