• Lists of novels and short fiction by women that have been shortlisted by awards other than the Hugo (or made the Locus Recommended Reading list). In an entirely unrelated story, voting for the Locus Poll, in which anyone can vote, closes tomorrow. (And apparently there’s some YA you should be considering, too.)
• Eastercon reports: one, two, three. And Paul Raven has put up his recording of the reviews panel.
• Everyone’s seen Jonathan Lethem’s essay, “The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction“, right? You may not have seen this exchange of emails between Lethem and Ray Davis, originally published in NYRSF.
• Paul Di Filippo remembers SF Eye. Gabe Chouinard points to the new Scalpel Magazine, launching in May.
• The nature of consolation and comfort in reading and writing: Christopher Barzak and Matt Cheney.
• Abigail Nussbaum on the Hugo novellette shortlist and on the Life on Mars finale. Other Life on Mars reactions: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. See also this interview with Matthew Graham, which includes information about the sequel series Ashes to Ashes.
• Pete Young on Sunshine. And two reviews in the Guardian.
• What would a history of seventies sf look like?
• Programmes for Alt.Fiction 2007 (28th April, Derby) and Sci-Fi London (2nd to 6th May).
• Recommend some action-adventure science fiction page-turners.
• And finally: the funniest review of His Majesty’s Dragon you will see for a while. (Key quotes: “I actually suspending reading Schismatrix to read this, if you can believe it”; “Honestly, this isn’t really a fantasy book. It’s an alternative history novel”; “I can see why the voters nominated it for a Hugo after all.”)

• Pirates are out, Fauns are in: Pan’s Labyrinth replaces The Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on the Hugo ballot
• Two views of The Road at Strange Horizons, by Victoria Hoyle and Paul Kincaid. And a third, dissenting view by Levi Asher (via)
• Not unrelatedly, “In my eyes, the [Clarke Award has lost its] credibility this year, and I would encourage those interested to boycott the award“. Martin asks if Oprah now has more credibility than the Clarke. Tony has another response.
• Nic reviews River of Gods and inadvertently starts a slapfight about Ian McDonald’s portrayal of India
• Abigail on the Battlestar Galactica season finale (which I haven’t seen yet)
• Nicholas Whyte rounds up reactions to the first episode of Doctor Who‘s third season
• Faren Miller on The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
• Scott Esposito on The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and other Jewish alternate histories (via)
• An early review of Sunshine in The Scotsman
• Jeff VanderMeer interviews Jonathan Strahan
• And I’m not going to claim it’s the best April’s Fool I saw yesterday, but as an old Angel fan, this gave me a nostalgic glow. (via)

(One day there will be substantive content here again. But probably not this week, alas.)

• Andrew Mckie (among other things, sf reviewer for the Telegraph, interviewer of Ken Macleod and Gary Wolfe at past BSFA meetings, and introduction-writer for Glorifying Terrorism) has a blog.
• So do Elizabeth Hand, Lucius Shepard, Paul Witcover and Paul di Filippo.
• John Clute reviews Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown.
• Where’s the YA sf? (via)
• The contents for the first Best American Fantasy, and Matt Cheney’s preface.
• M. John Harrison describes the M1 then uses it as an example of writing about landscape.
• Early word on Red Seas Under Red Skies is positive, but not unreservedly so.
• SF on film (via).
• Draft programme for the 2007 Science & the Public conference (more info), on May 19th.
• And in July there’s a conference on short stories that’s calling for papers.
• And to finish, another iteration of “what is the minimum one should reasonably be able to expect from a reviewer?“

• “At the risk of sounding like a nerd, I’m beginning to think science fiction’s actually quite good“
• David Langford has put an essay by David Masson online: Some Thoughts on Language in Science Fiction.
• New fiction by David Marusek: “Osama Phone Home“
• Greg Egan posts to usenet, spawns giant thread; the original post points to a FAQ for Permutation City
• Nic Clarke on Yvgeny Zamyatin’s We
• Abigail Nussbaum on the Nebula short story ballot
• Paul Kincaid on Un Lun Dun
• The latest issue of The Internet Review of SF has an interview with Elizabeth Bear and a review of her latest novel, Carnival, among other things. Elsewhere, Jonathan wonders what’s wrong with IROSF.
• Jeff Vandermeer is unimpressed by Terence Rafferty’s review of The Terror
• An interview with Richard Morgan about his new novel Black Man (which, I have to say, despite not getting on with Morgan’s fiction in the past, sounds promising)
• Neal Stephenson’s inexplicable defence of The 300
• John Scalzi is running for SFWA president as a write-in candidate. More discussion here.
• And Paolo Bacigalupi on futurizing:
  

  Futurizing: The process of adding kick-ass gadgets, tools, and extrapolations to a sci-fi story to make it feel more futuristic so that it can fit more comfortably in the sci-fi genre. Closely related to Sense-of-Wonder Interior Designing.

• Paul Raven started a debate about publishing online: sf magazines don’t have to die. One of the things that fed into it was Jason Stoddard’s thoughts on new marketing 101 for sf publishers and writers, which he subsequently followed up with a second post (which takes us back in the direction of the author-reader relationship again). Meanwhile, Big Dumb Object remembers Bruce Sterling’s talk at the last BSFA/SFF AGM event, and Gordon van Gelder responded to Paul’s original post on the Nightshade forums, sparking another thread of discussion (telling quote from Daryl Gregory: “It’s interesting that people here see techies as natural screen readers, but not SF fans. Everybody outside the ghetto would assume that SF folks would be first in line. I mean, online.”)
• Speaking of content from print magazines online, F&SF has essays on Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman, Michael Swanwick, and Michael Andrei-Driussi. While the Matrix team have put up Tom Hunter’s interview with Josh Conviser, and Martin McGrath’s review of Children of Men.
• And a new online magazine: Darker Matter. Which, among other things, appears to have unearthed a Douglas Adams interview from 1979
• Adam Roberts on Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future.
• Nic Clarke on Mary Gentle’s Ilario.
• James Wood comprehensively not getting Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day; a partial response.
• Michel Faber on Jed Mercurio’s Ascent, which looks fascinating.
• Kim Stanley Robinson has been verging on ubiquitous this week, which has the effect of making me want to read Sixty Days of Counting even more than I already did. There are brief pieces at Salon and in the UCSD Guardian, an interview at Sci-Fi Weekly, and sundry radio and podcast appearances.
• Bookslut interviews Scarlett Thomas (whose The End of Mr Y I also want to read; hurry up, UK publication).
• And finally, for those going to Contemplation, a more-or-less final programme is online.

• Excerpts from Samuel Delany’s interview of Joanna Russ at last year’s Wiscon:
  

  SD: [Asks about the “double bind situation” — the economic realities of a writer trying to make a living writing.]

  JR: Yes, that’s awful. It’s not the writers’ fault. It’s the economics of publishing now. What I’ve seen again and again is that a writer will do very fine early stuff — really good stuff — and say, “Okay, I can make a living writing.” But they then find themselves having to work too fast. Words should not only be thought, they should be felt through, and there just isn’t enough time. People in that bind never do great stuff again. And if you don’t do that, if you say, “Okay, I will keep my day job (as they used to say in the theater), and I will just write what I damn well please,” you end up working too hard.

• Vote for the genre cover of the month
• In the Guardian, Audrey Niffenegger reviews Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners (in some ways I can’t help wishing they’d got someone British to write that review), and Gwyneth Jones reviews Hal Duncan’s Ink
• Fiction: 23 small disasters by Benjamin Rosenbaum, Christopher Barzak, Greg van Eekhout, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Meghan McCarron, Tim Pratt, and Elad Haber
• Audio fiction: a new Susanna Clarke short story, “The Dweller in High Places”
• Ain’t It Cool News has an sf book reviewer
• Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Philip K. Dick
• Maureen Kincaid Speller on Ian McDonald
• Abigail Nussbaum is reviewing the Nebula-nominated short fiction again: she’s started with the novelettes
• Kit Whitfield on inventing slang
• Escapism and the end of Pan’s Labyrinth. Posts I will write when I have time: a comparison of the endings of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Science of Sleep.

• 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.