- So, the short story club is done. (Well, final discussion ongoing.) Thank you to everyone who participated! It will return, though I’m debating what the focus should be next time: more new fiction? Classic stories? Award nominees? Thoughts welcome.
- Hey, you know what hasn’t been discussed enough? The death of science fiction. Responses here, here, here, here, here and here. EDIT: And now, the follow-up.
- Paul Kincaid on the question Robert Holdstock didn’t answer
- Abigail Nussbaum reviews The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, and raises a number of points I really must get around to responding to. (You might think I’ve already said enough, but apparently not.)
- An interview with Joss Whedon
- An interview with Vandana Singh
- A two part interview with David Anthony Durham
- Paul McAuley on The Aerodrome: A Love Story by Rex Warner
- Matt Cheney on Under the Dome by Stephen King
- David Hebblethwaite on Finch by Jeff VanderMeer
- Karen Burnham on The Devil’s Alphabet by Daryl Gregory
- Nilanjana Roy on Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald
- Jonathan McCalmont’s latest Blasphemous Geometries column, on “Why moral choices in video games are no longer fun”
- Some fiction: three stories by Nisi Shawl, “The Water Museum“, “Bird Day“, and “Good Boy“; one by David Moles, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom“; and an international sf issue at Words Without Borders.
- Karen Healey’s column on YA sf and the adolescent body
- “Genre expectation, subversion, and anti-consolation in the Kefahuchi Tract novels of M John Harrison“
- Alison Flood reads The Book of the New Sun
- Jason Sanford discusses the circulation of online genre magazines
- The best “paranormal fantasy” (?) of the decade. Also, you can vote for the best UF covers of the year. They have a category for “Best Partial Body Cover”.
- Hooray, there is going to be a second series of the Survivors remake after all
- Adam Roberts has been reading fantasy: Tolkien, Greer Gilman, and, er, Kevin J Anderson
- And to finish: Slingers, and The Observer magazine’s 1989 predictions for London in 2010
Tag: links
The Forest of Links and Teeth
- PS Publishing have released a sample section from John Berlyne’s Tim Powers bibliography Secret Histories (see Graham Sleight’s review), focusing on The Anubis Gates, and including a tribute to the novel by China Mieville; you can get it here [pdf]
- David Hines on the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and on Terminator Salvation
- Vandana Singh has some thoughts on writing (and not writing) the other, and on as others write about India, specifically Ian McDonald
- The new issue of Fruitless Recursion features Karen Burnham on Starboard Wine by Samuel Delany, Paul Raven on Reading Science Fiction, eds James Gunn, Marleen S. Barr and Matthew Candelaria, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro on Roger Luckhurst’s cultural history of sf
- Nalo Hopkinson on why she writes sf and fantasy: Looking for Clues
- The latest issue of Conjunctions is a sort of follow-up to the “New Wave Fabulists” issue of a few years ago; and as well as the introduction, you can read stories by Elizabeth Hand, Ben Marcus, Jonathan Carroll and Jeff VanderMeer online
- Anil Menon on the first book of Hoshruba
- Nic Clarke on Irons in the Fire by Juliet E. McKenna
- Paul Kincaid reviews The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr at SF Site
- Peter Carty reviews Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui in The Independent
- New group blog, with an enormous number of mostly-British-sf-writer contributors (Andy Remic, Tricia Sullivan, Tony Ballantyne, Juliet McKenna, plenty of others), aims “to celebrate everything positive, funky and exciting in the Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror Universe!” Hmm.
- A women in science fiction reading club; I have been meaning to read the Elgin, Slonczewski and Butler books on that list for ages, so plan to join in when they reach those titles. First up, however, in June, is The Female Man.
- John Crowley interviewed at The Believer
- Reviews of Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger: Sean O’Brien in the TLS, Hilary Mantel in The Guardian, John Preston in The Telegraph
- More on The City & The City: Adam Roberts’ review, and China Mieville on crime novels, writing and ending them
- Abigail Nussbaum and Martin Lewis, on Kit Whitfield’s first novel Bareback/Benighted
- Charlotte Higgins on Lavinia by Ursula K Le Guin, in The Guardian
- Martin McGrath on Toby Litt’s Journey Into Space, and some of the responses thereto; maybe one day I’ll even get around to writing up my own thoughts.
- Has anyone seen Fermat’s Room yet? It sounds interesting; here’s a write-up by Philip French that makes it sound interesting (also rounds-up other recent Spanish genre films; Timecrimes had passed me by completely)
- A conversation with Jedediah Berry; for those of you who subscribe to the LRB, there’s a review of The Manual of Detection in the latest issue, here
- Graham Sleight justifies the existence of his column and considers suspension of disbelief at the Locus blog
- Star Trek has been discussed to death by now, but Abigail Nussbaum has two good roundups of links; I particularly recommend Adam Roberts’ review, and indeed Abigail’s own review. Elsewhere selenak has been re-watching some classic Next Generation [unrelated, but see also her comparison of Angel‘s Lilah Morgan and Dollhouse‘s Adelle DeWitt]; I was inspired to rewatch “Darmok” last night, which is exactly the nerdy side of Trek that I missed in the film, and which held up surprisingly well
- And finally: a slightly confused piece by Tim Lott in The Independent, calling for the Great English Novel, notable here for the following: “The writers who have come closest to writing an important work of literature in recent years are simply not naturalists. D B C Pierre, David Mitchell, Scarlett Thomas and Susanna Clarke have all written books that were genuinely fresh voices – but the first was a satire set in America and the other three were verging on fantasy or even science-fiction.” Even, indeed …
Evidence of Links in a Case of Abandonment
- Jetsie de Vries is resigning as co-editor of Interzone: “I am unhappy with the direction and tone the fiction in Interzone will be taking.” UPDATE: response from the remaining editorial team: “We would like to reassure readers and authors that there is no change in editorial ethos or policy – explicit or implicit, actual or pending – at Interzone.” Curious.
- The deadline for the BSFA 50th Anniversary Short Story competition is this Friday.
- Abigail Nussbaum reviews the October/November issue of F&SF; Lucius Shepard takes exception to her criticism of his review of Iron Man; Abigail responds; and Shepard responds. I am pretty much on Abigail’s side on this one.
- Stephen Mitchelmore discusses Jeannette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (and takes a swipe at Ursula Le Guin’s review of same while he’s at it).
- Steven Shaviro reviews The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua, and is a fan: “The Red Men is a brilliant work of social theory, in the same way that (as I have argued before) novels by authors like J G Ballard and Bret Easton Ellis are works of social theory.”
- Two reviews of Saturn’s Children: Russell Letson in Locus (my copy of which seems to have gone AWOL somewhere over the Atlantic), and Andrew Wheeler
- Andrew Wheeler has also reviewed Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi
- An interview with Mary Doria Russell
- Reviews at SF Site: Paul Kincaid on John Crowley; Jonathan McCalmont on Greg Egan (taking some issue with Adam Roberts’ review of Incandescence; and Paul Raven on Snow Crash. Oh, and a less-than-convincing review of The Steel Remains by John Berlyne.
- An in-depth interview with Richard Morgan; lots on the thinking behind his recent books in there.
- Dan Hartland has a new blog (and a great review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao at Strange Horizons).
- At Strange Horizons, Richard Larson tackles The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (of “The Goosle” fame), and Abigail Nussbaum looks at Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End.
- Faren Miller reviews The Alchemy of Stone
- Allegra Goodman has written a (YA) sf novel
(There will be content soon, honest. Probably starting with something about the M. Rickert story whose title I have corrupted for the title of this post.)
