Via ellen_datlow ....

Gavin Grant and Kelly Link report the death of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series.

http://lcrw.net/wordpress/?p=768#comments

Damn.

I started reading science fiction as a kid, 'way back in the '60s, so I absorbed the Party Line of the day, the one that was promulgated back during the 'New Wave' Wars: that 'science fiction' was but a subset of the larger universe of 'speculative fiction'.

'Speculative Fiction' (known to its friends as 'SF') included 'science fiction', but also ( Read more... )

What Kind of Reader Are You?
Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm

You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader

Book Snob

Literate Good Citizen

Non-Reader

Fad Reader

What Kind of ( Read more... )

There's a sub-genre of recent novels that have the look-and-feel of science fiction, but which aren't actually science-fictional.

Cryptonomicon is probably the type specimen here: it hit every SF button I have, and yet it's SF mostly only by courtesy: the 'data haven' idea is a little bit sf'nal, the crypto is fun, but mostly it's some sort of ( Read more... )

I was participant in a conversation over on LibraryThing that touched on the question of, well, how many books is enough? How many books do you think you're ever going to get around to reading ( Read more... )

Over at LibraryThing I've been involved in a long-running discussion of Why That Stuff You Read Sucks. I'm recycling a point I made over there:

By this point in the thread, I think we all understand that people read for different reasons. What I'm still not getting is why this is a problem.

Because it's also true that people write for different ( Read more... )

from the July Locus:

July Man vs. Machine MHG / Helfers
August Pandora's Closet MHG / Rabe
Sept Heroes in training MHG / Jim Hines
Oct Fate Fantastic MHG / Daniel Hoyt
Nov Wizards Inc MHG / MColeman
Dec The Future We Wish We Had MHG / Likiss

2008
Jan Fellowship Fantastic MHG / Hughes ( Read more... )

I just need a place to vent:

The Library of America issued a volume of Ben Franklin's Writings in 1987.

In 2005, they split the volume in half, and reissued it as Vol. I (Silence Dogood, The Busy-Body, and Early Writings ) and Vol. II  ( Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings).

This has been making me quietly insane: because I spotted a LoA ( Read more... )

A question is posed on LT:

So, Bob, how wrong am I to tag Buffy (of the vampire slaying fame) as science-fiction? Also would love your opinion on the sf vs. sci-fi vs. s/f whatever tagging--perhaps you can point me to the discussion, I did some half-hearted wading in the Science fiction group, too ineffectual, didn't come across THE debate, I don't ( Read more... )

I've been accumulating books since I was a teenager.
 (The clerk at Lescron once asked me - "So...do you read all these books you buy?")
Now that I'm finally getting my library accurately cataloged, now is a good time to unload some dupes.

I ran across a first printing of Neuromancer at the SCPL Sale , bought it for a quarter.  Sold it a month or ( Read more... )