Today's assortment:
A meme
via andrewducker:
look at my icons and tell me which, if any, you like best, and why.
A fascinating
post by Matthew Cheney on teaching Neal Gaiman's American Gods to High School students.
A somewhat melancholy article in the Independent, on the effects of
writing for posterity but publishing for now.
A charming story (less than 500 words) by Stuart Carter called '
Tell Stephen Baxter Not To Worry'. On a slightly more surreal Baxter-related note, see
this comic.
Angel news: S5 DVDs are due in february. When I saw
this, I was terribly worried. I don't want Spike on the cover of the DVDs of my show, dammit! Fortunately the
UK edition is much better.
An
interview with Tony Ballantyne at Infinity Plus. The followup to Recusion will be Capacity, and after that Divergence. And speaking of followups, Amazon claim to already have a cover for
No Present Like Time by Steph Swainston. It's not a patch on the cover for
The Year of Our War, though.
There's something niggling at me, in the back of my head, inspired variously by Geneva's
review of Cloud Atlas, my disagreement with the same, Jonathan Strahan's
post about what those who write about sf should be doing, Jeff Noon's phrase
'post-futurism' and
swisstone's writing on
Vurt (also
here). But I haven't quite worked out what it is that I want to say, yet.
A full list of Guests of Honour for
Concussion, the 2006 Eastercon.
Note to self--at some point, read these stories:
Life In Stone by Tim Pratt; '
Is You/Is You Ain't' by Michael Canfield; '
Anda's Game' by Cory Doctorow; the last month or so of
SCIFICTION. Oh, and there's going to be a dead-tree
SCIFICTION anthology. Woohoo!
Mind you, it's reached that point in the year when I have to go into reading triage: when I admit I'm not going to get through everything I would like to get through by the end of the year. Currently, I absolutely want to get through Swiftly by Adam Roberts, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, The Wizard by Gene Wolfe, Air by Geoff Ryman, Set This House In Order by Matt Ruff, City of Pearl by Karen Traviss, Empire by Niall Ferguson, Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, the second issue of PostScripts, the July (all-american special issue) of F&SF, and the Different Worlds anthology. But it's not going to happen, is it?