F&SF‘s January acquisitions include:
An iTunes meme, stolen (as usual) from Andy Wheeler, who (as usual) stole it from Keith R.A. Decandido:
How many songs total: 5861
How many hours or days of music: 33.7 days
Most recently played: "The Dissentience" by Protest the Hero, from Fortress
Most played: "Blacken the Cursed Sun" by Lamb of God, off Sacrament (135 times)
Most recently added: "Goddess Gagged" by Protest the Hero, from Fortress
Sort by song title
First Song: "A.D.D." by System of a Down, off Steal This Album!
Last Song: "…" by Callenish Circle, off Flesh Power Domination
Sort by time
Shortest Song: "Invite Yourself In" by Ultraspank, off Progress (00:17)
Longest Song: "Iowa" by Slipknot, off Iowa (15:05)
Sort by Artist
First: The Absence
Last: 36 Crazyfists
Sort by album
First album: Above the Weeping World by Insomnium
Last album: 2000 Years of Human Error by Godhead
First song that comes up on Shuffle: "Midsummer Night" by Korpiklaani, from Tales Along This Road
Search the following and state how many songs come up:
Death – 541 (Probably because of the "death metal" genre labels; it probably would’ve been even more, but not all of my tracks are correctly labeled.)
Life – 132
Love – 42
Hate – 45
You – 249
Sex – 16 (14 of them due to White Zombie’s album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1)
Jonathan Strahan currently has an open reading period for his anthology series Eclipse:
I am currently reading for Eclipse Two, the second volume in the original science fiction and fantasy anthology series that I am editing for San Francisco-based publisher Night Shade Books. Eclipse is a series of anthologies in the vein of Orbit, Universe and New Dimensions, updated for the 21st century. It’s new and it’s proudly genre. It has no theme, and there’s no such thing as an Eclipse ‘type’ of story. Instead writers are encouraged to take any and all of the colors of the genre palette – be they steampunk, cyberpunk, new space opera, old space opera, fairy tale, ghost story, hard SF, or whatever – and use them as they will to create something unique and wonderful. That said, I am particularly looking for strong science fiction stories for Volume Two. Each volume of Eclipse features more than a dozen new stories by some of the best and brightest writers working in the field today. For example, Eclipse 1, which was published in October 2007, features Peter S. Beagle, Jack Dann & Paul Brandon, Terry Dowling, Andy Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Eileen Gunn, Gwyneth Jones, Ellen Klages, Margo Lanagan, Maureen F. McHugh, Garth Nix, Lucius Shepard, Bruce Sterling, and Ysabeau S. Wilce.
Visit Jonathan’s website to learn how to submit a story.
The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings and the South Street Seaport Museum present: Readings from Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
Carol Emshwiller
John Langan
Guest Curator: John Joseph Adams
Tuesday, February 5th — Doors open 6:30 PM
Free Admission — $5 donation if possible
South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery
213 Water Street
Newton Minnow’s ‘vast wasteland’ has never been a problem within literary science fiction, so don’t let the title of John Joseph Adams’ anthology of post-apocalyptic tales put you off. With 22 writers ranging from Octavia Butler to Cory Doctorow, Wastelands has already earned starred reviews. Two of its finest writers will perform readings for us, introduced by the editor.
Carol Emshwiller is the author of six novels and more than 100 short stories. Her short work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and has been collected in several volumes, most recently in I Live With You. In her career spanning five decades, she has won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. In 2005, she was presented the World Fantasy Award for Life-Time Achievement. Her most recent novel, The Secret City, was published in 2007.
John Langan has published several stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, two of which–"On Skua Island" and "Mr. Gaunt"–were nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. A collection of his short work, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, is forthcoming from Prime Books. Langan’s reviews and essays have appeared in Dead Reckonings, Erebos, Extrapolation, Fantasy Commentator, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, The Lovecraft Annual, Lovecraft Studies, and Science Fiction Studies. An adjunct instructor at SUNY New Paltz, he is in the process of completing his dissertation on H.P. Lovecraft.
John Joseph Adams was born in 1976. He is the assistant editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and was guest-editor of Shimmer Magazine’s special pirate issue. He is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in: Amazing Stories, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Kirkus Reviews, Locus, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Publishers Weekly, SCIFI.com, Strange Horizons, Subterranean Magazine, and Writer’s Digest. He lives in Perth Amboy, NJ and at www.johnjosephadams.com.
Books will be available for sale at the reading.
The New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series is in its umpteenth season (we’ll specify after Gordon Van Gelder tells us when it all began) of providing performances from some of the best writers in science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, etc. The series takes place the first Tuesday of every month at the South Street Seaport’s Melville Gallery, 213 Water Street. Admission is free, but $5 donations are encouraged to offset costs and buy dinner for the readers. The producer and executive curator is radio producer and talk show host Jim Freund.
WHEN:
Tuesday, 2/5/08
Doors open at 6:30 — readings begin at 7
WHERE:
The South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery
213 Water Street (near Beekman)
http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=213+Water+Street,+New+York,+NY
LINKS:
http://www.hourwolf.com/nyrsf
http://www.southstseaport.org
http://www.nyrsf.com
Correlations, the blog of the PBS series WIRED Science, has part one of an interview with Pump Six author (and frequent F&SF contributor) Paolo Bacigalupi today as their "Science Fiction Friday" feature. (And stay tuned throughout the weekend for more of the interview.)
What made you make the decision to start writing science fiction specifically?
I grew up reading science fiction and I think that was probably the biggest thing. I grew up on Heinlein and my father’s science fiction collection. My father was a big SF reader and those were really the first books that I read. They were science fiction and fantasy. Heinlein’s CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY. It was STARMAN JONES. It was things like THE HOBBIT by Tolkien. Those were the first books that I read where I actually remembered what I’d read afterwards and actually cared about the characters enough to want to run home and finish reading whatever book I was reading. So I’ve always had a connection to the genre because of that– those big adventure stories that science fiction and fantasy provided.
I think when I first sat down to write a book – when I was first sort of testing out the idea of being a writer – I just naturally gravitated to the idea that I would write science fiction. I read so much of it, I was familiar with it, and I liked it, and so that was where I started out thinking that if I was definitely going to write a book, it was definitely going to be science fiction. This original book that I was going to write, it was all set in the future China world, sort of the version that you see in "Pocketful of Dharma," and it was entertainment–it was pretty fun to write. It was interesting in it’s own way, but science fiction was just sort the thing that seemed like it was the natural thing.
Read the whole interview, and be sure to leave some comments to encourage WIRED Science to continue this series of SF author spotlights!
Check it out, a new magazine is launching, and at a really affordable price, too:
The wonderful world of science-fiction pulps is populated with lithe heroes, bosomy heroines, bug-eyed monsters and space-suited villains from Mars. It is also garishly illuminated with the latest pseudo-scientific jargon. Readers of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, etc. take such words as teleportation, parastasis and rhodon-deracts in stride.
Into this world of science and sex this week stepped a new contender, the Magazine of Fantasy, a slickish, 35¢ quarterly. Published by the American Mercury’s bustling Lawrence Spivak, who also runs radio’s Meet the Press program and puts out a string of mystery publications, Fantasy is designed to lift imaginative fiction up to the level of the highest brows.
Click here to read the rest of this breaking news story. Oh, wait, this was published in 1949…
That’s right–the launch of F&SF was covered in TIME. This was an interesting thing to stumble across, and one of the reasons the web is really great.
For the organizationally-inclined among my readers, I have a favor to ask.
What I need is a system, or a piece of software that will help me keep track of publicity mailings–basically, where I sent what. I’ve been using an excel spreadsheet to keep track, but it’s not ideal. I’d like to have something that will cross-reference all my data, so I can look at a book and see where it’s been sent, look at a review venue and see what I’ve sent them, and look at who actually reviewed what.