Feb. 9 — SCI FI Wire published a piece I wrote about Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel Sixty Days and Counting.
Sixty Days and Counting deals with abrupt climate change. But it’s more than that, best-selling SF author Kim Stanley Robinson said: It’s utopian fiction, structured as a near-future disaster domestic comedy.
Feb. 8 — SCI FI Wire published a piece I wrote about Elizabeth Haydon’s new novel The Assasssin King.
The Assassin King is part of Elizabeth Haydon’s Symphony of Ages, which literally spans the history of the universe. Haydon told SCI FI Wire that she plotted out the history of the universe from birth to death in order to write work of this magnitude.
If you’re like me, and you hate it when bands stream a song on their MySpace page or wherever, but don’t let you download it, then this software is for you. Replay Music is a streaming music recorder, and as the ad copy says it’s incredibly easy to use. I’ve used it several times now, and every track has not only been simple to record, but its turned out perfect as well. You can download the program as shareware and get 25 free recordings out of it, and then if you want to keep it, it’ll cost you $39.95. You ask me, it’s totally worth it.
See, the thing is, you give me a song to put on my iPod, you’ve dramatically increased the chances I’m going to buy your album. But you put it on your MySpace page, where I have to sit in front of my PC to hear it, it’s not going to help you much. And I want to discover new bands as much as those same bands want to be discovered by me and others like me, so everybody wins.
Feb. 7 — SCI FI Wire published a piece I wrote about Dan Simmons’s latest novel, The Terror.
The Terror centers with the ill-fated Franklin arctic expedition of 1845, then adds a fanged monster. Multiple award-winning SF/fantasy author Dan Simmons told SCI FI Wire that his latest novel is a work of imaginative fiction based on actual historical events.
I created a MySpace page for Wastelands, my post-apocalyptic reprint anthology forthcoming from Night Shade Books. Check it out, and friend it!
Kaolin Fire writes to tell me about a new magazine:
Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine publishes 200 pages of literary and genre fiction, poetry, articles, and art, and features contributors from around the world. GUD (pron. “good”) pays semi-pro rates for content and pays royalties on the profits of the sales of the magazine, effectively making the contributors shareholders for that issue.
GUD is available for purchase in print and electronic (PDF) format. It is published twice yearly, although we expect to go to four issues a year in our second year of publication. The initial print run for Issue 0 was 200 copies (and the second run is 200 copies as well), and we are investigating distributorship for the magazine within the US and abroad. We expect our circulation to grow as word gets out.
Check it out at www.gudmagazine.com.
I just learned about this new audiobook-type project called AudioFilk.com. Here’s what I was told about it:
We’ve just launched a new Audiobook-esque type site called AudioFlik.com. It’s pretty much what you’d get if you combined an audiobook, radio drama, and film soundtrack. We deliver the content weekly to subscribers of each program, but since you’re a self-professed Sci Fi hound, I wanted to offer to put you on our comp list for our first production which is a Sci Fi dealio entitled ARCTIC INVASION.
Basically we send out a new “Chapter” each week, but instead of special apps or unique programs, we just send it out via our nifty system that uses old fashioned email for distribution. At any rate, check out the site and let me know if you’re into it. The first chapters is available below.
Site: AudioFlik.com
Current production site: ArcticInvasion.com
Free Chapter:
http://www.audioflik.com/ArcticInvasion_free.html
Anyone heard of that, or listened to it yet? Any thoughts?
Feb. 6 — SCI FI Wire published a piece I wrote about Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s novel Catalyst, which is a finalist for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award.
In my previous post, I showed off my F&SF collection. Here, you’ll see the rest of my Shrine to Short Fiction. When I reorganized my books (which I did in part, because [a] they weren’t organized at all, and [b], I needed to remove them anyway so I could secure the bookcases together), I decided that I wanted to keep all the short fiction repositories separate, so that when I’m looking for a specific short story, I’ll have a better chance of actually finding it.
Pictured there on the bookcases are all of my anthologies and collections in hardcover or trade paperback. On the floor there are all of my mass market books of short fiction. I had to order more of the 2-shelf bookcases, so I’m waiting on those to arrive, at which point I’ll put the mass markets on top of that 5-shelfer there which currently has audiobooks piled on top of it.
For those curious, if you go to the Flickr page of this photo and view the original hi-res size, you should be able to zoom in closely enough to read most of the titles.
I don’t remember if I blogged about this previously or not, but last year I bought a complete run of F&SF from a long-time fan, who no longer had the room to store his collection. It took me a while to get around to it, but I finally got them all unpacked. Behold. That’s all of them.
Well, except for the November 1983 issue. That appears to be the only one I’m missing. Anyone have one they wouldn’t mind parting with?
Also pictured here are my new 5-shelf bookcases, on top of which you can see I’ve stacked smaller 2-shelf bookcases. The 5-shelfers are all screwed together for stability, as are the 2-shelfers, but I need to attach the 2-shelfers to the 5-shelfers with shims or something (as suggested in the comments to a previous post).
In addition to F&SF issues, you’ll also see some other stuff on the shelves. For instance, there’s a complete run of F&SF‘s sister publiation, Venture, which didn’t last very long (it had two brief runs in the 50s and 60s), and a few F&SF anthologies. Below that are some misc. short fiction magazines and graphic novels.
