Our Ballardian Present

Cousin Brucie blogs about JG Ballard getting recognized as a visionary for his novels of global disaster. When I started getting into science fiction, it was at the beginning of cyberpunk, with which I was smitten including that of Cousin Brucie. At the same time, I really was getting into the “new wave” SF which [...]

Popularity: 37% [?]

Tags: ,

Interview with Kelley Eskridge

Long one of my favorite people, Kelley Eskridge posts about an interview series that appears to be working down Jeff VanderMeer’s list of favorite short fiction writers. Here is her interview, and it is a pretty good one. If this intrigues you at all, stick around because Kelley will be one of the early guests [...]

Popularity: 84% [?]

Tags: ,

Nicola Wins

As I predicted she would the other day, Nicola Griffith won the Lammy award. Way to go!
Popularity: 50% [?]

Popularity: 50% [?]

Tags:

Nicola and Kelley Tidbits

I occasionally blog about my friends Nicola and Kelley. I realized in my list of things to blog about I had several related to them, so I thought I’d collect them together.
1. Both of them urge people to call the California governor’s office and take the phone poll about whether or not you approve of [...]

Popularity: 54% [?]

Tags: ,

Nicola Griffith’s New Novel Blog

My dear friend Nicola Griffith is performing her own interesting blogospheric experiment. She is writing a novel about Hild of Whitby and to aid in her research she has started a research blog about it. I think this is a smart move. By sharing what she learns, she attracts whatever community there is about that [...]

Popularity: 38% [?]

Tags: ,

RIP, Robert Jordan

On Sunday, Jim Rigney aka Robert Jordan passed away. He’d been ill for some time so it is not unexpected but it is nonetheless sad news. I’m not a reader of his, but I did meet him and find him a very pleasant and kind man.
I interviewed him for Reality Break back in 1994. At [...]

Popularity: 28% [?]

Potterless

Speaking of hype that doesn’t affect me…
I’ve never read a Harry Potter book and when I tried to watch one of the movies I thought it was perhaps the most boring thing I had ever seen and I didn’t finish it. On the one hand, as a bibliophile I love to see people so excited [...]

Popularity: 23% [?]

Lesbian Characters You Should Know

Here’s a list of 13 lesbian and bisexual fictional characters worth reading about from After Ellen. What is significant to me is that my friend Nicola made the list with her character Aud Torvingen. New book! I went to the Myrtle Beach B&N to buy it for this present trip and they didn’t have it. [...]

Popularity: 27% [?]

My Friends Write Books

Two of my best friends in the world are a couple, both are writers and both of them have brand new books out now or very soon. Kelley Eskridge has her story collection Dangerous Space out shortly from Aqueduct Press. It’s not too soon to put in your order. Her debut novel Solitaire was one [...]

Popularity: 33% [?]

Tags: ,

Ebook Detractors Live On

Frequent correspondent Derek sent me this link to an article stating that ebooks are doomed. I suppose I could do some point by point contrarianism, but nine years after I left my job at Intel to go work at an ebook startup I just don’t have that much energy for a real comprehensive job of [...]

Popularity: 30% [?]

15 Vonnegut Quotes and More

I’ve grown very weary of these interminable top N lists of things, but here is a rare one I cared about and enjoyed. The Onion AV Club has a list of the 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut said better than anyone else. Good stuff. On Bob’s Slacktime Funhouse recently, the Lymph Node Institute did two shows [...]

Popularity: 26% [?]

Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

I’ve seen notices that Kurt Vonnegut has died. That’s a damn shame, because if there is one voice America needs right now it is his. He was a man with a hatred of war, not because
of being a peacenik but because he was a warrior. His  eloquence and exquisite writing ability expressed that point as [...]

Popularity: 19% [?]

Clevenger Reads Dermaphoria

Craig Clevenger, somewhat inadvertent friend of the blog, has done a reading from his novel Dermaphoria. This was for an episode of KQED’s Writers’ Block. I will read it, as I absolutely loved his novel The Contortionist’s Handbook. The only downside I could tell about Dermaphoria is that it maybe is too thematicallly similar to [...]

Popularity: 25% [?]

Tags: ,

Ebook Readers

I’ve been a proponent of ebooks since I joined a startup almost nine years ago to help build an electronic publishing system. If you’d have told me then that by 2007 the state of the art would barely have advanced beyond that of 1998, I’d have wept openly. The fact that one of the best [...]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Nicola Griffith on NPR

More about my friend Nicola Griffith. This weekend she was on The Best of our Knowledge. It actually airs in my area but I missed it live on the radio (which is not uncommon.) Apparently they have a podcast feed which means that you can get an MP3 of the show, rather than the craptacular [...]

Popularity: 38% [?]

Tags:

Wildside Press Audio Books

This is cool. Wildside Press is now publishing audio books. Thus far, two Elric novels and Piper’s Little Fuzzy are available. I love me some Michael Moorcock, so I might indeed check these out.
Popularity: 22% [?]

Popularity: 22% [?]

Ammonite’s Map of Jeep

For those of you who are fans of my dear friend Nicola Griffith, here is something cool. She’s posted her map of the planet Jeep from the novel Ammonite. It’s a great book, and she’s a great writer. Check it out!
Popularity: 29% [?]

Popularity: 29% [?]

Tags:

ATM for Books

A coworker IM’d me this link to an “ATM for books”, an on demand kiosk for printing and selling you books while you wait. Interestingly enough, our lunchtime conversation included me talking about the possibilty of book distribution incorporating POD to a great extent. Rather than ordering more obscure books, I suggested, there would be [...]

Popularity: 23% [?]

More Giving It Away

I’ve picked up my first hostile commentor to the post on this subject from a few days ago. That’s a little surprising that there is only one. All of the arguments I had on SFF.net, the flamiest, most ad hominem filled turdfights were all on intellectual property issues.
Via Kathryn comes news of another author [...]

Popularity: 20% [?]

Tags:

Giving it Away

My Orycon panelmate Cory Doctorow has an essay in Forbes Magazine of all places, talking about his role as an author in the post-scarcity world. I am far from universally agreeing with everything Cory says, but I’m right with him down the line with his thinking on literature, the role of free works in the [...]

Popularity: 25% [?]

Tags:
keep looking »

Bad Behavior has blocked 2344 access attempts in the last 7 days.