Science fiction writer John Scalzi started it. He tried to make our heads explode with a particular music video.
I’ve grown rather attached to my head over the years, and so I returned fire on my own weblog with this find.
Within ten minutes, he parried with this retort.
Oh, it is on, bucko. Of course you realize, in the words of the great philospohers, this means war.
Ball’s in your court, fella.
The Agony Column reviews Ibrahim S. Amin’s The Monster Hunter’s Handbook.
Fantasybookspot reviews David Bilsborough’s first novel, the epic fantasy The Wanderer’s Tale.
Fantasybookspot also reviews Julie E. Czerneda’s Survival.
SFF World reviews The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks.
SciFi UK Review also covers the June issue of Hub magazine.
Strange Horizons reviews Scarlet Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y.
Neth Space reviews Tobias S. Buckell’s first novel, the alien-planet adventure novel Crystal Rain.
The Agony Column reviews Paul McAuley’s Cowboy Angels.
Monsters & Critics reviews an anthology called Many Bloody Returns, though I can’t quite read who the editors are.
SciFi Weekly reviews Emma Bull’s new Wild West fantasy novel, Territory.
SFF World reviews Dave Duncan’s Mother of Lies, the second of two books in his current fantasy series.
Harper’s magazine has an excerpt from Karl Schroeder’s Crisis in Zefra in their July issue, but the whole thing — a fake non-fictional account of a near-future African peacekeeping mission that Schroeder did for the Canadian army a few years ago – is also available online, in a form that makes it look creepily real.
Eric Flint posts “snippets” of all of his current novels on his blog – that sounds like little bitty things, but each day he posts good-sized chunks, and he does dozens of “snippets” for each book. For example, today there’s snippet 30 of 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, snippet 17 of The Mirror of Worlds, and snippet 52 of Pyramid Power.
John Scalzi (the most recent winner of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer) posted a list of his work that’s available for free online, which includes his entire first novel, Agent to the Stars. (Agent is pretty good, actually; it’s the first thing I read by Scalzi, and it made me want to track down his other books.)
Tobias Buckell has posted the first third of his current novel Ragamuffin on the ‘net for everyone to read.
BestSF.net has posted Jonathan Sherwood’s story “Under the Graying Sea,” originally from the Februarty 2006 issue of Asimov’s.
John has announced he’s a Write-In Candidate for President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and I’m supporting him, mainly for this:
"I don’t believe that Michael Capobianco, the fellow running for SFWA President, is at all the right person for the job. Let me note again that this is not a reflection on his personal character; I’ve not met him outside the online SFWA newsgroups and a few other online venues, so I cannot speak as to whether he is a nice guy or whatever. I’m sure he is. Likewise, Mr. Capobianco is a past president of SFWA and has won the organization’s service award, which suggests that in the past, at least, he has been viewed as a reasonable choice for leading the organization. The question in my mind is not his past service, of which I have no experience (it was before my time) but whether he’s the right person to lead SFWA forward now.
"I don’t think he is for two reasons. First, he hasn’t had a novel published in this century; his last published novel, White Light, which he co-wrote with William Barton, was published in hardcover in 1998. Essentially, he’s a decade out of practice with the practical aspects of publishing science fiction. This matters if one believes, as I do, that SFWA should primarily be a professional service organization; it particularly matters if one believes, as I do, that the publishing world in the 21st century, even this early on, is manifestly different than it was in the 20th century. I have books professionally published in both centuries; I know how much it’s changed, and I deal with the publishing world on a daily basis.
"Second, I believe that based on what I’ve read from him Mr. Capobianco is fundamentally afraid of the changing publishing world, and the changes in the world of speculative fiction, and that this fundamental position will cause him to make his tenure as SFWA backward-facing and defensive, rather than forward-thinking and innovative. This will make SFWA even more irrelevant to working writers — that is, the people who are shaping science fiction — than it already is.
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