February 27, 2005
SF news & views
Nalo Hopkinson's blog is at a new address, in case you were wondering where she was.
Adam Roberts has posted his assessment of the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist for 2005. He compares this year's crop with the nominees for the BSFA Award, and finds that the Clarke list this year tends towards the populist, even the middlebrow. Roberts is such a smart reviewer and has the most apt turns of phrase: "Knowledge," in Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, is "pathologically metastasising" and in Iron Council China Miéville writes "a compacted prose that works with a thesaurus-density of signifiers to build, layer on layer, a distinct and often atmospheric effect." I have come to trust his judgement, even when I don't fully agree.
Matthew Cheney writes on clubbiness in (sf) bookblogging. (Disclaimer: Adam Roberts and I are sporadic email correspondents.)
There is a blog called Mundane-SF that started last Nov. They have a manifesto that concludes "That the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet," and a list of "stupidities" which includes "Aliens: especially those aliens who act like feudal Japanese/American Indians/Tibetan Buddhists/Nazis." Hear hear! Though I am glad that they recognize the 'harmless fun that these and all the other Stupidities have brought to millions of people."
Superheros: don't quit your day jobs (from Long story; short pier).
In the "this will be news to some" dept.: Reading sf makes you a better Christian (via BoingBoing).
Addendum:
M Valdemar: A blog about horror and the death of contemporaneity (via Plep).
The Fantastic in Art and Fiction: created by the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections (via Life in the Present). Very attractive site; great images.
Sources of The LotR, including _The Ring of the Niblung, Beowulf, The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison, &etc. (via Catalogue Blog).
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