The Infinite Linkness

I am now back in the UK. While I was away, I accumulated quite a lot of links. Here’s a selection, bearing in mind that some of them will be old news:

• John Scalzi is revising his “top 50 personal sf/f blogs” list again, and wants to know if your Technorati ranking is above 50,000. (Every time I check, this place is hovering between 50,000 and 60,000, so no luck for me.) This time round he’s adding a section for group blogs.
• Campbell Award finalists. A good list, but it’s usually a good list with an utterly boneheaded choice for winner; given that I’m expecting Ben Bova to take it.
• Sturgeon Award finalists. A really good list (especially pleased to see a nod for M. Rickert’s “You Have Never Been Here”, which seems to have been overlooked by every Year’s Best anthology).
• Fahrenheit 451 “is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.” Says Ray Bradbury.
• This year’s Readercon programme.
• Locus reviews: Graham Sleight on Endless Things by John Crowley, Gary K. Wolfe on The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod. You can post comments there, you know. Also from Locus, a discussion of horror.
• Paul Witcover interviews Brian Aldiss about his new novel HARM; note that since the interview was conducted the book has found a UK publisher, Duckworth, and will be out over here in August.
• An interview with Iain Banks; on his next sf novel, Matter: ‘”It’s a real shelf-breaker,” he says enthusiastically. “It’s 204,000 words long and the last 4,000 consist of appendices and glossaries. It’s so complicated that even in its complexity it’s complex. I’m not sure the publishers will go for the appendices, but readers will need them.”‘
• Big changes at Bertelsmann’s Book Clubs, including the SF Book Club; see posts by Jonathan Strahan here, here and here.
• Warren Ellis on reviews. (”Sorry about all the italics: I feel like I’m turning into John Clute — a writer I hate for the way he tortures language, like a man trying to dry a wet dog by frying it on the stove.”)
• The Ratbastards will be publishing novellas.
• Joe Hill reviews Chuck Palahniuk’s latest, Rant.
• John Crowley reviews The Pesthouse by Jim Crace.
• Jan Morris reviews Owen Sheers’ debut novel, Resistance.
• John Clute reviews The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.
• Colin Greenland reviews Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan.
• On fantasy: one, two. See also.
• Kit Whitfield on that list of books for boys.
• And last but not least, new fiction by David Mitchell: “Denouement.”