Empire of the Links

• After ten years, Infinity Plus is shutting up shop. There’s plenty of good stuff in their final update, though: an interview with (and two stories by) Paul McAuley, other stories by Jeff VanderMeer, Nicola Griffith, Gareth Lyn Powell and others; and about a dozen new reviews.
• Further to Jeanette Winterson’s comments on sf, Maureen Kincaid Speller thinks about science in fiction as opposed to science fiction. And here’s the first review I’ve seen of The Stone Gods
• Nic Clarke takes an in-depth look at Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
• Gary K. Wolfe reviews Connie Willis’ The Winds From Marble Arch
• Elizabeth Hand reviews Chris Barzak’s One for Sorrow
• New York Times reviews: Jonathan Ames reviews Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, Dave Itzkoff reviews Gibson’s Spook Country
• Michael Swanwick hath a blog; here are his thoughts on interstitial, mundane sf, and the new weird
• Micole on vidding at the Aqueduct blog
• Neil Williamson on juried vs voted awards
• Kit Whitfield responds to Jonathan McAlmont’s discussion of the aesthetics of fantasy; Jonathan follows up and a mammoth discussion ensues
• The cover of Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology, Eclipse; a poll about the names on the cover; the publisher responds
• The website for the forthcoming Wastelands anthology has the full text of M. Rickert’s brilliant story “Bread and Bombs” for you to read. (In a teensy-tiny window.) There are also stories by Cory Doctorow and Richard Kadrey
• And finally: Peter Wilkinson has set up a public friends group to track posts from Worldcon