Singularity’s Links

It has been pointed out to me that I’ve been somewhat remiss about posting link round-ups recently. Sorry about that; I’m going to try to get back to doing them about once a week. In the meantime, here’s a bumper load.

• Chris Roberson has posted his article from Vector 254, History Repurposed.
• This year’s SF Site reader’s choice poll was topped by The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss; the almost completely different editor’s choice poll was topped by Brasyl. If you disagree with those, there’s still plenty of time to take the Locus Poll and Survey.
• A request for help from reviewers: “For every book you read in the SF or F genre, take a note of which ethnic, religious, social groups are present within a work in a significant way. […] Mention main characters that are male or female and secondary, but significant characters that are male or female “
• Reviews of Matter: Andrew McKie in the Telegraph, Lisa Tuttle in the Times, and Steven Poole in the Guardian. (Some discussion of the latter here.)
• Steven Shaviro reviews From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain by Minister Faust.
• John Clute reviews The Man on the Ceiling by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem.
• Steven Poole reviews Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago
• Ursula Le Guin reviews The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin
• Jetse de Vries reviews Brasyl
• Abigail Nussbaum has finished her series on Deep Space Nine; here’s the index to all the posts.
• Marcus Gipps has the first review I’ve seen of Nick Harkaway’s debut, The Gone-Away World
• Paul Kincaid reviews The New Weird anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
• Gary K Wolfe reviews Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi.
• Graham Sleight’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows column looks at Ray Bradbury.
• The tables of contents for the Hartwell/Cramer year’s best fantasy and year’s best sf.
• Solaris have bought new novels from James Lovegrove and Keith Brooke.
• Jason Sanford has the 2007 circulation numbers for the sf fiction magazines.
• As widely noted, the Internet Review of SF is back, with among other things an interview with Peter Watts and a look at Robert Silverberg’s early work.
• Strange Horizons’ articles department is also back at full strength, with updated guidelines.
• Speaking of Peter Watts, he recently resigned from the editorial board of On Spec. Here’s why, with some followup here and here.
• Jed Hartman on Norman Spinrad’s criticism
• Richard Morgan tries to set expectations for his next novel:
  

  Look – it’s like this: if you really, really love Tolkein with a firmly burning uncritical passion, then there’s a good chance The Steel Remains is going to upset you. If you really, really love all those stories about simple, good-hearted farm-boys becoming princes or wizards, then there’s a good chance The Steel Remains is going to upset you as well. And if you like your heroes masculine, muscular and morally upright, well, then you could be in serious trouble here.

  Oh, yeah, and if you really think that “things were better” at some unspecified pre-modern point in human history then you’d really be wasting your time with this one.

• An interview with Vandana Singh. And her collection now has a cover, and should be out this month.
• SF Signal asks: what purpose does short fiction serve?
• And finally: Torchwood Babies.

In other news, the Baroque Cycle Reading Group is go! I’m going to start Quicksilver this month, and hope to post about the first part of it (ie “Quicksilver”) either just before, or more likely just after, Eastercon.