How To Link Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe

Well, the reading is done, and the class starts tomorrow, which means I’ll be offline for the weekend and it’s time for a long-overdue links post.

• Abigail Nussbaum’s fascinating review-essay on With Both Feet in the Clouds: Fantasy in Hebrew Literature, edited by Hagar Yanai and Danielle Gurevitch
• A talk by William Gibson given at Book Expo America: “For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over.”
• Laura Miller on YA dystopias, in particular The Hunger Games
• Alastair Reynolds has had an excellent stint blogging at Babel Clash, with posts on optimism (… and spaceflight, and plotting), as well as challenging reads, colonisation, and representation
• Mary Anne Mohanraj’s Wiscon Guest of Honor speech
• Graham Sleight’s talk “Excellent Foppery“, on the use of history in the fantastic (and note the shiny new website)
• Helen Oyeyemi on the Library of America Shirley Jackson collection
• John Clute’s latest Scores tackles two books by Michal Ajvaz
• Splice seems to be dividing opinion: the case for, and the case against
• Paul Kincaid on language and science fiction; and on Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, with some further discussion of Marxist criticism
• Some older books considered: Capek’s The War With the Newts at The Asylum; Greenland’s Take Back Plenty at Follow the Thread; Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus at Number 71; Vonarburg’s The Silent City at Eve’s Alexandria; and an overview of the first four volumes of Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars series
• The first half of Lara Buckerton’s review-essay Fauxplexity, examining Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Lucifer’s Dragon
• Some newer books considered: Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming; China Mieville’s Kraken; Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love (and more positively); Matt Cheney enthuses about Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death; and Ken MacLeod really knows how to make me want to get stuck in to Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty: “It’s a bit like reading a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, or Ursula Le Guin – or maybe a mashup of all them”
• Some reviews of short story collections at Strange Horizons: Holly Black’s The Poison Eaters reviewed by L Timmel Duchamp, Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters reviewed by Abigail Nussbuam, and Douglas Smith’s Chimerascope, reviewed by TS Miller
• Interviews with literary review sites: The Quarterly Conversation, The Rumpus and The Millions
• The finalists for this year’s Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short fiction of 2009

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