No Present Like Links

• I sort of assume everyone knows about this by now, but I haven’t actually mentioned it here yet: if you’re not following Jonathan Strahan’s podcast discussions with Gary Wolfe, you should be: wide-ranging, informed discussions about all aspects of the sf and fantasy field. You can subscribe via iTunes (search for “Notes from Coode Street”), or here are the links to the posts for the episodes so far — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven (with Amelia Beamer), eight (with Jeremy Lassen), nine — which have some interesting follow-up comments in most cases.
• Night Shade Books have been pulling shennanigans, as summarized here, with their response here and a follow-up from one of the authors involved here; SFWA has put them on probation
• Jeff VanderMeer interviews L. Timmel Duchamp on the occasion of Aqueduct Press publishing its fiftieth book
• Gwenda Bond rounds up Kelly Link’s posts from her recent blog tour
• Currently blogging at Babel Clash: Mark Chadbourn and Justina Robson
• Graham Sleight’s latest Yesterday’s Tomorrows column looks at Robert Silverberg
• Hal Duncan has a long column unpacking the nature of “cultural appropriation”
• A new group blog is aiming to review every Gollancz Masterwork
• Dan Hartland on The Dispossessed
• John Clute’s latest Scores looks at the first volume of William H Patterson’s biography of Robert Heinlein and at Cory Doctorow’s For the Win
• Steven Shaviro’s consideration of Splice
• Gary K Wolfe on China Mieville’s Kraken and The Best of Peter S Beagle
• Dhalgren: a difficult book?
• Shigekuni considers The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
• Roz Kaveney on two apocalypses: Justin Cronin’s The Passage and Mira Grant’s Feed
• Martin Lewis on “Misogyny in the UK“: two recent British horror-comedies
• Jonathan McCalmont likes MD Lachlan’s Wolfsangel, and has some thoughts on fantasy Big Dumb Objects
• Rich Puchlasky on “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, in verse and prose
• Two assessments of Lost: Adam Roberts and Bernadette Lynn Bosky
• Elsewhere, Adam Roberts has finished his Wheel of Time read with a summary post
• Matt Cheney on Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
• Paul Kincaid on Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds and on essay collections by Gwyneth Jones and Ursula K Le Guin
• William Mingin had some issues with Farah Mendlesohn’s The Inter-Galactic Playground
• Patrick Hudson on Jetse de Vries’ anthology of optimistic sf, Shine
• Six female editors are interviewed at Broadsheet
• Some of Jason Sanford’s favourite stories so far this year
• Jose Saramago has died; there’s a nice overview of his concerns at the Guardian blog, and you can read the Paris Review interview with him here. See also Ursula Le Guin’s review of Seeing. I’m still hoping, perhaps unrealistically, to write up my thoughts on that book in the near future.