SF Tidbits for 1/27/09
By John DeNardo |
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at
12:10 am
- Awards News: Neil Gaiman Wins Newbery Award for The Graveyard Book. (See also: past winners.)
- Interviews & Profiles:
- @Bibliophile Stalker: Nick Mamatas (You Might Sleep…).
- @Rescued By Nerds: David J. Williams (Mirrored Heavens).
- @SciFi Wire: Justin Gustainis (Evil Ways).
- @If You’re Just Joining Us: A podcast-interview with Charlie Huston (The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death).
- Two early Rudy Rucker’s sf novels (The Sex Sphere and Spacetime Donuts) have been re-released with Rudy’s own paintings for the cover art.
- Judith Berman offers up this Rather Cranky Post on Verisimilitude in Fantasy: “…if a writer is literate enough to write and publish a book, couldn’t he or she manage some basic research into natural history and astronomy?”
- Joseph Mallozzi reviews Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen.
- Can you guess Fiction’s Most Realistic Vision Of Our Astrobiological Future? I’d tell you, but…I’m sorry, I can’t do that.
- MTV names Boba Fett one of the Greatest Movie Badasses Of All Time.
- Real Science @ Centauri Dreams: A Science Fictional Take on Being There, responds to Robert Metzger’s State of the Art science column in the SFWA Bulletin: “Would a species capable of star travel actually need to make the journey, given the advances in technology that would surely make it possible to learn more and more about exoplanets from its own star system?”
- Someone tell me if this video is worth it. I just can’t get past the heinous imagery of the headline “Fran Drescher on William Shatner“.
- Lists:
- In case you don’t have enough to read, Jessica Merritt lists The Top 100 Science Fiction Blogs, grouped by focus area (perhaps unnecessarily as many of those sites fall under multiple groups). Still a great starting point for good sf on the web! (After you are done here, of course!)
- A few cool-sounding films make Popular Mechanics‘ list of The 5 Geekiest Sci-Fi Movies at Sundance 2009.
- Wired‘s lists of 10 Science Fiction Films I Cannot Wait to Share With My Kids is perhaps not as useful as [breaks arm patting own back] my own list of 7 Sci-Fi Movies For Parents to Share with Their Kids. I’m just sayin’…
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I never fully agree with online lists, but leaving this blog out of the top 100 and giving io9 the #1 stop invalidates the entire list for me.
This is the only scifi blog I check daily.
Thanks for the kind words, Martin. I didn’t think it was possible, but my ego has gotten even bigger!
Do note that, despite the numbers on that list, they are grouped. So, if the Books & Comics group, which does list SF Signal, were listed first, we’d be #2!
I’ve got issues with the listing, and not just because I’m not on it. I find io9 almost unreadable and have been avoiding it since I first gave it a shot. i remember it covering almost nothing I was interested in, and doing so in ways I was even less interested in.
I can’t click on blogspot blogs at work, but I think they linked up William Lexner’s blog and unless something has changed recently, it hasn’t been updated in quite a while.
(I am NOT going to talk about the Hotlist, I am NOT going to talk about the Hotlist…)
And finally, in my negative discussion, I really think that any listing of the top SF blogs that doesn’t include John Scalzi’s Whatever is entirely lacking. I know he writes as much about non SFF as he does about SFF, but seriously. That’s a hell of an omission.
The good: Tor.com, Wertzone, OF Blog of the Fallen, Grasping for the Wind…(and others)
It’s WEIRD list.
Thanks for linking to the Top 100 list, John! And you will always be #1 Poo-Bah in my book.
Big time congrats to Neil, The Graveyard Book is an enchanting story and certainly deserves the award in my humble opinion.
I don’t generally get annoyed when people lump science fiction and fantasy together under one heading and call it either one or the other as most of the time when that happens you can make some allowance for who is doing it. But to call a list Top 100 Science Fiction and then to go on and list several websites that by the list’s description are about ‘fantasy’ is kind of hard to overlook. And I really many of the blogs that are mentioned as catering to ‘fantasy’. But should they be in a Science Fiction list? And if so, should the tag line about them at least mention that they also do science fiction related stuff? I cannot argue that there are many great sites on that list, and kudos to SF Signal. But come on…can’t we in the community do a little better job of demonstrating an understanding of the genre classifications, regardless of how we feel about these classifications?
Oops, always remember to proof read before hitting “post”.
That should read “…Top 100 Science Fiction blogs…”and the next sentence should say “And I really like many of the blogs that are mentioned as catering to ‘fantasy’”.
Please return to your regularly scheduled programming….