Sighted At Other Sites

I've gotten suddenly busy and haven't updated this site nearly as much as I hoped to, and haven't been doing nearly as much reading as I'd hoped to, so I thought I would take a moment to point readers toward interesting other SF-related material currently on the web.

Graham Sleight has started a new weblog, Stet, which is young but already brimming with good thought. I particularly liked his look at the worldview of the Harry Potter books, wondering if that worldview is inherently liberal or conservative or a bit of both.

Richard Calder takes a long look at Swinburn's poems "Faustine" and "Dolores", concluding:
Both Faustine and Dolores are, of course, succubi: muses that possess and inflame the author -- or, at any rate, those authors 'marked cross from the womb and perverse' -- muses that bring down the fire and reveal the beauty of Hell ...

As such, they are incarnations of my muses, too.
Tim Pratt offers some off-the-cuff speculations about speculative poetry, and links to a discussion of speculative poetry at the Nightshade Books discussion area which is very much worth your attention.

While I'm mentioning the great Nighshade discussions, you can find there two threads about the controversial concept of "The New Weird" -- here and here. For different discussions on the same topic, you can find five threads at Third Alternative Press's discussion board section on M. John Harrison. For a general overview of the whole idea of "The New Weird", see this site.

At Locus, Cynthia Ward has an excellent overview of the brilliant animated films of Hayao Miyazaki.

SciFiction has a new Lucius Shepard story. Shepard is always, always worth reading. I'll probably review the story here once I get a chance. If you like Shepard, don't miss his movie reviews at Electric Story, some of the best writing being done on the web, and some of the best film reviewing being done by anyone anywhere.

Bookslut offers a review of Three Novellas by Thomas Bernhard.

That's it from here. I'll post more soon, with any luck.

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