Stuff, with a Side of Nonsense

I've just returned from a bit of travelling, and having not had much internet time during my travels, I probably owe you an email. In fact, if you've tried to contact me at all for the past couple months, I probably owe you an email. Please forgive me. I hope to get caught up with all correspondence and correspondents sometime before the heat death of the universe.

Some odds and ends...
  • I inadvertently left a big box of Asimov's magazines back in New Hampshire, so I'm not sure how well my project of meditating on the archives will work out, as I've only got various scattered issues with me now, and don't expect to be able to get the others until sometime this fall, which is probably not causing anybody any great angst, but still...
  • While I was away, a new issue of Strange Horizons was posted, including a new column of mine and the news that the 2007 Fund Drive has been extended. (Please don't hold the continued publication of my columns against them.) Also that day, the World Fantasy Award nominations were announced, and editor-in-chief superbeing Susan Marie Groppi was nominated in the "Special Award, Non-professional" category (because she does great work and doesn't get paid for it, though the writers get paid professional rates). I don't want to pretend to have favorites for the awards, because many people I'm very fond of are nominated, and I want them all to win, but I do think it's particularly nice that Susan and the whole Strange Horizons crew are getting a lot of much-deserved good attention these days.
  • It's been a long road, but Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: The Movie is now live on the internet. I was involved with the project in its early days, but hadn't been able to continue, and it's great fun now to see what all those crazy nascent ideas metamorphosed into. It's also exciting to see the extraordinary and beautiful novel now in paperback.
  • Speaking of paperback and extraordinary books, Peter Turchi just let me know that he's got a new website and his marvelous book Maps of the Imagination will be released in paperback in a couple of weeks. The hardcover is beautifully designed and produced, and I look forward to seeing how the book translates to the new format.
  • Paul Witcover's post about the New Yorker's article on Philip K. Dick by Adam Gopnik garnered a lot of interesting comments, both from lovers and loathers of PKD. I'm definitely on the lovers side, but I try to keep myself from being too illusioned about Dick's weaknesses, and I'm wary of a lot of the claims made for his work over the past decade or so. Though I've tried at times to write about his works and legacy, I can't claim to have a sure understanding of my own attraction to Dick's writings, and so I usually just end up responding to somebody else's attempt to articulate (or criticize) such attraction, and saying, "Well, no..." or "Sort of, but...", which isn't really very helpful.
  • World Fantasy Award nominee John Klima has put Jeffrey Ford's World Fantasy Award-nominated story "The Way He Does It" online. I know a lot of people were all googly-eyed over Mr. Ford's "The Night Whiskey" (from the World Fantasy Award-nominated Salon Fantastique), but I, ever addicted to being in the minority, much preferred "The Way He Does It". Although now it's up for an award, maybe that means I'm no longer in the minority. No, that thought is too unsettling for me to continue contemplating it...

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