The Mumpsimus

Some random notes, observations, and links: First, welcome to readers who are reading this blog via the Asimov's and Analog magazine websites, where we have been chosen as a blog of the month. (And no, we don't make it a habit of referring to ourselves in the first-person plural, except when we're being particularly ironic or feeling immensely self-important, but sometimes it slips out.) I'm particularly happy that this site was chosen this month, because it's the month Best American Fantasy hits the stores, and the book contains a story first published in Analog , Geoffrey Landis's marvelous robot fairy tale "Lazy Taekos". And as for Asimov's , well, unfortunately there aren't any Asimov's stories in the book, but I've been reading the magazine since the late 1980s, and hope to do some things here in honor of its current 30th anniversary, including write about at least a few of the stories included in the fine anniversary anthol...

Rain Taxi has now posted an interview I recently conducted with Mary Ann Caws , mostly about her book Glorious Eccentrics .

It lives! Yes, a box o' BAF has landed, and yesterday I even delivered the very first contributor's copy to Meghan McCarron , and since Meghan is working during the summer at One Story , we met at the One Story offices and I presented that estimable publication with a copy as well -- they have been enthusiastic supporters of our work from the beginning, and provided us with one story for the book and one story for the recommended list. Jeff and Ann are sending out the other contributors' copies in the next few days, and the book itself should be available in stores by a week from today. As Jeff notes , if you don't buy your copy from an independent bookseller, please consider picking one up at Borders . They've decided to take a chance on us, and we're grateful.

Since leaving my home state, I've become something of a New Hampshire chauvinist. So it gives me great pleasure to see that the new U.S. poet laureate is Charles Simic , who has taught for many years at my own undergraduate alma mater, the University of New Hampshire (yes, I was at NYU longer, but UNH is the place that gave me a diploma, so I've got some loyalty to them). Last year, New Hampshire's Donald Hall was the poet laureate, and now it's Simic (who is, I must admit, a poet far closer to my tastes than Hall, but I have tremendous respect for Hall's work as an editor and promoter of poetry, and he's absolutely wonderful as a reader of his, or anybody's, work). Selections of Simic's work are available online at the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation websites. I highly recommend his Selected Early Poems , the prose poems in The World Doesn't End , all of his essays and memoirs, and his book about our beloved Joseph Cornel...

I've been working on finishing up a long review with a deadline of tomorrow, so my brain is a bit fried. The review sparked a question that I have no answer for, though I'm sure it will be easy for somebody out there to respond to. The question is this: Is there an anthology of science fiction stories about drugs? The dream book that popped into my mind, and one I'm pretty sure doesn't exist, would be a wide-ranging reprint anthology covering everything from mad scientists with weird serums to 1960s psychedelia to cyberpunk narcotics to ... well, I'm blanking on recent druggy SF stories, but I know there are a few. Lacking that particular book, though, what is there?

The world has achieved perfection. Howard Waldrop is blogging at the Small Beer Press site: You’ll notice there’s a beaver in both ads, the animal more responsible even than the buffalo for the settlement of the US from sea to shining sea. You’ll also notice Lincoln is wearing a stovepipe ("beaver") hat. It’s all surrealistically related . (Waldrop has, actually, entered the blogosphere before. But it's good to have him back.)

It's LitBlog Co-op time again, and this quarter's pick is Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe , a bizarre and wonderfully fun novel that LBC nominator Megan Sullivan sums up well: Set sometime in the future, this book chronicles a group of settlers from Manhattan traveling South in a large bus/tank to establish an outpost in southern Virginia. The book features historical figures like John Smith, Pocahantas and others. Each chapter tells the story from a different character’s perspective. The settlers are led by John Ratliff, whose mother’s boyfriend is the CEO of the Manhattan Company, who are enemies of the Brooklyn Company. The Indians, who speak English (which they try to conceal to the visitors), aren’t technically Indians. They just try to live like them and are “red” because they’re not using strong enough sunscreen. Powhatan leads them with the help of his advisor Sidney Feingold. Pocahantas falls in love with greasy haired communications officer Johnny Rolfe and saves the li...