Laura Dave creates and discusses a music playlist for her novel The First Husband.

Samad Behrangi

One of the best active IF authors (@zarfeblong) just released one of his games for iOS. FUCK YEAH.

This is one of my favorite short stories ever, a lesbian Jewish love geeky fantasy-ish love story. I hope Katherine Fabian writes more for me to read, soon!

The first step to solving an anomaly is identifying it.

I'd put it down to us mistaking Sense of Wonder for Innovation. We used to read SF to get the heady high of a big vision, the "eyeball kick" as Rudy Rucker describes it, of seeing something brain-warpingly different and new for the first time. But today you don't need to read SF to get a sense of wonder high: you can just browse "New Scientist". We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980. (Definitely than in 1970.) We're carrying out this Mind Meld via the internet, and if that isn't a 1980s cyberpunk vision that's imploded into the present, warts and all, I don't know what is. Seriously: to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF.

"Egan says that it took a year to "control and calibrate" the story she's now tweeting; her tight prose doesn't exactly invite replies. But the shift into Twitter is a truly modern serialization technique; there's more going on here than simply contemporary fiction meted out 140 characters at a time."

"The first thirty seconds in a person’s
presence are the most important."

Thornton Lyne, created to be as despicable as possible, is so angry about being rejected by Odette Rider that he tries to frame her for embezzlement, only he gets murdered first. Naturally she's the obvious suspect.

The first true Western novel, since apparently we don't count pulps. Meandering but kind of excellent.

I don't know if whatever made Rinehart think an evil, costumed master criminal was a good idea was the same thing that gave Agatha Christie a fatal weakness for worldwide criminal conspiracies, but the results are similar. This book is subpar, but as usual Rinehart can't help being fun.

http://redeemingqualities.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/the-rich-mrs-burgoyne/

A widow moves to town with her two daughters and a rumored fortune and leads her neighbors vaguely in the direction of the simple life. Completely delightful.

SPOILERS. In which Clint and Phil were secretly married and Fury uses that to his advantage to help keep secrets. Oh this is just wonderful. A really well done fix-it that fits logically with canon, with great characterization all around, and a really satisfying emotional arc. I basically loved everything about this. | Maybe he came back too soon. Maybe he should have waited, waited until every third thing he saw in this base didn't remind him of Phil like a knife twisting in his gut. But even as he thinks it, he knows that's fucking stupid, he's never been one to wait for wounds to heal before ripping them right back open, not without someone there to make him lie back and take a break, and Phil's the only one who ever did that for him.

One of the truest joys of reading occurs when you discover an amazing authors while your favorite author is writing her next book. Unfortunately, by publishing a new book every month (please note that I did not say “writing”), James Patterson is creating something like a monopoly, wherein readers can fulfill their Patterson fix without ever having to discover another author.

Money quote:

> The demand for multiple novels a year, however, seems to be more about reader demand than improving an author's fan base. According to the *Times*, James Patterson (and his co-writers) released 12 books last year. And while that's great for James Patterson and his publisher Little, Brown & Co, it's not great for anyone else writing thrillers. If readers can get a monthly fix of one author, what will encourage them to seek out new authors?

While I'm certainly glad people are reading at all, James Patterson's “McNovels” are a far cry from his earlier, better work. I'll also add that his system of hiring other people to write his books simply can't hold up in the long run.

A 1972 essay by Samuel R. Delany explains why: “[V]irtually every great name in s-f… has had at least one eight-to-sixteen-year period when he could write no science fiction at all.”