Too many good bits to quote just one.

"As the world undergoes daily transformations through the application of technoscience to every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. However much science fiction texts vary in artistic quality and intellectual sophistication, they share in a mass social energy and a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. At this moment, a strikingly high proportion of films, commercial art, popular music, video and computer games, and non-genre fiction have become what Csicsery-Ronay calls science fictional, stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the seven beauties of the title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technsocience's development into a global regime."

"Look, here's a simple fact: The alien didn't ask to be born. It didn't ask to have an evolutionary gestational strategy that relies partly on a third-party host. You can't in good conscience blame it for that. And when it is born, do humans gather 'round to appreciate the miracle of birth? They do not. They try to kill the alien. What choice does the alien have but to run and hide?
"And then, naked, cold, hungry, and outnumbered, what choice does the alien have but to try to survive? The humans are the ones hunting it with shock prods and flamethrowers. Can it really be blamed for fighting back? If you were being hunted down by heavily armed superior forces, would you be thinking, Well, golly, I'll just let them burn me to death with a flamethrower, that seems fair? It is, in a word, doubtful. You'd do what the alien does: fight back."

"The Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist came out. Christopher Priest, who you may remember from The Prestige, does not approve of it no way no how.
"Now, I actually like his post. I’m not going to call it a rant because I don’t enjoy that word–it seems to downplay the possibility of Getting Mad on Your Blog having any style, craft, or critical merit and it’s not really a rant when it’s reasoned, clever, and passionate. Whether you agree with Priest or not, it is all of those things. In fact, “Have we lived and fought in vain?” his comment on Greg Bear’s latest, is one of the great oh-this-fallen-world zingers I’ve heard in lo these many years.
"Way back in grad school, one of my professors said he felt quite fondly toward Harold Bloom, though he found many of the man’s ideas toxic and wrong-headed. “We need,” he said “somebody to go on TV in a leather jacket and cry about the death of literature. Somebody has to do that for us, as a culture.”
"Well, it looks like Priest has taken up the leather for us this year. And I’m fine with that because someone has to do it. Someone has to move the Overton Window ever so slightly toward high art. High art gets crapped on all the time, and even the phrase is basically a self-reflexive accusation/admission of elitism. But things get shitty, Sturgeon’s Law applies, the center cannot hold, and very occasionally, as high-maintenance lunch-to-literature conversion machines, we need Mommy and Daddy to not be proud of us to spur us on to write better books, to synthesize the high and the popular a little better every time. You will find a thousand authors arguing that what is popular is ipso facto good and anyone who says otherwise is a pseudo-intellectual heel. One guy should be able to say the opposite.

[nice essay snipped]

"No one is going to go: hey, you know, he’s right, I am terrible and Imma fix it! The whole nature of books is that they speak to some humans and not others. The point of shedding tears about literature is not to stage some kind of intervention that moves everyone over to your way of thinking. That trick never works. It’s to piss people off so that somewhere somebody–probably not the people he lit into–thinks to herself: I’m gonna write something so good even that Priest jerk will bow low before my might. And the world is made better by that unspoken challenge.
"Whatever the ballot looks like next year, whatever trends and sales and celebrity and chance do to the state of the field, whatever cringing and wincing I have done this morning on behalf of the authors you have deemed unworthy, Mr. Priest, I can tell you one thing:
"You have neither lived nor fought in vain. I promise."

I have read none of the nominated books and so I have no legitimate opinion about whether he's being fair. (Except that I don't think that's a good description of Stross's style in general.) But it's a joy to watch.

"Not to belabor the point -- the story, which purports to be set in 2511, is actually set in roughly 1985, i think. And why did this not bother me while I was reading it, only to make me angry on the bicycle, later? Because I grew up reading SF stories written before 1985. I grew up reading rediscovered-lost-colony-FTL stories in which the protagonists got lost in the woods, and it was fun. It didn't occur to me then that they would have GPS cell phones. It was easy, this morning, to simply forget the world of today, and read as if I was in 1985. But on some level this is morally bankrupt. When you don't know something, you are innocent of it. Once you do know it, though, all that is possible is feigned innocence, or incoherence."

"giant hairless killer-kitten"

Potential problem of specificity: is this any worse in SF than in any other branch of fiction?

Forthcoming books from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

"I suggested to Heather Knight, the impressario of these events, that a production of R.U.R. with Nao robots would be screamingly funny, but she didn't think it feasible."

Cf. Jo Walton, on how having a world unfold in one's mind is the primary SF reading experience. (I quote from memory.)

"mmcrivin: I think our world is closer to being a cyberpunk dystopia than to most old SF visions of the future. Japan isn't a global hegemon and states haven't withered away. But the combination of massive inequality, cheap electronic tech, and a ubiquitous Internet perpetually clotted with the activities of penny-ante scammers and crooks feels very cyberpunky to me.
scifantasy : That sort of depends what you think of as cyberpunk. Which underlies the whole debate, really.
mmcirvin : I suppose. Still, the fact that we're having this conversation on a post-Soviet forum periodically brought down by politically motivated distributed-denial-of-service attacks by botnets of hacker-controlled PCs with possible shadowy connections to elements in the Russian government, and the paroxysms are visually represented by a picture of a goggle-eyed goat chewing on a bundle of shredded wires? Totally cyberpunk."

An actually rather good interview in, of all places, Vice magazine. (Which I can now truthfully say I have read for an article.)

"I am becoming increasingly convinced of the necessity of what seems to be a very crude intentionalist method in literary interpretation: that in many cases, the attitudes reflected by characters (or, to a lesser extent, situations) in various texts are in fact direct statements of the author’s own views.

Sophisticated readers tend to reject such a notion absolutely, and the reasons for this are usually good. Many attempts at creative writing start from what might be called the idealized projection of the self, or the creation of an environment in which certain wrongs might be redressed. Or where certain ideas find a more logical or consistent home, for that matter. The Mary Sue phenomenon is a reliable proxy for what I am talking about here.

I was reminded of this interpretive gambit, or problem, or however you want to construe it, when reading this NYT article on children kidnapped in Argentina’s “dirty war.” I was at first appalled that you won’t find the name “Kissinger” in the article, or any other mention of how the United States—driven by such nuanced reasoners as Jeanne Kirkpatrick—did nothing to intervene in such atrocities. I then thought of my long-held suspicion that the origin of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which is a long first-person narrative of a torturer in a far-future South America who ends up redeeming humanity, was inspired by the news accounts from South America during the mid-to-late 70s. That’s not particularly interesting or novel, I suppose, but the fact that Severian offers up in the course of the novels an apologia for his profession has always struck me, in the care with which the argument is presented, as being endorsed by the author. (The argument is that essentially it’s more humane to torture people for crimes rather than to imprison them, and that also it is the only way to maintain order when threatened by external subversion. This last element—reprehensible as it is—is not argued as strongly in the text, to be fair.)"

The 747 and the B-52 are over half a century old, but show no sign of going away, and might well be good for another half century.  What else?

"My problem is, I've seen Carnivale.
Carnivale, for those of you who don't know, was a criminally short-lived television show which was also about a Depression era circus, and also about a hapless and orphaned young man who gets hired on when the show sweeps through his town. But it is also about the death of the magical medieval world and the birth of the nuclear century, about the scars of WWI, about a peculiarly American mythology full of ghosts, boom towns, and wastelands, about magic, death, incest, and religion, about avatars of light and dark--but so deftly written that even in the end you were never sure which was which. It was about family and the road and show business and each character was fascinating, even when the hero was onstage. And Water for Elephants is about a kid who falls in love while working for the circus and then complains about everything in a nursing home."

" If science is the theology of nature – with the wilder reaches of physics standing in for its scholastic philosophy – SF is its mythology, its folklore, its peasant superstition. Television, film, anime and computer games supply the statues and holy pictures, which (this time) really do move."

"I was getting a book off the shelf last night and I came eye to eye with the hardcover of Patterson's biography of Heinlein Robert A Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century and I realised what a stupid title it is. Especially for Heinlein, who seemed to write things that went straight from the nineteenth century to the future without pausing for the present."

The list itself is disappointingly heavy in the worst sort of American military science fiction (but also Bujold, and _The Years of Rice and Salt_).

A nice interview with the admirable Walter Jon Williams, whose books you should read.

James Nicoll's nightmare future. (Note: not actually nightmarish.)

... by which he means the first _properly human_, not the chronologically oldest, in much the same way that Marx somewhere said all social formation before socialism are properly speaking part of pre-history. (I make this comparison advisedly.)

"And that’s one of the problems with crazy sci-fi design in the real world: it never belongs to the people you want it to belong to, and it carries a completely different and sinister statement about who owns the future. Versace doing SPACE:1999 set design. It should have been Freeman Dyson’s ride."

Bacteria colonies would in fact be far better suited to space travel than primates. Just saying...

"1491 in space", indeed.

Nice.

An excerpt from the letters column of _Analog_, 1979.

First of all, a new book from Williams! Secondly, half price on everything in the Night Shade Books catalogue through 28 March.

As an aside in a a long look back at his "Merchant Princes" series, Stross describes a book he ended up not writing but I would've loved: "cross the streams of The IPCRESS File and Heart of Darkness in a universe where the first world war ended in 1919 with allied tanks sitting in the wreckage of Berlin, and the decaying British empire went on to invent fascism in the 1940s. It's 1962, and two OSS agents are injected into British-dominated Europe to trace the underground railroad that is funneling abducted/brainwashed American scientists east. Our two spooks, "Wild" Bill Burroughs and his swivel-eyed Californian sidekick Philip K., follow the trail — by way of a sleazy S&M nightclub in Hamburg presided over by ageing queen Adi and his boyfriend Rudi Hess — to Ceylon, where in the guts of a hollowed-out mountain they confront the jackbooted, monocle-wearing Air Commodore Arthur Clarke and his program to build an atom-bomb powered space dreadnought."

Cultural studies investigation into the idea of nanotechnology & its propagation etc.

Sam Jordison reads his way back through the Hugo winners. Fun.

Well, that's one book I won't have to bother with.

"In other news, I know how to fix the Matrix sequels. See, here’s the thing: you’re the Matrix. You’re the computer. And you’ve got all these pesky geeky hacker types who are right on the edge of figuring out that reality doesn’t exist and they’re all part of a big computer program. They’re unhappy, they’re rebels, they’re anti-establishment. And they like games. So you boot them out of the system. And into another system that looks just like a big video game, where they get to fly around in cool ships and blast away at monsters and live in the challenging post-apocalyptic landscape they’ve always dreamed of.

"If I’d written them, the sequels would have been all about Neo figuring out that so-called reality was just another version of the Matrix. There’d be a second rabbit hole, and a whole new set of weirdness. And ultimately, we’d probably discover that there are no bodies — just a computer still running after the end of the world."

"Having a world unfold in one’s head is the fundamental SF experience." I think this is wonderfully insightful, but it's also almost a testable hypothesis.

Premise for the best genre novel EVER: "You know, presumably the undead do not have the same life support issues the living do. The implications of this for crewed spaceflight are obvious."

Warning: I'm serious about the time-sink tag.

Walton is a good critic, to my mind, but this is the kind of thing which drives me up the wall. The claim is that certain sorts of books were written, and read, because they satisfied certain desires among a particular population of readers and writers; also that they had those desires because of certain historical events, and their social relations to those events. The evidence for this is, to be kind, thin. It works better as "couldn't you imagine writing books like this, if you felt this way?". (Ans.: yes, I could.) Shorter me: Verstehen, bah!

"help grow a new generation of mad and frightening engineers."

Why yes, the output of this machine does account for at least half of what I read, why do you ask?

I like how the author thinks, certainly. Edited later: the novel's _really good_: http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2009-10.html#bitter-angels . Edited yet
later: The author is actually Sarah Zettel (this is not a big secret), who wrote
many other good novels under her own name in the '90s.

Imprint for English translations of Japanese sf/f.

The great Jo Walton appreciates the great Walter Jon Williams. These are splendid books.

Vance's _The Dying Earth_ is one of my favorite books, but I haven't read it in many years and it's _possible_ I have forgotten this scene... but I don't think so. Edited to add: I had forgotten this scene. (The witches' sabbath in "T'sais".)

"I come from the classic British tradition, where science fiction is social fiction. Therefore, in my head, the most valid way to come to terms with The Age Of Giant Fictional Machines and the terrifying miasmic presence of the 21st century is in fact to frame the whole discussion in terms of monstrous chunks of implausible technology, remaking the world by drilling or blasting or generally stabbing it with nuclear-driven metal bits, trying to stop things from exploding, and having the Cigarette Of Victory afterwards.

I think stories like these contain important lessons for our children.

My child, of course, watches SUPERNATURAL and gets all her news from MOCK THE WEEK. So we’re all doomed anyway. But I wanted to note the thought down."

Reconstructing the plot of the missing book that connects _Atlas Shrugged_ to _Anthem_.

Brian Stableford doing far-future dying earth SF!

"About science fiction's uncanny oracle, and U.S. politics, and Katrina. With poetry."
But, as you know, you should be reading this blog already.

I am on a book-restriction diet at the moment, but you people should indulge.

Jo Walton appreciates WJW. You, too, should appreciate WJW.

The best, most intelligent vampire novel ever written is coming back into print. Buy it and read it.

Downloads of books by Kelly Link, Maureen McHugh and John Kessel.

Having read the online episodes --- they're actually rather good.

PNH's obit for Clarke. "He rejoiced to live in a gigantic universe of unencompassable scale, and he thought the rest of us should rejoice, too."

"Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if we hadn't been each other's First Contacts. Virgin civilizations, groping each other in the dark."