Christopher Barzak's Blog, page 12

Calling all speculative fiction writers and readers:

The Nebula Award nomination period is now open! The rules have changed a lot this year, and I'm excited to see how those changes are reflected in the preliminary and final ballots.

Alas, I've read almost nothing but books assigned for my MFA degree and my own students' stories in the last year, and am woefully behind on many of the current sf releases, wondering now to vote.  So I'm calling on all of you (whoever's out there reading this...

Two really well done reviews of the new volume of Interfictions are out.

First one from Strange Horizons:

If anyone else feels like we're still drowning in slipstream—or, rather, drowning in definitions of slipstream—this follow-up to the 2007 anthology Interfictions certainly won't offer any easy answers to the question of what's been going on lately with all this genre-bending stuff. What Interfictions 2 does offer is a set of stories that, if united by only the most tenuous thematic and...

"Despite everything, I believe people are good at heart."

I'm so glad Anne Frank could believe this.  It's a testament to her own goodness.  It is not a testament to human nature itself, though.  It tells us more about Anne than it does about ourselves.

I don't believe it.  I don't attribute my disbelief to my own goodness, but to what I have seen of humanity, including what was going on around Anne, after the fact, and would like to say, You know what?  People are still very eager to do away...

(AP) Several squirrels are barking at each other outside my upstairs window like military personnel.  If any of them turns out to be the jerk who was living in my attic a year and a half ago or so, and if he's planning to launch a new attack, there will be war.

Just sayin'.

I hereby repeal my obviously premature congratulations to the state of Maine, which I gave out all too naively this past May.

Now, instead, I'd like to say good luck to those Mainers who want a better, inclusive, love-supporting culture in which to exist for their and their children's futures.

I feel sorry for everyone, even for those who voted in the spirit of exclusion and inequality.  I really do think they don't understand what they are missing.  They see their decisions as a protection...

The second volume of Interfictions releases today, and just tonight I learned that the anthology has been selected by Amazon.com as one of the top 10 SFF books of 2009!

You can see the whole list by clicking here.

I can't wait to hear what readers think of the selection of stories Delia and I pulled together.  I think the book has great range.

Happy reading, if you give it a go.

As mentioned in a previous post, I did an interview with the lovely Jamillah Knowles of the BBC this past Sunday about the second volume of Interfictions, which I co-edited with Delia Sherman, and now it's available as a podcast.   Here's a link to it, but, just so you know, it's a conglomeration of subjects she's covered. My interview comes in around just over the halfway mark, if you want to skip ahead.

Happy listening.

The other night, pre-viral infection, I was in a bookstore and was stopped in my tracks by a book I've looked at too many times in too many similar covers:  Wuthering Heights.  It was face out and had a beautiful cover design, full of color, with a Tim Burton-esque rendering of Cathy on the front cover.  I took it down off the shelf to see the wraparound from back to front, a whole landscape of the book done in the same style really, and was really toying with the idea of buying the book...

An article from the NYT on the rise of teenaged runaways over the past few years, as the economy has worsened. It's sad and, for me, recognizable.  One of the things I encountered every now and then when I was going around reading from my first novel, One for Sorrow, after its release a couple of years ago, was the occasional reader who would come up to me afterward to say how much they liked the book but found something about the running away that the narrator, a fifteen year old from...

I hate being ill.  When I am, my body feels like a foreign country.  A foreign country that's been taken over by a hostile imperial army.  My head feels like my feet, as if I use it to move myself around from place to place.  I sigh a lot, and linger on bad memories.  I am reduced to feeling like a child, powerless and confused.  And all this just from a low fever and aching muscles and bones.

Obviously, I am ill today.  And complaining from my bed.

I was at a book launch party last night.  My...