Saving The Stone

From William Gibson, via Jack Womack, this lovely story about how the London Stone, and if legend is to be believed, the metropolis itself, was saved.

Plugging Away

Tardily, via Locus, I see that James Sallis has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times.

Well, it’s about time. I’ve been a fan of Jim Sallis’s writing for years - I still remember being knocked out by the delicate, elliptical evocations of otherness in ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ and ‘Faces, Hands’ back in the late 1960s. He’s edited New Worlds, written a couple of dozen sf stories (collected in Time’s Hammers), still reviews for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but these days he’s best known for his Lew Griffin mysteries, set in New Orleans. Now he’s two books into another mystery series, and from the profile I learnt about a novella, Drive, published by a small press that I immediately ordered from Big South American River. If only I was more on the ball -- I could have bought it in Powells last year, when I was in Oregon doing research.

All Shall Have Prizes

Finalists for the 2005 John W. Campbell Memorial Award:

Baxter, Stephen TRANSCENDENT Gollancz
Cash, Steve THE MEQ Del Rey
Gerrold, David CHILD OF EARTH Benbella
McAuley, Paul MIND'S EYE Simon & Schuster UK
McDevitt, Jack SEEKER Ace
Macleod, Ken LEARNING THE WORLD Tor
Macleod, Ian R. THE SUMMER ISLES Aio Publishing
Marusek, David COUNTING HEADS Tor
Sawyer, Robert J. MINDSCAN Tor
Stross, Charles ACCELERANDO Ace
Traviss, Karen THE WORLD BEFORE Eos
Wilson, Robert Charles SPIN Tor

When The Spam Hits The Fan

‘My Theory of Evolution is that Darwin was Adopted’ is my favourite randomly generated spam header of the year. Pure Monty Python.

Not that I approve of spam, of course, even if it is a good source of names for evil child-eating drug-riddled galactic overlords.