…is the sound of a grown man sobbing. They didn’t televise the 5th ODI in South Africa, did they. Bastards. And what was the score? The highest ODI total in history, is all.  4/433!!!!   And Punter got 164 of 105 balls. You think Smith is worrying about the Aussies choking?

This September Gollancz in the UK will publish a new Stephen Baxter collection, Resplendent. The book is listed as being the final volume of Baxter’s Destiny’s Children sequence, much as the collection Phase Space was a pendant collection to the Manifold sequence. I pretty much overlooked a lot of early Baxter, and only started reading him actively once Phase Space was published. The stories in Resplendent were published between 1999 and 2006, and I’ve read most of them. I don’t know how they’ll read as book, but there are some very good SF stories here. One of the collections of the year. Be sure to check it out.

The contents of Resplendent are:

• Cadre Siblings
• Reality Dust
• Silver Ghost
• On the Orion Line
• In the Un-Black
• The Ghost Pit
• The Cold Sink
• Breeding Ground
• The Great Game
• The Chop Line
• The Dreaming Mould
• Conurbation 2473
• All in a Blaze
• Riding the Rock
• Lakes of Light
• Between Worlds
• Mayflower II
• Ghost Wars

Oh, and for what it’s worth, I’d love to see a ‘Best of Stephen Baxter’ collection. Given that most of his collections are in print, I doubt it could ever happen, but it’d be a good book.

Well, according to fellow members of the FictionMags mailing list, today is the 80th Anniversary of the day that Amazing Stories first went on sale. The magazine his US newsstands on 10 March 1926 and, at some level, modern science fiction began. I’m almost surprised no-one got a commemorative anthology out.

It’s really only just beginning to wend it’s way through production, but all the signs are there that Best Short Novels: 2006 is going to be a reality before too long. My editor Andy Wheeler just emailed me the very cool looking cover for the book, which you can see here.

The contents of the book include:

• “Human Readable”, Cory Doctorow
• “Fishin’ With Grandma Matchie”, Steven Erikson
• “The Gist Hunter”, Matthew Hughes
• “Magic For Beginners”, Kelly Link
• “The Policeman’s Daughter”, Wil McCarthy
• “The Little Goddess”, Ian McDonald
• “Audubon In Atlantis”, Harry Turtledove
• “Inside Job”, Connie Willis
• mysterious ninth story

The best way to get a copy of the book, along with the mysterious ninth story, is by joining the SF Book Club. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t hesitate to do so, if I but could.

You can see a large copy of the cover by clicking on the image on the right. You can see a copy of Les Edward’s original image by clicking here.

I’ve been pondering science fiction a lot, this past couple weeks, and year’s best anthologies particularly. I’ve been asking myself questions like ‘what makes a good year’s best’, ‘what should go into one’, ‘how long should it be’, ‘as year’s bests have gotten longer, has the overall quality of the books increased, decreased or stayed the same’. As I’ve been pondering, I’ve been searching through all kinds of bibliographic listings, just to see what’s there. I was surprised to see Orson Welles had written an introduction for a year’s best, and even more surprised that he’d edited an SF anthology. What I didn’t expect to stumble across, though, was information on Bleiler and Dikty’s Years Best Science Fiction Novels series. Between 1952 and 1955 these two veteran anthologists compiled what I now suspect was the first ever ‘year’s best novellas’ anthology series. I was really surprised. I’d thought the Terry Carr series was the first ‘best novellas’ series, but live and learn. Bleiler and Dikty edited five volumes of Years Best Science Fiction Novels. I’m headed to Oakland again later this year, and I expect I’ll be burying myself in CHARLES’s basement for a day or so, pouring over what they did and how they did it. Always, always something more to learn.