I loved the covers that Edward Miller (aka Les Edwards) did for the British editions of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and The Scar. When it came time for the third Bas-Lag novel, though, his UK publisher opted to pick up the US covers instead. Turns out that his Czech publisher liked the Miller covers too, and ended up commissioning the cover you see on the right for their edition of Iron Council. You can see a larger version of the cover on Miller’s website.

Just a quick note. All comments on this blog are moderated, so it may take a while for your comment to show up. I apologise for this, but I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam, so it’s a compromise.

I am the worst web surfer in the world. Almost every interesting thing that I’ve found online, I’ve been pointed to by someone else. This is true of the latest site I’ve been browsing, Articulate. It’s the ABC’s artsblog, and it features all kind of cool information on books, music, movies etc.  The only reason I found it was that I was contacted by Gary Kemble, who writes for the blog, who will be covering Conjure next month. I know it’s going to be a great convention, andI hope you all will be there. But, if you can’t, check out Gary and the Articulate gang.

The family dispersed to all points of the globe on Saturday: Jessica to Unigym with Marianne, Sophie to ballet with her grandma, and I went cd shopping with my brother. Later in the day, I was shopping in the local mall out in the distant suburban paradise that is Morley, when I happened across Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword. I was sufficiently delighted to find a local edition (well, it’s the Pan UK edition distributed locally) that I bought it forthwith, and I think you should too. If you’re living in Australia, it’s almost certainly in your local bookshop and is worth seeking out. So, what are you waiting for? Go.

My esteemed collaborator Gardner Dozois is set to edit a new anthology, The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Best Science Fiction Short Novels, for St Martins Press. Despite the somewhat unwieldy title (I don’t envy the book designer getting that on the spine ), it should be a cool book, presenting a selection of the 100 plus novellas he’s reprinted in his The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series. It’s a follow-on from Best of the Best : 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction which was published last year. There’s some discussion about the new book over at the Asimov’s forums. From a purely selfish perspective, I’d love to see more in the story notes on why Gardner picks the stories for the new book, why he thinks they’re important and have stood the test of time. It would be very interesting.