For all that I love science fiction and science fiction magazines; my favourite magazine in the world is, by some considerable margin, The Word.  It’s the only magazine that I subscribe to that I don’t read for professional reasons and one of the few that I read cover-to-cover every issue.

Just the month before last the indefatigable scribes at The Word reviewed former Go-Betweens frontman Robert Forster’s book of essays, The Ten Rules of Rock and Roll and I was sufficiently interested that I picked up a copy at the greatest independent bookstore in Australia, Planet.  The book was smart and witty and perceptive, so I decided to keep an eye out for more from Forster. 

It turns out that he reviews for The Monthly, where Australian SF writer John Birmingham also appears fairly regularly.  Being a 21st Century kind of magazine, The Monthly makes all of its content available online for free a month or so after the print issue has been and gone. While I’ve now started buying The Monthly, I was delighted to get a chance to read Forster’s review/essay, “From Mop Tops To Moustaches“,  on the recently remastered Beatles catalogue.  An excellent essay and the sort of thing I’d love to see done really well in the science fiction field.

Reading Forster’s book led me directly to former Hunters & Collectors singer Mark Seymour’s book, Thirteen Tonne Theory (also obtained from Planet) which was one of the best books about life in the rock business that I’ve come across. It’s strongly recommended, even if you’ve never heard of the band.  Smart, funny, and he cut out all the dull bits. And, between these two books, I may just have had enough time off reading SF that I’m feeling like diving into some new work again, which would be terrific.

So I need to lose like a billion kilos, right, cos almost all of my activities are sedentary. I’m trying to fit in as much walking as I can to aid in the cause. Just did a six kilometre round trip walk to the local shopping centre in 28C sunshine. I am sweating like a porcine creature. Blech. Did I mention the blech? Blech.

One of my happiest discoveries last year was Tony C. Smith’s StarShip Sofa podcast. Each week the indefatigable Tony would sit down with some of science fiction’s luminaries and chat about what they were up to, the day-to-day issues confronting the science fiction field, and so on.

The podcast was bright and smart and funny.  I was delighted when Tony invited me to appear on it, and very disappointed when he decided to stop producing it before I could.  Now, I hear he also has a very fine audio podcast where he publishes audio versions of terrific stories, but the Sofa podcast was my favorite and I do miss it.

Now I hear that podcasts are eligible for the Hugo Award, which makes perfect sense to me, and it seems like StarShip Sofa is eligible for Best Fanzine. Produced by one man with a microphone, a Skype account, an awesome accent, and a love of SF, it should be eligible and I, for one, will be nominating Tony and the Sofa this year.

I’ll add, I don’t usually campaign for awards, but this is a little different.  A podcast up for a fanzine Hugo is a new thing, and I think we need to embrace such things, making sure the award remains relevant to what is happening in the field today.

The 2009 Nebula Awards nominations are now out.  Check the full list out on the SFWA site.  Congrats to one and all!

I think I’ve been overthinking posting to the blog, which is why posts have slowly gone from a torrent down to a trickle. I’ve not posted on all sorts of things, mostly because I want to stop and think about it, write something more considered etc. This plainly is not conducive to actually blogging at all, never mind blogging effectively.

With that in mind, I shall try to lighten up a little. Looking back at old posts I find it wasn’t at all hard just to say ‘go read’ this or ‘did you see that’, and so I shall.