The good folk at Night Shade have posted the full text of Ted Chiang’s Hugo and BSFA Award nominated story “Exhalation” in multiple formats on their website for the joy and delectation of readers everywhere. There is also a wonderful podcast of the story over at Starship Sofa. The story is from my anthology Eclipse Two. I’d like to thank Ted and Night Shade for being willing to let this happen.

Note: Link now fixed.

The good folk at Anticipation have announced the nominees for this year’s Hugo Awards.  You can see the full list here.  Obviously I am deeply honored and delighted to be nominated for Best Editor – Short Form.  I was stunned when I heard, and am thrilled about it. I’ll be in Montreal, of course, and hope you will be too.

There are too many people to shout out to, but I’d especially like to say congratulations to Ted Chiang, whose story “Exhalation” from Eclipse Two is on the ballot. I love the story and will be voting for it.  Other than, congratulations  to everyone else in my category (the 2008 gang back together again?), to Charles and my Locus crew, to Lou, Shaun, Charlie, Ian, Cory, Neil, Cheryl, Bill – everyone!  It’s going to be a wonderful night, celebrating a great year.

Inspired by a young barista’s mad passion for music, I have commenced blogging about short SF over at the Locus blog. It’s all under the moniker The All-Time Top 40(-ish) – A Quixotic Endeavor. Each week I’m reading and reviewing one of the stories from Locus’s 1999 All-Time Top 40 Short Story List, just kinda as something to do.  There have been suggestions this will lead to anthologies and such, but probably not. Mostly it’s a way of connecting with some older fiction and slowing down how I read.  On reflection I might have picked the superior looking Best Novelette list, but the dye is cast and there’s no use complaining now.

For those who are interested, if this works (and we’ll know by 5 January 2010 if it did) I intend to do something on the best short fiction of the 2000s.  That’s away aways though.  The intention is that a new review will appear every Tuesday, unless I get bored, in which case they’ll either come a lot faster or not at all. It’s an adventure. Come check it out!

Every now and then the system doesn’t forewarn you that an interesting book is coming. Instead, it arrives, unexpected, and you fall in love with it and with the surprise of it.  And suddenly you’re reminded, as a jaded old reviewer type, that all of this reading caper is still worth it.  A week or two ago Jedediah Berry contacted me to say he was getting a copy of his first novel, The Manual of Detection, sent out to me. It sounded pretty good, and I was pleased he’d done it because I’d read a story or two of his, and because I’d heard it was a pretty book. But I wasn’t enjoying reading much at the time, so didn’t think on it too hard.
Well, I came home Tuesday, tired and out sorts with the world, to find a package sitting on my desk here in the disaster zone we call my office.  Hmpph, I thought.  Another galley of some utterly avoidable book, most likely. But it wasn’t.  It was this really lovely dark green book with a big golden eye embossed on the cover. No dustjacket, but beautifully designed.  I was intrigued, but feeling jaded with reading (my adjustment to multifocal spectacle lenses is imperfect right now and reading has been hard, so I’m disenclined).  But there was rain, a city, an enormous Detective Agency that might have fallen out of Brasil, a mummy, a man on a bicycle, a mysterious woman.  I was intrigued. I was trapped. Suddenly I was sucked into the book, pulled forward by the story, cushioned by his writing.  I’m only half way through The Manual of Detection right now. It might fall apart. It might not. I don’t think it will. And now I wanted to know about “The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker” and “The Man Who Stole November Twelfth”.  I want Berry to promise to write stories for me from the casebooks of Charles Unwin and Travis T. Sivart, for I am lost and I am intrigued and I love his book quite a lot.

How much? Enough to tell you to make sure you get a copy. Enough to think I need to buy another, because this one has  a chip in the boards. And if it has a chip in the boards, I can buy a nice new to keep and use this one to lend out to others, so I can share this wonderful story. The Manual of Detection is really quite special.