Over at Ecstatic Days, JeffV mentions that he’s just re-read Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, and is delighted to find that it holds up today. I’ve been working with Vance material over the past eighteen months, and I’m really happy to hear that other readers are finding it as fresh and vital as I am.  A discussion that’s been going round the backrooms of the Locus offices for the past year is just how influential both Vance and Philip Jose Farmer have proven to be.  At one point, time looked to have passed them both by, but more and more it’s becoming clear they’ve had an enormous impact on the field.  I hope someone reprints The Best of Philip Jose Farmer in a trade edition soon.

Amazon have released their new e-book reader, the Kindle, this week. It’s of absolutely no relevance here in Australia because it’s not offered for sale here, we don’t have our own Amazon store, and we can’t use the wireless network it’s based on.  That said, a thought or two.  It seems unreasonable to say that something is or isn’t going to be successful when it’s only just been released, but a couple things did occur to me. First, it’s the coolest name for a new device since Microsoft released the Zune.  Second, neat use of ’70s retro styling.  Way to go. And, third: who wants another dedicated device for reading?  Isn’t it obvious that the category killer here will be a nice, cool looking object that is a phone, a music player, a video player, a websurfing thing and an ebook reader? It’s not that we can’t carry the Kindle. It’s that we can’t carry it with our cell phone, our iPod, our camera, our Blackberry and whatever else we may or may not have.  One object to rule them all. That’s what we need.

Well, I’ve done exactly one of the things I’d intended to do since I got back from the States. This morning I emailed out the first draft of the Locus Short Fiction Recommended Reading List. Lest you think that I simply make this list up, it starts with a large list of stories sourced from a variety of recommenders (the most important, at this stage, being the monthly recommendations published in Locus selected by our two short fiction reviewers, Nick Gevers and Rich Horton). The draft list then goes through a number of iterations, with comments and recommendations sought from our reviewers, experts in the field and so on. By the time it’s done it will probably have been through eight or ten iterations, and had input from most of the major short fiction people in the field.  It will, of course, still overlook a story or two, but I think it ends up being the best source of short fiction recommendations in the field.  I’ll keep you up to date on progress with it in the coming months, as we lead up to the February 2008 issue of the magazine.

Other than that, the main thing here is that my mother is in hospital.  This was long scheduled, but still is a difficult thing.  She’s almost seventy and needed surgery, and both she and her doctor’s were very concerned about complications arising from medication and so on. I spoke to her last night and this morning, and she sounded okay but very weak.  Today’s main thing, apart from getting ready for the return to work tomorrow, is visiting her in hospital.  I have my fingers crossed that she’ll be home by this coming weekend and on the mend.

What else? I’ve been watching the cricket, faithfully not reading, and keeping my eyes peeled for Iain Banks’s Matter popping through the mailbox. What else can you do? More soon…

And the Library Journal weighs in on Eclipse One:

Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy. Night Shade. Nov. 2007. c.263p. ed. by Jonathan Strahan. ISBN 978-1-59780-117-1. pap. $14.95. SF

From Andy Duncan’s opening tale of a parish priest’s encounter with a precocious little girl and her pet chicken, Jesus Christ (“Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse”), to the final story, by Lucius Shepard, of an unforgettable relationship with a Russian woman as enigmatic as the country of her birth (“Larissa Miusov”), the 15 original stories gathered here defy easy categorization as either sf or fantasy but push the borders of both genres to surprising extremes. Contributions by a variety of veteran and new writers including Peter S. Beagle, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Bruce Sterling, and Gwyneth Jones round out an unusual collection of speculative fiction that belongs in libraries where short stories are popular.

Dear blog,

This week has been, in some senses, a wash.  I arrived back on Sunday afternoon. I thought I was perky and fine, but I slept two hours of Monday and Tuesday afternoons away, and have felt hungover for most of the week so far. Jetlag, oh how I love thee.  I’m very happy with how my trip went, but happier that CHARLES went into hospital on Monday and was sent home because he was fine.  I’m worried because my mother is headed for hospital on Saturday, for surgery, so struggle to worry about the deadlines that aren’t quite whizzing by.  Today I watched both of my girls swimming lessons, which delighted at least one of them to almost unreasonable proportions. Tomorrow Marianne and I are taking my mother out for lunch.  I will worry about deadlines on Friday.  The cricket’s on, and I can noodle away between deliveries. Proposals to be written and reminagined, and lists to be made and checked.  I should focus.  And that day job comes back onstream on Monday. Till then, though, it’s lunch, naps and West Wing re-runs.  Envy me.

J