Let there be no doubt, in my opinion the best non-years best reprint science fiction anthology published in 2006 was James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel‘s Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. Where most slipstream or interstitial anthologies I’d seen were touchy-feely, wishy-washy poorly thought out exercises, Feeling Very Strange was smart, savvy, and very, very well edited.

For that reason, and for that reason only, I was interested to see that Kelly and Kessel had agreed to edit a cyberpunk anthology. In all honesty, it didn’t seem to me that the world was exactly crying out for such a book, but given their track record, it seemed worth giving the book the benefit of the doubt.

Well, the details are now online over at amazon.com, and Rewired: the Post-Cyberpunk Anthology looks very interesting indeed. It basically seems to cover what happened to cyberpunk after Sterling’s Mirrorshades – cyberpunk after cyberpunk, if you like. All things considered, that’s an interesting idea. This one has gone straight on to my ‘must buy’ list, and should be on yours too, if you’re at all interested in science fiction. Very cool, indeed.

I was just looking at the demo for Microsoft Office 2007 and realised that I don’t need a faster computer or a faster, more efficient piece of software. I need a faster me.

According to the SFBC website, Best Short Novels: 2007 will ship in two weeks, which is pretty cool. I think this latest volume in the ‘Best Short Novels’ series is one of the best I’ve done, with great stories by Kage Baker, Cory Doctorow, Jeffrey Ford, Robert Reed, Chris Roberson, Michael Swanwick, Ysabeau Wilce, and Robert Charles Wilson. If you like the series, though, now is the time to sign up and order a copy. I’d love the series to continue next year, but this one really has to do pretty well. So, if you’re interested, please check it out.

I’m not saying I’m nervous, but there’s about a week to go till the deadline hits for stories to be in for my next anthology project, Eclipse, and so far I’ve received exactly one story. Now, it’s a fine story. I like it very much. I bought it, and I think you’ll like it too. But. One story is a chapbook, not an anthology. There are going to be more stories, right? Yes? Of course there are. Definitely. There always are. Yes. Definitely. Um.

I’m reading, reading, reading at the moment. Because of some terrible psychological scarring that even I can’t quite explain, I can’t seem to bring myself to pick up a magazine, a collection, or an anthology and read it cover-to-cover, so I dip in here, try something there, taste just a little bit of this or that. This morning I sampled Ellen Datlow’s guest-edited issue of Subterranean Magazine and John Klima’s Logorrhea, and would happily recommend both to you.

The story that I read in Subterranean is a dark, horrible little piece by Terry Bisson called “Pirates of the Somali Coast”. It’s told as a series of emails written by a young boy on a cruise ship to his mother and best friend, and circles around the idea of being divorced from the reality around you. I’m not sure if it’s good – the whole epistolary thing usually troubles me – but it’s disturbing and I think will stay with me all through the year. I then read Tim Pratt’s “From Around Here” in Logorrhea. It tells of a traveller who visits an Oakland neighbourhood and tries to unravel the reason for the dark shadow that hangs over the area. There’s a lot to like in this story: Pratt captures the neighbourhood perfectly, gets the characters just right, and all in all delivers what is probably his most successful story to date. It may be because I lived in Oakland, which made the story resonate even more for me, but I liked “From Around Here” even more than his ‘video store of dreams’ tale, “Impossible Dreams“, from Asimov’s last year which I also really enjoyed. It’s a very strong tale, and is definitely on the shortlist for my year’s best this year.