I have this other journal, and I’ve not been good to it. It’s supposed to be the sexy wonderful site for all things year’s best, but I’ve never quite committed to it. It lives over at www.yearsbests.com. I’m going to tinker with it over the next few weeks: get the RSS feed working, make sure the site links are right, maybe play with the look. Mostly, though, I’m going to blog about reading for the years bests. I’ve not done much of that here, but I’m about to do quite a bit of it there (I think). I admit I have no self-discipline, so this might not happen, but it’s what I intended to do. Check it out if you think it might be of interest.
One of the stories that’s missing from my Best Short Novels: 2007 is Charles Stross’s Missile Gap. It was originally published in Gardner Dozois’s One Million A.D., and then reprinted in a specialty press edition. In honor of Technopeasant Day and the Locus Awards nomination, you can now read it here. Go read it. It’s a story that I’m pretty confident saying would have been in every year’s best SF this year, if we could have just gotten permission, so this is a real bonus for everyone.
So, you read ‘Notes from Coode Street’, you live in the United States, you read science fiction, and you’re wondering just what you can do make the day special. Well, there’s one thing you could do. Let me know if you’ve see The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 1 in the wild. I know it’s out there, I know it’s selling well (very well!), but I’ve not actually seen a copy, and I’d love to know how it’s doing out in the stores. So, if you’ve seen a copy, let me know in the comments to this post. No need for photos, though that’d be cool — just a note to let me know that this whole publishing a book thing actually happened.
The nice folk, the web elf I suspect, at Neil Gaiman’s website have posted all sorts of stuff to do with his story “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” You can read the story, or download a recording of Neil reading it. There are also links to the other Hugo nominees for Best Short Story. You should read them all.
I have a real soft spot for “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”. Neil kindly and generously wrote it for my book The Starry Rift. When it first appeared in my email inbox I was struck by all of the things that make a good Neil Gaiman story a good Neil Gaiman story: his writing voice, the smoothness and confidence of the telling, the deft skill of it all. I was also struck by how dark it was. However, time and circumstance meant that it didn’t end up in The Starry Rift. Instead, in sterling fashion, it filled the role of original story in his excellent collection Fragile Things (which came out last year), and was reprinted in my The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 1. Neil kindly wrote a replacement story for The Starry Rift, “Orange”, which you’ll have to wait till next February to read, and “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” is on the Hugo ballot, which fills me with all kinds of pleasure. If I could vote for it, I would. And, who knows, maybe I’ll get to bring you another Neil story in some other book some time in the future. If I do, I know it’ll be a delight.
