It’s hard for complaints not to look like sour grapes when, after the summer the Australian cricket team has had, it goes through a form slump and you point out problems. It looks like you can handle success, but not failure. Still, a few thoughts. How essential was a three game series that may have cost the World Cup appearances of Michael Clarke, Brett Lee, and Matthew Hayden? It’s hard to see how it was worth it. Even if we’d won three nil, as opposed to losing three nil, it would have been of marginal value. The most disturbing thought, though, is this one: since December 2005 Australia has failed to defend the four highest one day scores in this history of the game; 436 against South Afrtica, and 346, 336,  and 331 against New Zealand. It must say something that essentially the same bowling attack and fielding side has had this problem, and it’s only made worse by the fact that two of these failures were in the past week.  While there’s still every chance Australia will regroup and head into the World Cup with a competitive team (though frankly, sans Symonds, Lee, and possibly Hayden and Clarke), and it still well may win the competition, it’s going to be a much tougher tournament that we expected, especially if the bowlers and fielders can’t get their acts together.

It’s easy to get taken for granted. If you’re around for long enough, do good work for long enough, people come to assume that ‘of course it’s good’ when you do something new, and are only waiting for ‘this one’s great’. It’s how anything gets overlooked, and I think it’s what happened to Terry Dowling and the two new stories he did for his collection Basic Black, which was published last year by Cemetery Dance.

Dowling added “La Profonde” and “Cheat Light” to Basic Black, and it garnered great reviews in the US, with Publishers Weekly giving it a prestigious starred review. And yet, somehow, here at home not a whisper. So far, the collection has barely received a whisper of mention, and neither story has ended up on any awards ballots or in any year’s bests. Given that the stories are good, I can only assume that this is because we’re used to having a writer of Terry’s calibre around, and that we sort of taken it for granted that he’ll be good. I don’t know.

Anyway, this makes the news that Terry’s story “La Profonde” will appear in Datlow, Link & Grant’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection particularly welcome: something that’s only highlighted by his being the lead-off name on the cover. Clearly the book’s editors and publishers know that they’ve got something pretty special, and see it as an advantage in the US. Hopefully we’ll wake up and realise that soon too. Oh, and it’d be nice if someone would reprint Basic Black, which was out of print within several months of publication. Everyone should have a chance to see the book. Dowling was, is, and remains one of our very best.

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Note: Because comments don’t appear on the main page, thought I’d add that you can get a galley of Basic Black for as little as $US7.00 and a hardcover for as little as $US29.00. Not too bad.

The guys over at Wildside have announced that Ann VanderMeer will be the new fiction editor for Weird Tales. Ann’s done a lot of interesting editorial work over the years, from her days back when she was editing The Silver Web, on to her many collaborations with Jeff VanderMeer. I think she’s a really interesting choice. For my money, Weird Tales had really lost it’s way over the years, losing touch with the field that it played an incredibly important role in creating. Here’s to a fresh editorial eye coming in and giving the whole publication a fresh perspective: I can’t wait to see what she’ll do, I’ve no doubt it’ll be interesting.

Subterranean Press have officially announced that they will publish Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling in September of this year. It’ll be available in both a trade and limited edition. This one took a lot of work, really didn’t come easy, but it’s done. I hope you guys like it when it hits the shelves. The contents of the book are:

• Introduction by Karen Joy Fowler
• Foreword by Bruce Sterling

Part I: The Shaper/Mechanist Stories

• Swarm
• Spider Rose
• Cicada Queen
• Sunken Gardens
• Twenty Evocations

Part II: Early Science Fiction and Fantasy

• Green Days in Brunei
• Dinner in Audoghast
• The Compassionate, the Digital
• Flowers of Edo
• The Little Magic Shop
• Our Neural Chernobyl
• We See Things Differently
• Dori Bangs

Part III: The Leggy Starlitz Stories

• Hollywood Kremlin
• Are You for 86?
• The Littlest Jackal

Part IV: The Chattanooga Stories

• Deep Eddy
• Bicycle Repairman
• Taklamakan

Part V: Later Science Fiction and Fantasy

• The Sword of Damocles
• Maneki Neko
• In Paradise
• The Blemmye’s Strategem
• Kiosk

I was out noodling around on youtube.com yesterday and, for reasons I can’t really explain, decided to search on Neil Gaiman, just to see what’s there. Well, as it turns out, there’s quite a bit. Neil, who’s a really entertaining speaker, travels the world talking here and there. While he’s there, perfectly nice people seem to quietly hold up their mobile phones, video what he says, and post it to youtube.com. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. You can see him being interviewed, answering questions, and even reading stories. If you search carefully, you’ll see him reading “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, which is in my new year’s best.

There are a bunch of other readings, including one of Neil’s new story “The Witch’s Headstone”, which I think ranks amongst the best stories he’s done in the past few years. As he explains in his Q&A, the story grew out of a time when he and his young family used to live across the road from a cemetery. They had no garden of their own, so Neil would take his then infant son across to the cemetery, where they’d play amongst the headstones. That led to him imagining the tale of boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard, which would eventually evolve into the book he’s now working on, The Graveyard Book. As it turns out, “The Witch’s Headstone” is one of the early chapters of The Graveyard Book, and is really quite delightful. It’s sort of Charles Addams in Bradbury’s October Country, but in England instead.

I don’t really want to say much more about it, but the best (and first) place to read it is in Jack and Gardner’s new anthology Wizards, which contains tons of other cool stuff as well. Garth Nix has a lovely story in it, one of his best, as do  Gene Wolfe, Andy Duncan, Terry Dowling and a bunch of other people. I’ve not finished the book yet, but what I have read is good. You need to check it out.