Cory Doctorow is letting you download his new collection Overclocked for free. I won’t go into the whole Creative Commons thing, which Cory’s been doing for a while now. Instead a comment on the book. I’ve read all of the stories in Overclocked, and reprinted half of them in various year’s bests, which is something of an endorsement. One appeared in the prestigious ‘Best American Stories’ series, another was up for the Hugo, and still another was published on something called Flurb. I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one more was up for, or even won, the Hugo. And there’s a cool long novella that appears here for the first time in English. Personally I think you should buy an actual dead trees version, but if you want to try before you buy, you can download it too.

A few Thursday notes:

• Warren Ellis is talking science fiction art and science fiction magazine design. He makes the reasonable point (I summarise) that the sf magazines don’t exactly look cutting edge these days. It’s a fair point. The last great new design I saw was the Analog bedsheet from the ’60s. It’d be nice to have a good looking, well designed SF magazine.
• Speaking of covers: saw the cover Ellis’s Fell: Volume 1 Feral City on his site. It’s by Perth artist Ben Templesmith. By weird it’s-a-small-world-itis, I work with Ben’s wife. Who knew?
• The Dreamhoster forum thingy is up. Come say hi.
• I’m reading Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois’ anthology Wizards right now. I’m five stories in maybe, having read stories stories by Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix, Mary Rosenblum, Kage Baker, and Eoin Colfer. Interesting and good stuff. I think the Gaiman story “The Witch’s Headstone” is part of his The Graveyard Book, but I don’t know for sure. It has made me think more about YA, though. The stories are good, but I’m not sure that at least one doesn’t talk down a little to its audience, and fall into the pitfalls of writing the kind of story they think kids might like rather than just writing a story.

Sophie was sick yesterday, the flu or something , so we sat on the couch, me working on the laptop while she watched Dora the Explorer.

Reviews for The Jack Vance Treasury are starting to flow in. Following a solid review from PW and a very good review from Booklist, this last week has seen excellent reviews from Matthew Hughes at SF Site and Paul Di Filippo at Scifi.com.

The nice folk over at Australian Specif in Focus have generously invited me to be part of their ‘Focus on Editors‘ series of discussion forums. Starting tomorrow sometime, I’ll be over there ready to talk about whatever interests anyone: editing, anthologies, science fiction, heritage vegetables, the merits of Sufjan Stevens. Whatever appeals. I’ll post here when it’s live. Drop by and say hi.