Cory Doctorow makes some remarkably sensible points about Google’s Book Search service.

Should you and I ever be in the same place, and should you ever here me grumble about the editing life, remind me of this. First, I am incredibly lucky (and I know it). Second, there are two things that make all of it worthwhile. The first is the moment when, having thought up an idea and persuaded someone else that it’s a good one, you sell a book. There’s a real adrenalin rush to knowing that it worked, it was a good idea, and it was going to happen. The second, and by far the best thing, is the moment when a new story for a book arrives via post or email, you open it and read it, and it’s not only good, it’s so surprisingly, stunningly good that it makes you want to shout out loud, punch the air, and run around grinning like an idiot.

The reason I mention this is that I’m working on completing my first original anthology – all the others up till now have been reprint anthologies – and I’ve had at least four or five moments like that while working on the book. It’s been thrilling. The book, The Starry Rift, will finally be out in mid-2007 and I can’t wait to see what people think of it.

The Guardian reports that “Every time Miles farted they had the tape machine running.“

Time is running out to nominate for the Ditmars. To help with nominations, Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt have published a remarkably useful list of short fiction by Australians published in 2005. You can find information on the Ditmars themselves here, and the nomination forms are here. Anyone can nominate for the awards, and you don’t need to have read everything published during the year. Voting is restricted to paid members of the national SF convention, Conjure. You can buy a membership here.

Collection news continues to tumble in here at Coode Street. I note that, according to the news page on his website, Alastair Reynolds has two collections due out in the second half of 2006: Galactic North from Gollancz/Orion will collect his future history stories, while Zima Blue and Other Stories from the good folk at Night Shade will collect the best of his other short fiction. This is good news, especially when you add in Jeffrey Ford’s The Empire of Icecream and M. Rickert’s Map of Dreams from Golden Gryphon, a cool new Kage Baker collection, Dark Mondays, from Night Shade, Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, Alan DeNiro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, William Browning Spencer’s The Ocean and All Its Devices, Elizabeth Bear’s The Chains That You Refuse, a bunch of others I need to research, and I even heard a whisper of a rumour that someone out there may be planning a new Howard Waldrop collection. Sweet. All we need now are things like collections by Tom Purdom, William Barton, Wil McCarthy and a bunch of others and the world would be complete.