A quick follow-on about Charles de Lint. The first story set in de Lint’s fictional city of Newford, “Timeskip”, appeared in 1989. The first Newford novel, Memory and Dream, appeared in 1994, and there have now been four collections of short stories and eight (I think) major novels set in that city. The cast that started with Jilly Coppercorn and Christy Riddell has grown and grown, till it’s now a large ensemble of friends, musicians, artists, figures from myth and so on. It seems to me that this cast can be as much a burden as a gift. There’s so many of them, with so much history, that they begin to weigh down the story that’s being told. Could it be time to start fresh?

There are any number of good reasons for joining The Science Fiction Book Club. You get access to all kinds of cool books for very reasonable prices, they do their own nifty omnibuses and hardcover first editions, and they even do anthologies by people like me. However, this morning I heard one of the best reasons to join up yet.

Last year the good folk at Centipede Press produced an enormous retrospective of the best short fiction of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, Two-Handed Engine: Selected Stories. It was a great book, beautifully produced, finely crafted and full of top-notch stories. The only drawbacks were that the book was a little pricey and that the edition was fairly small. Well, apparently the SFBC has just reached an agreement to reprint Two-Handed Engine in a nicely affordable edition this May. If you can’t think of any other reason to join up, this is it. The book is wonderful, and this is probably the most accessible edition likely to be published for some time. Oh, and if you like beautiful books, check out the Centipede site because they still might have a copy or two of the first edition left.

PS: To follow on from something in the comments, if you’re not in the U.S. you can’t join the SFBC. You can, however, usually find SFBC editions of books on amazon.com with little difficulty.

I am one of the least organised people I know, which is not good. I need to be better organised, that way I’d be less flustered when I’m reminded of deadlines. Yesterday was a ‘work from home’ day, and it was mostly productive. I got a lot done, and made some progress on anthology work. The main thing that has changed since my chirpy post about the weekend is that the deadlines now look much more concrete. The 1 March delivery date for The Starry Rift, which was always there, is now solid and urgent. This is for good reason, and I’m happy with it. Everyone at Viking has been wonderful (hi Sharyn!) and all of the contributors have been terrific to deal with – I just suddenly feel a need to re-read the whole book, re-check the texts, review the running order of stories and so on. I also now definitely need to get the introduction and author bio notes in shape. This also makes the 16 February delivery date for Best Short Novels even more important. I have all of the stories, all of the permissions, and most of the story notes. Again, I need to write the introduction, clean up three of the story notes, and confirm the running order. The book is 220,000 words long, so I’d like to do that without re-reading too much, but that may not be possible. I also need to get six different proposals done, and I’m trying to work out a few other things. Still, I do have eight days, including a weekend, so it’s all do-able, if the rest of the world just keeps in line.

I have struggled for a long time to work out, and clearly express, exactly what I feel is wrong with Charles de Lint’s later novels. I first read de Lint’s work back in the mid-80s when I stumbled across a copy of Yarrow. I was intrigued by his combination of magic and urban landscapes, and went on to read pretty much everything he wrote (to date I think the only Newford novel I’ve not read is Spirit in the Wires), and to like a great deal of it. It’s long been my feeling that he reached his peak back in 1994 when Tor published Memory and Dream. It seemed to me then, and still does now, to be the best expression of everything that he’s about: the magic, the love of art and artists, the opposition to abuses of power and so on.

In the following years though, as first Trader appeared, and then Someplace To Be Flying, Forests Of The Heart, and then The Onion Girl were published I increasingly struggled with his novels, and eventually thought I was going to stop altogether (which is why I skipped Spirits In The Wires). The reason, I’d begun to realise, was that the message had taken over the medium. De Lint’s love of art and artists, who are best loved in his stories, and his understandably passionate fight against those who would use their power to dominate and damage the defenceless consumed the stories he had to tell. Gradually, the stories became secondary, and the characters became mouthpieces. This was clearest in The Onion Girl, which focussing as it does on artist and survivor of abuse, Jilly Coppercorn, is also arguably closest to these two great concerns.

And yet, I went on to read The Blue Girl, which avoided a lot of this, and was de Lint’s strongest novel in a decade, and then over the weekend I read Widdershins. It’s a book I approached with real caution, advertising, as it does, the consummation at last of the relationship between two of de Lint’s longest running cast of characters. For the most part, it’s a terrific book, right up to the discussion of power and the abuse of power. At that point it becomes polemic, the characters flatten and become two dimensional as they use pretty much exactly the same language to express their views on the subject. Were they to approach the same subject differently, to not use the same expressions and so on, their views might appear to be that of a like-minded collective, but when a young girl and an aged Native American spirit both express the same view in the same language they seem more like mouthpieces for the author, rather than individual characters. While this is disappointing, it’s something I hope over time de Lint will work through (assuming he’d even see it as a problem) because there’s a lot in Widdershins to like. I guess I’ll be reading the next one after all.

The shortlist for the 22nd annual Crawford Award, presented by the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, has been announced. The nominees are:

• Judith Berman, Bear Daughter
• Hal Duncan, Vellum
• Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night
• Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts
• Sarah Monette, Melusine
• Holly Phillips, In the Palace of Repose
• Anna Tambour, Spotted Lily

You can find a list of previous winners here. I was involved in the deliberations this year, and was delighted with the quality of work we saw, and with the final list. I’m especially happy to see some collections on the list, and to see a fellow Aussie being honored.