A clarification about the World Fantasy booklet. If you would like your book(s) listed in our free booklet, then you need to provide the following information, as requested below:

Title:
Author:
Blurb (inc. quotes, advance review extracts etc.):
Jacket Pic: a 150 dpi image in jpeg format ( 75 mm x 105 mm)
Extent (no. pages):
Publication Date:
Publisher(s) and Territories:
Agent or rights holder contacts:

If you can’t provide an image, that’s ok, but the information must be provided in this format if it’s to be included. Because we intend this to be similar to a catalogue, a simple list of titles won’t be sufficient. Also, because of limited time, I’m not able to follow up with someone else for this information. I’ll need it sent, ready to use, to jstrahan (at) iinet (dot) net (dot) (au).

A sample of what you could send would look like this:

Title: Eidolon I
Author: Jonathan Strahan & Jeremy G Byrne eds.
Blurb (inc. quotes, advance review extracts etc.): An exciting new anthology from Eidolon editors Strahan & Byrne, with classic new stories from Simon Brown, Chris Lawson, and others.
Jacket Pic: eidolon.jpg (attached)
Extent (no. pages): 420pp
Publication Date: November 2005
Publisher(s) and Territories: Eidolon Books (Australia), Prime Books (USA). Other world English language rights available.
Agent or rights holder contacts: Contact Jonathan Strahan at jstrahan (at) iinet (dot) net (dot) au.

If you have any queries about what you should provide, please don’t hesitate to email me. We want this to be a success, and to help promote Australian writers and their work.

My buddy Jack Dann has a new website over here at www.jackdann.com. Check it out.

A while back I put together a list of Howard Waldrop’s short fiction, along with all of the first publication information. Recently I needed that information again, but couldn’t find it elsewhere on the web. With that in mind, I’m adding The Howard Waldrop Bibliography semi-permanently to this blog. I’ll do my best to keep it up to date, and will add the info from it to the Waldrop Wikipedia entry, when I get the chance.

With all of the music lost with various iterations of the cd collection that were stolen, there are some things that I’d like to be able to get hold of to rip for the iPod. Surfing the web I stopped in at the Rhino Records site, I saw these boxes and knew that I’d love to rip them:

• Have A Nice Decade: The ’70s Pop Culture Box
• Left Of The Dial: Dispatches From The ’80s Underground
• Like, Omigod! The ’80s Pop Culture Box
• Whatever: The ’90s Pop & Culture Box

That said, I don’t know if I’d buy them. Those things are pricey.

Since this blog tends to circle around these things, an observation. Ian McDonald has never really received the recognition he deserves in the United States. While his early work appeared there with some regularity, his later books were often not picked up by US publishers, and he often isn’t mentioned when the field’s best short story writers are listed.

And yet, based on the stories I’ve read over the past six months (powerful pieces like “The Little Goddess” from Asimov’s, “Written in the Stars” from Constellations, and a yet-to-be-published piece I’ve seen) he easily sits in the top five or six short story writers working in the genre today. If you love science fiction and you love short stories, you need to be reading him. If I recall correctly, PS Publishing will be doing a McDonald collection, which should be wonderful. Hopefully there’ ll be an American collection sometime too.