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.

Some morning links:

• The Guardian has an interesting interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, which underscores just how prescient his ‘Science in the Capital’ novels seem, given current events.
• Bill Shafer’s Subterranean Press have announced the happy news that they’ll be publishing a new William Browning Spencer collection, The Ocean and All Its Devices, in the next handful of months.