I’ve been posting too much over at Deb’s blog, talking about Australian SF and such. If you’re interested, there’s a link somewhere over there on the right. In the meantime , I’ve spent a little time surfing the next and come across a couple cool things:

Link link
Salon’s Laura Miller loves Kelly’s Magic for Beginners. I do too, and so will you.

Mark’s list link
Mark over at Locus Online is intending to add information about editors to his book listings, and to put together a list of work by cover artists for each year. These are the reasons why Mark deserved his Hugo, and why we should all love what he does. He’s one of those people who does cool, useful stuff without anyone much noticing. It takes a lot of work, and he does it all pretty much on his own and unpaid too.

Story link
Ellen over at SciFiction has just posted a terrific new M. Rickert story, “Anyway”, which you should check out.

And a comment. Yesterday I received the October Realms of Fantasy in the mail. It’s the alternate issue, the one that comes without the soft porn cover, and it has a cool story by Tim Pratt and Greg van Eekhout. It’s called “Robots and Falling Hearts”, and is a lovely piece. I read it pretty quickly last night, and liked it very much. I think I might post a kind of review tonight or tomorrow, but I’d like to re-read it first.

In the interests of correcting a previous typographical error, this shameless promotional placement –

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There are other books deserving of similar product placement, but this blog recommends you take a peep at this one first.

I am a very fickle reader. It’s rare book that, if I’m not in the mood, can pull me along regardless. For some reason, right now I feel a need to read something with starships in it. I do not have anything with starships in it on the ‘to read’ shelf. I’m hoping to see Al Reynolds Pushing Ice pretty soon, which should hit the spot. In the meantime, I’m reading Gwyneth Jones’ Band of Gypsys and not really doing it justice. Similarly, I just dipped into Hal Duncan’s Vellum. Tried the first forty or so pages, and it seems cool. But, there’s something about the structure, will all of these italicised section headings, that is really putting me off. I think when I hit it in the right mood I’ll love it, but right now…I know to wait. So, I’m guessing it’s either Jeff’s The Cosmology of the Wider World, or short fiction tonight. Hmmm.

The latest issue of Ticonderoga Online came out a while back, and somehow I missed it. Given that it includes a rather dubious interview with me, which I somehow blocked from memory I guess that’s understandable. Still, Russ Farr and his crew are doing a cool job. You should check it out.

It’s been pretty widely reported that Amazon.com have started up their new Amazon Shorts program, which allows you to buy and read previously unpublished short stories and essays for just $US 0.49 each. They have some really fine writers involved, including people like Terry Bisson, Lucius Shepard, Jack Dann, James Morrow, Robert Silverberg and others.

A few people have suggested that, if successful, the program could grow into something to rival Ellen Datlow’s SciFiction. While I hope the program is a huge success, I’m not entirely sure how it will go. Why? Well, first, I’ve not heard much about who’s editing the program. Something like SciFiction has an editor like Ellen Datlow, who has both the skills and the smarts to do a great job. There are cool people running Strange Horizons and other fiction sites, but there’s no information on who’s actually editing for Amazon.com. This is supported by the information that Amazon has released about the program. It seems that once Amazon have okayed you, you can pretty much add anything you want. Hmmm.

There is another thing that I’m not sure about. If you sell a story to SciFiction you get paid (something like twenty cents per word I think). If you place a story on Amazon.com you get no payment up front at all, and split the 49 cents with the big A. Now, I think that could work fine for a Stephen King or someone like that, but I’m not sure how it will work for writers with smaller followings. I hope it works for them, but…. Oh, and for those interested, there’s a discussion about this over at Asimov’s.