I have been in ongoing negotiations with Byron Preiss of ibooks inc. and Martin H. Greenberg of Tekno Books for some months now to develop a line of year’s best annuals that I truly believe will revolutionise science fiction and fantasy in the early 21st century.
As we all know, these are exciting times but challenging days lie ahead, and no one is likely to be more challenged than the average reader. With that in mind, I have developed a solution to everyone’s reading problems, a line of carefully focussed, niche ‘year’s bests’. While I wasn’t going to announce the details of those plans for a while, you can now see all about them at Locus: Online.
I notice odd things. One that’s been going around in my mind, as I try to push myself to actually write a book review, has to do with Patricia McKillip’s Od Magic. It’s a great book, you should buy it. As with all of McKillip’s books of late, it has a truly lovely dust jacket by Kinuko Craft which pretty much provides a summary of the book (much as Josh Kirby’s covers did for Pratchett’s Discworld novels). When you’ve read the novel you’ll recognise the characters on the front and rear of the book, and the various other elements. What might strike you as odd, though, is that none of the novel’s male characters are represented. Given that at least one is, arguably, the book’s major character, it seems very strange.
I used to buy David Pringle’s Interzone during the Classic IZ years (say 1985-1995) for the non-fiction, specifically for John Clute’s non-fiction. I loved what he wrote for the magazine, and I thought it lost a lot when he left. Well, he’s returning in IZ198 (coming soon), and you can talk to him about it on his message board here. You should. I will.
