Six weeks ago I went out and bought the then new, and still reasonably current, R.E.M album Around the Sun. After a fairly brief listen I posted, fairly hastily, my views on their efforts. Well, this evening I went over to Mark Kelly’s blog where he discusses the album. Setting aside the fact that he liked the album better than I did (or do), reading his post made me realise that I hadn’t clearly articulated one of the things I’d meant to. Mark notes that I responded to the lack of a drummer, which is true. What I should have made clear, and didn’t, was that what I was noting was Berry’s absence as part of their overall creative endeavour, rather than simply as a tub-thumper. The band is on record that Berry made a major contribution to their songwriting and played an important role in the studio, as well as playing. The big change in R.E.M’s sound is that the melody and structure which he’d been credited with providing is now gone. We have the fabulous, formless darkness. Sometimes this works wonderfully well – as in “Daysleeper” and a few others – but I find myself harking back to the last real R.E.M. album, New Adventures in HiFi, which remains superior (to me) to anything they’ve attempted since.

If you’re in Australia this mini website contains good news. I note that they’ve used the Disney dub for Kiki, so I assume they’ll do the same for the rest.

…the sound you can hear is one head being beaten, slowly, against a wall. sigh.

That’s how long everyone has to finish assembling Fantasy: Best of 2004. Unfortunately we had to drop a story at the last minute because we couldn’t get permissions for it, so I made changes to the manuscript for the book this morning and emailed it off. It’s due in stores in 110 days. Wow!

Note (added later): I just took a look over at amazon, and they’re listing both year’s best as due out on 1 Feb, which is 85 days away! I’m a little thrown by this.

The remarkably productive Rich Horton continues his annual personal odyssey through the pages of the short fiction published in 2004, posting new summaries this weekend for Amazing Stories and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine to his sffnet newsgroup. I pretty much agree with his summaries for both. Amazing Stories is mostly a media magazine, but some of the short fiction is pretty good, and ASIM deserve enormous applause for their regularity. I actually think they undersell themselves, but they’re worth checking out.