I’ve been running around trying to do a bunch of things, as you all now, and somehow in amongst it all I managed to miss Matt Cheney’s interesting interview with Paolo Bacigalupi over at The Mumpsimus. I’d not heard of Bacigalupi before reading “The Fluted Girl” and it was interesting to hear more from him.

As previously reported, Marianne and I headed off to a retreat on Friday evening and Saturday for our first night away together since Jessica was born way back in June of 2000, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable and very relaxing time. We got to enjoy a wonderful meal at The Loose Box which wandered across three or four hours, before retiring to our chalet for late drinks and conversation to the wee hours (you can see the menu here). Saturday was a very relaxed breakfast, before meandering our way home in the mid-afternoon. All in all, well worth doing.

I tried to not bring any kind of work along, but I did pack the September issue of Asimov’s so I could catch up on the one or two stories I’d missed, and one of them, David Moles’ “The Third Party”, was very good indeed. I’d read a couple of David Moles’ stories here and there over the past couple years and got to meet him while I was in Oakland this year which was nice, but “The Third Party” is easily the best thing I’ve seen from him. It’s a fairly traditional piece of science fiction adventure, filled with political intrigue and other maguffins, but it’s tightly written and well thought out with interesting characters. All in all, clever stuff and worth checking out. I’ve seen a few online comments about wanting to see the novel it seems to be part of and, while I can sympathise, I think it stands alone very well indeed.

From inside the Raintown event…
It’s not the place you’d expect to look for a new short story, but it’s an M. John Harrison story so it’s not likely to be something you’d expect. I think I failed to mention this before, but Mike has a new story over at amazon.com. It’s set in the Light universe and is cool, strange and thought provoking. I think it also deserves to be ranked amongst the best short science fiction of the year.

I haven’t spoken to Jack about this, but it turns out that the cool people at Eos are the ones publishing the US edition of Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice. Don’t know if there are any plans to do White Time – though an Ace Double style hardcover would have been really cool – but you need this book. It’s coming out in March, so order it now and get ready to devour it when it comes out.

If it helps motivate you any further, Ellen Datlow’s said she’s taking the opening story for her next year’s ‘Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror’, which is great. I’m particularly happy that Margo’s agreed to write a story for my young adult SF anthology, and hope she gets a chance sometime soon to finish that novel!

There are all sorts of interesting conversations happening all over the web, and unless you know where to look it’s easy to miss them.

I just stumbled across Niall Harrison’s discussion of the early list of the year’s best short fiction that I posted here a while ago (it’s over at LiveJournal, but you can only post if you’re a LiveJournal subscriber). It’s interesting to see what he and others think of my list (for example, Niall didn’t like John Kessel’s “The Baum Plan for Financial Independence”, though I still do), and the other comments they have. The one thing I’d respond to is that if readers are interested in Margo Lanagan’s story collection Black Juice it’s due to be published in the US in March by HarperCollins. For my money, it’s pretty much the best collection of 2004 and I expect to see stories from in it most of the year’s bests. Hopefully the World Fantasy Award judges will get to see and consider it next year.