The year is hurtling to a close, and with it the reading period for Science Fiction: Best of 2004 and Fantasy: Best of 2004. With a little luck, Karen and I’ll have final tables of contents for both books in a week, and I can then get down to the job of writing introductions and story notes, and debating sequencing. Once that’s done, it’ll be on to Locus‘s annual recommended reading, which I need to get under way shortly, back to my own reviewing (ha!), and some work on other anthology projects. In the mean time, a call to readers of the blog. If you have any 2004 stories to recommend that we consider for the year’s bests, now’s the time. Drop me an email using the address on the right side of this page, post to the comment field, or post to my NightShade message board. I will follow up on recommendations. I’d also like to thank everyone who’s helped so much this year, letting us see material early and so on. It’s never easy meeting these deadlines, and we couldn’t do it without your help.

One of the mixed blessings about attending international conventions is that you make friends that you only see once a year, or sometimes once every few years. And then, because conventions are typically an insane cascade of happenings, must-do’s, and obligations, you never quite see those people for long enough.

One of the people who I didn’t get to catch up with properly in Boston was Mike Walsh, publisher of Old Earth Books and all round good guy. I first ran into Mike following up review stuff for Locus, and found that we share a love of the fiction of Howard Waldrop and Avram Davidson (Mike gets to walk with the angels, if for no other reason that he published Limekiller), which you should go buy right away).

At Boston Mike published a handful of beautiful looking, and intrinsically cool, new books. Two of them came as a bit of a shock – Centenary editions of Cliff Simak’s City and Way Station. They were a shock because I couldn’t quite believe that the Centenary of Simak’s birth was going by essentially unremarked upon. I’m really happy Mike has published these books, and you should buy them too (especially Way Station which I love beyond reason), but a major publisher should be doing something. If we can have treasuries of short fiction by Avram Davidson, Jack Vance or R.A. Lafferty, shouldn’t there be one from Simak acting as a bulwark against the possibility of this fine writer being forgotten? sigh. Oh, Mike also published an edition of Edgar Pangborn’s Davy. I’ve never read it, but if Mike thinks it’s worth reprinting, I should. In my spare time. Soon.

Neil Gaiman mentions, a photo that David Hartwell took which you can see over at Kathryn Kramer’s blog, of Neil, Stephen Dedman, John Clute and Terry Pratchett, and wonders when the caption competition will begin. I don’t know if it will, but something like “New Hawkwind line-up announced” comes to mind. I’m guessing Pratchett would be on drums, Clute on bass, Dedman on keyboards and Gaiman on guitar and vocals.

He also mentions writing ‘a book about naked, bisexual, hard-swearing wizards who drink a lot while disparaging the Second Amendment’. I don’t know about a whole book, but a short story would be a lot of fun.

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.