Dec 31, 2009

DD Noir T-Shirt

Hey, here's something cool to spend your gift card on: A Daredevil Noir T-shirt at SuperheroStuff.com, featuring Tomm Coker's cover from #1. Sweet.



Also you could buy the book!

Dec 23, 2009

Your Year in Cryptozoology

Courtesy of Portland's own Loren Coleman via his Cryptomundo blog, the Top 10 Cryptzoology Stories and Top 10 Cryptzoology-Related Deaths of 2009.

And! Check out the bikini-loving Polish Bigfoot:

Dec 21, 2009

We Have a Different Office for Petty Homicides

From a Portland Press Herald article about the apparent murder of a guy on Saturday night: "A lawyer with the Attorney General’s Office, which prosecutes serious homicides, is working with police."

O Journalism!

Dec 19, 2009

Another ToC: Best SF and Fantasy of the Year vol. 4

From editor (and all-around cool guy) Jonathan Strahan:

Introduction, Jonathan Strahan
1. It Takes Two, Nicola Griffith (Eclipse Three)
2. Three Twilight Tales, Jo Walton (Firebirds Soaring)
3.
4. The Island, Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)
5. Ferryman, Margo Lanagan (Firebirds Soaring)
6. A Wild and Wicked Youth, Ellen Kushner (F&SF)
7. The Pelican Bar, Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse Three)
8. Spar, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld)
9. Going Deep, James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s)
10. The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Holly Black (The Eternal Kiss)
11. Zeppelin City, Michael Swanwick & Eileen Gunn (Tor.com)
12. Dragon’s Teeth, Alex Irvine (F&SF)
13. This Wind Blowing, and This Tide, Damien Broderick (Asimov’s)
14. By Moonlight, Peter S. Beagle (We Never Talk About My Brother)
15. Black Swan, Bruce Sterling (F&SF)
16. As Women Fight, Sara Genge (Asimov’s)
17. The Cinderella Game, Kelly Link (Troll’s Eye View)
18. Formidable Caress, Stephen Baxter (Analog)
19. Blocked, Geoff Ryman (F&SF)
20. Truth and Bone, Pat Cadigan (Poe)
21. Eros, Philia, Agape, Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com)
22. The Motorman’s Coat, John Kessel (F&SF)
23. Mongoose, Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear (Lovecraft Unbound)
24. Echoes of Aurora, Ellen Klages (What Remains)
25. Before My Last Breath, Robert Reed (Asimov’s)
26. Jo Boy, Diana Wynne Jones (The Dragon Book)
27. Utriusque Cosmi, Robert Charles Wilson (The New Space Opera 2)
28. A Delicate Architecture, Catherynne Valente (Troll’s Eye View)
29. The Cat That Walked a Thousand Miles, Kij Johnson (Tor.com)
Recommended Reading

Wonder what's in slot #3...Jonathan has a note about it in the original post.

Watch Flippy Day Now!



Congrats to the gang at Big Appetite Films. There's also a Flippy Day blog...

ToC: Year's Best SF and Fantasy 2010

Here's the ToC of the Prime Books year's best antho, edited by Rich Horton:



“A Story, with Beans” by Steven Gould, Analog, May
“Child-Empress of Mars” by Theodora Goss, Interfictions 2
“The Island” by Peter Watts, The New Space Opera 2
“Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance” by John Kessel, The New Space Opera 2
“The Logic of the World” by Robert Kelly, Conjunctions 52
“The Endangered Camp” by Ann Leckie, Clockwork Phoenix
“Sylgarmo's Proclamation” by Lucius Shepard, Songs of the Dying Earth
“Three Twilight Tales” by Jo Walton, Firebirds Soaring
“Necroflux Day” by John Meaney, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 3
“This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe” by Robert Charles Wilson, Other Earths
“Technicolor” by John Langan, Poe
“Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirksy, Tor.com
“A Painter, a Sheep, and a Boa Constrictor” by Nir Yaniv, Shimmer 10
“Catalog” by Eugene Mirabelli, F&SF, February
“Glister” by Dominic Green, Interzone, August
“On the Human Plan” by Jay Lake, Lone Star Stories, February
“Dragon's Teeth” by Alex Irvine, F&SF, December
“The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” by Catherynne M. Valente, Clarkesworld, August
“The Qualia Engine” by Damien Broderick, Asimov's, April-May
“The Long Cold Goodbye” by Holly Phillips, Asimov's, March
“Wife-Stealing Time” by R. Garcia y Robertson, Asimov's, November
“As Women Fight” by Sara Genge, Asimov's, October-November
“Images of Anna” by Nancy Kress, Fantasy, September 14
“Mongoose” by Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear, Lovecraft Unbound
“Crimes and Glory” by Paul McAuley, Subterranean, Spring “Living Curiousities” by Margo Lanagan, Sideshow
“The Death of Sugar Daddy” by Toiya Kristen Finlay, Electric Velocipede, Spring
“Bespoke” by Genevieve Valentine, Strange Horizons, July 27
“The Persistence of Memory; or, This Space for Sale” by Paul Park, Postscripts 20/21

Original posting, with inside links to the stories that are online, is at Sean Wallace's LiveJournal.

Dec 18, 2009

Titles...and an Anthology

Me and a whole bunch of other folks talk about titles--good and bad, lost and found, imposed and abandoned--with Shawn Speakman over on Suvudu.

On his blog, Marty Halpern has some interesting stuff about the Fermi Paradox and his and Nick Gevers' Fermi-themed anthology Is Anybody Out There?, in which I am very pleased to be included. My story is called "The Word He Was Looking for Was Hello." The book will be out from DAW in June; a complete TOC with story notes is part of the abovementioned blog post.

Dec 15, 2009

Filipino Comic Artists Take Care of Their Own

Nice USA Today article here, with this group of images:



Apart from the fact that this is a most laudable project, one of those guys is drawing my next Marvel project...wish I could say who, but not yet.

DaMarcus Beasley Rises from the Dead

What a goal.



Maybe he's going to remember how to play soccer in time to make the final 23 for South Africa...

Dec 9, 2009

Your Day in Genre Taxonomy and Premature Elegy

N.K. Jemisin, guest-blogging over at VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days, suggests a binary division within urban fantasy. (My .02, given in short form in the comments, is that both of her suggested subspecies de-emphasize the essential nature of the mode, which is the re-creation of the experience of the urban as something fantastical in nature. I wrote an article about this that will show up in a Cambridge UP book Farah Mendlesohn edited, maybe sometime next year.)

Also, the most recent prediction that SF is dying comes from Mark Charan Newton. Hasn't SF been dying (because of women's predominance in the book-buying marketplace/accelerating technological change/the rise of fantasy/the usurpation of central SF tropes by literary writers/whatever else) for decades now? Like, since the 50s? I remember once having a conversation with a professor of mine at the University of Denver. I mentioned doing some writing about SF and he said, "Huh. Science fiction. Is that still a going thing?" Not in a dismissive way--we talked afterward about some SF that he liked--but in the way of someone convinced that SF had once been interesting and now wasn't any more.

It was ever thus...SF has been dying since the moment it was born. Newton follows up here... some interesting stuff in the comments.

Dec 8, 2009

Mighty Cool Dash Shaw Web Series

Episode 1 of The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century AD:

Maybe the Dumbest Thing an Agent Said This Week

From Galleycat: "In Virginia Woolf's day, you just sent in your manuscript and it was published, no questions asked."

Riiiiiight. This insight coming to you from the literary historian who gave us Alec Baldwin's A Promise to Ourselves.

Free Story

Good people of the internet, you can read my story (novelette, if you want to get technical) "Wizard's Six" at the F&SF web site. Its younger sibling "Dragon's Teeth" appeared in the December 2009 issue of that illustrious magazine and is shortly to reappear in a couple of best-of-2009 anthologies...

At the bottom of each of the story's three pages you will note subscription buttons. Use them. It's the holidays!

Dec 3, 2009

Space beer!

Really!

Video at Huffington Post, allegedly...but I can't get it to play.

Also in the Telegraph, a woman who has had plastic surgery to look like Jessica Rabbit.

Dec 1, 2009

The Evidence Is Six Years Old...

...but it proves fairly conclusively that Terry Goodkind thinks you are an idiot. What amazing condescension toward the people who have made him rich (not to mention the other writers of whose work his novels are so transparently derivative).

(via Ansible)