Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 83

Empty Your Heart of Its Immortal Cyclonopedia

For some time now I've been meaning to mention Paul Charles Smith's excellent new blog Empty Your Heart of Its Mortal Dream, which is devoted to all manner of weird and decadent literature. But now it's become imperative, because he's gone and tackled Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia, a recent favorite of mine.

He's also been mucking about with Cormac McCarthy…

…frolicking with J.G. Ballard…

…kvelling over Elizabeth Hand

…and indepth analysis of a lot of Angela Carter books,

among all manner of...

Charles Yu's How to Live in a SFnal Universe and Other Best SF/F of the Year to Date

I just posted a kind of interim year's best list, showcasing titles that energized and challenged me thus far in 2010. Novels by Michal Ajvaz, Darin Bradley, Brian Conn, N.K. Jemisin, Karen Lord, Thomas Mullen, Nnedi Okorafor, Dexter Palmer, and Charles Yu are all on the list, with further mentions of McDonald, Lowachee, and Holmes.

I want to focus on the Charles Yu novel, How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe, for a moment, as a kind of corrective.

The novel has gotten its share of...

Last Call for Micro-Submissions for HarperCollins Antho

Want to be in a cool book? All it might take is writing 100 to 150 words. But you've only got until the midnight EST on September 7th. That's two days from now.

All the details here, which is also where you should post your entry.

Jeff

PS My NYTBR SF column runs today in the print version. check it out!

Last Call for Micro-Submissions for HarperCollins Antho originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on September 5, 2010.

New York Times SF Column: Lord, Lowachee, and More

My SF/F Chronicle column appears in the New York Times Sunday Book Review this weekend, and the electronic version is already available online. I reviewed novels by Karen Lord, Ian McDonald, Karin Lowachee, and Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud.

I enjoyed all of these books, but I must say I haven't cackled outloud at anything quite so hard as I did at some of the more comical scenes in the Karen Lord novel, Redemption in Indigo, nor been so rewarded in that laughter by the grounded seriousness t...

Thursday Stuff: Last Drink, Booklife UK, 3-Bear, Finch UK

(Yes, there will be Last Drink Bird Head awards again this year…)

This is the dreaded flush-it-all-out-in-one-post post. Too many books out, too much stuff associated with the books, so let's tackle it all here and let you sort through the bits and pieces.

First off, Last Drink Bird Head, the ProLiteracy charity antho we edited Wyrm Publishing last year is out in a Kindle edition. That's right–all the coolness of the John Coulthart layout, Scott Eagle cover art, and Jacob McMurray cover...

Brian Conn's The Fixed Stars

I just participated in a MindMeld where I didn't take the assignment about new movements that seriously, except in the entry entitled "Next Wave". However, another bit, while played for humor, also had a serious component:

Connpunk: Stealthvirus Brian Conn will rewire all of our brains by 2015 and connect them to the Mother Spider that we may power the engines of his narrative monsters. No book not written by Conn will exist by 2020. All hail Conn. (Damn you, Conn.)

Although a joke, I was also ...

"Ann VanderMeer Presents" Art Galleries at io9

(The mighty Ivica Stevanovic; we're collaborating, slowly, on a graphic novel of Finch.)

Time's just gotten away from me, but I wanted to point readers and lovers of cool, grotesque, weird art to Ann's regular art gallery showings of great artists over at io9.

You can view all of them, including the most recent, right here.

Evil Monkey: Steampunk and New Weird

(Hawk Alfredson)

Evil Monkey:

How many Steampunks does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Jeff:

Oh no.

Evil Monkey:

Just guess, dude.

Jeff:

I have no idea.

Evil Monkey:

Two, one to change it and a second to glue unnecessary clock parts to it. (Thanks, James Burnett.)

Jeff:

Sigh.

Evil Monkey:

Now. How many New Weirdies does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Jeff:

….

Evil Monkey:
More than a dozen. You need one to put forth a manifesto about the lightbulb, another to ascribe cosmic malice to the...

The Wesleyan Antho of SF: Spotlight on 1990s–2000s

I just received a copy of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (Arthur B. Evans, ed.; Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., ed.; Joan Gordon, ed.; Veronica Hollinger, ed.; Rob Latham, ed.; Carol McGuirk, ed.).

It looks like a worthy enough volume, and I certainly understand that there are space constraints and other constraints that act upon editors compiling a collection of stories–if I didn't know it before, I know it now from co-editing The Weird with my wife, Ann.

That said, here's the...

Weird Tales: Vids, Fic, Mag

Weird Tales is getting back up to speed, transitioning from Stephen Segal to Ann VanderMeer as editor-in-chief, with Mary Robinette Kowal as art director and Paula Guran heading up nonfiction. The cover of the forthcoming issue is above.

On their site, they've now got a new one-minute video created by Gregory Bossert from text by R. Scott McCoy and original fiction—Aidan Doyle's very surreal and sly story "Mr. Nine and the Gentleman Ghost". Cool stuff!