I had planned to announce my latest e-book today, but Amazon is slow in putting the pages up, so that announcement will have to wait for tomorrow.
So instead of an e-book announcement, here is a linkdump:
I noted my dissatisfaction with the results of the National Public Radio Best Science Fiction and Fantasy poll before. It seems that I am not the only one unhappy with that poll (and even the longlist was seriously skewed towards certain subgenres, while almost completely omitting others). Nancy Jane Moore offers this list of 243 science fiction novels, suggested by the readers of the Book View Café. And at Dreamwidth, someone named eruthros has also called for nominations for an alternative list, though this one will include not just books and short stories, but also films, TV shows, comics and fanfiction.
Angry Robot Books introduces the pretty cool Worldbuilder project.
The 2011 longlist for the German Book Award (Deutscher Buchpreis), which is supposed to be the German language equivalent to the Booker Prize or Prix Goncourt, was announced yesterday. The longlist is a mix of established writers and debut authors. In general, the German book award has a decent track record of getting little known authors and unusual works on the long- and even on the shortlist (last year’s shortlist even included an SF novel of sorts), but winners tend to be very conventional fare, usually family sagas involving either the Third Reich or Communist East Germany or ideally both (the German Book Award judges love family sagas) or examinations of the lives of self-involved urban thirtysomethings, who are inevitably revealed to be shallow and selfish by the narrative, because they don’t want children and eat Vietnamese food* and don’t worry about the implications of terrorism all the time. Last year’s winner, a novel about the immigrant experience by a young Swiss writer, was actually one of the outliers.
Over at the Pegasus Pulp blog, you can also read how German TV almost discovered indie publishing.
*No, I have no idea what’s wrong with eating Vietnamese food either. As far I remember the excerpt of a shortlisted work I read several years ago, the problem was that Vietnamese food was considered normal, which it well should be after more than thirty years of immigration from Vietnam.
sending...