Three Links and Two Plugs

I’m still here for now. The big (or not so big) switchover will happen later today. I hope there won’t be any service interruptions here, though I managed to get the year’s first two translation jobs out of the door just in case the internet fails on me.

And now for some links:

Tor.com has an appreciation of Isaac Asimov on the occasion of what would likely (since Asimov did not know his exact birthdate) be his 92nd birthday.

Isaac Asimov also features quite prominently in the results of Locus Online‘s recent poll about the best SF and fantasy works of the 20th and 21st century. The 20th century results are heavily weighted towards the classics of the genre, but not all that controversial. Meanwhile, the 21st century results leave me scratching my head. So John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War is the best SF novel of the 21st century to date? Really? And Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl is still voted the third best SF novel of the 21st century to date, in spite of all the well-documented issues with the novel? Meanwhile, there are very few woman writers on any of the lists. Writers of colour don’t fare very well either. And urban fantasy is apparently not fantasy, unless written by Neil Gaiman. In short, the results say more about Locus‘ core readership than about the best SF and fantasy of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The New Yorker has an overview about the juiciest literary feuds of 2012. The annual Günther Grass uproar is of course included, though I wonder whether The New Yorker couldn’t find a photo of Grass that was taken sometime in the past forty years, cause the one that illustrates the article is ancient. They misrepresent the Dave Eggers thing as well, because Günther Grass is only tangentially involved with the Günther Grass foundation and the Albatross award. So Eggers did not snub Grass (not that Grass would have cared – he likes stirring up shit), but instead snubbed the awards organizers, jurors, bookstores, etc… by canceling his appearance at the last minute and he snubbed his own translator, because the Albatross award is given for a work translated into German and split between author and translator. And trust me, you do not want to snub your translator.

Plus, they missed Christopher Priest versus the Clarke Awards, even though that dust-up was a lot more amusing than the annual “Günther Grass pisses off someone” go-around.

Finally, here are two plugs for worthy projects:

Book Matchers is a search engine which allows you to enter all sorts of parameters and then recommends you a bunch of books (mostly indie so far) which matches those parameters.

Like many other German children and teens I loved Tamara Ramsay’s fantasy classic Die wunderbahren Fahrten und Abenteuer der kleinen Dott when I found it at the school library years ago. Now Malve von Hassel has translated this classic novel into English. Rennefarre: Dott’s Wonderful Travels and Adventures is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo and likely elsewhere.