Up and Away

From tomorrow on, I will be in Ireland until Tuesday, May 2nd.

I’ll take my netbook along and will try to make the occasional post. Nonetheless, blogging will be light, since I don’t yet know how the Wi-Fi connectivity is and I really don’t want to spend my holidays hanging around in a coffeeshop with my netbook.

Expect more details about my trip as well as photos, when I get back. You can also expect my first e-book to go live sometime in May. I had actually planned to get everything done over the long Easter weekend, but life intervened. Finally, I also feel the stirrings of a new longer project. Ah, good times.

In the meantime, I leave you with some links:

It’s definitely awards season. This weekend, the BSFA awards were awarded. Ian McDonald won the best novel award for The Dervish House, while Aliette de Bodard won the best short story award. Paul Kincaid won the award in the non-fiction category.

The Dervish House was also nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke award, but lost out to Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. I didn’t get around to reading Zoo City yet, but the reviews have been excellent. Besides, it’s always great to see an award of international importance go to a writer who is not from the US or UK. And now the Clarke Award has been won by South African writer and the BSFA award by a French writer. Our genre is getting a lot more international and that alone is reason to celebrate.

As if winning the Clarke Award wasn’t enough, Lauren Beukes also has a post about writing the Other at the World SF blog.

At the Guardian site, literary translator Helen Stevenson talks about the challenges of translating the works of Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou into English.

There is an interesting discussion about experimental SF and fantasy going on at Jeff Vandermeer’s blog.

At Tribal Writer Justine Musk discusses “the creative gap” and how to get through it.

And now for something funny: In the Guardian a mother recounts how a discussion with her nine-year-old daughter about tadpoles evolved into a discussion about human reproduction. Hilarious and so true.