Still getting back on track from company visiting and the Read Roger post that sucked me in way way way too deep. (I foolishly used an aircraft analogy in discussions about freebies. Now someone is suggesting I will forever own Cessna aircraft because they smartly sent me free mugs and blankets. I guess I can see how folks think our review of a book can be bought with a cupcake if they think a $400,000 aircraft decision hinges on a free mug. Good grief!) (And no - I'm not going back to that thread!!)

Anyway, Dorman T. Shindler has a review of the Mike Resnick edited 2007 Nebula Showcase over at Subterranean Press online. Along with some interesting thoughts on Kelly Link, he concludes with this comment about a Harlan Ellison reprint included in the book:

It’s powerful stuff, and not a word of it is science fiction…or fantasy. But it’s also a fine reminder that the best writers in the field of SF& fantasy don’t pay attention boundaries, borders, streams or pigeonholes, preferring to blaze their own trails and look back in wonder when all is said and done.

Another reminder of why I love the SF genre, and continue to seek out YA titles to get teens loving it as well.

Resnick also has a great piece on the creation of his character Lucifer Jones up at the site as well. Although I don't think this counts as an author interview (perish the thought!) I appreciate the peek he gives his readers into the always interesting nature of creativity.

Don't know if you missed this but Ray Bradbury won a Pulitzer (as did the divine John Coltrane).

Ed really needs to do some donating - the man is going to be buried if he isn't careful. (Another reason why most bloggers can not be bought with books - there are just too damn many of them!)

Jenny Diski on Lapland - here's a taste:

n her Acknowledgements, Vendela Vida thanks Galen Strawson for an article that got her thinking about "the kind of person who would see their past as unconnected to their present". This was the mainspring of her novel. Clarissa, discovering her life to have been a lie (or, rather, that those she loved had lied to her) makes her journey and then remakes her life. The melodramatic nature of her discovery, and the geographical extremes she has to go to in order to resolve the mystery, make her a rare case: most people engage in much more quotidian struggles to connect who they were to who they are. Clarissa's disconnection between her then and now doesn't seem particularly unusual - only the lengths to which she has to go to realise it mark her out; for my taste, far too clearly as the heroine of a novel in search of the somewhere else of fiction.

Concern is building over Jane Campion's John Keats biopic - will it be pretty to watch but far from the truth? I just read the excellent YA biography collection Wildly Romantic and I have to say the Keats story comes across as just plain sad more than anything else. I'm not sure if I could watch a movie where the hero dies coughing up his own lungs and basically choking in blood. (I doubt this is a spoiler.) Yes, there was a romance, but when two of his brothers died from the same horrible disease, the whole thing is not looking very date night to me.