Publishers’ Weekly has a review of the Year’s Best SF:

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection Edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martin’s Griffin, $21.95 (704p) ISBN 978-0-312-55105-6

Veteran editor Dozois, 15-time Hugo winner, offers 30 stories, several of them Hugo-nominated. The table of contents is dominated by familiar names like Michael Swanwick and Greg Egan, but occasionally leavened with relative newcomers like Hannu Rajaniemi and more obscure authors like James Alan Gardner. Settings range from the present-day (Nancy Kress’s “The Erdmann Nexus”) to the distant future (Ian McDonald’s “The Tear”) and alternate history (Aliete de Bodard’s “Butterfly, Falling at Dawn”). Similarly the moods range from relatively upbeat (Dominic Green’s “Shining Armour”) to pessimistic (Swanwick’s “From Babel’s Fallen Glory We Fled”). In some entries the SF elements appear to be almost an afterthought, but most earn their inclusion. Dozois also provides short biographies, a detailed overview of the year in SF and a lengthy list of honorable mentions. This is a worthy addition to a venerable series. (July)

Ha, neat.

(yeah, I know, “Aliete” is mispelled. I’ve checked with Gardner Dozois, and everything should be fine in the final version of the book. Plus, I suspect I’m the only “de Bodard” writing spec-fic anyway *g*)

Amazon lists the book as coming out on June 23rd. *excited*

-Editor extraordinaire Jetse de Vries is running a series of very interesting articles on optimistic SF around the world here, and is also having a number of musings about change in Africa and the Islamic world respectively

-Mary Robinette Kowal over at AMC with an article on The Worst-Dressed Women Warriors in Fantasy. Oh yes. It’s amazing how movie women never ever dress sensibly for the battlefield (you’re left feeling they want to find themselves a husband/lover on the battlefield instead of victory). And don’t get me started on exposed necks and the general lack of helmets…

-Fellow Campbell Nominee Gord Sellar has a fascinating post on SF, culture and translation, taking the example of Korean spec-fic.
When you think about it, it’s a source of endless fascination how the US manages to export its myths, dreams and ways of thinking around the world. There’s a number of tropes (the self-made, uneducated man, the lone hero/maverick, the Frontier Myth) that feel very American to me, and that, as Gord points out,  shouldn’t translate well to other cultures (the lack of education would be a killer in France or in Asia).

I think a big part of it is economic factors (France was also exporting a large part of its culture at a time when it was the dominant economic power in Europe): a sort of mimetism, whereby people adhere to US values in the hopes of being as prosperous as the US. Also, of course, a very commercially-driven export, with an infrastructure geared towards selling as many copies worldwide as possible.

Still… Wonder why it’s working so well for the US, in comparison to other countries. Am I missing something else that’s obvious?

Garked from Vylar Kaftan, a rundown of characters in my stories by gender, race, sexual orientation, age, class and ability. I wanted to add religion as well, but faith is quite a different kettle of fish when the gods are allowed to be main characters.

I tracked 172 main characters: the arbitrary part of the selection was choosing whether a character should be included or not. I went with “has significant part in plot”, but even that is debatable… If a character appeared several times (in different stories), I only counted them once.

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At Worldcon 2005, I bought the first two books in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates. I read them, and wasn’t really drawn into them: they were too complicated, and I hated the ending of at least one of them (Deadhouse Gates, which was pretty depressing). So, when I got book 5, Midnight Tides, in the WFC bookstash, I neatly put it away at the back of my bookshelf, thinking I would never really read it, but hating to lose a good hardback.

Until Saturday, when I was desperately looking for something I could read, and could find nothing but that one. 

The fact that I finished it over the weekend is probably a sign that my reading tastes have changed. Wow. I just loved the whole worldbuilding, with the various races vying for supremacy in an unfamiliar world, and the Ascendants interfering in everyday life in sneaky ways. The various characters were awesome, from the slaves to the mad Emperor to the undead thief. Yeah, the ending was pretty bleak as well, but I didn’t mind so much–it was a welcome change from some of the sappiness I’ve read recently. 

Obviously, I’m becoming more patient and less dreamy-eyed as I grow older

(and I’m digging up those two previous books to reread them, and ordering all the others)