AndWat's BlogSpot

Closing, but not deleting, this blog

2005-04-14T00:58:00.000-04:00

I have had less time for reading fiction, and still less time for blogging about it, in 2005 than I had hoped and expected. Hence the lack of posts to this blog. I won't be posting here any more. I don't plan to delete this blog, and I may revive it at some point.

In other Andrew-blog-related news, I decided that to move from Blogger to WordPress as my blogging software. My main blog, now and for the forseeable future, is changingway.net. Please visit me there!

Tales from the Trade

2005-02-27T21:26:00.000-05:00

For some reason, I've seen a few interesting blog posts recently about the publishing process. Here are the ones I could find again...

Charlie Stross posted about the development of his fantasy series. Ted Chiang posted about the art on the cover of his collection; he hated the art, and tried very hard to get it changed, but his efforts were in vain. Adam Fawer (guest-)posted about helping along the sales of his first novel.

On the non-ficition side, Joe Wikert posted about Kathy Sierra's post on creating a bestseller.

The gates in NYC

2005-02-16T13:53:00.000-05:00

gates in central park
Originally uploaded by sssnole.

I wish I could get to Central Park to take this in. Thanks to the many who've uploaded photos, particular those who have put their work under a Creative Commons license.

First best thoughts

2005-02-12T21:38:00.000-05:00

Ever since I heard it was coming, I decided I needed The Best of the Best, Gardner Dozois' selection from the first 20 Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies he edited. So here it is on the couch with me, 650+ pages of it. (To be more specific, 688 pages, 1.7 pounds, 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.8 inches.) And here in this post are some earlyish thoughts on BotB.

It's an amazing deal, and would be even at its list price of $20. I got it for $14 out of an Amazon gift certificate, and at that price it seems a steal. The 36 stories in it, each by a different author, span the years 1983-2002, 20 years during which I read little sf and less short sf. Not all the stories are new to me, but I'm starting with the ones that are. So, although the stories are in chronological order, my reading of them isn't.

I've read about a dozen of the stories so far. The two I've enjoyed the most are "Breathmoss" by Ian R MacLeod and "Stories of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. I come to each of these writers from a different direction. MacLeod is already a favorite, and I've written about another of his stories in a previous post.

Chiang, on the other hand, was a writer whose fiction had previously impressed me, but hadn't really got to me. In "Story of Your Life," as in other pieces by Chiang, there are interesting (to say the least) ideas. In his stuff I've previously read (e.g., "Hell is the Absence of God") the main characters, and the ways in which they are linked with the ideas, hadn't convinced me. But the first-person narrative voice of "Story" works well to tie together elements as varied as: linguistics; aliens; talking to one's daughter; and ways of experiencing the world.

Any collection of this nature lends itself to second-guessing, so here's some of mine. I won't get into the micro, the "How come Greg Egan is represented by 'Wang's Carpets' rather than by 'Reasons to Be Cheerful'?" sort of question. I'll focus on wider aspects of this fine anthology.

I'd have liked to see more longer pieces included. For example, Lucius Shepard is represented by the short story "Salvador," and a good one it is too. But he is widely considered to be a master of the novella form, and so the substitution of "The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter" (which I love) or "R&R" (which I've yet to read, but comes highly recommended) might have improved the volume.

Another writer I'd like to have seen given more space is... Gardner Dozois. I've enjoyed his summations at the start of each of the Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies. I'd have loved to read at the start of this volume his summation of the 20 years of sf covered. But he only gives himself 3 pages, which doesn't give him room to say much. However, he does comment on the "lack" of novellas, pointing to "practicial considerations of length."

In summary, I'm very glad to have this anthology. I'd have liked more longer pieces. I would have been willing to lose a little in author coverage (i.e. to have few than 36 authors/stories) in order to shift the balance this way. I would have liked a longer opening from the editor. I'd have been willing to lose the short (about half a page, sometimes a little more) introductions to each story in order to make room for a summation of the 20-year period. But the stories printed here, long, short, and in between, seem to give a very good account of the two decades.

A sign!

2005-02-11T23:26:00.000-05:00

Holy water
Originally uploaded by lil.

When I saw a recent collection of photos from one of my favorite photographer on Flickr, I thought that some of them could be juxtaposed to suggest a story, rather like the chainsaw pictures of a few posts back. Then I decided it was unlikely that a story would do them justice, and that I'd just blog them so that the sign in this post more or less pointed to the falls in the one from a few minutes ago.

Water pic

2005-02-11T23:22:00.000-05:00

Another amazing photo by lil. It looks like the end of a quest. I must go to Bali. Or write a story about a quest. Or update this blog...

Guardian's top 10 litblogs

2005-02-06T10:58:00.000-05:00

The top 10 literary blogs include some with which I'm already familiar (e.g., Bookslut) and some I really must check out soon (e.g., so many books). Even though I check the Guardian Unlimited site most days, I somehow managed to miss this top 10. I arrived at it via this post from yet another good litblog.

Chainsaw graphic novels

2005-02-03T22:35:00.000-05:00

So this Austrian guy Johannes finds an old chainsaw box in his grandfather's shed. On the back of the box is a sequence of four black and white drawings. What does he do? I'm glad to say that he scans the drawings and puts them on his web site, along with an open invitation to add words to turn the drawings into a (micro) graphic novel.

You can find the invitation and a list of the responses here, my micro graphic novel here, and the page at Boing Boing where I found out about the project here.

40 other sf blogs

2005-01-28T23:08:00.000-05:00

Jim Kelly has a (regular?) column in Asimov's SF magazine called "On the Net." The February column, "Breathing the Blogosphere," is at the magazine's web site. It comprises Jim's thoughts on blogging and a list of 40 recommended blogs. This one isn't among the 40; guess that Gaiman guy needs the publicity more...

Flickry goodness

2005-01-23T13:51:00.000-05:00

I've recently signed up to Flickr, and am liking it a lot. Here are some of the reasons why. I can share my own photos. It's free, at least for me, and for other light users. I can browse through photos that others have posted. Tags and groups are among the features that enable me to find stuff to my taste.

For example, here's a photo called "Bind,", by lil. I found it via the "Orangy goodness" group. Those reading this blog at its home, rather than via an aggregator, might have been able to guess that orange is one of my favorite colours. Normal reading-related service will resume soon. But snow-shovelling will have to resume even sooner...

Sunday snow

2005-01-23T13:23:00.000-05:00

Snow, with cars and stairs
Originally uploaded by AndWat.

This is what Boston (and much of the northeast USA, apparently) looks like today. And it's still snowing!

Friday update

2005-01-21T15:45:00.000-05:00

I am still reading The Golem's Eye, and enjoying it, although it doesn't grab me as hard as The Amulet of Samarkand (first book of the Bartimaeus trilogy) did. I've been dabbling in a bunch of other stuff.

Of the fiction I've read online recently, I've enjoyed Elizabeth Bear's "Follow Me Light" the most. In this short story, Bear shows tremendous judgment in choosing what to tell the reader and when, what to hint at, and what to leave unsaid. I started a couple of times trying to work out how to write about it in more detail, but couldn't find a way to do it justice. I've given you this enthusiastic recommendation, and the link; I hope that you'll follow them.

Another (meta)link: my delicious sf links. (del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It tells you what that means here.)

In "real life," I am an academic. The paper submission deadline for one of the biggest conferences in my field recently came and went. I volunteered to review a few papers. A few somehow seems to have turned into eight. So I was not in a good mood when I started looking at the papers. I was in a worse mood when I saw that several of them depart from the conference's submission guidelines. One of them exceeds the page limit, another does not reveal its title, and so on.

This strengthens my resolution that, when I finally get round to sending sf stories to magazines and other outlets, I will be a scrupulous observer of the submission guidelines. Why have the first impression one makes on the a gatekeeper be a bad one?

It's been over a week since my last post to this blog. That's longer than I meant to leave it. But then, if people read blogs via feeds, maybe fresh content is less important for (some) blogs than for (most) other types of web site.

Footnotes in fashion

2005-01-10T20:47:00.000-05:00

I just started reading The Golem's Eye, the second novel in Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. One of the things that makes the prologue a pleasure to read is the footnotes. The narrator, Bartimaeus the djinni himself, adds asides in footnotes such as this one:

Each sentry was a minor djinni, scarcely better than a common foliot. Times were hard in Prague; the magicians were strapped for slaves and quality control was not what it should have been. The chosen semblances of my sentries proved as much. Instead of fearsome, warlike guises, I was presented with two shifty vampire bats, a weasel, a pop-eyed lizard, and a small and rather mournful frog.

Then I realized that I seem to have read rather a lot of footnotes in novels in the last year or so. There are those in The Amulet of Samarkand, the first book in the trilogy. By the way, I just flipped through Golem, and it looks as though most of it is footnote-less, and narrated in the third person. Oh well. More on the book when I finish it.

There are footnotes in Lost in a Good Book, in which Thursday Next, Special Operative in literary detection, finds herself with a lawyer who can only communicate with her using footnotes. Lost is, like Golem, the second book in a series, but Jasper Fforde seems to be threatening to write far more than three Thursday Next books. I devoured The Eyre Affair, the first of them, enjoying its British bookish humour. I found Lost harder going, and couldn't get through the third Thursday. I don't think the books are getting worse, just that two of them should have been my limit.

And of course, there are many wonderful footnotes in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

Trackback

2005-01-09T09:37:00.000-05:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog by the automatic install wizard for Blogger. The installation was very quick and smooth - let's see how the features work. I've turned off Blogger commenting, replacing it with Haloscan's. Blogger currently has no trackback feature, which is why I went to Haloscan in the first place.

El Iskandryia and Veniss

2005-01-08T11:35:00.000-05:00

I recently bought and read Veniss Underground, by Jeff Vandermeer, and Pashazade, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I started the former with a few days remaining in 2004; I'm not sure whether I finished it in 2004 or 2005. The latter is the first book I both started and finished in 2005.

Since I intend to write at least a little about each novel I read in 2005, and had no such resolution in 2004, I'll start this post with Pashazade to make sure I get to it. In the first chapter, we meet Felix, Chief of Detectives of El Iskandryia, at a murder scene. He drinks heavily, smokes, is overweight, and was thrown out of the LA police. I found him the most likeable character in the book.

In the second, we go back a few days and meet the young man who turns out to be the central character, Raf. He has an old fox living inside his head. Why? Well, that's just one of the puzzles about Raf, and he doesn't have the answers to some of them. The next few chapters move us around with respect to date and to main character, until the cast is assembled.

One of the most impressive things about Pashazade is that it's very well thought-out as the first part of a trilogy. It's a murder mystery, resolved within this volume. And it's about the mystery of Raf, much of which remains at the end of this volume. Thus, by the end, there's a well-judged mix of closure and open questions.

Since the setting is important, and unusual in the sf with which I'm familiar, let's read a little about the free Mediterranean port city of El Iskandryia.

The free city was not just built on the rubble of its own history, it used that rubble in the rebuilding. Greek columns reshaped by Roman artisans now formed part of mosque doorways, having been ripped from an earlier Byzantine church. So, too, the cultures had mixed. Until the rich mix became its own culture.

The quoted paragraph illustrates one of the main things that prevented me liking Pashazade as much as I wanted to. The prose seems to be trying to establish El Iskandryia as a fascinating, exotic place, but doesn't succeed in making it so for me. The last couple of sentences quoted. Point to the problem. Short sentences may establish a laconic style suitable for a murder mystery, and make for easy reading, but they don't help to establish the sense of place for which Grimwood sometimes seems to be striving.

Describing the other main ways in which P didn't work for me involves spoilers, so skip over this paragraph if you want to avoid them. Grimwood kills off one of the best supporting characters about halfway through. You can probably guess who it is if you re-read the above, and I tell you that it's not the fox. Then there's the matter of Raf's plucky little neice, whose computer wizardry is introduced rather too late in the novel and rather too convieniently for its plot to be convincing.

This is probably sounding more negative than I intend it to be. I did enjoy Pashazade and will probably pick up Effendi, the second novel in the trilogy, at some point. I've heard a couple of opinions that Effendi is the best of the three books, and I am interested in finding out more about Raf.

I have two main reactions to Veniss Underground. One, Jeff Vandermeer writes very well. Two, Veniss is less real to me than is Ambergris, in which Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen is set. I'll revisit the comparison between the two cities and worlds of Veniss and Ambergris when I've read the definitive version of City of Saints and Madmen (I have an earlier version, comprising four stories). You can make a partial comparison without leaving the comfort of your browser. Among the Vanderstuff online are "Dradin, in Love" and "Quin's Shanghai Circus," the first parts respectively of City of Saints and Madmen and Veniss Underground.

That's enough writing for now. Time to read something.

A Time of Strangeness

2005-01-05T22:06:00.000-05:00

When I started this blog about sf, I never expected to be linking to Time magazine. But since it, like me, has named Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as novel of 2004, here I am linking to the relevant page at Time.com. And to my own comments on the book.

Best of best anthology

2005-01-05T20:49:00.000-05:00

One of my tools for catching up with what's been going on in sf in the years I've been away has been Gardner Dozois' series of best of the year anthologies, which is at the time of writing 21 years old.

I'll probably pick up his forthcoming "best of the best" anthology, which draws on the series' first 20 years. It is due out next month, according to Amazon. The table of contents is currently online here.

Back from England

2005-01-05T07:11:00.000-05:00

We got back into Boston last night, later than we'd hoped due to headwinds.

While in England, I did capture Vandermeer and Grimwood. No, I don't mean that I took hostage the partners in some Dickensian law firm. I mean that I picked up Veniss Underground and Pashazade. I didn't manage to track down the elusively monosyllabic Ford: that is to say, Waterstones in Nottingham did not have The Physignomy.

More soon...

About to fly to England

2004-12-27T13:40:00.000-05:00

My wife's parents have set off through the (melting) snow back to Philadelphia, after spending a few days with us. One of the few days, yesterday, was our daughter's first birthday.

This evening, we fly to spend a week or so with my family in England. I will try not to be deterred by Cheryl Morgan's recent post about values in the UK. My wife is at work, leaving me in charge of Maddie, and of getting started on the packing.

While looking after Maddie and getting ready for the trip, I've been enjoying one of my birthday presents: the Talking Heads' DVD, Stop Making Sense. We've been enjoying it. "Hey, Maddie, see that funny-looking guy? He's going to sing us a song called 'Psycho Killer.' We'll get to 'Burning Down the House' a little later. Isn't this age-appropriate?" (No, I didn't actually say that out loud to her.)

Priorities for books to try and get hold of while in England: Pashazade, by Grimwood (not yet out in paperback in the US); Veniss Underground, by Vandermeer (UK mass market paperback edition includes a story not in the US edition, although said story is in the Secret Life collection, which I'll probably get at some point); The Physiognomy, by Ford (looks to be easier to track down in the UK than in the US).

This will be the last post befeore we fly. I'll try to report from England once or twice. In closing, more about Maddie. If you are reading this at my page, rather than at an aggregator, you can find a link to her profile in the sidebar. And she is the only person in the world who thinks I can dance.

Christmas haul

2004-12-25T18:41:00.001-05:00

Today I opened presents, two of which were books: the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges; and Cities. The latter is a collection of four novellas. I bought it mainly for the one by Paul Di Filippo and and for the one by China Miéville. I've read shorter stuff by the former, liked it, and wanted to see how he'd do on a bigger canvas. I've read Perdido Street Station by the latter, didn't much like it, and wanted to see how he'd do on a smaller canvas. Have so far read the first story in each book. Am currently too lazy to comment...

Ian MacLeod & Richard Thompson

2004-12-25T11:00:00.000-05:00

Of the authors I've "discovered" in my recent re-entry into sf, Ian MacLeod is one of my favorites. Richard Thompson is my favorite musician. There's a lot in common between the work of these two.

I illustrate this here with reference to a specific IM novella, "New Light on the Drake Equation" (first published at online SciFiction in 2001, in the collection Breathmoss, and in at least one best sf of the year anthology) and a specific RT song, "Beeswing" (orginally on 1994's Mirror Blue, also on the Action Packed compilation; the Amazon links enable you to listen to a sample, or you could go to iTunes or similar. If you'd like a description of RT before going to check him out, I think that the best I can do is "folk-rock singer-songwriter-guitarist").

Both "Drake Equation" and "Beeswing" have a male protagonist, who is a less vivid character than the female lead, his former lover. "Drake Equation" is about Tom Kelly, a scientist who is engaged in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) after the rest of the world has withdrawn interest and funding. The woman is Terr, who was a restless graduate student when Tom first met her.

Terr had already worked her way through half a dozen courses, and had grown bored with all of them... she fluttered from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, flower to flower, sipping its nectar, then once again spreading her wings and wafting off to some other faculty.

At first, "spreading her wings" is a metaphor. But it becomes literally true, because the future in which IM sets his story is a "new world of extreme sports, where, if you wanted to do something that your body wasn't up to, you simply had your body changed." Terr does indeed have her body augmented with wings.

The woman in "Beeswing" is just as restless. When the narrator suggested they settle down, she reacted with horror, telling him that "you shan't own me." The couple split up and lose touch. This is how the song ends:

And they say her flower is faded now
Hard weather and hard booze
But maybe that's just the price you pay
For the chains you refuse
She was a rare thing
Fine as a Beeswing
And I miss her more than ever words could say
If I could just taste
All of her wildness now
If I could hold her in my arms today
Then I wouldn't want her any other way.

Self-destruction and drinking are prominent in that quote, and in the song in general. They are also important in the story, which opens with Tom finishing off last night's wine and chasing it with absinthe before driving from his home - a wooden hut on a French mountain - to town.

Of all the similarities between the novella and the song, the most important to me is the tone of melancholy, and how beautifully it is expressed. I think that this comes across in the quote from the song, as much song lyrics can work separated from their music. I won't quote the story to illustrate this, in part because the tone comes from the whole novella rather than from any one passage, and in part because I'm writing a lot more than I thought I would when I started.

I don't want to overstate the similarities between IM's story and RT's song. I won't try to make anything of the title "New Light on the Drake Equation," and how the word light appears in the title of two of Thompson's most important albums, and how Richard played on some of Nick Drake's songs (e.g., electric guitar on "Time Has Told Me").

No, the Drake and the Bee are different creatures. The former is told in the third person, the latter in the first person. Drake is mainly about the male lead, Bee mainly about the female. IM doesn't play lovely acoustic guitar (well, he may do for all I know, but I can't hear it when I read Drake), while RT certainly does. Bee doesn't have, and doesn't strive for, the very strong sense of place that Drake has. While each of Drake and Bee gives a very clear picture of the time in which it's set, they are set in the future and the past respectively. But I hope I've shown that, despite these differences, the similarities are striking.

Since this is an sf blog making one of its occasional links to music, the "typical reader" is more likely to be familiar with Ian MacLeod than with Richard Thompson. Said reader might be interested in some Richard Thompson recommendations. The 3-cd boxed set, Watching the Dark, is excellent. If you're put off by its price, then you could wander across to iTunes and buy in much smaller quantities.

To be specific, how about a song using metaphor to comment on precarious relationships? That's how I'd describe at least two RT songs, and these two happen to be among my favorites. Both are from the days of Richard and Linda Thompson. (They were formerly partners in music and in marriage.) One is Wall of Death, with Richard singing lead and playing electric guitar. The other is The Great Valerio, with Linda singing lead and Richard playing acoustic. If you want more recent RT, then I'd recommend a live track or two (from iTunes or from RT's web site).

In closing, though, I'll mention Watching the Dark again. It's not only a fine selection of RT's work; it's what Tom Kelly is doing when we leave him, SETI-obsessed in his hut, at the end of "New Light on the Drake Equation."

ps No I didn't spend Christmas day writing this. I made a minor edit, and changed the date in order to push it to the top, above my MetaBlog ramblings of yesterday pm.

MetaBlog

2004-12-24T17:55:00.000-05:00

I keep on wondering what blogging is, or should be, all about. In particular, is a blog meant to be read on the day of publication or shortly thereafter, and then ignored because there's so much new content coming on to the web all the time? Or is a blog meant to be a web site that can be linked to and referred back to indefinitely?

A couple of thoughts follow from this. One concerns the site I (rather hastily) chose for this blog. For how long will Blogger/Blogspot keep these blogs around? Will it preserve the URLs? Another thought is that I don't need to arrive at any conclusions about blogging in general, just about this blog.

What will probably work best for this blog is to be a mixture of the ephemeral and the more lasting. For the more lasting stuff, I've added a heading, Selected Posts, to the sidebar, and have set up a list underneath it to link to those posts that I... select. I'll try to maintain such posts against linkrot, and to edit out any writing bad enough to embarras me. That'll leave most of this blog vulnerable to linkrot and other ravages of time.

Talking of linkrot, will this and other blogs at BlogSpot be vulnerable to it? That seems to depend on Google, which now owns Blogger/BlogSpot. And, given what Google does, it seems to be in its interests to maintain content and URLs.

Oh yes, and I guess I should add a site feed. I started reading some of the RSS/Atom debate, decided that it's the kind of thing one needs to treat as either a very small deal or a very big deal, went for the former, and followed the simple instructions in Blogger Help to add an Atom feed.

2005: looking forward to reading

2004-12-23T19:55:00.000-05:00

Actually, my list of books I'm looking forward to reading in 2005 would have a lot in common with some "best of 2003" lists: The Light Ages, Veniss Underground,... Others are looking almost as far ahead as I am behind. One such is Niall Harrison, who has blogged his a book for every month of next year list. If I had such a list, it would probably overlap with Niall's.

Birthday

2004-12-23T10:35:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was my birthday, but I was too busy to blog. Some cool gifts, including a DVD that been on my list for a long time: Stop Making Sense. No books for the birthday, but some of the Christmas-wrapped parcels seem to contain booky goodness.

Merry Miéville

2004-12-20T09:45:00.000-05:00

I just read and enjoyed 'Tis the Season, a Christmas story by China Miéville. It's a satire about intellectual property, published in Socialist Review. I found my way to it by following the link from The Mumpsimus, Matthew Cheney's fine blog. I'm not a particular fan of Miéville - I'll post here soon about why Perdido Street Station didn't work well for me - but this story is a lot of fun, and it's probably good for a blog to be topical, or at least seasonal.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

2004-12-18T22:45:00.000-05:00

My book of the year for 2004 is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. It is set in the early 1800s, mainly in England. But this is not the England of history, although the Duke of Wellington appears, along with other historical characters. Neither is it the England of Jane Austen, although the language in which it is described is certainly Austenesque. Rather, this is an England, and a world, in which magic exists, is studied and, by a few, practiced.

The novel works wonderfully, to a large extent because of the way Clarke's prose captures the country, the period, and the magic. Here is a sample:

Imagine... the interest that surrounded Miss Wintertowne! No young lady ever had such advantages before: for she died upon the Tuesday, was raised to life in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and was married upon the Thursday; which some people thought too much excitement for one week.

Another sample is available online here.

This second sample illustrates one of ways in which Clarke shows us the world she has constructed; she tells us stories from it, often in footnotes.

I haven't said much about plot or character, because neither of them is driving this novel. The plot is a big story about the world, and the characters are pieces of the world. Clarke has more stories to tell about the world, and more pieces of it to show. She reveals this in an interview at her web site. The site also quotes some of the many favorable reviews the book has received. Most of these are from mainstream, rather than from genre-specific, sources.

But the best account of this book I've read is the review by the sf critic John Clute. As well as copious praise, he has a couple of criticisms, each concerning a way in which the book might have been trimmed. I disagree with his assertion that almost every scene in the first 300 pages should have been trimmed. I agree with his assertion that some trimming would have been in order later on in the novel, and that the Greysteel family, who we and Jonathan Strange don't meet until we are more than 500 pages into the novel, should have been cut out. Clarke's novel doesn't need every one of its 800 pages.

Having said that, I loved my 800-page visit to the England, and to the magical world, that Clarke has created. It is rare that I am so thoroughly engrossed by a novel.

Linkup

2004-12-16T14:15:00.000-05:00

One of the things that makes this a good time to get into sf, or to get back into it, is the amount of sf and sf-related stuff online. So there are many worthy sites to which I could link. But to link to too many sites may dilute the recommendation of any particular site. So I'll start off with just a handful of links for this blog, including one or two links each from a few types of site.
We start off with a couple of indexes to sf available online, each organized by author. Free Speculative Fiction Online, as the name suggests, links to sf available at no charge. Best SF Gateway covers much of the same ground, but includes links to sf for which there is a charge. I prefer the organization of the former. I include the latter because I don't want to exclude pay-to-read stuff from my own surfing or from anyone else's.
Of the sites that publish sf online, my favorite is SciFiction. This site publishes an original story most weeks, and republishes a classic about half that frequently. This site is as professional as any sf print magazine in terms of the writing itself and the editing. But access requires neither payment nor registration.
Many sf authors have web sites. My favorite author site is that of Jeff Vandermeer. Jeff's site includes or links to some of his fantastic fiction, his message board, and his blog, which is one of the few I regularly read.
Finally, there are a lot of reviews of sf on the net. Emerald City is my favorite source of such reviews, and includes some other good stuff as well.

Kickoff

2004-12-16T09:30:00.000-05:00

To get this started... I live in Boston, MA, USA, with my wife, our daughter, who will soon be one year old, and our dog. I am an academic. I read a lot, and not just for my job. My recreational reading at the moment includes a lot of speculative fiction (i.e. science fiction and some of its close relatives). That sounds like a lot of very different stuff, to the extent that it's unlikely that more a few people will be interested in all, or even in most of the family, the job, the fiction reading, and whatever else would end up in a general-purpose pan-Andrew weblog.
So this blog will focus on the fiction I read, with occasional comments on other aspects of my life as they intersect with that reading.