m. c. de marco

I’m hoping to read some of these stories, but for now they’re just a blog post: William Shunn recommends these top ten Podcastle podcast stories; and Pyr passes along Bookgasm’s top 5 books of the year and also collects praise for Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Here’s a lovely flash fiction story by Erica Hildebrand, a fellow Odyssey graduate: Product Safety.

I probably tweeted this back when it came out, but here, via a mailing list I’m trying to catch up on, is the Telegraph’s story on folktales:

A study by anthropologists has explored the origins of folk tales and traced the relationship between varients of the stories recounted by cultures around the world.

The researchers adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ancestor.

I try to read a few books by a lot of authors rather than all the books by a few authors, but in certain cases I’m a fangirl and I try to read them all. Usually this is easy to do, because the books are laid out in a particular order (Lois McMaster Bujold, Gene Wolfe), there aren’t so many of them (Mary Doria Russell, Greg Egan), or I’ve been following them long enough to pick everything up (Walter Jon Williams, Doris Lessing).

But in some cases the task is overwhelming. I find myself fifteen or twenty years behind on the output of some prodigies of literary prodigality.

At io9, there’s a review of last year’s The Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko. I found it by accident in the library a couple of weeks ago, and I agree with the reviewer, more or less:

The Walls Of The Universe is a really fast, entertaining read, with nice, crisp prose. (At one point, Rayburn hits a guy with a tire iron, and he falls “like a suit off a rack.”) The little character touches, and the parallel between the two Johns’ stories in the two alternate universes, add a lot to the basic idea.

Jon Evans at Tor.com explains some of the South African cultural references in District 9:

District Six. A famous ghetto in Cape Town, always South Africa’s most liberal city, in which people of all races coexisted harmoniously even during the apartheid years. In the 1970s, more than 60,000 people were forcibly removed from the district and resettled elsewhere, on the grounds that interracial interaction bred conflict.

At io9, a book review of Memory Sticks by Wood Ingham:

A few months ago, Wood Ingham joined with authors Will Hindmarch and Chuck Wendig, to form an on-line writer’s collective known as Jet-Pack. Although initially connected by their work for RPG publisher White Wolf, the three authors’ flash fiction and short stories revealed a series of off-kilter realities and glossy dystopian futures.