m. c. de marco

Via Walter Jon Williams: Tim Holman’s survey of fantasy book cover art shows that it’s been a bad year for unicorns and dwarves. The comments suggest some creative ways to restore balance to the Force, as it were.

Via Angel Station: One Giant Leap to Nowhere, a depressing New York Times editorial by Tom Wolfe about the unexpected premature end of the space age forty years ago.

I found This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams at the library, and Jo Walton’s review of his Dread Empire’s Fall space opera trilogy at Tor.com. Commenters note that WJW is undermined by his breadth: one year he’s David Weber, the next year he’s Iain M. Banks, and now he happens to be … Charlie Stross, according to a few commenters on John Joseph Adams’ Tor.com review of This is Not a Game.

Walter Jon Williams blogged last week about Useless Day, the unpredictable day of the week on which he gets nothing done. I measure my writing in weeks, so I have Useless Weeks instead. The first week of December, for example, is always a Useless Week of goofing off after NaNoWriMo.

Walter Jon Williams blogs some brief words of doom and gloom for the publishing industry during this live reenactment of 1929:

[P]ublishing runs on credit. The money that is paid to authors is borrowed from banks. Banks aren’t even lending to other banks right now, let alone businesses with the tiny profit margins we see in publishing.

Via del.icio.us sf: SciFan is a database of science fiction and fantasy, classified by theme, author, series, and more. Although the site looks old and perhaps moribund, they assure readers they’re still active:

We update our database almost daily, with the ambition to make it a comprehensive and accurate resource for bibliographies and biographies in our favorite genres. As of today we include 67385 books, 18275 writers, 8195 series & 4285 web links.

Via SFScope: Night Shade Books has published Walter Jon Williams’ Implied Spaces, with bonus downloads. Also new in their catalog is Greg Egan’s Incandescence.