Weekend Links

Here are a few interesting links to things that have grabbed my attention:

Jonathan McCalmont has a very detailed review of Ian McDonald's Brasyl. He likes it perhaps even more than I did and I found his take on the end sequence to differ somewhat from many who complained about how it "weakened" the novel. His point of view is similar to mine, although I think McDonald perhaps could have been a bit more concise in the explanations. More on that another time.

Interesting review of Sarah Hall's just-released-in-the-US book, Daughters of the North (The Carhullan Army in the UK)

Small Beer Press has released John Kessel's story collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, as a free download under a Creative Commons license.

Matthew Cheney on the ridiculousness of a group trying to define what is and what is not a poem. My response to that: There are many more words to be wasted saying what one is not than are dedicated to exploring what is.

SF Signal Mind Meld discussion piece on the state of short fiction today.

Hal Duncan has a few free downloads that might be of interest to some reading this, including a novella that apparently hasn't yet been released in any format before.

Tobias Buckell asks his readers what they look for in a review, reminding me that I still have to write something to that effect later.

Nic of Eve's Alexandra reviews Clarke Award finalist Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel, which I'm planning on reading in the next week or so for a future review here.

Fantasy Book Critic has an interview with Alan Campbell.

James Nicoll writes about the question of if/how genre awards are exercises in futility.

Via Science Fiction Awards Watch, the nominees for the Compton Crook Award (best first novel). Read Abercrombie and Rothfuss's entries, might read the others some other time.

And finally, Realms of Speculative Fiction has a roundup of genre-ish blogs that interest that new band of Slovenian bloggers. Nice selection, even if I view epic fantasy works (the well-written ones, anyways) a tad more favorably than what might be presumed after reading that piece!