My Favorite SFF Things, 7/23-8/11/2012
Clarion 2012 is over, and focusing on awesome SFF stuff happening around the world/web is helping me keep from hyperventilating, or curling up into a ball and never emerging.
Rejoice, New York City speculative fiction fans!! Singularity & Co is opening up what sounds like an amazing new SFF bookstore!! I’ll be heading out to Brooklyn ASAP to check it out. Kick em some cash on Kickstarter, if you’re so moved. Among other things, they aim to “Build an open source book scanner (see http://www.diybookscanner.org/for an example) to aid in turning forgotten paper books into e-books.”
Carlo Rambaldi passed away - the brain behind awesome things like the Aliens xenomorphs, the Silver Bullet werewolf (my favorite werewolf ever)… and creepy things like E.T.
The peerless & crucial Racebending.com has a great piece up about the racially problematic casting call for Spike Lee’s remake of Oldboy. It includes an amazing Twitter exchange between Racebending & Spike himself, which must be seen.
My hero and Clarion instructor Jeffrey Ford is serially publishing a great story on his Live Journal.
AND SPEAKING OF JEFFREY FORD! if you’re going to be in NYC on August 15th, he’ll be reading at KGB Bar. And if you’re NOT going to be in NYC, you should be. I’ll be there!
In light of recent con-cons (convention controversies - no, that’s not a real abbreviation, I just made it up), John Scalzi has a helpful incomplete guide to Not Creeping.
Jason Sanford, who I think is great, just got a story accepted at Asimov’s.
Nick Mamatas is going to be on a bunch of panels at Worldcon, and therefore I think if you’re going to be at Worldcon you should go to those panels.
Tor.com features a Barnes & Noble Bookseller’s roundup of the best SFF books.
Chinese SFF wins big at the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards! Big props to winner Ken Liu, who I adore.
In books I’ll definitely be checking out, Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty (Graywolf Press) is a “fictionalized nonfiction” book about the Soviet Union - one of my favorite subjects.
