WWWednesday: January 22, 2014

Lists and awards

Realization: There will never be a time when I do not have lists of books that all of us want and only some of us can afford and none of us have time to read. Here’s Wilder’s Book Review’s 10 books to look forward to in 2014. Am now interested in The Incorruptibles based purely on the woodblock sexiness of the cover.

Jonathan Strahan has also recently released the table of contents for Volume 8 of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and the gender, ethnicity, and even publication diversity is very much appreciated. High fives for helping to silence the old but-we’d-have-to-sacrifice-literary-quality-on-the-altar-of-political-correctness nonsense.

Oh, and there’s more feather-ruffling over the Hugos and who may or may not have ruined them.

Articles and such

Not too much on the thoughtful article front this week, except for Tor.com’s new and terribly exciting column on post-binary gender in science fiction. It might even—stick with me, here—go beyond The Left Hand of Darkness.

Book Riot also ran this killer little sampling of famous literary figures and their browser histories. Except that I’m 900% sure Jay Gatsby’s would be “daisy buchanan.” Owen Meany’s (IN ALL CAPS) is just perfect though. Those who feel inspired are invited—nay, encouraged—to provide the internet search histories of fantasy and sci-fi characters at will.

Writing and publishing

But there’s lots of interesting interweb news, so:

• Ann Leckie held and open forum discussion thingy at iO9, and answered some pretty interesting questions in the comments.
• Damien Walter ponders the age old question: can the WHEEL OF TIME books collectively win a Hugo? If that series–which is several hundred pounds of flammable material useful almost exclusively in an apocalyptic-survival situation–wins a Hugo, then then the universe has lost all sense and order. Not to sound biased or snobbish.
• There’s a call for papers to an entire conference on Lois McMaster Bujold. This is a real thing. That is happening.
• Alan Moore has apparently done his last interview, in which he says many huffy things about how superheroes are lame and adults shouldn’t be so obsessed with them.

Pretty things

Oh, so many pretty and strange things for you all. Enjoy:

• Via Tor.com, we have an artistic rendering of The Neverending Story that makes the luck dragon less of a scary muppet thing.
• And here’s CollegeHumor’s annual honest titles for the Oscar nominees.
• Much more sincerely, here’s a really, really cool tumblr thingummy for Hugo-eligible artists. Holy moly, guys, Sarah Webb.
• Back to less serious, somebody has apparently illustrated Game of Thrones as Japanese woodblock art.
• And on to straight up depressing: Here’s a vision of Africa if it had never been colonized. To which we should all say…eh, sort of. Except that only parts of Africa were into the whole statism thing, with accompanying political boundaries, and not everybody would even have seen their cultural territory as a physical geography, and even this might not be enough countries because dude there are 3,000 languages up in that continent. But still. Cool.