Welcome to another edition of World Wide Wednesday, Fantasy Literature’s quick look at what is buzzing around the Internet.
1) China Miéville is not on Facebook!
We’re a little late on this one, since the fake profiles have since been taken down, but Deanna Hoak first brought us Mr Miéville’s letter to Facebook. Just be careful that all the people you friend on Facebook are who they say they are!
2) Sticking with China…
We’ve also seen posts this week involving China Miéville and John Mullan in conversation at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in the UK. This proved interesting thanks to the commentary about the Booker Prize and the lack of genre representation.
3) Why can’t we all kiss and make up?
When the Booker Prize winner was announced last week (The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson won, if you didn’t know!) we had the usual round of posts concerning under-representation of genre fiction in literary prizes. Whereas other people mostly wanted everyone to kiss and make up!
4) Embargoes
Some people think embargoes don’t apply to them.
5) Censorship
Okay, warning first up – the post I’m about to link to links through to some rather disturbing content, so be careful about young eyes. Fantasy and Scifi Lovin’ is talking about censorship – are some films so vile that they actually make the case for censorship? Where does art stop?
6) Things I Don’t Have to Think About Today
John Scalzi brings us a truly wonderful stream-of-consciousness essay which makes you re-evaluate your own life. This really should be read widely – Things I Don’t Have to Think About Today.
7) Epic Fantasy
Adam brings us the question “What is epic fantasy?” and then proceeds to provide some answers in terms of the distribution of power. A quality read (and check out the subtitles for the pictures!)
8) Longest Fantasy Series
At the other end of the spectrum in terms of serious work, we have The Walk into Mordor blog aiming to show which are the longest fantasy series. It’s not scientific, but some of the results are fairly surprising!
9) The rise and fall of speculative magazines!
In this edition we bring you both the rise of a new print and pdf magazine as championed by the fab Lou Anders – BULL SPEC and the demise (again) of Realms of Fantasy.
10) Free Readin’
The Black Library – providers of Warhammer and Warhammer 40K tie-in fiction – have started producing eBooks. As a celebration of this fact, for all the Fridays during October they are issuing free eBook copies of some of their classic titles.
Thanks for the news, Amanda!
I hate to see bloggers fighting with each other (over the embargo in this case). I like to pretend this kind of angst doesn’t exist. Who cares who gets out the first reviews of TOM? We will be submitting to the WOT embargo because we promised the publisher we would.