I’m not sure why, but for some reason book reviews written by authors whose work I like tend to carry more weight with me than reviews by almost anyone else. This is why I pay special attention to things like Paul Witcover‘s reviews at Realms of Fantasy and Sci Fi Weekly, or Norman Spinrad‘s review/essays in Asimov’s, etc.
I was pretty pleased, therefore, to see Paul Di Filippo‘s reviews of fantasy for kids in the Washington Post this week–especially since he reviews a couple of my favourite YA authors, the Larbfeld Collective.
Of course, all we cool kids have already read the Midnighters books (by “New York Times best-selling author Scott Westerfeld“!) and the first two of Justine’s Magic books, but it’s still nice to see them getting reviewed, with some other genre works, by a genre (well, at least mostly genre) author, in a major paper.
Today’s great new word, which nicely fills in the spectrum between heresy and apostacy:
takfir: In Islamic law, the term takfir or takfeer (تكفير) refers to the practice of declaring that an individual or a group previously considered Muslims are in fact kafir(s) (non-believers in God). The act which precipitates takfir is termed the mukaffir.
Also new to me this week: muliebrity, which is apparently the female version of virility. Presumably this is one of those words that were made up fairly recently when someone noticed the abscence of a gender mirror for a well established male-oriented word–probably from the Latin muliebritas (“womanhood”).
Over at Meme Therapy, they’ve raised the question “We’ve teleported you to your favorite Science Fiction setting (you’ll thank us later). You’ve just gotten over your initial shock. What do you do now?”
Some of the people answering include authors Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher, Karl Schroeder, and Jeff Ford. (If you dig around a little at the site you can also find interviews with these guys and lots of other good stuff.)
I quite like Ford’s answer:
Grab a fucking ray gun and start blasting hiney headed aliens, whose pulsating domes gush purple jiz when scorched. Then I’d beam up into warp drive and teleport into the vortex of the singularity where my projected consciousness would be downloaded into a quantum pill that I’d take and know myself. After that I’d jump into the suspended animation cradle and slip into a deep slumber in which I’d have a dream that was longer than my life. I’d dream about this girl from high school — Shilla Bonazz. She wore her hair in three pig tails. She chewed Bazooka 24/7.
The world to get yourself put into is pretty clearly Banks‘ Culture, I think, since that’s where any given person has the best odds of getting the best results. (However, if you want to assume that you’d get the good end of any given world, there might be something to be said for the Wild Cards universe as an Ace, or May‘s Galactic Milieu as a powerful operant, or Williams‘ Aristoi universe as one of the aristos, or…)
Overheard in New York is still cracking me up.
Girl #1: You know, I’ve always been interested in a relationship with my cat.
Girl #2: I think that’s illegal… pretty much everywhere.
Girl #1: So is giving your donkey weed, but here we are.
This post (by Stephen Dedman) at Talking Squid amused me greatly. I always like to get some really profane thinking into my blasphemey.
The first comment on the post, though, points out some painful hypocrisy.
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