Books

Spook Country on SFAW

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Generating traffic for a web site is a fascinating problem. There are all sorts of quick fix ideas offered, but basically nothing beats having content than people will link to of their own free will. But what do you do if you have something you think is really good, but no one is linking to it? Well, obviously you might be wrong about it being good, but maybe no one knows it is there. So maybe a nudge or two is in order.

What has got me thinking about this most recently is that I finally got a good book discussion going on Science Fiction Awards Watch. It has a great panel: Ellen Datlow, Lou Anders, Mike Levy and Rick Kleffel. The actual discussion is very interesting. Yet Google Analytics tells me that to date a mere 22 people have bothered to take a look. That’s kind of disappointing.

Still, new venture and all that. Maybe I just need to spread the word. We shall see. Launching wouldn’t be interesting if it wasn’t a challenge.

Journalist Can’t Count – Shock Horror!

~ Cheryl

Today’s Guardian contains a new shock story about the book trade. A survey of 1,324 publishing industry professionals taken at the Frankfurt Book Fair produced the amazing prediction that the high street bookstore may have vanished in 50 years time. Wow. And just how many of the respondents were saying this? Was it as many as 90%? Of course not. Perhaps two thirds? Well, no. More than half? Sorry, try again. The overwhelming statistical support for this idea came from “Almost a quarter” of those who took the survey.

Cue shock story about declining standards in maths teaching in British schools.

Video Book Reviews (really!)

~ Cheryl

Jeff VanderMeer has just posted the first in a promised series of video book reviews. Why? You may ask. Have the gray caps finally got to him? Well no, because what he’s reviewing are books that you really have to see to appreciate how good they are. Of course it helps that he is featuring Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, both of which are big favorites of mine, but the other two books he has picked also work really well in the video format. Well worth checking out.

Reading Update

~ Cheryl

Dana Copithorne’s The Steam Magnate is one of those books that I would have loved to talk about in Emerald City. It is a bit slow, and none of the characters are terribly sympathetic, so I can’t see it having mass appeal, but it is very different from the run of the mill fantasy. It is set in a world that is in some ways more technologically advanced than ours, and in some ways less so, and a rather muted level of magic is an accepted technology. If you like interesting fantasy novels, this one is recommended.

In Borders yesterday I picked up Fugitives of Chaos, the sequel to John C. Wright’s Orphans of Chaos, which I have been looking forward to for some time. Love the cover – nice job, Irene.

Bookstore Happiness

~ Cheryl

I like my local Borders. When the girl on check-out starts enthusing to you about Neil Gaiman and Elizabeth Bear you know that the store is doing a good job.

Neil, Bear – if either of you know the girl I’m talking about, she deserves a thank you present from me. Email me.

All of which reminds me, Borders has started the 3 for 2 thing over here. I noticed this the day I was in San Jose to see Neil. I had a lot of time to kill between his gig and the evening event with the CVB, and I spent part of it browsing in the Borders around the corner from the Fairmont. They had two good books in the offer, but I couldn’t find a third, so I decided to try my local Borders at the weekend; it is much bigger so I expected a bigger selection. Much to my astonishment, I found that they had an entirely different selection of books on 3 for 2. And not just that they’d sold out of the ones I wanted – they were in stock, but not in the offer. How about that – local stores making a decision about what to put on special. Can you imagine that happening in the UK?

Cheap Books

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I have an email voucher for 20% off full price items at Borders stores in the UK and Ireland. It says on it please distribute to all of your friends. It is good through Dec 3rd. Email me if you want one.

Blimey, the Beano!

~ Cheryl

Paul Gravett was a Guest of Honor at AnimeCon in Finland this year, and a very nice chap he turned out to be. I think the friend he brought with him was Peter Stanbury. That would make sense because the two of them had been hard at work on Great British Comics, here reviewed enthusiastically by The Guardian.

Reading Update

~ Cheryl

Having just uploaded a new “Currently Reading” image, I figured I’d better say a few words about those books I have read but will not be reviewing.

I covered Dreamhunter by Elizabeth Knox in Emerald City. The second half of the duet, Dreamquake, is now available. These books are YA, and there are parts of them, especially Dreamquake, that are clearly aimed at teenage girls. However, there’s some serious plotting going on too, and towards the end the books turn up to be surprisingly science-fictional. As YA books go, these are decent adult reading.

Guy Gavriel Kay kindly sent me a copy of his new novel, Ysabel. It isn’t out until the new year, but you might want to pre-order it now. I can’t say much without creating spoilers, but I will say that it is a major departure for Kay, being set in modern times, but it still oozes history and long-time Kay fans are going to be very happy.

Beery Goodness

~ Cheryl

Small Beer Press have some great books due out next year, including the new Elizabeth Hand novel, Generation Loss, and John Crowley’s final Aegypt novel, Endless Things. You can pre-order here. Go on, you know you want to. (Thanks Jonathan!)

Here We Go Again

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

According to today’s Guardian the French have decided that all reviewers are liars and cheat, always on the take. Goodness only knows how much of this is true, or even partially true but blown massively out of proportion for the purpose of selling newspapers, but as usual the end result, whether it is true or not, will make people even less likely to trust reviewers. I am so glad I am out of that game.

Geek Heaven

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This week Oxford University Press is publishing a book called They Never Said That. It is a dictionary of quotations that weren’t. You know, things like “Beam me up, Scotty” and “Elementary, My Dear Watson.” I can’t think of a better present for your favorite geek. Armed with this book, every time someone makes a quotation from a science fiction movie or TV series, he’ll be able to say, “ah, well, that’s not quite right, you see, what he actually said was…”

Clute and I were discussing the book yesterday morning. We agree with its editor that one of the best things about it is that the “wrong” quotations are often much more apposite than the originals. Language evolves, and so do quotes.

Mainstream Watching

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

There have been a couple of interesting articles in the UK papers over the weekend. The first is from The Independent, and it looks into the scary fact that Booker Prize winning author, John Banville, has written (Shock! Horror!) a crime novel! Naturally this has been done under a pseudonym – mainstream authors are just as much a brand as SF writers. I would have been amused if he had called himself John M. Banville, but actually he’s gone for the traditionally gritty gumshoe name of Benjamin Black. Banville also admits to finding writing genre fiction liberating.

I’d been writing ‘literature’ since I was 12. So I needed to do this. I’m already half-way through the next one in the series and I’m having a peculiar kind of holiday from myself.

The article is also quite interesting for what Banville has to say about living in Ireland under a theocracy. Being British, I’m not going to comment on any of that, except to say that if Banville’s assessment of Catholic Ireland is anywhere near correct I’ll take freedom, with all its faults and responsibilities, any day.

The other article of interest is in The Guardian. Following the public passion for list-making, they a have asked a bunch of literary luminaries to vote on what they think is the Best British/Irish/Commonwealth (a long-winded way of saying “not American”) Novel of the past 25 years. The list of also-rans is fascinating. It includes Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, all of which have obvious SF&F themes. There are also books by Angela Carter, Michael Moorcock and Iain Banks. The literary community is doubtless currently engaged in frenetic speculation as to which of the “literary sages” voted for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Waterstones Launches New Web Site

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Slowly but surely the UK’s retail sector is catching on to the Internet. Instead of whining about losing sales to Amazon, Waterstones have finally launched their own web site. (Yes, they did have one before, it was outsourced to Amazon, to whom they claimed to be losing sales hand over, oh never mind.) The new site looks quite good. SF/F/H has its own section, but then so do Crime and Romance so we are not being picked on. There’s not a lot in the way of non-sales content, but they do have a “best SF” page with a fascinatingly ecclectic collection of books on it. Talking of odd mixes, there’s a an “Award winners” page, that includes the Clarke and the Hugo but not the BSFA or World Fantasy, includes the Stoker but not the IHG.

Still, the important point is that they will ship overseas, so US readers who currently buy from Amazon UK might want to do some comparison shopping. Ditto those of us who live in Darkest Somerset and need to visit other towns to find a Waterstones.

By the way, those of you with an interest in online retailing might like to check out this Guardian article which has a brief section describing how various major UK retailers are doing.