Thomas Pynchon seen (or not) from Brazil. Time to confess that I think of Against the Day as something I slogged through and lived to tell about, and I haven’t tried The Bleeding Edge for fear that it’s his Golem100.

Thanx to Metafilter

Why is genre fiction obsessed with Belisarius?

Thanx to Tor.com.

Babel-17 put a space opera, a meditation on language and communication, alternate sex/love arrangements, and a fascinating protagonist into under 200 pages.

Thanx to Tor.com.

Tor.com gives away A Fire upon the Deep, and Jo Walton tells us why it’s so great.

sartorias looks at Tremontaine

Why Ada Palmer writes like that

Thanx to File 770

Major writer bio you can read for the gossip

Thanx to Tor.com.

I tend to the vulgar oversimplification that science fiction is a literature of ideas and fantasy is a literature of dragons, so when there arose a thoughtful, rigorous writer who insisted that he wrote fantasy, I wanted to ask a question from my childhood: “Who lost China?”

China Miéville, like J.G. Ballard and William Gibson before him, was interesting and different enough that people thought he and those resembling him deserved a new subgenre name: in his case, the New Weird. Here is a history of it.

There are a couple of items that seem newer to the author of the article than to me. I do not find it unusual that a new movement name inspires three reactions: (1) This is not a movement but divers writers by violence yoked together. (2) This is a movement, and it’s the best thing since sliced bread. (3) This is a movement, and it’s a threat to our natural bodily fluids. Also, fantasy that thinks like science fiction may be weird, but it wasn’t new. It was the basis of a successful and beloved magazine: Unknown.

Thanx to Metafilter

Roz Kaveney on sf and respectability

Great writers in one sentence each