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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
grahamsleight's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, September 6th, 2008 | |
| 11:59 am | Question Has anyone out there sent me a packet recently that's too big to fit through a regular letterbox? If so, could you let me know what it is? I'm waiting in for a Royal Mail redelivery of it, but it's looking increasingly like they've messed that up, and it'd be helpful to know how big this thing is if I have to trek out to the sorting office. |
| Saturday, July 12th, 2008 | |
| 11:47 am | An anthology For my own reference as much as anything, a selection of my favorite poems from the late ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} tomsdisch's LJ Endzone. I freely admit to having omitted some stuff that offended me politically. (There were some difficult cases here: I wound up including Arab Love but omitted Job Application. Your mileage may vary. Beyond a certain point, as with Larkin, the politics are an unavoidable part even of this partial selection.) The headings are mine and are almost certainly too cookycutter, but helped me make some sense of the material. The selection is skewed, I realise, toward the material he published in 2006 and 2008: for some reason - repetition, perhaps? - I wasn't as taken by as many of the 2007 poems. ( Many links behind the cut ) |
| Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 | |
| 11:22 am | BSFA interview I would normally mention this later, but since a lot of people round here are about to get swept up in Eastercon, an early announcement. I'll be interviewing Paul Kincaid, aka peake next Wednesday 26th March, about sf criticism and in particular his new book What it is we do when we read science fiction. This is part of the BSFA's monthly series of author interviews, and takes place at the new venue (the upstairs room of The Antelope pub, 22 Eaton Terrace, London SW1) and usual time (7pm, though fans are normally around from 6pmish.) |
| Thursday, January 10th, 2008 | |
| 5:05 pm | Congratulations to Christopher Barzak, whose first novel One for Sorrow has won this year's Crawford Award. Locus has the shortlist. |
| Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 | |
| 2:02 pm | BSFA interview This month's interviewee at the BSFA meeting in London will be Roz Kaveney, writer, editor, political activist, and not least LJer rozk. I'll be asking the questions, next Wednesday 24th October, from about 7pm at the Star pub in Belgravia (upstairs bar). As usual, fannish faces can be found there from around 6pm, and we'll all decamp for a meal at the local Spaghetti House afterwards. |
| Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 | |
| 11:40 am | BSFA interview tomorrow In my ongoing role as understudy interviewer for the BSFA, I'll be taking the place of Pat McMurray - temporarily stranded, I believe, in Nether Amazonia or somewhere - and interviewing the very wonderful Juliet McKenna (aka jemck) tomorrow. Usual place: the Star pub in Belgravia from around 7pm - full details here. |
| Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 | |
| 11:51 am | |
| Saturday, August 25th, 2007 | |
| 7:54 am | ...and more Heinlein. This time, online extracts from the discussion I did with John Clute and Gary Wolfe, which is printed in full in the August Locus. |
| Friday, August 24th, 2007 | |
| 9:51 am | My long Locus piece on Robert Heinlein, written for their August Heinlein Centennial issue, is now online. Comments disabled here so you can comment there if you want. |
| Saturday, July 14th, 2007 | |
| 5:05 pm | Question Have any of you lot sent me something via Parcelforce to my home address recently? I ask because there was an attempt to deliver it here while I was away recently, and I'm currently in the middle of an uncomedy of bureaucracy as I try to get them to deliver it while I'm here. (My assumption is that the parcel's from a publisher, but I'm usually pretty thorough about asking them to deliver book-sized parcels to my work address.) |
| Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 | |
| 10:01 am | There were angels in the glass... It's Ægypt week at Strange Horizons: they're publishing reviews of the volumes of John Crowley's four-book sequence on successive days. On Monday, Abigail Nussbaum on The Solitudes; today, me on Love & Sleep; tomorrow, Paul Kincaid on Dæmonomania; Thursday, John Clute on Endless Things. PS: It's fund drive time, too. |
| Friday, June 1st, 2007 | |
| 6:09 am | Endless Things My review of John Crowley's latest novel, Endless Things, is now up at Locus Online. |
| Monday, April 23rd, 2007 | |
| 8:10 pm | As you know, Bob, today is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch day, in which a bunch of people are putting some of their work online, for free. (In theory, the work is "professional-level". The piece I've picked was delivered as a paper at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in 2004 and subsequently published in expanded form in The New York Review of Science Fiction, with whose kind permission it's reprinted here; copyright remains with me.) It's an essay on Damon Knight's great last novel Humpty Dumpty: An Oval, which I still think is enormously underrated. ( About 4,500 words behind the cut. ) |
| Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 | |
| 4:13 pm | John M. Ford secondary bibliography - work in progress A request for assistance, already conveyed to a couple of people privately. The forthcoming Foundation 100 is going to be a special fiction issue. fjm and I commissioned work from a bunch of people, one of whom was John M. Ford. He responded positively in a couple of emails, but died before he could finish his story. As a result, I'm going to write some kind of appreciation piece in place of the story, and would like to be able to give readers of Foundation - some of whom are academics, some fans - pointers not just to his work but to essays reflecting on it. My problem is that there doesn't seem to be very much that falls into that category. I did a long essay on his last collection, Heat of Fusion, but there's not a lot else that I can find. My preliminary scrappy list (compiled with help from David Hartwell, Davey Snyder, and womzilla and, I know, not in anything like consistent reference style) looks like this:* Brown, Andrew (2006). "A worm's eye view". In The Guardian. * Clute, John (2006). "John M. Ford". In The Independent. * Cobb, Christopher (2002). "'Scrabble with God,' Fiction with John M. Ford: The Unpredictable Pleasures of From the End of the Twentieth Century and The Last Hot Time". At Strange Horizons * Duane, Diane (1997). Appreciation for Boskone 34 programme book. (Also here.) * Ford, John M, and Nielsen Hayden, Patrick (2001). Interview re The Last Hot Time. At The Well. * Gaiman, Neil (1997). Introduction to From the End of the Twentieth Century by JMF, NESFA, 1998. (Also here.) * Hitchcock, Chip (1997). Appreciation for Boskone 34 programme book. * Nielsen Hayden, Teresa et al (2006). "John M. Ford, 1957-2006". Post and comment thread at Making Light. * Sleight, Graham (2006). "The New Originals: John M Ford's Heat of Fusion". NYRSF, April 2006. If anyone knows of anything else reasonably substantial (rule of thumb: more than 1000 words and/or more than just a "straight review", especially if offering significant comment about JMF's work, not his life), please let me know. And yes, I'm fully aware I stretched those definitions in the list above. Also - a not very subtextual plea - if anyone wants to write something substantial about his work for Foundation, I'd be very very pleased to see it. (As, I'm sure, would DGH and womzilla for NYRSF.)(Also also, a secondary question I'm wrestling with: why is there so little substantial critical writing on JMF?) |
| Friday, January 26th, 2007 | |
| 10:49 am | Crawford Award The shortlist for this year's Crawford Award, for best first book by a new fantasy writer, has been announced: Daniel Abraham, A Shadow in Summer Alan De Niro, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead Keith Donohue, The Stolen Child Theodora Goss, In The Forest of Forgetting Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora Naomi Novik, Temeraire M. Rickert, Map of Dreams The award will be presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Fort Lauderdale in March. More details at the Locus homepage. |
| Saturday, January 20th, 2007 | |
| 11:42 pm | Clarke Award Wearing my hat as a juror for this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award (for the best sf novel published in the UK in 2006), I've spent most of this afternoon in the shortlist meeting with my fellow jurors. The nominees - announced at a celebration held in London this evening - are: End of the World Blues, Jon Courtenay Grimwood (Gollancz) Nova Swing, M. John Harrison (Gollancz) Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Lydia Millet (Heinemann) Hav, Jan Morris (Faber) Gradisil, Adam Roberts (Gollancz) Streaking, Brian Stableford (PS Publishing) |
| Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 | |
| 8:30 pm | BSFA interview next week People may have seen this elsewhere, but repetition can't hurt: I'll be interviewing Paul Cornell - novelist, comics writer, author of Father's Day - for the BSFA next Wednesday 24th. The venue has changed, as Tony Cullen explains: Due to some sudden and urgent (structural, I think) work that needs to be done to The Star Tavern, it will be closed for the week of 22-26 January, when the BSFA meeting (with Paul Cornell, interviewed by Graham Sleight) would have been held. But, splendid people that they are, The Star have organised an alternate venue for us, The Antelope on Eaton Terrace. We used this place a few years ago, when there was a double booking at The Star, some of you may remember. |
| Saturday, September 30th, 2006 | |
| 11:30 am | SF history: a small sidebar In my Vector column a couple of months ago, I said, "I was digging through a pile of old Interzones the other day, trying to find a quotation which had eluded me when I was writing my column for the last Vector. (If my memory isn't tricking me, it was Geoff Ryman, in his interview in IZ33, arguing for "good-faith sf"—which sounded remarkably like his prescription for Mundane sf fifteen years ahead of time. That was, naturally, the one issue I couldn't find.)" I found the issue finally - in the middle of a stack of Atlantic Monthlys, natch - and Ryman does say more or less what I remembered in his interview with Stan Nicholls. The relavant extracts: (All from IZ 33, Jan-Feb 1990, p. 44.) |
| 8:06 am | John Clute's Independent obituary of John M. Ford. |
| Monday, September 25th, 2006 | |
| 10:59 pm | I only met John M. Ford once - if you count queueing up at Noreascon 4 to get my books signed as meeting him - but I knew his work for years and years, starting with the best RPG scenario ever, "The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues". Then there were the Star Trek books, effortlessly stretching the form while still in love with it, and The Dragon Waiting, and Growing up Weightless, and Heat of Fusion, that astounding jewel-box of a collection. And now he's died, aged 49. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has "Against Entropy", one of my favorite Ford poems, at the head of her post on Making Light; but he also threw off things like this, seemingly at will, that would have me laughing hard enough to cause internal injury. As Neil Gaiman mentions, Farah and I had commissioned Ford to write a story for Foundation 100, our special fiction issue next year; I find myself imagining how impossibly brilliant that story would have been - let alone Aspects, his long-in-progress fantasy epic. I can't remember the death of someone I didn't really know ever feeling so personal. |