You May Have Missed... Links 28/08/08

Last Night's BSFA meeting was an interesting affair. I was not exactly won over by Gwyneth Jones' reading, partly due to the material and partly due to the fact that I don't actually like being read to but as the interview wore on I couldn't help but warm to her if only for the fact that she kept saying "I was brought up by cyberpunks". A full write up will be jealously kept to the next issue of Fruitless Recursion though. Sorry world.

• io9 have an interesting clip of Neal Stephenson talking about the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. I'll be interested to see how this plays out in the book as Husserl, Leibniz and Godel's attempt to re-animate metaphysics are all examples of spectacularly ornate intellectual cul-de-sacs.

• Karen Burnham at Sprial Galaxy Reviewing Laboratory begins a review of P. G. Wodehouse's The Man With Two Left Feet before suggesting that Connie Willis is some kind of latter-day Wodehouse. All hail Spode!

• The Vault of Horror has part III of their interesting on-going history of Horror on TV. A subject close to my heart as once upon a time I wrote a piece about the top 10 greatest works of British TV Horror for Videovista.

• Pat's Fantasy Hotlist has a poll up about what people think about Suvudu.com, Random House's Megasite. At the moment the biggest block is people who aren't paying attention with the second biggest comprised of people who like it, but this group are outnumbered by the people who dislike it to varying degrees. I have to admit, out of the three professional megasites, Suvudu.com is, for my money, by far the weakest. Tor.com is propped up by Jo Walton but io9, seems to generate the most interesting stuff. Yes that stuff is counterbalanced by hollow-skulled commercialism and astonishing crassness as well as a tendency to talk about "sci-fi" but I think they have a higher hit rate with me than either of the other two. Interestingly though, all three are, at best, a beat behind the SF scene in general and tend to do a bad job of interacting with the scene at large.
  

Comments

[Joe Sherry]

I don't even check io9 or Suvudu. I figure if there is anything worth reading I'll find a link to it somewhere.

My problem with each site is that there isn't nearly enough on SFF literature. I want discussion on books and stories and when I checked each site I saw very little.

Tor.com has John Klima discussing short fiction and that's what keeps me coming back. He doesn't post as often as Walton, but he's my highlight.

[Jonathan M]

More on Suvudu from me tomorrow actually.

I don't really pay much attention to Klima as I'm not into short fiction but what strikes me about all three sites is the fact that despite being professional and featuring big names in some cases, they aren't really that much of an improvement over your standard SF-related blog. The only thing they really have going for them is volume of posts.