Susan Wyndham of "The Sydney Morning Herald"'s "Entertainment" weblog is a judge of this year's Barbara Jefferis Award and noticed the rather bleak nature of many of the entries.
If you've ever wondered what this whole sf genre is all about, then Jonathan Strahan may be able to provide some guidance. He's going to be commenting each week about one classic sf story on the "Locus" magazine weblog. The list of 43 stories is based on the magazine's "1999 All-Time Readers Poll Short Story List", and covers the years 1940-1985; I did say these were classics. It's a tad top heavy with Ellison stories, and the list is very US centric: the only Australian connection I can find is "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith from 1955. I wrote about that author here a while back. Nevertheless it looks like being worth watching. Garth Nix thinks Jonathan should anthologise the whole set. Adding in his comments as introductions to each story would also be a good idea.
Mike Glyer on "File 770" announces that Bruce Gillespie won the Best Fan Writer category of the 2009 Fanzine Activity Achievement (FAAN) Awards. Bruce was Fan Guest of Honour at the 1999 Worldcon (Aussiecon 3) and has been publishing since the 1960s. You can read back issues of "Steam Engine Time" and "SF Commentary" on the "eFanzines.com" website.
Miriam Burstein, "The Little Professor", has been reading Kisses of the Enemy by Rodney Hall.
Pavlov's Cat attended the book launch of Tracy Crisp's novel Black Dust Dancing, and writes of what she saw there - in words and pictures. Tracy is the blogger at "adelaide from adelaide".
The bloggers at "Alien Onion" have noted that the Melbourne Writer's Festival isn't interested in The Great Australian Novel right now; they want The Great Australian Text Message, or Gr8 Oz Txt Msg if you prefer.
Angela Meyer and Gerard Elson have a look at the print and film versions of Watchmen on Angela's "LiteraryMinded" weblog.
