books... mostly sf

Triffids and Jizzle
Originally uploaded by jovike.

Elastic Press have published many of my friend Allen's books, including The Elastic Book of Numbers which has just won a BFS award, and on Saturday 4th November they have a special event to launch a new anthology with a musical theme Extended Play, edited by Gary Couzens, with an introduction by Jean-Jacques Burnel. The event features live performances from Lene Lovich, Tall Poppies and Ciccone. Ten quid for three bands and ten authors!

Another old schoolchum Nick Papadimitriou has an essay in the new book London: City of Disappearances edited by Iain Sinclair.

VISCO is the Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art with some good articles on various sf, fantasy, weird and horror fiction magazines. Another way to explore the cover art from VISCO is SF Cover Explorer, by Jim Bumgardner, of krazydad.com, a great programmer I met on Flickr.

I'm a member of the Penguin Paperback Spotters' Guild group on Flickr, devoted to the art and design of Penguin book covers. See also Penguin books at the Design Museum.

The University of Otago's online exhibition Straight Jackets notes that "the general neglect of book jackets has resulted in a scarcity of early examples".

Of course we would not have these fascinating images and great reads if it were not for physical books, a medium that will survive this digital age as explained in Chris Mitchell's review of Double Fold in Spike magazine. (What's coming after digital? Analogue again, probably.)

Bookshops: Fantastic Literature. They have a nice email newsletter in which old duffers like me try to remember the titles of sf stories they read as youths. For more general than genre titles, also available by the yard, try Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road. I've been to the shop and climbed to high shelves many times. Download their enormous catalogue and read their news and trivia. Another good source is AntiQbooks.

For real sf nuts (remember Skyrack?) eFanzines are obviously fanzines online, in web or PDF format. A labour of love. Or here's a more professional magazine from the US: Locus. I keep up-to-date with science fiction with Ansible's estimable email newsletter. Sf fandom invented words like fandom and fen - the plural of fan. trufen.net is stuff for fans.

Download free science fiction books!

Why not catalog your books online in a big library thing? I did this on paper once, thirty-five years ago (no laughing please) and I can see that online you won't get the benefit of my lovely handwriting and doodles. Anyway, here's the entry for Olaf Stapledon.

Buy me a book for Christmas! Or better still, buy Elemental a short story anthology to raise funds for tsunami disaster relief with contributions by big name authors Brian W. Aldiss, David Gerrold and Larry Niven inter alia.

"We contacted Sir Arthur C. Clarke," said Kontis.

Clarke, the author of "2001: A Space Odyssey" among many other great works, lives in Sri Lanka and was directly affected by the disaster.

Savile assured the author that they were not asking him for a short story — because of his age and poor health, Clarke does not write much, if at all, anymore.

"We asked him to write the foreword," Savile said. "Within 24 hours, we heard back from him, and within another 24 hours, we had the foreword."

If you're thinking of using Writely instead of Nisus or Word or whatever to write, then head for Google Docs. Authors can collaborate online! There is a revision history and word count. Documents can be saved in plain, HTML, RTF, Word, PDF and OpenOffice formats.

Aspiring writers sometimes ask published authors which pen they use... The Write Stuff. And mind your apostrophes!

Book reviews are always to be found at The New Statesman, like this review of So Now Who Do We Vote For? by Suzanne Moore or a review of A Woman in Berlin by J. G. Ballard.

Literary blogs: many are linked to in the excellent This Space.