Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in grahamsleight's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, July 5th, 2009
11:00 pm	Final Readercon schedule My final Readercon schedule now looks like this: 70 Years of Van Vogt Thursday 9th, 7pm, ME/CT with Gary Wolfe, John Clute, Charles N Brown [[Locus will be running in August one of my retrospective columns, on van Vogt, plus a transcript of this roundtable discussion with the above-listed illuminati.]] The Career of Elizabeth Hand Friday 10th, 1pm, Suite B with F Brett Cox, Adam Golaski (M), Paul Witcover, Gary K Wolfe The Year in Novels Friday 10th, 2pm, Suite B with Charles N Brown, Ernest Lilley, Shira Lipkin, Paul Witcover Excellent Foppery Friday 10th, 7pm, ME/CT Solo talk (though with surprise guest discussants) Following on from his talk at last year's Readercon (a potted history of the last twenty years in speculative fiction), Sleight now discusses the use of history in the fantastic — from John Crowley's Ægypt sequence to Tim Powers's fantasies of history. Other works discussed include Road Runner cartoons, Harry Potter, slash fiction, and the stories of Elizabeth Hand, Russell T Davies, and Thomas Pynchon. Overarching theories may be suggested; gratuitous mentions of Shakespeare may also take place. Novels of Advocacy vs Novels of Recognition Saturday 11th, 1pm, Suite E with Paolo Bacigalupi, John Clute, Ken Houghton, Barry N Malzberg, Robert J Sawyer At the keynote Thursday night panel at Readercon 18, our panelists stumbled upon a useful taxonomic distinction: novels that advocate for a particular future (a la Heinlein) versus novels that merely attempt to recognize and describe a possible one (a la Gibson). There was some debate as to just how strongly the field was moving from the former to the latter, and if there was such a trend, its relationship to others (optimism vs. pessimism, far futures vs. near futures, etc.) One of the panelists, Graham Sleight, has recently renewed the discussion online. We'll explore the numerous possible directions raised by Sleight and others. [[This is Readercon's description, not mine. I don't normally talk about myself in the third person. First person plural, maybe, but don't we all?]] The Readercon Book Club: China Mieville's The City and the City Sunday 12th, 1pm, Maine with Jedediah Berry, John Clute, Jim Freund (M), Glenn Grant At the center of former Readercon GOH China Mieville's new novel is a stunning, beautiful conceit that is revealed, in its basic dimensions, over the first six or so chapters. Reading these was about the most fun we've had with speculative fiction in years — and the book then gets even better. The reader gets a taste of the lived experience of a world existentially very peculiar, in prose much sparer than Mieville usually writes. That the conceit is revealed early makes the novel difficult to discuss without spoilers, so we urge you to read it before reading any reviews. And then come to this panel! From which the only conclusion I can draw is that I'm not intended to have lunch that weekend. Final program grid on the Readercon website here. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
12:07 pm	Doctor Who question Is the Peter Hawkins who did voices for the Daleks and Cybermen (and Captain Pugwash, Bill & Ben, etc) and who has obituaries here and here the same Peter Hawkins who published, under the pseudonym Karl Maras, a 1954 sf novel called The Plant from Infinity? I can find neither confirmation or denial of this online, but both seem to have been born in 1924. (No prizes, it's just for fun.) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
8:58 pm	For those of you interested in such things, I should be appearing on BBC Radio 3's Night Waves tomorrow night (from 9.15pm) discussing the work of Philip K Dick with presenter Philip Dodd and another sf author, to be confirmed. I assume the programme will be available afterwards via iPlayer if you're in the UK. ETA: And it doesn't clash with paulcornell2's "State of the Art", on Radio 4 at 2.15pm tomorrow. Hint, hint. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
6:47 pm	Self-promotion comma shameless comma repeated 1) I've just received a copy of On Joanna Russ (Wesleyan U P, ed Farah Mendlesohn), a book that I think is splendid only partly because I have a contribution in it on Russ's short fiction. (Amazon UK / US) 2) I'll be interviewing Nick Lowe (the sf film critic, not the rocker) for the BSFA on Wednesday evening. No admission charge, details here. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
7:57 am	Public service announcement If you want to friend me on Facebook but we haven't met in real life, by all means go ahead, but send me a message with your friend request saying who you are, why you're friending me, etc. Same applies if we've met in passing in the sort of context (crowded room party, etc) where names and faces tend to blur. Thanks! (Is this the way others deal with this question of online manners? Other suggestions as to how to handle it welcome.) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
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. (Comment on this)
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 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 ) (Comment on this)
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.) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
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. (Comment on this)
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. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
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. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
11:51 am	Yeowch. Terrific review of Ben Bova's Titan by Adam Roberts on Strange Horizons today yesterday. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
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. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
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.) (Comment on this)
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. (Comment on this)
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. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
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. ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
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?) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
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. (14 Comments |Comment on this)