Marginalia

[coalescent]

I've been working through my bloglines backlog, so some of these are going to be pretty old.

From the Guardian: Ursula le Guin on Jose Saramago, Steve Davies (or Stevie Davies, depending on which bit of the byline you read) on Tamar Yellin, and Geoff Ryman on Cambodian writers.

The Accidental wins the Morning News Tournament of Books. Semi-related: beware of the snark.

Farah Mendlesohn on The Big Empty by JB Stephens and, incidentally, character:

This takes us to something I’ve been considering more and more both in terms of YA fiction and science fiction in general. It stems from that whole “sf doesn’t do character” argument. I’m not, here, going to give you a list of the sf writers who do write effective characters, nor am I going to pursue the idea I used in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, that the “character” in sf may be the planet or the “what if”. Instead, lets accept that sf characters are often pretty bland. I think there is a reason for this: they aren’t “characters” in the proscenium arch, let’s watch someone develop sense at all, nor are they intended to be. Instead, they are avatars.

News of a new bimonthly zine attached to Fantasy Book Spot.

John Clute has moved on from livejournal to wikipedia.

Chris McLaren on confusing the art and the artist.

Gabe Chouinard on being a critic of the fantastic.

That can't be all the good stuff, though, so feel free to link me to anything else exciting I've missed in the past fortnight.

Comments

[veggiesu.livejournal.com]

Interesting discussion on the Chris McLaren link (and some rather disturbing links from it).

Not at all convinced by the argument that when SF does poor characterisation, it's deliberate, so that the reader can experience the events vicariously. It's just an excuse aplied to retrospectively to let (in this case) SF off the hook. Poor charcterisation is poor characterisation, no matter how much you try to justify it.

[grahamsleight.livejournal.com]

Possibly of interest: James Morrow's Top 10 books on witch persecution.

[nuttyxander.livejournal.com]

Interesting Jose Saramago review, I have the proof lying around and must get around to reading it. Quite shocked by the anti-Ali Smith snark.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Responding to Clute on Wikipedia.