SF/F/H RSS News Digest via Alltop.com

Here's a website that genre bloggers, readers and fans might want to check out (which I don't think I've seen mentioned elsewhere just yet).

In a mediabistro.com interview posted yesterday, tech-evangelist turned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki talks about his latest project: an RSS aggregator by the name of Alltop.com that aims to provide a news-gathering service for anyone who doesn't have the time, inclination or know-how to set up their own, bespoke feed-list via a service such as Google Reader.

Alltop.com gathers RSS feeds into themed sections, the aim being to provide as wide an overview of the activity within a particular area of interest as possible, rather than a topic-specific drill-down. Kawasaki explains:

"Think of it as a digital magazine rack. If you went to a newsstand you would see racks of sports magazines, celebrity magazines, car magazines, wine magazines, and food magazines; we have our own virtual rack where we aggregate the Web sites and blogs of the top feeds for each of those topics, and we show the latest five headlines from each source."

I checked out Alltop's genre coverage and sure enough, there's a well-developed and densely-populated section that focuses on science fiction / fantasy / general genre blogs at sff.alltop.com as well as more general books- and writing-related sections (books.alltop.com and writing.alltop.com) that may also be of interest.

Speaking as someone who's spent a fair fair amount of time over the last eight months compiling my RSS-subscription list of genre bloggers, to help me track online coverage of Orbit authors and titles, I really could have done with finding this site round about last May...

January 8, 2009 | Filed Under Online Finds | Leave a Comment

Books of 2008, reading plan 2009

Last year I set myself a target of reading 60 books (novels or novellas, not counting graphic novels) and came pretty darn close to meeting that target with a total of 55, which wasn't too shabby.

I started the year with Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie and finished with The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore. In between, I managed to explore a reasonably eclectic mix of territories: from epic fantasy to psychological horror, historical mystery to space opera, serial killer thriller to YA adventure, comic surrealism to fictional memoir.

I enjoyed far too many highlights to list them all, but I am extremely glad I read Guy Gavriel Kay's World Fantasy Award winning Ysabel, as well as Peter Crowther's mini-collection The Land at the End of the Working Day, from the now-defunct Humdrumming Press. Pete is selling copies of that one via the PS Publishing website and I urge you to grab one if you're any sort of fan of the strange, surreal, funny and moving bar tales of Spider Robinson's Callahan's series, in particular.

I also enjoyed reading (or re-reading) some favourite graphic novel series during the year. Mike Carey's eleven-volume Lucifer series was a real treat, and I also caught up with another swathe of Hellblazer back-reading. Plus, re-visits to Alan Moore's Tom Strong and Promethea and a re-read of Jeff Smith's nine-volume Bone adventures.

For 2009 I'm planning on revising my targets slightly. I'm still hoping to read about 60 books, but I'll be interspersing my regular fiction reads (many of which will be Orbit titles, naturally) with a number of marketing titles that I've got my eye on, hopefully to the tune of one a month. Meanwhile, my regular Xmas voucher haul will be helping to fill some gaps in my graphic novel collection, so I'm hoping to be able to re-read the first five volumes of Fables and bring myself up-to-date with the next six. I think I might take another look at The Books of Magic as well.

I'm also hoping to treat myself to a couple of re-reads of favourite novels, which is something I've hardly dared do for the past few years. But what the hell, eh? Sometimes it's important to get back in touch with much-loved books from years gone by, if only to remind yourself of the path you've taken to reach your current reading preferences. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

January 3, 2009 | Filed Under Books and Reading | 2 Comments

David Gemmell Legend Award - Voting is Open

The first round of voting for the inaugural David Gemmell Legend Award has been open since December 26th and I've cast mine. I won't say which book I voted for (it is a secret ballot after all) but I will say that I think it's great that we have a new award that serves a dual purpose: commemorating the life and work of one of the great British fantasy writers whilst recognising the work of the current cream of the fantasy crop.

Of course, we already have the World Fantasy Awards, the British Fantasy Awards and numerous smaller, more specific accolades performing much the same latter role, so it will be interesting to see whether the DGLA works to differentiate itself in years to come.

Personally I think there's an argument for re-focusing the award on fantasy novels that are either published in the UK or written by UK-based authors. This stronger focus on the regional element would have two main benefits, from a marketing perspective:

1) It would generate attention for the work of UK-based authors and publishers, which would in turn offer a stronger incentive for those authors and publishers to support the award and publicise it via their own blogs, websites and mailing lists.

2) It would help to position the award as the fantasy equivalent of the highly-regarded Arthur C Clarke Award, which has been providing a focus on UK-based science fiction writers and publishers since 1987.

I also think a return to the originally-announced voting system - a judging panel for the final decision on the winner, based on a shortlist generated by public vote - would be a good idea. This original system had the dual advantage of allowing the public to have its say via the first stage vote, but then removing the 'popularity contest' element at the second stage and allowing a qualitative final decision to be made by a panel of acknowledged experts, whose necessary reading pile would be limited to just those five titles. A win-win there, surely?

But in the meantime, we do have a two-stage voting system, it is open to the public and I therefore urge everyone to head on over to gemmellaward.ning.com and participate. Voting is simple and you don't have to join the Ning group first if you don't want to.

Update 03.01.09: SFAwardsWatch.com picked up on this post, but managed to interpret my musing on how the award's marketing potential could be boosted as a call for a radical overhaul of the DGLA before the first winner has even been voted for. Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that wasn't what I was suggesting, but that just goes to show: it's all in the interpretation.

Update 08.01.09: James Long shares some thoughts on the second round public vote over at speculativehorizons.blogspot.com.