Feed Control: seven highly recommended genre aggregator blogs

The Silence of the Feeds I was forced to take drastic action a couple of weeks ago: having realised that there was just no way I was ever going to be able to keep up with the vast output from the 150+ RSS feeds that I'd merrily subscribed to over the past year or so, I took a deep breath, reached for the 'unsubscribe' check-box, and instigated a full-scale cull.

It was tough, but in the end I managed to unsubscribe from over a hundred. I started with anything just too prolific for me to have a hope in hell of keeping up with (Boing! Boing! was the first to go) and then moved onto the bulk of the expendables: Marketing / Web 2.0 themed blogs that I'd read one or two interesting posts on a while back and had subscribed to out of habit, before I knew any better...

Then there were a few that I was genuinely reluctant to let go: really interesting blogs written by authors, editors and publishers whose work I've read and enjoyed, or whose blogs I know of by their deservedly high repute: Neil Gaiman, Lou Anders, Ken MacLeod, Charlie Stross, John Scalzi, Jeff Vandermeer, Tobias Buckell, to name but a few...

Why did I drop their feeds? Simple time-availability issues: these guys all tend to post regularly on a wide range of topics; too regularly and too widely for me to keep proper tabs on it all. Don't get me wrong, it's the sort of material that's great to sit and read and ponder if you have the time; the sort of material I'd love to be able to keep up with, if I could.

Besides which, it actually occurred to me, about half-way through the process, that if I really wanted to keep a weather-eye on the most pertinent debates of the day, or to be alerted whenever the aforementioned authors, editors and publishers post something particularly fascinating, then it's actually quite easy to arrange. All I really need to do is make sure I was subscribed to the best aggregator sites that I could find; the ones that regularly pull together and present all the best material from around the genre-flavoured bits of the web.

And so here - in no particular order and for the benefit of several readers - is my personal selection of seven highly-recommended genre aggregator blogs; the pick of the crop that I've found to-date. Some of these guys write opinion pieces as well (which is great) but in general, I keep them in a Google Reader tag-group called 'Genre - Essential' because they can be relied upon to aggregate regularly and aggregate well...

Joe Gordon - The Forbidden Planet Blog Log. Joe is a pro-blogger in the truest sense of the phrase; he actually gets paid by his employer, UK genre-specialist retailer Forbidden Planet International, to write entries for the FP Blog. As a result, you can expect several entries per day from Joe, mainly with a general books and comics them, but encompassing a wide range of diverse sf-ish or graphic art -esque sub-topics: everything from previews of the latest Doctor Who merchandise to reports on Iranian political cartooning. He's also usually first out of the traps with the latest press releases from UK publishers, and isn't afraid to speak his mind when the occasion warrants, either.
Niall Harrison - Torque Control. Niall is the current editor of the British Science Fiction Association's Vector magazine. He's often outspoken (he isn't afraid to chuck stones around his own glass house either), always eloquent, and produces regular Links round-ups (complete with pun-based titles).
Iain Emsley - Yatterings. Iain used to run the online bookstore The Aust Gate until he decided to focus his energies on blogging instead. The results are great: Yatterings is regularly updated with interesting news snippets and he regularly takes the time to conduct in-depth author interviews.
Paul Raven - Velcro-City Tourist Board. Velcro-City is definitely one of the most rich and diverse sf / culture / science / tech blogs around. Paul brings all his interests to the table, so there's always a great mix of content, and his 'Fresh from teh intarwebs' round-ups are a great way of catching up.
James Bloomer - Big Dumb Object. James is another regular, nay prolific, poster; he usually manages several updates a day on a wide variety of topics, with plenty of Doctor Who content to explore, if you're a fellow fan. Again, another great site for keeping up to date with the most important news and current events.
JP Frantz and John DeNardo - SF Signal. Online since July 2003, SF Signal is a team-produced blog/zine with regularly updated content that ranges from news snippets and round-ups to book reviews, competitions, readers polls and more. (It's pretty much the sort of thing I always aspired to with The Alien Online, but had to give up on when it all got to be too much on the admin side of things.)
Andrew Wheeler - The Antick Musings of GBH Hornswoggler, Gent. Andrew Wheeler used to blog professionally for The SF Bookclub of America, before they decided (for reasons best known only to themselves) to let him go. At that point he started using Antick Musings as a Blog in Exile, putting out the same extremely regular round-ups of interviews, reviews, podcasts, news and links, until recently when he was taken on by the far more far-sighted ComicMix, so check out his posts there as well. This guy is the uber-blogger's uber-blogger. Seriously, I have no idea where he finds the time...

So, there you have it. My current list of the seven best genre fiction-themed aggregator blogs. Not that these are the only feeds I read, of course. There are several other close-call candidates in the 'Genre - Important' tag folder, including British Fantasy Society News, the aforementioned ComicMix, Irish Sci-Fi News, SFScope, Neth Space and, of course, Locus Online. Then there are a bunch of genre publisher blogs: Orbit, Solaris, Pyr, Subterranean, TTA and some general publisher / book news / bookish blogs as well.

But hey, this is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list and I'm always open to new sources of news and hard fact, so please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments. If anyone suggests anything I find particularly fascinating, I'll run an update in a week or three.

July 10, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | 20 Comments

Paul Raven on the Genre Ghetto

If you've been following the conversational thread that was kicked off by the On Fantasy... entry I posted the other day, you might also be interested to read Paul Raven's take on the 'Genre Ghetto' meme over at his Velcro-City Tourist Board blog.

Paul makes the very valid point that folks like us - genre fiction bloggers and blog-readers - probably have an overly-optimistic view of the health of the genre, as we're likely to be far more aware of the wealth of new talent on offer than the average genre book-buyer in the high-street might be.

And as it's the average etc. who gets to determine - through those all-conquering forces of supply and demand - just what gets published and therefore determines the availability and depth of the genre fiction field at high-street level, the question then becomes: how to avoid a situation whereby the interesting stuff published at the margins becomes marginalised even more, to the point of non-viability.

Paul argues for a more effective adoption of the technology available; which I totally agree with, hence all my recent talk of the need for increasingly sophisticated and trusted information filtering mechanisms (blogs, review websites, author recommendations of other author's work) to help the more discerning reader find the good stuff in the first place and then make an informed purchasing decision.

Paul also argues that:

"...mainstream publishing is a monoculture. Genre has always been somewhat of an independent annexe to it, and I think that in the long run its future survival is dependent on that becoming more the case than less...

He's saying that we dwellers-within should pick up the ghetto, carry it out of the city, then circle the wagons and start our own township out on the plains. Again, I'm all for that, although to be honest I was under the impression that this was pretty much happening already.

And I have always thought that there's far more mileage for genre publishers in concentrating on talking to genre readers and genre fans, than there is ever likely to be in any attempt to persuade some minute fraction of the mainstream readership to come on down to the ghetto they're so scared of and take a look around (we promise not to mug you while you're here - honest...) More on that in later posts, workload allowing.

Anyway, Paul's is a damn good contribution to the ongoing debate. Well worth a read.