Views from Medina Road

A few days ago I created a 2006 subdirectory for the website -- in which to place the cover image of the January '06 issue of F&SF, for the magazines page posted earlier this week. And today I added the first 2006 event to the author events pages (for a reading by Rob Sawyer, who likes to plan ahead). Time flies. As someone who grew up in the '70s, this is the deep future.

It might seem suspiciously coincidental to have posted three announcements just today about 2006 writers workshops, but in fact all three e-mails/press releases arrived in the past week.

Magazine subscribers note that rates rise January 1st. Renew now. Or subscribe, for the first time!

Within the next couple days I will be posting Gary Westfahl's essay about the process of assembling his SF Quotations book. And in December I have planned reviews of King Kong and of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And maybe more.

Oh, and today's LA Times has an op-ed, Fiction into fact into fiction, about a forthcoming Lost tie-in novel, purportedly written by a Flight 815 passenger who did not survive, and which manuscript is found in the wreckage during an episode to be broadcast next Spring. The writer, David L. Ulin, book editor of the Times, is deeply cynical about this blurring of fact and fiction, citing Bradbury's interactive soap operas in Fahrenheit 451. Chill, I say; I think the idea's pretty cool.