The Guardian has a short piece on the CS Lewis literary estate, CS Lewis Ltd, who have sent the Saville-Smith family a 128 page legal dossier over their buying of the .mobi domain for Narnia. Their claim is that he is using it for cyber-squatting rather than being a present for an 11 year old [...]
Cory Doctorow over on BoingBoing posts an interesting article on the placing of his book in the YA section of book stores which appears to have confused some people and Scott Westerfeld picks this up on his blog asking “There’s an interesting wave of discussions going on right now about YA sections of bookstores. Do [...]
A couple of weeks ago, Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell sat down and chatted about the Edge Chronicles and the excellent Barnaby Grimes series.
Paul : I started it (Lord of the Rings) too late. I’m not a real fantasy afficionado really which is probably why the Edge is odd.
Chris: We’ve talked about this a [...]
Wired’s Threat Level blog has an interesting piece on the NSA’s release of paper’s regarding the discovery of electromagnetic vulnerabilities in encyption machines which led to various bits of research in cracking during the Cold War. TEMPEST, the name for the attack, was proved in 1943 but it appears disppeared until 1951 when the CIA [...]
Atlantic Books will be publishing the new Neal Stephenson, Anathem (Amazon UK), in September which I’m hoping is going to give some answers as the nature of Enoch. How Root is he? What has Stephenson really been driving at since the awesome Cryptonomicon?
Synopsis from Amazon:
“Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a [...]
Weird Tales has posted a great list of 85 weird authors including Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, Tim Burton and so on in a list which respects weirdness and not genre boundaries. They will be running a piece on each creator a day.
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BBC’s iPM, the personal version of the PM programme, had an interview with Steve Vander Ark about the court case (it should be on the podcast).
Having heard it, I’m in two minds whether he and RDR are naive or wilfully keeping their head in the sand. Firstly there is the issue of how the contributors [...]
Scott Westerfeld recently took some time to talk about Extras and Midnighters. I’ll post the link to the Extras questions once they are online.
One of the things that struck me was that there’s a certain school rites of passage feel.
My Dad was a data processing guy in the 60s, he ended up working with Nasa [...]
The Independent has an article bemoaning the decline of the rural way of life and countryside (which has been going on for a couple of hundred years really) and it reminds me of a theme in Tolkien and the new Steve Augarde series.
Industrialism has changed the landscape irrevocably and to some extent the pastoral ideal [...]
Roger Sutton over on the Horn Book blog has recently read George Eliot’s Middlemarch (which I confess to reading and disliking intensely).
He makes a point which Scott Westerfeld made to me about using language for children in an as yet to be transcribed interview. Writers need to push the boundaries of their language for children [...]