Lorem Ipsum

Arrived home to find a new issue of Interzone waiting for me. Flipped through it—unusually for me; I usually just read through issues pretty linearly, with occasional skips ahead to break up the fiction with some reviews—and ran into an article titled "Interzone's Guide to SF on the Web." With a sense of pleasant apprehension, I skimmed through the article: book review sites, Usenet newsgroups, nothing I haven't seen before, ah! here we go: "Fiction sites."

Four paragraphs on Infinity Plus, the Web's premiere sf reprint site. A valuable service, with vast vast quantities of material. The article's author, Peter D. Tillman, is careful to note that he contributes regularly to the site, so he may be a little biased, but I do agree with him that it's an impressive and worthwhile site.

Then the next paragraph begins thusly: "Ellen Datlow is singlehandedly responsible for just about all the original professional-level sf available online. . . ."

Oh. Oh, well.

Then two paragraphs pointing to indexes of online sf, four paragraphs talking about Baen Books on the Web (everyone is pointing to Eric Flint's essay about the Baen Free Library this week; the URL's been floating around in email for at least a year now, I'm not sure why the sudden renewed interest), including the comment "After all, who's really going to read an entire novel onscreen?" (Uh, that'd be me, for one, but I'm a known geek.) And then a final paragraph on the ISFDB, which isn't actually a fiction site. No mention of any magazines other than those edited by Ellen; no mention of Fictionwise or anyone else who sells ebooks. Sigh.

I can't complain too much. Tillman does make clear from the start that these are merely sites he visits regularly. And my guess is that SH wouldn't be much to his taste anyway; a couple of his comments suggest that his tastes lean more toward David Weber than Charles de Lint. And the article is pretty impressive, covering quite a lot of ground despite not attempting to be a survey.

And though Tillman notes that he got a lot of tips from Jim Kelly's column in Asimov's, there are indications that this article was written back in November, before the column in which Jim talked about SH, so it's entirely possible that Tillman's now more aware of us. The eternal problem with print magazines attempting to cover the Net; things change an awful lot between deadline and publication.

But it's still disappointing.

Hmm. Tillman does include an email address at the end of the article; maybe I'll drop him a note and point him to Tangent Online and the sff.net newsgroups and The Infinite Matrix and Fictionwise and ElectricStory and, oh, maybe another fiction magazine or two.

Oooooh! I poked into ElectricStory, and they pointed out that Fictionwise is publishing a three-in-one version of Alexei Panshin's marvelous Anthony Villiers trilogy! For $7! The Thurb Revolution (book 2 of the trilogy) is one of my favorite books. The trilogy (okay, so it's actually a series, it's just that the fourth book in the series has been pending for 30 years now) concerns an impoverished but dashing young man, Anthony Villiers, who wanders the interstellar Nashuite Empire in the company of a froglike humanoid named Torve the Trog. Villiers (I hope this isn't a spoiler; it's been a long time since I've read them) is a remittance man—are y'all familiar with the concept? A remittance man is the son of a lord; the son has to keep moving from place to place, because his father keeps sending small sums of cash to a series of locations; the idea being that if the son is kept on the move, he can't stay in one place long enough to gather followers and come home and try to take over. The result in this case is that Villiers can move in the highest of high society (I'm told that the books are Regency-style comedies of manners; some day I'll have to read more Regency stuff) but never quite has enough cash on hand. There are duels, and assassins, and bureaucrats, and syrupy children's-book authors, and incisive narratorial comments, and wry irony and wit, and laugh-out-loud funny bits. The whole trilogy, but especially the second book, is utterly charming and highly recommended, especially at this price, especially given that it's long since out of print and probably difficult to find anywhere else. (There's a used copy of the third book available cheap at Amazon, though.)

Oh, I suppose I should mention that Panshin is far better known for two things:

• Heinlein in Dimension, a critical study of Heinlein's work which I gather earned Panshin the eternal enmity of Spider Robinson; and
• Rite of Passage, a YA novel in which Panshin responds to Podkayne of Mars by saying, in effect, "That's not a thirteen-year-old girl genius protagonist; this is a thirteen-year-old girl genius protagonist."

Some day, maybe he'll finally write The Ultimate Pantograph. But in the meantime, I shall comfort myself with the first three books. Thurb.

Boy did I ever manage to stray from the topic there. What I was about to say, before I got distracted by Panshin, is that it's time I went and finished editing a story.