{"id":826,"date":"2003-01-14T01:27:09","date_gmt":"2003-01-14T09:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/01\/14\/826.html"},"modified":"2003-01-14T01:27:09","modified_gmt":"2003-01-14T09:27:09","slug":"red-queens-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/01\/14\/red-queens-race\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Queen’s race"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A little over six months ago<\/a>, I noted that I had 17 books stacked next to my bed waiting to be read.<\/p>\n

Since then, I feel like I've been reading pretty much nonstop. I've certainly finished a fair number of books during that time.<\/p>\n

Tonight, I have 25 books stacked next to my bed waiting to be read. (And that's not counting the dozen or so less-urgent ones those editors sent me a month or two back, or the magazines and chapbooks that are also on the to-read-soon stack.)<\/p>\n

Maybe the thing to do is to stop reading entirely; maybe the books would get bored and go away.<\/p>\n

In other news, one of the items I unearthed from that stack tonight was the October\/November 2001 issue of Asimov's.<\/cite> I had started to read the issue some time back, but apparently never finished it. In particular, I suspect I had been saving Charlie Stross's \"Troubador\" (the second in the Manfred Macx series, which is to say the sequel to \"Lobsters\") as a special treat for after I finished the rest of the issue, only I'd forgotten all about it. So I read \"Troubador\" tonight and loved it. I find that the Macx stories work best for me if I read them at relatively high speed and just let the impossibly cool ideas and tech jargon and in-jokes wash over me like rain into a windshield at 100 mph (tonight seems to be my night for mangling metaphors), laughing out loud every couple of pages when something particularly startling and funny comes along.<\/p>\n

Memo to self: don't wait too much longer to read \"Jury Service<\/a>.\" Yes, it's a novella, but chances are very good you'll enjoy it.<\/p>\n

Oh, and in other other news, I finally ordered the premiere issue of 3SF<\/a>,<\/cite> the new British print sf magazine published by Big Engine (Ben Jeapes's highly-regarded British small press) and edited by Liz Holiday, former editor of the now-defunct magazine Odyssey,<\/cite> which I never saw but have heard good things about. I sent my PayPal payment on Monday 1\/6, California time. The magazine arrived on Saturday 1\/11; it took less than 5 days to get here from the UK. That seems pretty remarkable to me, given that Interzone<\/cite> seems to take months. (I assume IZ<\/cite> goes by surface mail, and this came by airmail; also, the issue of 3SF<\/cite> was a bit pricey. But still, mighty quick.) I haven't read anything in 3SF<\/cite> yet, but a glance shows that the production values are almost as high as IZ<\/cite>'s, which is a compliment, and its cover is printed on nice heavy paper stock. I know, I know, that looks like damning with faint praise, but it's really not. I'm just tired. Good production values are very important to me; I appreciate a magazine that looks good as well as containing good material. And this one's got some good writers in it; am looking forward to reading it, in my copious free time.<\/p>\n

I find it interesting that two out of two British sf magazines I've sampled treat gaming rather more seriously than most US print prozines do. In particular, Warhammer<\/cite> and Warhammer 40K<\/cite> novels seem to be respected and taken seriously. But maybe I'm reading too much into various comments.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A little over six months ago, I noted that I had 17 books stacked next to my bed waiting to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}