Happy new year everyone! If you’re anything like me, the holidays were less a time for rest and more a time for oh-my-god-why-are-they-here-we-don’t-have-a-gift-quick-rip-that-fruit-cake-in-half… you get the picture. Here’s your latest batch of chained links to catch you up on what you might have missed during the holiday season.
We’ll lead off with a few from the Metakritiko section of the Philippine Online Chronicles. I’ve recently been named editor of the section (which is the POC’s arts/culture and reviews portion) so if any of you have arts news of interest, events that need attention or creative works that you’d like reviewed, drop me a line and we’ll see what we can do.
- SF Related Metakritiko Articles:
- Fantastic Mr. Fox Review (by me)
- Inglourious Basterds Review (by Fidelis Tan)
- Avatar Review (by Mighty Rasing)
- Wapakman Review (by *sob* me)
- My 10 Most Entertaining Reads of 2009 (by me, and yes, they’re mostly Spec Fic. What can I say?)
- Local SF in Mainstream Media:
- “News of the Shaman” by Karl R. De Mesa was featured in the January 3, 2010 edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer as one of the books to watch out for in 2010 . The paper version of the article had a picture of the book cover as well, which you can see above. (Image from Trust Your Black Shirt)
- In case you’re interested in a taste of Karl’s aforementioned and upcoming short novel, Karl generously let us use an excerpt from it in Ruin and Resolve, our charity anthology–which Butch Dalisay has magnanimously mentioned in his column today in the Philippine Star.
- Writing Related:
- Just remembered Three Headed Monster Publishing and checked their website to discover that they’re open to comics/prose stories dealing with superhero romance until January 10, 2010. Bit late to start one now, but if you’ve heard of this before or have one lying around…
- Music for Another World: speculative fiction where music is integral to the story. Deadline is still a ways off (April 30, 2010) but since the theme is so specific, might want to get an early start. And hey, that £80 payment is nothing to sneeze at…
- SeaBeast Anthology: Elves - deadline is October 1, 2010. (Take a good look at those contingent royalties though.)
- Charles Tan interviews Leonardo Giron (World SF News Blog)
- Expanded Horizons’ World SF Stories Summary 2009
- Genre Related:
- Mary Robinette Kowal – The Evolution of Fantasy Musicals (Sci Fi Scanner)
- Top 10 Science Fiction Movies of the Decade (BSC) and here’s John Scalzi’s Top 10 (Sci Fi Scanner)
- Science Round-up:
- Top 10 Physics Stories of 2009 (NewScientist)
- Top 10 Space Stories of 2009 (NewScientist)
- Sorry Vegans: Brussel Sprouts Want to Live Too (New York Times)
- Related to the Philippines:
- A post on an online repository of pdfs of articles found in Asian Ethnology/Asian Folklore Studies, quite a few of which relate to the Philippines and Philippine culture. (The post links to a few sample articles on Philippine mythology.)
- Despite fund lack, the arts thrive (Philippine Daily Inquirer)
