Here are some views from around the net of Kij Johnson’s Nebula award winning story, “Ponies“. Lois Tilton, from her bi-monthly column at Locus Online: Every girl gets her own pastel talking pony with wings and a horn. But before the other girls will let her join the group, she has to take a knife [...]

Theodora Goss on Reading Protocols by way of James Thurber. Andrew Wheeler muses on the Characteristic Ages of Genres. Matthew Cheney recounts his experience Teaching with the Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. John H. Stevens on Speculative Fiction as a critical term. Tim Harford mentions Cory Doctorow’s For the Win in the context of selecting [...]

Welcome to the first installment of this awards-based Short Story Club. This week the focus is on Aliette de Bodard’s “The Jaguar House, in Shadow“. Here’s a round-up of reactions from around the Net: From Lois Tilton: Alternate history. Greater Mexica has been overtaken by a reactionary theocracy, and the traditional orders of Knights have [...]

This week we have a podcast recorded with Brian Evenson (Altmann’s Tongue, The Open Curtain) and Peter Straub (In the Night Room, A Dark Matter). We talk about Conjunctions magazine (specifically Conjunctions 39), genre writing and academia, Kelly Link, H. P. Lovecraft, Gene Wolfe, and much else.

People both online and offline have written in to let me know about a whole bunch of award short lists that I missed in this post (although to be fair, some of those nominations were announced this week, a few days after the original Consensus post went up). Since there’s so much interest, I’ve gone [...]

The Guardian has been running quite a bit of material on SF in recent days, partly because of the opening of an sf exhibit at the British Library. Among the pieces featured: China Mieville bringing radical sf into the mainstream, many high profile sf writers talk about their favorite sf novels, Neil Gaiman on Gene [...]

OK, I’ve received just enough encouragement to be dangerous here, so we’ll try this out. Last week I put together a list based on all the awards short lists I could find to date. I argued that these represent a newborn consensus about the best fiction of 2010. On the list were three short stories [...]

We are now deep in the thick of the 2011 awards season, with the announcement of the Locus, Hugo, and Nebula shortlists as well as other finalists and short lists. I thought I’d check in and see if there is any consensus forming about the fiction from 2010. Awards often form an interim-step in canon [...]

Way back in the midst of March I sat down with Joe Haldeman and Jay Lake at ICFA. They talked about the experience of being ill, and recovering, and what that means for a writer specifically. This is especially poignant as Jay heads back into surgery and chemotherapy.