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  • Fast Times at Fairmont High

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    Ack! Vernor Vinge has done it again! His Hugo award-winning novella Fast Times at Fairmont High is not merely an excellent story (what else would you expect from the Vingester?) but it throws out some wonderful ideas about the future of entertainment and the singularity. The quality of SF writing has increased drastically recently, in…

  • iainbanks.net

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    Iain Banks has a shiny new website completely devoid of content, apart from an extract from Dead Air (it’s not bad). Oh, and the covers of his non-SF novels have been updated and become quite respectable now.

  • Banks interview

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    View from the left Banks – another interview with Iain Banks (better than the Guardian one). “He played Civilisation 3 for a month recently, then wiped the files and binned the CD.” Ah, a man of my own heart.

  • Douglas Adams

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    I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed Douglas Adams’ writing until I started reading The Salmon of Doubt today. It’s not just his fiction that I like; his essays are equally – if not more – fun to read. Take this excerpt from his essay called Hangover Cures, for example, written in December 1999: “What is…

  • Guardian Banks interview

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    A Guardian interview with Iain Banks in which he reveals he wrote his new novel, Dead Air in only six weeks. Should I be worried?

  • The Decline of Metafilter

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    Once again, Metafilter has me worried. Far be it for me to predict the imminent demise of one of the Internet’s most popular and well-known weblogs when it has confounded the predictions of countless others, but this time I think there’s a real problem.

  • Bulwer Lytton

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    The reliably humorous winners of the 2002 Bulwer Lytton contest for worst opening sentence for a novel. Also, check out the 2001 Lyttle Lytton contest winners, which limits the sentence length to 25 words.

  • Rereadability

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    2 comments on Rereadability

    Having just read three novels, I’ve come up with a theory about the quality of books. Namely, if a book withstands rereading at least once, it’s probably good. Additionally, if a book that reads well initially does not lend itself to rereading, it may not be as good as your initial impressions gave it. I…

  • Princess Bride

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    Just finished reading The Princess Bride. What a wonderful book! Extremely funny, romantic, adventurous, dashing, with enough sorrow and cynicism to balance it out. I don’t think I’ve read a fantasy story like it anywhere else. It makes me wonder whether this type of story can be adapted for alternate reality games/mmoes. I suspect that…

  • Hugos

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    Several of the 2001 Hugo SF short story nominees are online at Asimov’s Science Fiction. High quality free science fiction – it doesn’t get much better value than this.