Here I am in Croatia once more. The travel all went very smoothly. I flew Lufthansa to Frankfurt, and then Croatian Airlines on to Zagreb. The difference in the quality of the coffee on the two flights was startling. Croatians clearly take their coffee very seriously, even in airline catering.

For today I am staying with lovely friends who, embarrassingly for me, are far better read in science fiction than I am. Hello Milena and Marko, and thanks for the splendid hospitality. Thanks also to Mirko for collecting me from the airport.

This evening Mirko and I head out for the coast, and the first day of the convention. We should be there in good time. I’m told that programming at Liburnicon mostly happens in the evening, because you can’t get anyone away from the beach during the day.

Meanwhile I have one small Zagreb story for you. There is an old cannon here that fires at Noon each day. It has a short Wikipedia entry, which is in Croatian but you can see a picture. It also has a Twitter account. It tweets once a day. You can probably guess what it says. But it does it in Croatian, and vowels don’t work the same in all languages. So every day, on the stroke of Noon, it tweets “BUM!”.

Tomorrow I’m doing the Women’s Outlook show on Ujima again. My guest in the studio will be Stephanie Saulter. We’ll be talking about her trip back to Jamaica to launch Gemsigns there, and about the recent Nine Worlds convention in London. We’ll also cover various issues in Jamaican politics.

Other items on the show will include a “summer reading” slot in which various people, including Stephanie and myself, will talk about they have, or will be, taking to the beach.

The show begins, with Stephanie’s interview, at Noon. It is available for live streaming here. I’ll post links to the Listen Again service when I get home.

I’ll be dashing off to Bristol for this week’s Ujima Radio show shortly, and I have to stay in the city for an LGBT History Month event tonight. Fortunately I was busy on Sunday and I have a third book review for you. This one is of an academic study of women cyberpunk writers (including the very fabulous Lyda Morehouse whose books I am publishing). The book is Cyberpunk Women, Feminism and Science Fiction: A Critical Study by Carlen Lavigne. You can read the review here.

I’m also delighted to report two new books from Charles Tan and his colleagues at Flipside. The first, The Kite of Stars, is a new collection from the fabulous Filipino author, Dean Francis Alfar. If you enjoyed his How to Traverse Terra Incognita then you will want this book as well.

The other book is Alternative Alamat, an anthology of stories based on Philippine mythology and edited by Paolo Chikiamco. I know absolutely zip about Philippine mythology, so the book is immediately interesting on that basis. Charles hasn’t sent me a Table of Contents and I’m a bit rushed right now, but I do see from Amazon that Rochita Loenen-Ruiz has a story in the book.

When I wrote my report on Kij Johnson’s fiction masterclass I commented that I expected to start seeing reviews in which the reviewer castigates the novel for not following the “rules” of writing. I didn’t have long to wait. A couple of days ago Twitter led me to a review in which one of the characters is described thus:

she’s more like a person than a character. A lovingly drawn portrait rather than an actor that serves the plot

The review goes on to say that a novel full of characters like this would not work.

* head * desk * repeat *

I find writing courses interesting. I somehow doubt that anything other than long practice will turn my own feeble efforts into saleable fiction. However, a writer giving a course will inevitably tell you a lot about how she approaches her craft. As Kij Johnson is one of the most successful writers of short fiction around these days, I wanted to learn more about how she worked.

I should note at the start that here is no one correct way in which to write. During the class, Kij stated that she does not read “how to write” manuals, though she does read “how to” books by people in other creative industries. (She recommended one by a choreographer, I’m very keen to read David Byrne’s How Music Works.) If you want further confirmation, listen to the latest Coode Street Podcast in which Nancy Kress explains that she and Connie Willis disagree utterly when it comes to how to write a novel.

Having said that, there are many techniques and guidelines that beginning writers may find useful. We therefore spent a lot of time talking about things like three-act structures, Freytag pyramids, try-fail loops, and so on.

The problem with such things, as with all forms of art, is that, having once discovered “the rules”, so many people fail to move beyond them. Ambitious artists always learn the rules only so that they can then discover new and innovative ways to break them. But I can also imagine commercial genre fiction editors (or Hollywood studio managers) yelling, “No, no, you must stick to the rules, it is what the customers expect!”.

I’m beginning to see the problem affect reviews as well. Once a reviewer knows that there is a supposed set structure to a book, anything that deviates from it, even if it breaks the rules creatively and brilliantly, is liable to be marked down for doing so.

You can tell a book that is written to a structure. I described it to Kij as a Gerry Anderson novel, because the scenery looks like it was made on Blue Peter by Valerie Singleton, using empty washing up liquid bottles and sticky-backed plastic, while the characters can be seen being pulled round on strings controlled by the author (foreign readers, and younger Brits, may not get the cultural references, but hopefully the idea is clear). That’s a bit unfair to Gerry as he did very well with the budget he had available, but authors have no such excuse.

What I wanted to know from Kij was how you avoid that syndrome. How do you make your book sound like it is about real people, in real situations, even if it is set in some bizarre fantasy world. Her answer was that it is all a matter of detail. Obviously not excessive detail — that will just bore your readers. What you need is relevant snippets of detail. The sort of thing that will make it seem like you are describing a real scene, not just puppets in front of a painted backdrop.

There are other important aspects to successful writing as well. Clunky prose, for example, will ruin the best planned novel. I was also very interested by Kij’s comments about word origins, and how choosing words that are derived from Anglo-Saxon can create a very different effect to choosing words derived from Latin. But the sort of thing I describe above is quite common with debut writers, and I keep finding myself wishing that they’d listen to Nancy Kress as well as to Connie Willis.

The NHS is undergoing as major shake-up right now, and as a result is looking closely at various areas of its operations. On the assumption that gender treatments will still be available in future, they have a consultation out concerning their current standards of care. It is part of a wider look at mental health services, and you can find it here.

Looking at the papers they have on that site shows that, when people who know about the treatment of trans people get involved, the NHS can do pretty well. I still wish they would not class gender dysphoria as a “mental illness”, but I can’t see them changing that until the World Health Organization changes their classification.

The first paper, the one on clinical commissioning, contains a review of the literature on the effectiveness of gender therapy. As you might expect, it is more cautious that the EHRC document I blogged about recently, but it does repeat the findings of the NHS Audit study from 2008 which found that 98% of patients (from 647 responses) were happy with the outcome, despite 49% feeling that services at gender identity clinics could be improved.

Interestingly it also quotes a study from 1998 which estimates that male-to-female surgery saves the NHS up to £950 per patient per year, because those people would no longer need treatment for their distress. That means that the surgery pays for itself in around 10 years (based on the cost of mine in 1999).

I note that paper one also says that patients should only proceed with the Real Life Experience without a hormone prescription if it is practicable to do so, whereas as David Batty is suggesting that prescribing hormones before the RLE is malpractice.

The second paper clearly states that it is the duty of GPs to provide support for the life-long well-being of patients after they have been discharged by gender specialists. The only reason I can find for not discharging patients beyond 12 months after surgery is if they are not “medically stable”. If I’m not medically stable after 14 years, I wish one of these GPs would tell me what the problem was.

Yesterday I went up to London to read a book by Michael Dillon. If you’ve not heard of him, Dillon is the first recorded instance of medically-assisted female-to-male gender transition. Dillon, an Irishman, began his treatment in 1939 while living in Bristol. Later he trained as a doctor and is believed to have assisted with the gender surgery for Roberta Cowell, a British trans woman. The American, Christine Jorgensen, who is generally lauded as the world’s first transsexual, did not have her surgery until a year after Cowell.

Dillon’s influence, however, goes far beyond these pioneering surgeries. During his transition, he wrote a book, Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. This is the book that I needed to go to the library of the Wellcome Trust to read. I have to admit that Dillon’s prose is pretty turgid, though he was trying to write a medical treatise so perhaps that can be excused. However, there is no doubting the passion with which he argues on behalf of himself and people like him. In the light of the #TransDocFail controversy, I’d like to share a few quotes with you.

Dillon’s argument is that trans people are probably a result of some sort of malfunction of the endocrine glads. He has no direct evidence for this, but has a wealth of examples of other known effects of these glands and the chemicals they produce on the sexual characteristics of the body. He suggests that with trans people the problem may arise during the development of the foetus, a view that modern science is only just coming around to. Given the situation of a male mind in a female body (or vice versa), Dillon suggests:

Surely, where the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the body should be made to fit, approximately, at any rate to the mind…

And that is pretty much how trans people are treated to this day, using the same techniques of hormone treatment and plastic surgery that Dillon pioneered.

The book was published in 1946, when Britain was still recovering from WWII and the British people were full of enthusiasm for the Welfare State. Dillon saw no reason why trans people should be excluded from this:

Hormone treatment, whether for disease of the gonads, or for this purpose, is expensive. Surely in our post-war world we should see that all medicinal products are for international use and should be free to all sufferers.

These days estrogen is so cheap that doctors make a profit on prescribing it, and yet many trans women, including myself, have been denied access to the drug on the NHS.

Dillon had little respect for mental health professionals, and with good reason. The GP he first approached was George Foss, an early pioneer of the use of hormones in medicine. Foss was initially very supportive, but he decided that he’d better make sure that his patient was of sound mind. The psychologist to whom Foss referred Dillon not only insisted that Foss stop the treatment, he also gossiped to staff at Dillon’s workplace, resulting in Dillon having to leave a well-paid scientific job commensurate with his Oxford education and take up work as a mechanic in a local garage. Dillon notes angrily:

Why, then, must smug , self-complaisant people and psychologists whose knowledge is limited because they have not, themselves, entered into the experience of those persons about whom they presume so glibly to write, dictate to such what course they should or should not take. Is it not for the individual to judge whether he be ‘mutilated’, experimented on or left alone?

Given that Dillon pretty much invented the process of gender transition (long before Harry Benjamin codified it), I was expecting him to be an advocate of the medical route. However, Dillon seems to have been well aware that the trans community existed on a very broad spectrum of experience, and that surgery would not be appropriate for all. Given his distrust of psychologists, he advocated a patient-centered approach.

If, on the other hand, there is an incompatibility between the mind and the body, either the body must be made to fit the mind, as we have said, or the mind must be made to fit the body; and that is for the patient himself to judge if he be of age.

Which is pretty much where the trans community wishes we were today, instead of being stuck in a process whereby “doctor knows best” and the patient is treated as too mentally unstable to be able to know her own mind. Dillon, of course, has 1940s views on the ability of children to know their own minds, and he also demonstrates some pretty typical 1940s views on the nature of women, but there is no doubting the modernity of his views on the medical treatment of trans people. If he had been listened to, trans people would be far better off today.

There is a lot more where that came from. I’ll be giving a lecture on Dillon at the M-Shed in Bristol on February 16th as part of the ongoing LGBT History Month events, in particular the exhibition of LGBT life in Bristol being staged at the M-Shed by Out Stories Bristol (of which I am co-chair).

And hey, they have an exhibition on chocolate running at the same time. What more incentive do you need to visit?

The podcast of yesterday’s Outlook show is now available on the Ujima website. If you want to listen to me talking about marriage equality, the Leveson inquiry, the forthcoming LGBT History exhibition and Bristol’s role in the history of transsexuals, click here.

The segment with me in starts around 18 minutes into the show. Before that there’s some explanation of the “fiscal cliff” for confused Brits. American listeners may find it interesting that we regard your government as much more left wing than ours in its current economic policies.

The other two guests on with me were very interesting. I spent a long time after the show chatting to Edson Burton. His re-imagined version of the Odyssey, The Ithaca Project, sounds fascinating, and will have fantastical content as well as some very contemporary relevance. You can learn more about the work that Edson does here, and for local people there’s a note about free acting workshops for people who want to take part in the show.

The papers here in the UK have, as is traditional at this time of year, been full of discussion of the New Year Honours List. Who has been justifiably recognized? Who has been shamefully snubbed? Who turned down an honour? Are the honours a disgraceful anachronism?

I tend towards the anachronism end of the spectrum. Certainly I think it is daft to have titles that reference a “British Empire” that no longer exists. But at the same time I see people like Christine Burns (herself an MBE) celebrating the people who are honored for their work in Equality & Diversity.

You see, one of the things about the Honours is that they indicate who is an acceptable member of British society and who is not. In a country as obsessed with class and status as this one, that’s important. So I’m happy that people such as Christine and April Ashley have been recognized for services to trans rights, and I look forward to the day when trans people start getting awards for things other than asking to be treated as human beings. Many of them are, after all, very talented.

Then again, the Honours don’t happen by magic. Nor does the Queen scour the newspapers looking for people to recognize. No, you get on an Honours list because people have suggested you are a suitable recipient. I was not surprised to see Ben Goldacre complaining on Twitter about people lobbying him in search of nominations. One of the reasons that trans people, and indeed science fiction writers, don’t get awards is that we think our people have no chance, or don’t even know that we can suggest them. Promoting your community’s star performers for honors is, I submit, a legitimate form of E&D campaigning. Had they worked in others fields, I suspect that Dave Langford, Paul Kincaid and Vincent Docherty would all have had some sort of recognition by now. It’s worth thinking about.

A quick follow-up to Friday’s post. Here’s a photo of me with the Olympic Torch. That’s Louise with me, and Ben Bird of Shout Out in the background. My thanks to Karl for the photo and Mary the Producer for tagging me on it in Facebook.

Late last night I was looking for something to prevaricate about rather than start a new work item. So around 10:00pm I started looking at the Locus All Centuries Poll. I got to bed around 1:00am and finally got to sleep around 2:00pm. Part of that was due to the cold, but a lot of it was due to the blasted 20th Century short fiction. I shall explain.

Picking 10 novels in each of SF & F in the 20th Century was hard, but the lists seemed quite comprehensive and in the end the only one I added was Waking the Moon. On another day I might pick entirely different lists, and before you all start yelling please note that I went from reading very little to reading an awful lot of new stuff when I started Emerald City, so there are a lot of pre-1995 books I haven’t read.

Note also that there are a bunch of personal favorites in here. This is a popular vote award, right? And while my favorites might not be very popular, I’m still going to ignore anyone who tries to argue on the basis of an absolute standard of quality.

20th Century SF Novels

Brunner, John : The Sheep Look Up
Carter, Angela : The Passion of New Eve
Carter, Raphael : The Fortunate Fall
Dick, Philip K. : The Man in the High Castle
Haldeman, Joe : The Forever War
Le Guin, Ursula K. : The Dispossessed
May, Julian : The Many-Colored Land
Noon, Jeff : Vurt
Roberts, Keith : Pavane
Wolfe, Gene : The Book of the New Sun

20th Century Fantasy Novels

Danielewski, Mark Z. : House of Leaves
Hand, Elizabeth : Waking the Moon
Harrison, M. John : The Course of the Heart
Holdstock, Robert : Mythago Wood
Kushner, Ellen : Thomas the Rhymer
Miéville, China : Perdido Street Station
Newman, Kim : Anno Dracula
Powers, Tim : The Anubis Gates
Ryman, Geoff : Was
Wolfe, Gene : Soldier of the Mist

I was disappointed in the lack of women writers in there, but then we are talking 20th Century, and for much of it SF&F was heavily male-dominated.

Let’s stick with novels for a while, and move on to the 21st Century. I felt much better read here, and consequently choosing 5 in each category was just as hard as choosing 10 in the 20C. A lot of well-loved books got left out.

21st Century SF Novels

Courtenay Grimwood, Jon : Effendi: The Second Arabesk (2002)
Harrison, M. John Light (2002)
McDonald, Ian : The Dervish House (2010)
Morris, Jan : Hav (2006)
Sullivan, Tricia : Maul (2003)

I’m a bit confused as to why JCG’s Arabesk books were listed separately rather than a series, but Effendi is the best of them, which is rare for a middle book of a trilogy. I might well have had Kathy Goonan’s Flower Cities series in there had they not also been listed individually due to the series crossing the century boundary.

21st Century Fantasy Novels

Clarke, Susanna : Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)
Kay, Guy Gavriel : Ysabel (2007)
Miéville, China : The City & the City (2009)
Sinisalo, Johanna : Not Before Sundown (Troll)
Valente, Catherynne M. : Palimpsest (2009)

I note in passing that had the poll gone up to the present day I would have picked Under Heaven and Deathless instead of Ysabel and Palimsest, and room would have to have been made for The Drowning Girl.

I’m going to do 21st Century short fiction next because I at least had a fighting chance here. I don’t read a lot of short fiction, but I do read Hugo nominees. I should have known a bunch of stories. I had to restrain myself from saying, “I’ll just have everything by Ted Chiang and Kij Johnson”. Even so I clearly have favorites. Liz Hand is really good at the novella length, and Joe Hill’s wonderful debut collection is still fresh in my mind.

I think Tainaron is the only one not on the Locus lists.

21st Century Novellas

Hand, Elizabeth : Cleopatra Brimstone (nva, 2001)
Hand, Elizabeth : The Least Trumps (nva, 2002)
Swirsky, Rachel : The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window (nva, 2010)
Zivkovic, Zoran : The Library (nva, 2002)
Krohn, Lena : Tainaron: Mail From Another City (nva, 2004)

21st Century Novelettes

Ford, Jeffrey : The Empire of Ice Cream (nvt, 2003)
Gaiman, Neil : A Study in Emerald (nvt, 2003)
Hill, Joe : 20th Century Ghost (nvt, 2002)
Hill, Joe : Pop Art (nvt, 2001)
Link, Kelly : The Faery Handbag (nvt, 2004)

21st Century Short Stories

Chiang, Ted : Exhalation (ss, 2008)
Duncan, Andy : Senator Bilbo (ss, 2001)
Fowler, Karen Joy : What I Didn’t See (ss, 2002)
Johnson, Kij : 26 Monkeys, also the Abyss (ss, 2008)
Lanagan, Margo : Singing My Sister Down (ss, 2004)

And now the hard part. I know I did read short fiction in the 20th Century. Heck, I can remember reading Dangerous Visions back in the 70s. But can I remember any of the stories in it now? No. The task was further complicated by the fact that there are some stories in the lists that are so famous that I can’t remember whether they are familiar because I have read them, or simply because I have heard so much about them. Finally my list is colored by what I was reading a lot of when I was younger, which means Howard and Lovecraft. I did role-playing: D&D, Call of Cthulhu. Of course I read that stuff.

However, I was having real trouble coming up with stories from the lists that I knew I had read and liked. This was the point at which I started leafing through anthologies, especially The Weird, and looking up favorite writers on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. There are several stories here that I have added to the lists.

20th Century Novellas

Chiang, Ted : Seventy-two Letters (nva, 2000)
Le Guin, Ursula K. : The Word for World Is Forest (nva, 1972)
McCaffrey, Anne : Weyr Search (nva, 1967)
Hand, Elizabeth : Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol (nva, 2000)
Lovecraft, H. P. : The Shadow Over Innsmouth (nva, 1942)
Stableford, Brian : Les Fleurs du Mal (nva, 1994)
Tiptree, James, Jr. : Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (nva, 1976)
VanderMeer, Jeff : The Transformation of Martin Lake (nva, 1999)
Vinge, Vernor : True Names (nva, 1981)
Wyndham, John : Consider Her Ways (nva, 1956)

20th Century Novelettes

Chiang, Ted : Tower of Babylon (nvt, 1990)
Hand, Elizabeth : The Boy in the Tree (nvt, 1981)
Harrison, M. John : Egnaro (nvt, 1981)
Harrison, M. John : The Luck In The Head (nvt, 1984)
Howard, Robert E. : Worms of the Earth (nvt, 1932)
Keyes, Daniel : Flowers for Algernon (nvt, 1959)
Le Guin, Ursula K. : Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight (nvt, 1987)
Lovecraft, H. P. : The Call of Cthulhu (nvt, 1928)
Tiptree, James, Jr. : The Women Men Don’t See (nvt, 1973)
Wells, H. G. : The Land Ironclads (nvt, 1903)

20th Century Short Stories

Bisson, Terry : Bears Discover Fire (ss, 1990)
Bisson, Terry : They’re Made Out Of Meat (ss, 1991)
Carter, Raphael : Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin (ss, 1998)
Charnas, Suzy McKee : Boobs (ss, 1990)
Clarke, Arthur C. : The Nine Billion Names of God (ss, 1953)
Gaiman, Neil & Vess, Charles : A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ss, 1990)
Howard, Robert E. : Queen of the Black Coast (ss, 1934)
Le Guin, Ursula K. : The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (ss, 1973)
Russ, Joanna : When It Changed (ss, 1972)
Zoline, Pamela A. : The Heat Death of the Universe (ss, 1967)

I have added a credit to Charles Vess for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Neil insisted on it when the story won the World Fantasy Award, and he was right to do so. It may seem to outsiders that in comic creation the writer does the words and the artist the pictures, but in practice the artist often has a considerable input to how the tale is told, and has a considerable effect on how the tale is read. (Conversely, writers often suggest the scenes that the artist should draw in their scripts).

Anyway, there are my lists. They are undoubtedly WRONG!!! And I doubt that they will have much overlap with the final results. But it was an interesting exercise building them.

Update: Aaargh! I’d forgotten they want us to rank them. This may prevent me from actually voting.

I have email from Liza asking me to remind you all about the Locus All-Centuries Poll, in which you,the great science fiction reading public, get to vote on your favorite works of the 20th and (nascent) 21st centuries. I haven’t voted. Just looking at the recommended lists sends me into fits of indecision, not to mention guilty depression over all of the great books and stories I haven’t read. And I’m going to hide from the Internets for a week or so when the results come out so as to avoid all of the angry fanboys venting about how the Locus readers are just WRONG!!!!

I will note that I think it is outrageous that Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon isn’t on the recommended list. I hope lots of you saw my tweet last night about the Cyber Monday fire sale that Open Road had of books by Liz and Octavia Butler. I’ve recently re-read Waking the Moon as a result of it being re-issued and I still love it. Must write a review.

Anyway, the nice people at Locus would like you to vote, and if nothing else you too can have fun — for various values of “fun” — looking through the recommended lists. You have until the end of the month to participate. Enjoy.

Late last night I spotted press release from Night Shade Books. I was vaguely aware that Jonathan Strahan’s excellent anthology series, Eclipse, would not be producing any new volumes. However, the announcement states that the anthology is going online. Instead of producing a book each year, Strahan will instead publish new short fiction, twice a month. So effectively Eclipse has become an online fiction magazine. It will be free to read. Presumably, in order to maintain the high standards set by the anthology (not to mention Jonathan’s reputation) it will be paying professional rates. As far as I can see it should qualify as a semiprozine. That looks like some serious competition for Clarkesworld, et al. That’s excellent news.

There’s no indication in the announcement of a business model, though I guess Jonathan may have something to say int he next Coode Street Podcast. My guess is that Night Shade will see it as a marketing vehicle, much as I did with Salon Futura. Hopefully it helps them sell books, because they do some very fine ones.

Talking of which, some of us are waiting eagerly for the new Kameron Hurley novel, Rapture. Get on with it, guys. 😉

Well, Gav did anyway. And I like it when people tell me that they are looking forward to buying a book.

My own review of Jagannath won’t be out for a few weeks yet. However, I can say that I’m very much liking what I’m reading. Also I met Karin Tidbeck at Ã…con this year and thought she was really smart. Besides, the book has enthusiastic recommendations from Ursula K. Le Guin, China Miéville, Liz Hand and Karen Joy Fowler. What could I possibly say that could add to that? If you want to hear from Karin herself, there’s an interview on Strange Horizons.

There will be paper copies available in a few weeks, but Jeff and Ann are releasing the ebook early. I’m delighted to have this book for sale. Check it out, please.

Neal Stephenson is touring in support of his new book of essays, Some Remarks. Last night he was in Toppings in Bath, and I managed to get away from work to see him. (I paid for it later by doing 2 hours work after I got home.)

I don’t think the crowd was quite what Neal was expecting, though the shop was packed, which was good. His chosen reading was from a lecture he gave at Gresham college a few years ago. Basically it eulogizes geekdom. That would have been wonderful at a convention, but the Toppings crowd was not really very geeky. Heck, Stuart Barnes was there. And if that means nothing to you, imagine a Stephenson reading at Borderlands in San Francisco and discovering Steve Young in the audience.

I’m also not sure I agree with Stephenson on this, though I should read the whole speech before forming an opinion. Fans have been describing themselves as Slans for decades, and it hasn’t made them better people.

Anyway, there were questions, most of them were OK if a little basic. I won’t say anything about the woman who opened by saying that she doesn’t read SF and then asked Neal what his least favorite Doctor Who villain was, save to opine that she probably works for a tabloid newspaper.

Stephenson will be in Bristol tonight, where he should get a much geekier crowd. Hopefully he’ll have a better time of it.

Now if only I could work out how Toppings got such a good crowd, and arrange for a repeat at each of their autumn SF events (Iain Banks, Paul Cornell and Peter Hamilton).

No, it is not me having a bad hair day. It is the surface of the Sun, taken using a new technique pioneered by Mexican astronomers. Congratulations to César Cantú and his team from the entertainingly named Chilidog Observatory in Monterrey. More details and a larger version of the picture here.

Talking of translation awards, one of the finalists in the long form category is Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik. I reviewed the book here, and also interviewed Mr. Towfik for Locus. I’m delighted to report that the interview is now available online at the World SF website. My thanks to Liza and the crew at Locus for giving permission for this, and to Lavie and Charles for their interest in the piece.