HarperCollins has luanched their own version of weBook. It's called Authonomy. The difference with HC's site is that the books with the highest community ratings get in front of an HC editor.

It's another example of the Web enabling new ways to replace the traditional "gatekeeping" functions in the book world. The first, of course, was community sites for recommending already-published books. As the number of column inches in the print world devoted to reviews has shrunk, book recommendation/review communities have grown. So now we have the problem of expanding slush piles (or the elimination of them) and limited first reader time being solved by volunteer first reader communities.

Jim Baen's Universe has already been doing this for a couple of years in short SF with their slush forum. Now the concept is expanding.

The October issue of Electric Spec is out with my short story "The Quantiversal Coefficient of Fate". I actually wrote this story twice. Once as it appears in Electric Spec, and once in a longer, more upbeat version. I've always liked the darker one better. So, just in time for Halloween, go read it. You can get it in either .PDF format, or MobiPocket's .PRC.

I finally have a copy of Satirica in my hand. The cover art looks even better in real life than it does on the screen. I need to give one more shoutout to Cac for the excellent art work. Of course, you folks know what I'm talking about, because you already bought yours, right? Hmm?

By the way, it turns out that at least four of the authors are in the NYC area. We're looking into doing some kind of reading/signing/appearance in the area. If you're interested in attending something like that, let me know.

I almost forgot to mention that Electric Spec has puchased my short story "The Quantiversal Coefficient of Fate" for their next issue. The publication date is slated for October 31st. No, it's not a pro market, but they do pay, and it's a nice publication that has a taste for the darker stuff that so many markets shy away from. Check it out, it's well worth reading.

At last, the Drupal-ization of the site is complete. Well, it's as true as that statement can ever be. There are tweaks and tune-ups galore to do, but it's complete enough to take it live. I'm still deciding whether or not I want to write a custom module for displaying online edition of The Heretic. It needs to handle keeping track of structure, the way the book module does, but I'd really like to construct some kind of auto-paging hook so that I can do formatting in the way I did with pageview.pl. For now, though, I just updated (am updating) the pageview template to fit the rest of the site.

Satirica is being discounted at Amazon, now, too.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0981685307

Okay, so I was asked who I considered the literary gems of science fiction. Read Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, Stanislaw Lem (forget the movie and read Solaris). Thomas Disch, perhaps, or Dan Simmons. A lot of Roger Zelazny's work.

That's off the top of my head. There are many more that I'm leaving out, I know, but that should be enough to get someone started.

Barnes & Noble finally has Satirica listed. They're also discounting it by 20%.

search.barnesandnoble.com/Satirica/[...]85304

I have long held that literary fiction and genre fiction were not in any way mutually exclusive. There have been many, many shining examples of very literary genre writers. Now people are starting to notice that there are many genre-leaning literary writers, too.

www.pw.org/content/invasion_genre_snatchers