Colin Harvey – author

I’ve officially been roboticized!

Asimovs for July 2009 is dissected at Suite101.

Over at Suite101.

Recently I took out supporting membership for Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Montreal in early August 2009. I already had voting rights from attending Denvention, and one unexpected benefit that I discovered was that as well as having the right to vote for the Hugo Awards, I also get a Hugo voting pack. This comprises a zip file of most of the novels, short fiction and non-fiction books on the ballot.

A quick trawl around Amazon shows that the four novels (out of five, as Neal Stephenson’s Anathem isn’t included) retail at about £25, while each of the non-fiction books costs close to that each.

So all told, the material available on Amazon has a retail price of £70 -over one hundred dollars- while much of the short fiction isn’t available there at all. That’s not a bad little bonus for my fifty dollar fee.

And if the WSFS (World Science Fiction Society) repeat the deal next year, it’ll be even better as I’ll still be eligible for that one as well. I‘ll still buy some of those books, especially the Hugo winners, because a downloaded pdf –even if it’s printed out—just isn’t the same as a proper book.

But it’s still a heck of a deal, and kudos to the WSFS for arranging it.

This week’s guest is Sharon K. Reamer, Assistant Editor for Allegory magazine, whose own short story ‘ The Raven Queen’ appears in The Phantom Awakes anthology from Morrigan Books.  Sharon takes us Behind The Slush Pile.

Todays’ Blog on Suite101 is on some books and mags I would have liked to have reviewed properly, but just haven’t found the time for. So a few words on each…with apologies to any of them that felt short-changed. Sorry guys.

New Blog at Suite101.

This week’s review is up at Suite101 — it’s Black Static 10. And having promised myself that I wasn’t going to blog today, writing the review spun off into the first of two blogs, this one only tangentially to do with the review. More on that tomorrow.

I’m back in the old routine at Suite101.