There’s this vast warehouse of a shop that covers three floors in Portland, Oregon. It’s a bit of a legend by all accounts — and even I’d heard of Powell’s Bookstore.

A friend of mine who was there on holiday sent me a snap of the front of it which looks pretty unprepossessing, but inside is a wonderland of books…

…and there it is — out in the wild.

Not quite next to Joe Haldeman or Harry Harrison, but close enough.

In the article I talk a lot about Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl, particularly in light of the fact that it’s only the fourth novel to win the ‘trinity’ of Hugo, Nebula & JWC. I’m not so naive as to believe that the best novels always win these awards. In fact some stinkers have won individual awards. But over the years they’ve collectively been a good barometer of what exemplifies what we should treasure, and point newcomers to as introductory works to the genre.

A second mini-thought: Nicholas Whyte mentioned on his blog that all five fiction winners were men. When I looked through my scrappy list, I found that the [fiction] winners for the 2000s had the lowest proportion of women of any decade since the 1970s.  Does that mean that Hugo voters are becoming more sexist, or is gender less of an issue in who the voters pick, leading to a greater preponderence of male stories on the ballot? You decide.

It’s starting to come together, and to celebrate Winter Song‘s realease into the wild in the US with a series of links and teasers over at Suite101.

More tomorrow, this time on Dark Spires.

The number of balloons flying also seemed markedly less than in the Fieta’s glory years, which are shown in the pictures attached here. That’s almost certainly down to the recession slashing corporate advertising budgets, which are the fuel of balloon flights through sponsorship. Car parking -which used to be free- now costs almost ten pounds per car per stay, discouraging people from coming and going. And it may be that the night-glow has cannibalized morning attendances. Whatever the reason, I hope that the Fiesta has many more years of success.

Meanwhile, elsewhere I’ve posted an interview with Hugo nominated writer Lawrence M. Schoen -known as Klingon Guy, due to his work on the fictional language- over at Suite101. (I bet you wondered where the Klingons came into the title…) Lawrence is a thoughtful and thought-provoking writer who provided an entertaining interview.

To paraphrase her, I’ve been thinking about age a lot lately. I’m exactly three months from my birthday, which will see me enter another decade. There’s a lot of unemployment in most countries, and despite the fact that ageism is theoretically illegal in the UK, most employers still have a residual favouritism toward employing younger workers, using code phrases such as ‘energetic.’  (I don’t know whether this is the case in the US as well.) Even assuming that I graduate, unless I unearth a best-seller in the next two years, I face a gap of eight to thirteen years when I graduate when I will probably need some kind of salaried position to supplement the erratic earnings of writing SF.

You’d assume that self-employed writers would be immune to such trends, but there are worrying signs with the recession squeezing publishers on all fronts.

Established writers running into problems selling their new novels is a phenomenon that’s been rumbling away for years. John Brunner found his career stalled in 1983 after a period away; before his death in 2000, Keith Roberts railed against the difficulty of selling his new works.  Both of those authors, however, had the reputation of being ‘difficult.’

More recently, Norman Spinrad has vociferously expressed his frustration at being unable to find a US publisher for his latest novel. Spinrad is two years short of celebrating 50 years in SF, has an enthusiastic French following, and has been a multiple Hugo and Nebula finalist — but significantly, never a winner. Spinrad is 70 next month.

James Gunn expressed similar frustration -but with considerably more dignity- a few months ago in an interview with Albedo One. This is a man who was made a Grand Master by SFWA three years ago, but he can’t sell his new novel in the US. Gunn is 87 years old.

It’s eminently possible that their problems have nothing to do with age, but more to do with their work being of insufficient interest to readers to hit break-even numbers in these commercially constrained times. But it would be interesting to know the average age of those editors who turned them down. Even more interestingly, how much of a factor is the likely length of their career? (Publishers are less and less interested in single-book deals, but rather in multi-book deals)  

We’ll never know, of course. But I feel a wholly illogical indignation on their behalf — these are giants of my youth, and deserve a little respect.  

But there’s no arguing with the cold logic of the marketplace, and I’m in no position to really complain, since I sold my break-out novel at 48.

I also posted up my full Angry Robot schedule at Suite101. Since the US and UK have different ordering and delivery cycles, there are four different dates, which makes it hard even for me to keep track of.

And I watched Misfits on Channel 4 last night. Brilliant. Heroes done properly — including a cheeky dig at the American series.

And the other bit of news is that I’ve passed my first year.

For anyone who is interested the full results are:

I think we’ll be going out for tapas tonight!

Outlined a novelette for a forthcoming anthology; afterwards wrote the daily 1400 words of the wip. As twittered earlier, managed to read the first chapter of each of the Angry Robot novels without Tourette’s Dog taking off vertically with nil warning (as she often does and) unleashing an unprovoked barrage of canine abuse at the world in general. Then -best of all- got the release dates for the books.

Winter Song will be out on August 31st, which is terrific since I can start book-specific rather than general blathering. And it’s only eight weeks away.  There’ll be more news on books in the wild in the next few weeks, but I’m going to eke out every nugget like a miser.

Let’s see if this afternoon can be as good!

Given that I haven’t read most of them for fifteen or more years, Marsh seemed to be an obvious choice, and a few of her earlier, slighter stories have indeed ended up on amazon.

But some have yielded little gems of underwriting which my younger self didn’t really appreciate. A lot of the stories are far more worldly than contemporaries such as Christie or Allingham, and the characters more finely drawn.  I’m finding myself reluctant to sell too many of them.

Damn – I’ll have to look for another author to cull….