Flurb, a webmag containing astonishing tales from some of the top sci-fi/fantasy writers out there. Put together by Rudy Rucker.

Michael's Chabon's "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" has become the first book ever to be nominated for the Nebula, Edgar, and the Hugo awards.

I'm excited about the new io9 Science Fiction blog. This is their manifesto explaining the site purpose.

Quoted: Earth is full of people who want to sell you cheap ways of seeing the future They tell you tomorrow will be more of the same, with shinier toys. Or that work as we know it is about to end. io9 is the visionary watchdog who calls those charlatans on their shit. We're going to show you a new world that's shockingly different from what you're used to. And it's not always going to be a shiny happy place.

click to play

Quoted: A rare documentary of science fiction on American television. During half an hour you will watch a synthesis of what was the first forty yea.... Nov 15, 2006.

An appraisal of where one reporter places Philip K. Dick among the literary/writerly pantheon.

Quoted: Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three. His reputation has risen through the two parallel operations that genre writers get when they get big. First, he has become a prime inspiration for the movies, becoming for contemporary science-fiction and fantasy movies what Raymond Chandler was for film noir: at least eight feature films, including “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and, most memorably, Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” have been adapted from Dick’s books, and even more—from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” to the “Matrix” series—owe a defining debt to his mixture of mordant comedy and wild metaphysics.

William Gibson Q&A in support of his new novel "Spook Country," a speculative fiction novel set in the recent past.

Quoted: You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it - it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you've got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn't true to the same extent even a decade ago.

Going to go see this tonight, I think...

I went and saw Greg Bear speak a month or two ago. He spoke about his advisor role at Homeland Security. I think it's a pretty great idea to have a group of able-minded science fiction writers thinking through possible disaster scenarios and how we can avert or at least respond to them.

Quoted: Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described deviant thinkers: science-fiction writers.

Good list of a few places to find DRM-free science fiction ebooks.