A Random Linkdump and Concert Tonight…

No time to post anything too significant today, or for the next couple of days. Oh yeah: this is late notice, y’all, but… Hwang Shin Hae Band is playing tonight. No idea if there are tickets available but I’ll be there a few hours early, trying to get one! Show’s at 8, and here’s a map to the venue — the Sang Sang Madang live hall… So anyway — my content free post of… Shiny Links! Some stories by people you should know about: Tina Connolly’s “Hard Choices” at Brain Harvest (or play the game, made by Kaolin Fire, here) …

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Lester Young Podcast Live @ Starship Sofa!!!

Yes, here it is! Tony  at Starship Sofa has posted this week’s podcast, which includes a wonderful dramatic reading by J.J. Campanella of my Asimov’s novelette “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues.” The cover art for this issue is an excellent scene from the story by artist Skeet Scienski (who also has an audio segment on genre art!) — I’m blown away by that art, man! — and the story is introduced by Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov’s SF! (I also do a little outro on the background for the story.) There’s also poetry by Bruce Boston, and …

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Worth Reading, March ’09

This entry is part 22 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I don’t link online fiction enough, but I found a few links at The World SF News Blog, which I mentioned in an earlier post. Here’s a great story at Strange Horizons by Shweta Narayan. Here’s a very interesting essay about SF (or its relative lack thereof) in the Arabic world, by Achmed A. W. Khammas. It’s particularly interesting in relation to relatively (though not exactly) comparable status in Korea, and its pinpointing of cultural and historical causes for the scarcity.

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The Story of Banana Mountain

My father used to tell me stories all the time, stories of the Old Country. That Old Country being Nyasaland, of course, and sometimes Rhodesia. Neither of those countries existed by the time he left the Old Country with my mother and me for Canada. His stories were weird in the kind of way that stories immigrants tell can be, but it used to hammer home to me the fact that, despite being a white man, he was absolutely a foreigner to the place I was growing up. It’s not to say he didn’t have advantages over, say, some of …

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