Yesterday, I reviewed "What Makes This Book So Great", a collection of Jo Walton's brilliant book-reviews from Tor.com. Today, Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden has posted his essay on the book, entitled "What Makes Jo Walton So Great." It's a tremendous read, and a great frame for the book, which is flat-out great.

@Veronica @warrenellis @scalzi @jjsaul @swordandlaser @StephenBrust @doctorow @neilhimself Assaulted BitCoin & invaded Libertopia, SAME DAY.

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) December 18, 2013

Charlie Stross's Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire presents a set of scorching denunciations of Bitcoin based on its technical, political, and economic demerits. — Read the rest

Earlier today, Mark wrote about a boycott of the Ender's Game movie; called for on the basis of Orson Scott Card's public statements opposing gay marriage. Unlike Mark, I really enjoyed Ender's Game and read it several times; later, I read John Kessel's brilliant essay about it and realized some of the ways in which it brilliantly — and troublingly — snuck in a message of justifiable pre-emptive violence. — Read the rest

A reminder that you've got 3 weeks left to apply for the excellent Viable Paradise science fiction writing workshop on Martha's Vineyard — a week-long, very intensive course taught by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Debra Doyle, James D McDonald, Steven Brust, Sherwood Smith, Steven Gould, Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch. — Read the rest

Steven Brust nails what it feels like after you send a book in to your editor:

It has now been over an hour since I sent my [email/query/story submission/250 thousand word novel] and I have heard nothing. Nothing. I now understand Lee's frustration at Gettysburg when Stuart didn't show up.

I love rediscovering cool things. I'm sure I learned, at some point, that the Soviet Union had once sent probes to land on the surface of Venus. But I had completely forgotten this fact until today.

This photo comes from Venera 9, which landed on Venus on October 22, 1975. — Read the rest

Inspired by some of the more pathological behaviors on display in the comment section of John Scalzi's blog Whatever, author Steven Brust has created a doggerel epic entitled "John Scalzi's Blog." Here's a sample:

I've done my work for the day,
I've twittered random shit.

John Schwartz in the New York Times writes about the case of Thomas Haynesworth (shown at left), a Virginia man wrongly convicted of multiple rapes in the mid-1980s and recently proven innocent by DNA evidence.

I must share a personal aside here: I lived in Richmond, Virginia, during those years, and experienced a life-changing and traumatic event related to the topic of this story. — Read the rest

The Granite City, Illinois police have arrested 37-year-old Gerry Arville Armbruster (mugshot above), and they believe he is the same guy who stole a massive collection of Superman memorabilia from Mike Meyer, a mentally disabled comics fan.

Armbruster, who sounds like a real class act, was caught yesterday by Granite City cops for a new crime: robbing a 76-year old man citizen of his jewelry and cash. — Read the rest

Bestselling author Patrick Rothfuss has pledged to help actor Nathan Fillion buy the rights to Firefly from Fox. Fillion, who starred in the series, has publicly said that if he had the money to get Firefly back from Murdoch and Co, he'd make it free and release it on the net:

Here's the deal.

Growing up, some of my absolute favorite books were the Borderlands anthologies — shared-world stories set in a ficton in which the realm of faerie has returned to Earth, in a city called Bordertown where elves and humans mixed freely and magic and technology worked erratically. — Read the rest

Spanish graphic novelists Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido created their hardboiled, anthropomorphic animal comic Blacksad for the French market in 2000, producing three full-length stories over the next five years (Spanish editions were published shortly after the French market). The individual stories have been published in English, but now, for the first time, Dark Horse has collected them all in a single volume. — Read the rest

Fish is Popular Science writer Gregory Mone's debut young adult novel. It's a short, quick, immensely fun pirate novel about treasure hunting, questioning authority, and coming of age.

Maurice "Fish" Reidy is sent to Dublin at the age of 11 when his family's farm-horse dies; he's to earn the money to buy a new one by working for his mysterious uncle as a courier. — Read the rest

A non-exhaustive list of books that would be considered fanfic except for the fact that they won the Pulitzer Prize (provided as a service to writers who believe that fanfic is "immoral, illegal, plagiarism, cheating, for people who are too stupid/lazy/unimaginative to write stories of their own" and who feel "personally traumatized by the idea that someone else could look at your characters and decide that you did it wrong and they need to fix it/add original characters to your universe/send your characters to the moon/Japan/their hometown.") — Read the rest

More scenes from a book tour: Steven Brust's kick-ass JHEREG license-plate, on proud display at BookPeople tonight in Austin (so awesome to see so many happy mutants there tonight!).

There's still plenty of schools, libraries, shelters and other worthy institutions hoping you'll donate a copy of For the Win to them! — Read the rest

On my family's Christmas holiday trip to Walt Disney World, I happened upon a copy of the 2002 book Disney's Looking at Paintings: An Introduction to Fine Art for Young People, written by Erika Langmuir and Ruth Thomson to coincide with an exhibition at London's National Gallery. — Read the rest

Elise Matthesen, conference chair for the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, writes,

From 1986 to 1995, Steven Brust and his friends put on a deep,
intelligent, and intimate convention on the literature of the
fantastic. Its return in 2008 was so much fun that we couldn't resist
bringing it back again in 2009

Fourth Street is a small convention for people who are serious about
good fantasy and good books- serious about reading them, serious about
writing them, serious about appreciating them in all their various
forms.

In my latest Guardian column, "When love is harder to show than hate," I look at the fact that copyright protects critics who want to talk trash about creative works, but gives no real protection to people who want to say nice things about them. — Read the rest

Here's a video of the distraught non-English speaking man from Poland who died from being tasered at the Vancouver Airport. He can be seen throwing a chair and trying to break other things.

When security arrives, he calms down and doesn't appear to be acting in a threatening manner. — Read the rest