Linky Establishment

Kim Stanley Robinson profile in the Los Angeles Times:

Some of the highlights are quotes from colleagues.

Terry Bisson: "He's sort of a high-modernist bohemian. But he's pretty middle-class about it too."

Karen Joy Fowler: "He believes that problems can be solved, and he sees the first step as imagining ways they might be solved. He is not interested in councils of despair."

Robinson, referencing his new novel Galileo's Dream (Spectra, 2009): Climate-change rejecters and free-market ideologues "have done just what the Catholic Church did with Galileo. They've made the wrong choice and are going to have to crawl away from it, but the damage will have been done." (read the Los Angeles Time article)

China Miéville on The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard:
"In Ballard . . . the passive voice is part of an invocation of paranoid totality and helps create a baleful world stripped of human agency in which things occur and are done to things."

"Ballard's cool distance does not end at the bedroom door: if anything, what goes on behind that door seems to be dreamlike and abstract fucking, and it spills back out and affects everything else. Investigations of the pornographizing drive as much as an expression of it, this porn is all metaporn."

"Ballard's ambivalence is one of the reasons he is a diagnostician, not a dystopian, and a brilliant one."

(Read the article in The Nation. Be prepared to click through four times to read the whole thing due to irritating website design.)

Best SF and Fantasy of 2009:
Jeff VanderMeer expanded his earlier best of the year list (here) and added commentary: Expanded list. 

International SF and Fantasy:

Jeff VanderMeer compiled a much-needed best of the year overview of international science fiction.

Best Books of the Decade:

Both Jeff VanderMeer and Matthew Cheney have done a brave thing and compiled their lists of the best books they've read over the past decade. These are fascinating and reward close attention.

Jeff VanderMeer's decade and Matthew Cheney's decade.