A Gathering of Links

News item: Connie Willis was named the 2011 recipient SFWA Grand Master Award. (follow here)

News item: Gene Wolfe will be celebrated with the Fuller Award, a new Chicago-area literary award, and an evening of entertainment. (follow here)

Samuel R. Delany: "I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing.”
-- From a Paris Review interview. (follow here)

William Gibson: “E. M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me -- that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream.”
-- From a Paris Review interview. (follow here)

"He has handed us a map to his own magic doorways." From the New York Times review by Pagan Kennedy of William Gibson’s new book of essays Distrust That Particular Flavor. (follow here)

"At the core of sf lies the experience of science ... The Mars and stars and digital deserts of our best novels are, finally, to be taken as real, as if to say: life isn’t like this, it is this." Gregory Benford on rereading The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998) by Thomas M. Disch (via SanJuanJon). (follow here)

Soviet-era visions of Mars (via BLDGBLOG). (follow here)

"Extra(ordinary) People is my favorite of Russ’s collections, a forceful, beautiful, astounding book that leaves me low on words to compensate for how I respond to it." Brit Mandelo reads Joanna Russ's Extra(ordinary) People (1984). (follow here: part one and part two)

Elizabeth Hand has two novels forthcoming, Available Dark, due February 2012, and Radiant Days, due April 2012. Hand was recently interviewed on The Coode Street Podcast (follow here). Hand writes about six favorite books (follow here).

Jeff VanderMeer's essay on overlooked books from 2011 convinced me to spend cold hard cash for several books that I had managed to miss (follow here).

VanderMeer gives a rundown of the 2011 nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award, in which he calls Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse "a brilliant book." I'm reading it right now and couldn't agree more. (follow here)

Joanna Russ (1937-2011)

Despite being inactive in fiction and criticism for many years, the loss of Joanna Russ is a significant one, a major voice in science fiction and fantasy silenced. She makes my list of top ten most influential United States science fiction authors of the past 50 years. Among her novels, especially notable are We Who Are About to . . . (Dell Books, 1977) and The Female Man (Bantam Books, 1975). Her short fiction was her greatest strength. Perhaps her best known is the Nebula Award winning short story, “When It Changed” (1972).

Graham Sleight, in his excellent essay on Russ’s short fiction that appears in On Joanna Russ (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) edited by Farah Mendlesohn, concludes:

For sheer inventiveness, formal range, and emotional force, I can think of only a few bodies of short SF to rival it: perhaps those of Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree, Jr., and Gene Wolfe. 

Russ’s essays and criticism were similarly extraordinary. Most recently published is The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (Liverpool University Press, 2007).

Related links:
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: Russ, Joanna
The New York Times: Joanna Russ obituary
Timmi Duchamp: Remembering Joanna
Kathryn Cramer: Goodbye, Joanna
Rose Fox: RIP Joanna Russ
Joanna Russ: When It Changed
Teresa Nielsen Hayden: Remembering Joanna
Brit Mandelo: Queering SFF: The Female Man
Brit Mandelo: How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ
Annalee Newitz: How to Remember and Discover Joanna Russ
Jeff VanderMeer: Joanna Russ and The Weird