Status Update | Sayonara, Summer

By gum, it's been a busy week or three! Not here, clearly. But with the summer well and truly behind us — sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it's true — the classes I teach in the evenings are in session again, and I dare say I may have overcommitted elsewhere in an attempt to fill some of all the free time that I hardly remember happening.

I suppose I have had a few hours to relax. I certainly played the hell out of Saints Row 4 — just the kind of mindless madness I needed, really — and the other half and I both stole a moment to learn all about Sam and the family from Gone Home. I never thought I'd be nostalgic about the mid-90s, but The Fullbright Company showed me just wrong I was. Yet Gone Home is a game as much about the future as the past: it's a glimpse into an age — fast-approaching, I hope — of more mature gaming.

Now that I think on it, I've seen a few movies, too: Star Trek Into Darkness, which wasn't half as awful as many made out, and Zero Dark Thirty, which impressed the hell out of me — and made me want to rewatch Kathryn Bigelow's vampire masterpiece Near Dark. I'm hoping to sit down with World War Z before the weekend, as well.

What? I said movies, not new movies. What do you expect? I haven't been to the cinema in nearly a year...

But by and large I've been filling my every minute with fiction. You'll start seeing the fruits of all that on The Speculative Scotsman shortly, but for the moment, recent highlights have included More Than This by Patrick Ness and Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of my favourite book of 2012. Still to come, there's some good-looking new Lavie Tidhar, Parasite by Mira Grant, Proxima by Stephen Baxter, and — of course — Doctor Sleep by Stephen King, which I've been reading this week... alas, I can't say much more about it than that.

For the foreseeable here, I have two more great guest posts in the can, not a few related reviews, a temperature to take and an announcement to make. The blog'll be back in business in a bit, basically, but no less than ten imminent deadlines mean I'll be occupied with other obligations a little longer.

Meantime, I hope you've been keeping up with the British Genre Fiction Focus over on Tor.com. This week's column went up earlier this afternoon, in fact: there's some Adam Nevill news and a bit about Ireland's bid to host Worldcon in 2019, but the starring attraction is a whole lot of talk about The Time Traveller's Almanac, complete with a mini-interview with Ann VanderMeer about the process of putting together what is an incredibly ambitious anthology. Read all about right here.