Terror, the Uncanny, Hugo Party, Podcast, and More

(Ann at the Hugo party, holding up a copy of the next day's newspaper thoughtfully brought by Randy Fingeroot. Article and video here. Randy also brought Ann copies of the actual plates that the page was printed from...)I've been sitting on some links, so here they are...A few photos from the Hugo party here in Tallahassee, which due to a flickr burp you'll just have to scroll down in the main feed to see.Jon Armstrong did a podcast interview with me that turned out great, in that I wasn't talking about the same old stuff. And since I've given up on having talking points, I can be a dangerous man in an interview.I invited Matt Cheney to interview Samuel R. Delany about the re-issue of his classic essays on reading and writing SF, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. It turned out great, and you can read it on Omnivoracious.Jesse Bullington has a new website.I don't agree with everything in this review of District 9--I thought the Nigerians were presented in a stereotypical and uninteresting fashion--but in terms of a potentially smart SF movie being deep-sixed by the stupidity of the action elements...absolutely. All the action stuff was out of Hollywood Cliche Central.Liz Hand pointed me to this cool article about a band tour created by her brother patrick, along with video.The cover of the Polish edition of Veniss Underground, sans text.K. Tempest Bradford's posted interesting lists of POC and women who've written mindblowing SF. I wish the specific short fiction list were a little longer--at only 22 writers that's a little thin.Hmm. There's a Voss Bender Memorial Blog.Noticing "strange SF" doesn't make it a movement--if anything Mr. Reynolds of space opera fame is the quintessential "strange SF" writer, and he fits nicely in terms of themes and certain aspects of his style with what you might call "New Weird," which never limited itself to fantasy (we had to in the antho because so much NW SF is at novel length). So do certain aspects of Banks, especially in the earlier Culture novels, and there's a ton of 60s and 70s SF that's crazy-strange. What's mostly lost here, though, is an understanding of how style and texture help determine the weirdness of a story. There's nothing strange about Sanford's story on a style level--the individual paragraphs are, if anything, straightforward, invisible, serviceable, and a little bit mundane. (The story's better than the style used to tell it, but I still didn't find it at all strange.)Greenpunk fares a little better, except that you can easily see how stories with ecological concerns simply appear across all genres and types of fiction. Indeed, the most interesting rising component of new Steampunk fiction is a willingness to engage issues involving the environment and a sustainable future. I think it's admirable to point out individual "Greenpunk" works, but laughable to think that an author would actually consider him or herself a "greenpunk." There's a limited range for you--something that after the first five years or so would be as interesting as growing your own chia pet.In other, possibly related, news, I just turned in a Steampunk slideshow--text and images to Film In Focus, to coincide with the release of the animated film 9. I'll post a link when it's up.As for where the terror and the uncanny in the post title come from, I just received by contributor copy of the Library of America anthology American Fantastical Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now, edited by Peter Straub.