Short

I just remembered that the deadline for the short story competition of IASFS (that's the Indian Association of Science Fiction Studies), in Douglas Adam's words, whooshed bye on June 1st.

The last and first time I wrote a story and won a prize for it was in school - a short detective story contest sponsored by The Assam Tribune. I borrowed part of the hero's name from the hero of Jatayu's books - Jatayu being a fictional character who's himself a writer in Satyajit Ray's superb Feluda series.

Speaking of short stories, last year Wired magazine asked leading writers to come up with the shortest stories they can think of. Some of the best are here.

Then there's the Asimov edited anthology of really short sf stories - not able to find my copy right now. The ones in that were not one-liners, but mostly one-paragraphers and one-pagers.

Coming back to short stories of 'normal' length, my favourite ones in the sf genre remain

• One-Face - Larry Niven
• Chrysalis - Robert Reed (more like a novella)
• Most of ones in Stephen Baxter's Vacuum Diagrams
• Most of the ones in The Collected Stories of Greg Bear

Some news, albeit a bit old

The 9th annual conference of the Indian Association of Science Fiction studies is in Pondicherry, 9-11th November 2007.

Overload

Have been thinking of getting another bookshelf, or maybe clear out some of the racks I'm currently using for keeping other stuff. And hopefully, with the Dekoh Books app , start a cataloging process :D.


Also need to store them sorted - or atleast, in a reasonably sorted manner, so that I don't end up getting multiple copies of the same book. Wondering when Dekoh books is gonna support barcode scanning.

Some more of my treasury ..hehe..it's good to gloat, sometimes.

Diversity

Spent my reading time last week reading a juvenile - Payal Dhar's A Shadow in Eternity. (Reading time is whatever I can squeeze out from my day for curling up with a book. Sigh.). Payal Dhar is one of the new breed of Indian fantasy writers, one of the prominent among them being Samit Basu.
Shadow is enjoyable, but what put me off was the shoddy editing - spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes - can't blame the author for them of course, but one would have expected better quality from a brand like Puffin. And children's literature surely deserves more attention to these things, doesn't it?
Other than that, the climax gave me a bout of deja vu - Basu's Simoqin Prophecies has more or less the same concept -

***********Spoiler warning**************
there's a prophecy, that an evil lord will rise, and that in the end the (good) hero/ine finds out s/he is one who's in the prophecy, and is the evil lord.
***********End spoiler*****************


There's a massive book sale in YMCA Secunderabad - not much sf :(. But loads and loads of those big reference books. Reader's Digest. McGrawHill. Yumm! Other than the usual stuff, got a one volume edition of The Golden Bough.
And The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by George Mann. Does not look so mammoth, though.

Filling the last two inches of my bedroom shelf

Earth - Final Conflict - Heritage
T2 Infiltrator - S M Stirling
Voyage - Stephen Baxter
Chronocules - D G Compton
The Demons at Rainbow Bridge - Jack L Chalker
The Star Trek Encyclopedia (50 bucks :D)
Star Trek Chronology
Star Trek DS9 (peekchure book)
Cemetery World - Clifford D Simak
Earthclan - David Brin
The Day of their Return - Poul Anderson
The Crystal Memory - Stephen Leigh
The World of Tiers - 1 - Philip Jose Farmer (I think I already have that)
A Thunder on Neptune - Gordon Eklund (ditto)
A Touch of Strange - Theodore Sturgeon
The Delikon - H M Hoover

That's the sunday book market stuff. From back home I got (non sf)
In the Meadows of Gold. Not what I expected it to be, with most of the book taken up by the translations of the buranjis (histories).
Atmojibonir Proyax - Dinesh Ch. Goswami - semi-autobiographical work by the writer known as the doyen of Assamese science fiction. (Pronouncing the 'X' in Assamese)
and some others.