So, everyone has seen this, the NYT’s incredibly disappointing and wrong-headed piece about The Higher Power of Lucky/Newbery controversy (I will say that I have put in a hold request for the book at our local library, one of the many, many fine libraries I’m sure aren’t participating in this madness At All).

Anyway. I have nothing to add to everyone’s extremely intelligent arguments, except this:

I will be so disappointed if Leila doesn’t come up with a scrotum-themed T-shirt. At least in a limited edition…

Updated: Dave proposes that what we really need is a new euphemism for scrotum; go vote!

The SFF round-up review I did awhile back is in this week’s Washington Post Book World. I reviewed Catherynne Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales, Peter Watts’ Blindsight, Mary Rosenblum’s Horizons, and Elizabeth Bear’s Carnival.

(The question mark at the end is a part of Book World’s charming coding–see also the ampersand in Shaken & Stirred–not an existential commentary.)

The winners of the first-ever Cybils have been announced. (For those of you in a coma, these are the YA/Children’s Lit Bloggers’ Choice Awards.)

Jen Robinson asks that you consider snagging one of these titles this week from Amazon or B&N.com or some such place with sales rankings.

There are some damn fine books on the winner’s list, including A Drowned Maiden’s Hair (which I loved loved loved) and Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (likewise). List of winners behind the cut (list stolen from Jen). And follow the first link in this post for commentary from the judges on each category.

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And The Envelope PleaseRead More »

From an interview at Salon with Rene Denfeld about her new book All God’s Children:

Can you explain that a bit more? You talk a great deal about the influence that fantasy-gaming culture has had on street families.

Over the past decade, through "Dungeons & Dragons" and computer fantasy play and gaming, it’s becoming increasingly acceptable for people in their 20s to spend hours a day engaged in adopting mythical characters or pretending they are part of a medieval society. A lot of young people are taking this fascination and acceptance of fantasy play with them into street culture. They will get engaged in elaborate, real-time fantasy games as part of this culture. They might perform rescue missions or decide that somebody offended them and have a mission to go punish the perpetrator.

Once they get on the streets, these youths take street names that are very important to them. In this particular case, the kids took names like Shadowcat and Gambit and Neo. They become absolutely enmeshed, sometimes to the point where I suspect that they really had trouble discerning reality, and started identifying exclusively by their fantasy name. Frankly, I was bowled over that the social service agencies that serve the youths will call them by their made-up, fantasy names.

It seems like she’s lumping an awful lot of stuff together under the "fantasy gaming" rubric.

Oh, and then there’s this at the end:

Did you find anything good in the street-family culture?

No. What is really striking about it is in the past we had hippie cultures and the punk cultures. And there were certainly a lot of criminals that intersected those cultures, but they were largely about something kind of productive and exciting and artistic. I think that today any energy that street families have is consumed by crime, meth and fantasy games. Anything that is happening creatively is far outweighed by the dangers that these youth pose to themselves and to each other.

Again, seems a bit extreme to class "fantasy games" in the same league with crime and meth. What do y’all think of this?