• Music: "Wise Up," Aimee Mann

SF, Poe, goths, and historians, oh my!

First of all, The Science Fiction Book Club is looking for the best SF novels of the 1990s. I was pleased to see that Mary Doria Russell, Lois McMaster Bujold, Neil Gaiman, and Neal Stephenson already had been mentioned.


I also found this amusing. (Of course, it's often true for historians, too!)



Speaking of Poe, a few questions for the Poe lovers: does anyone have any thoughts on Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow: A Novel and its perspective on Edgar Allan Poe's death? It's my impression that Arthur Hobson Quinn's Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography is still considered the authoritative work on Poe's life. What, if any, "must read" works on Poe have been published since Kenneth Silverman's Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance? (I haven't read John E. Walsh's Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe.) Any recommendations or musings are welcome. Thanks!


"It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream."
Edgar Allan Poe, from "Marginalia" installment XV, Southern Literary Messenger, June 1849