m. c. de marco

Via SFScope: Night Shade Books has published Walter Jon Williams’ Implied Spaces, with bonus downloads. Also new in their catalog is Greg Egan’s Incandescence.

SFScope reports that Pyr Books is expanding its line to about 30 books a year.

The World Without Us sounds like an essential aid for the apocalypse writer. What's left after you kill all the characters? Alan Weisman covers the factoids (the NYC Metro would flood in two days without electric pumps) and the final mark of late humanity on the new Earth (in the sample chapter on persistent polymers).

The Children of Hurin is out, and Amazon has a review by Christopher Tolkien's son Adam:

Remarkably, considering that the earliest passages in The Children of Húrin are 90 years old, Christopher's reworking of the book works brilliantly.

How to Survive a Robot Uprising is a lovely little website about the eponymous book:

If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace. [...] how could so many Hollywood scripts be wrong?

Via a mailing list: Michael Blowhard on how Gold Medal Books turned the paperback from a wartime fad into the mass-market phenomenon it is today.

As a publishing phenomenon, Spillane was like nothing ever before witnessed. His first novel — the two-fisted, paranoid-macho, hardboiled “I, The Jury” — sold only a couple of thousand copies when it was released in hardcover in 1947. But when Signet released the book in paperback the following year, it stunned the book industry by selling many millions of copies.

Via a mailing list: An editor at Tor goes through the details of P&L statements. Installment one of two charts the losses of an unsuccessful mass-market paperback.