I have just read the second in this Godspeaker series. It is called The Riven Kingdom, and I am still thinking about it – the sign of a great read. It’s not out yet, but you can buy Book 1 (above) in Australia. I think Karen Miller is one the most amazingly versatile writers I know – sf media tie-ins, classic fantasy, classic swords & sorcery, comic fantasy – she can and does do it all, and very well indeed. Remember her name.

Drop in here for another Fantastic Women interview by Karen, this time of Rachel Caine.

And now I guess the world is beginning to recover from the Potter hysteria epidemic. Somehow I have been left with a nasty taste in my mouth and I have been trying to analyse why. Instead of celebrating the launch of a long awaited book, we seem to have been deluged by tales of venality, gleeful spoilers, and cynical greed. And depressing accounts of how the whole Potter mania has not added up to a growing readership for books. It seems that for most, it’s just a cool thing to do because you can talk/SMS/blog/argue about it afterwards, not because reading a gripping story is satisfying of itself, and something you will want to do again and again with other authors. That is so sad.

Here in Malaysia, the big book chains, who have delighted in undercutting the independent book sellers for quite some time, found themselves the target of similar price cutting. The hypermarkets – so unsporting of them – suddenly announced the day before that they were giving huge price cuts of book 7 . And here they don’t usually sell books at all!

So the book chains got together and refused to sell Potter to anyone who hadn’t pre-ordered. Nice. I am not sure who I am miffed at here, but somehow I think the consumer will suffer, along with authors, in the end.

And was I out there buying the book? No. Fraid not. They are exactly the kind of book I would have loved to read when I was a kid, but I am not a kid any longer, and there is just so much more out there that I prefer and time is so precious…so I did read the first two, to see what all the fuss was about, and stopped. I am finally grown up…