And they're close to an Irish pub, too.

"You do realize," said Zanna, "that you're stroking a milk carton."
"You're just jealous."

China Miéville, Un Lun Dun

I spent part of the weekend on Vancouver Island helping my niece and her boyfriend move, but I also managed to find some free time to do some shopping in Victoria. If you're visiting British Columbia's capital, I strongly recommend Munro's Books on Government Street to anyone whose interests lie in the literary world.

During a previous visit, I had wandered into Munro's without any particular expectations, since very few non-genre bookstores have anything unique to offer to the science fiction and fantasy shopper*. However, to my surprise and pleasure, I found a paperback copy of Terry Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, which I'd never even heard of, let alone seen on a store shelf.

As a result, I went in this time with more of a sense of optimism, and was rewarded by a trade paperback copy of China Miéville's Un Lun Dun for a mere $11.00, which is not all that much more than I would have expected to pay for a regular paperback. Even more surprising, the price was actually $11.00, rather than $10.99 or some similar insult to my mathematical intelligence.

Now if they can only overcome their identity problem - do they really need to have their name in that many places on their storefront?

- Sid

* In fact, there are some genre stores that don't have a lot to offer, either. White Dwarf, Vancouver's science fiction and fantasy specialty store, has done nothing to impress me, between their hard-to-browse shelving and the fact that they never have called me about the book that I ordered three years ago. Their dog is a pleasant sort, though.

As a change from captions on cat photos.

In a Beautiful Mind moment of schizophrenic clarity I saw the book for what it was: not a gentle introduction to life's most profound curiosity, but a primer for the parasitic offspring of an invisible invasion!

Jason Yungbluth, Deep Fried Comics

The Internet has spawned a legion of webcomics, blogs, commentaries and forums, and I'm sure that there are people out there who fill every waking moment by subjecting other people to a barrage of links to their favourite net memes. I've done my best to avoid that here, although now and then a link to something will sneak in.

In this case, however, I couldn't resist. There's just something about the Zogg invasion manual ...

- Sid

You can stop now.

Usually when you have a black man or a woman president, a meteor is about to hit the Statue of Liberty.

Jon Stewart, 80th Academy Awards

As I type this, Barack Obama's inauguration is well under way in Washington, and it is impossible to ignore the historic nature of this event. And I mean literally impossible, in that if I had a dollar for every time someone has used the defining phrase "historic" to describe the situation, I'd be heading off to Fiji this afternoon instead of a job interview.

However, this event should have some kind of impact (no pun relating to the introductory quote intended) on the science fiction community. Sorry, it will now be necessary to create a different cliché to indicate a future or near future setting. Personally, I think that having a native American president would have a nice feel of irony to it, let's use that for our fallback position for now. However, I'm a fair minded man: I think that we can continue to cast Morgan Freeman as God.

- Sid