Pornokitsch

Links that caught our eye...

"Dementia is real horror. I see The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a story about a man losing his son; a father losing his son in his own lifetime, long before his own death." - INJ Culbard on adapting Lovecraft

Speaking of Lovecraft, Jesse Bullington makes his editorial debut with Stone Skin Press and Letters to Lovecraft - out 1 December. The early reviews are (deservedly) fantastic.

The legendary Joey Hi-Fi is joining Charlie Human and Lauren Beukes to talk about book covers (and presumably 'how to create brilliant ones') today at VUKA in Cape Town. Details here, and hopefully photographs to come.

Anne revisits "Beauty and the Beast" over at Hodderscape.

Final round of the Goodreads Choice Awards. (A 'best of the year' award that ends on 24 November. WTF.)

"Most readers do not know who publishes their favourite author." The problem - and one solution - from HarperCollins' Sam Missingham.

"I spend a lot of time with the story and its characters. Sometimes I imagine I’m talking to them, at other times I ask questions of myself, and there are those rare glorious hours when all you want to do in life is put it all down on paper and think about the material later." - Mirza Waheed interviewed by Mahvesh Murad (plus her review of The Book of Gold Leaves)

This year's Stocking Stuffer cometh! Details here. To get it free, sign up here.

A visual timeline of the future.

Fascinating article on Medium about why people don't believe in science, or, more broadly - why people refuse to change their minds (ever):

"The problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or context, or 'narrowcast' and often highly ideological media that have relatively small, like-minded audiences. Those basic human survival skills of ours, says Michigan’s Arthur Lupia, are 'not well-adapted to our information age.'"

On a similar point - the recent Requires Hate drama through the perspective of the Wikipedia 'Talk' page. Setting aside the content, the discussion is fascinating: in the SF/F community world, we have a lack of sources that achieve Wikipedia's standards for credibility. (Do we ascribe this to the rise of blogs and social? The inability of the traditional media to keep up with fast-paced stories of extremely niche interest? Or is this just another reminder that gossip - even typed and repeated a lot - still isn't journalism?) (Discuss. Papers due on Monday.)