The classic fanzine Ansible, which is available happily in an emailed edition, has just released it's 300th issue, which is available here. Have a look!

Just ran across this on File 770's blog. A majority of both the Novella and Novelette nominees are available on the internet... showing once again how much publishing is changing. Here are the Novellas, and as well Here are the Novelettes. Apparently the Chicon 7 team are working on coming up with the voter packet, but this lets you get in and start your reading early.

As you may know, it's become custom recently for the folks who have memberships (attending or not) to the upcoming Worldcon to get free copies of most of the nominees, so that they can all be checked out before it's time for voting. Even better this year, however, is that all five of the nominees for the Short Story Hugo are already free on the web, so why not have a look and enjoy?

“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld April 2011)

The Hugo Awards for 2012, which will be given out at Chicon 7, have had their nominations released. I could list the whole thing here, but it seems a bit of a mistake to, when the site for the Hugos will have all the details and will be updated in case of some minor error. But, I did have a few thoughts on them, which I thought I'd share.

Here's an interesting essay by Ursula K. Le Guin about the Death of the Book. In short, she doesn't think the book is going to die at all, and she seems quite optimistic on the future of the written word.

http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2012/03/26/the-death-of-the-book/

According to John Scalzi, "Connie Willis has been given the 2011 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America", which he should know because he's currently the president!

There's some rarified company that Connie Willis is joining, which I could list but wikipedia happily lists them all there. Much congratulations to Connie Willis!

Ed Bryant, Jr., a Colorado writer and all around great man, has found himself in a bit of a financial predicament brought about by, among other things, medical costs. The "Friends of Ed" organization has decided to showcase a two-pronged auction event to help raise funds for Ed's immediate needs.

A live auction will take place on October 23, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency in the Denver Tech Center during MileHiCon 43. Additionally, an online auction through Ebay will take place in the week prior to MileHiCon 43, ending on both Saturday and Sunday, October 22 and 23, 2011.

TheWildwriters.com is now up! This site is a group effort by area writers in several fields, including science fiction and fantasy. There are also children's books, from picture books throughtweens, YA, and nonfiction. Ebooks are available through Smashwords; print copies of many titles are also available.

There's also the Whiny Writer video. So far she's just trying to come up with a perfect opening line...

(Sent in by Jane Bigelow)

This is interesting - I found it via Evil Hat's blog. I don't know how many roleplayers check this site, but it's worth a look.

Technoir is a rules light game set up with the sort of cyberpunk and hard boiled roleplaying, using a rules-light system using tags. There's a Kickstarter that's already made it's nut, but there's also a Website for the game, where you can download the beta version of it.

From his wife's Livejournal:

On Wednesday afternoon, June 1, 2011, Joel had a respiratory depression that caused a heart attack, anoxic brain damage and major organ failure. Despite the very best efforts of the paramedics and the team at Hennepin County Medical Center, Joel was pronounced brain dead at around 5:37pm Thursday June 2nd, In accordance with his wishes, he shared the gift of life through organ and tissue donation.