Friday linky links

Plenty of note happening around the blogosphere, so here's some tasty links for you all to gobble up.

Mark Charan Newton has posted about what he perceives as the death of science fiction and why fantasy is the future.

2010 debut author Sam Sykes has blogged about his upcoming release from Gollancz, Tome of the Undergates, and very kindly mentions that Speculative Horizons - among some notable others - is the "gold standard for all opinions and reviews of fantasy fiction in the UK." Hmm, I think I'm liking this guy already! :) As it happens, I've got an ARC of this book (it's a monster) and I'm hoping to get around to it early next year.

Dark Wolf has reviewed The Cardinal's Blades by Pierre Pevel. I've also got an ARC of this one, will hopefully get around to it at some point. Incidentally, this might just be a serious contender for the 'best debut novel' award at the Gemmell awards next year (while it's not his first book, it is his first book to be published in English). Pevel is a well-known French author with plenty of books under his belt, so we might see a similar situation to last year's awards where the overseas readers vote in full force...

Aidan's got the full news about Pat Rothfuss's charity fundraiser. He's also got the cover art for the e-book edition of Robert Jordan's The Dragon Reborn (which is very nice) and a review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians (as usual, Aidan's thoughts mirror my own very closely). In fact, Aidan's got tons of recent content at A Dribble of Ink that's worth checking out, far too much to link to. So just go have a look. Oh, and congrats on finishing your novel, Aidan - great achievement. Fingers crossed that it finds a publisher.

The Wert-meister has got news of a recent response to Michael Moorcock's famous anti-Tolkien essay Epic Pooh, which allegedly provides a more in-depth and sophisticated response than many others written over the years.

Gav's conducted an interview with author Neal Asher and also has five copies of Asher's short story collection The Gabble to give away. This is yet another book that I've got on my frightfully large to-read pile...

Pat's got a guest post from genre artist Vincent Chong (who I seem to recall won 'best artist' at the British Fantasy Awards recently).

Graeme's got a review of Dan Abnett's Titanicus.

There's plenty of other interesting stuff out there, but that's all I've got time to link to at the minute. Check out my blog roll at the side for further tasty morsels. :)