Emerald City

I've mentioned here a few times (and much more prominantly on my review web pages) a particular fanzine named Emerald City. For those who don't know, a fanzine is writing about either SF or the SF fandom community, distributed for free or in exchange for another fanzine or letters or contributions. A lot of fanzines are focused on the fanzine community itself and on letter columns, but Emerald City, which just won a Hugo for the best fanzine, is primarily focused on book reviews.

It's really good stuff, and has been a source of a lot of really good book recommendations for me. I've not read a lot of what I've bought based on those recommendations yet, but I have quite a lot queued up.

Anyway, I just finished reading the entire set of them, back to #1, over the course of the last few months. As each one is pretty substantial, that's quite a lot of reading. Cheryl Morgan has become a much better writer over time, and I like the current issues much better than the earlier ones, but the book reviews are good throughout, as are the con reports.

If you like science fiction and like being kept abreast of what's happening, highly recommended. The issues are also very skimmable if you're only interested in the book reviews, or only in particular types of books, and Cheryl has been adding more regular features as time goes on (right now, she's doing interviews with different small press publishers every issue, which has often been fascinating).

(Now I'll have to find some other time-wasting activity to do between chatserver lines.)