John M. Ford back in print!!! (and a few other links)

[kate_nepveu]

I have accumulated many fewer links than I usually bother to post, but:

John M. Ford's entire backlist will be coming back into print, starting next year! (Except the licensed IPs, of course.) And a collection of miscellany and the unfinished epic Aspects, too.

I am so, so happy about this.

The linked article has some information on how this happened, which is fascinating—basically Isaac Butler, who co-wrote that epic oral history of Angels in America, read The Dragon Waiting at a friend's urging and went on A Quest to find out why Ford was so out-of-print. He ended up contacting Ford's family and agent, both of whom had been out-of-touch with everyone in publishing, and after a year-long negotiation, Tor reached this agreement with the family. The article disclaims any attempt to determine What Really Happened, and I'm not interested in vilifying or vindicating anyone—I do think there are some lines that can be read between, but we don't need to do that here.

I had genuinely resigned myself to this never happening.

A few links:

• A story at Tor.com by Brenda Peynado called "The Touches". I am not sure the ending fully works for me, but I read it avidly all the way through.

  I’ve been touched exactly four times in real life. The first was when my mother gave birth to me, picking up her bacteria as I slid out of her womb, the good stuff as well as the bad. My father caught me, and his hands, covered in everything that lives on our skins, made contact then, the bacteria, yeast, shed viruses, and anything else from under his fingernails spreading to my newborn epidermis. That was the second touch.

  I must have been gooey and crying, and they both held me for a moment before the robot assigned to me snipped my cord, took me up in its basket, and delivered me to the cubicle where I would live the rest of my life.

• The Speculative Literature Foundation is running a membership drive; over on Facebook, its director Mary Anne Mohanraj explains the very cool projects the SLF is hoping to pursue. They do good work, check them out.

• At Vulture, The Story of the 1991 Beauty and the Beast Screening That Changed Everything: it was a work-in-progress cut, which "incorporated four different stages from the movie’s long, arduous creation: storyboards, rough pencil-sketch animation, cleaned-up black-and-white animation, and final color footage." There's an embed of the song "Belle" in the article, or you can go directly to YouTube; it's weirdly interesting to watch, and it's also a nice reminder of how great the music is.

• At Vanity Fair, an article whose headline answers its own question: "You're Essentially a Prisoner": Why Do Dubai's Princesses Keep Trying to Escape? I remember hearing last year about the princess who was caught and was eventually visited by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland; I hadn't heard about additional developments until now.

• For some reason the font on this article is GIANT, but the NYT has a meaty article on China's Internet, more specifically on WeChat's dominance and how it is "an alternative vision of the mobile internet, one that is integrated across multiple dimensions and that is in essence a single large market."

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