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In this instance, a very nice review from Annalee Newitz of io9.

There’s a (very nice) new review of BNW, and an interview with moi, at SFRevu.com.

As Fred mentioned in the comments a couple posts down, the paperback of BNW is in stores now.

I have a guest post over at OUP Blog: Nine Words You Might Think Came from Science but Which Are Really from Science Fiction. In the comments, someone pointed out that one of my words is really from science after all. This is what happens when you try to assert firstness about things, but it was fun drawing up the list anyway.

The paperback edition of Brave New Words has been announced. They let me fix a bunch of embarrassing typos that snuck into the first edition, so I’m extra-happy to see this come out. It’s also got a spiffy new cover.  Oxford’s website gives a date of February, Amazon April. I’ll post again when I know more.

[Update: The official release date is April, athough copies may start to show up before then.]

Today I have a guest post on OUP blog about the Hugo, right here.

Another dorky thing the bored author can do is use Powerset to find all references to oneself in Wikipedia (because who wouldn’t want to do that?). Here are the results for me (the actual page is here):

It’s fun to see BNW in use as a reference book, with my definition of “science fiction” appearing the appropriate article, and two citations for Gibson’s coinage of “cyberspace”, again in the obvious places. (Well, duh, you say — of course it’s being used as a reference book — it is a reference book! But you don’t usually get to see the reference in action is what I’m saying.) The odd entry is Tom Smith — the reference there uses BNW not as a lexicographic, etymological, or linguistic reference, but as a secondary source for a quotation included as a citation for the work “filker”. Granted, the citation is from a convention program book, and therefore extremely hard to track down, but it’s interesting to see BNW being used as a book of quotations as well as a dictionary.

Well, two and a half months is a long time to go between posts, even for me. I finally got a copy of the last issue of Locus, and I was very pleased to discover that I came in second for the Locus Award. (The winner, Barry Malzberg’s Breakfast in the Ruins, was announced some time ago, but I didn’t see much point in posting that I lost until I found out by how much.) Malzberg pretty well creamed me, but I get some consolation from a comment in Locus that the online voters preferred BNW over Breakfast by a slight margin. Thank you, on-line voters, for your excellent taste! Those of you who have been following the brouhaha over this year’s Locus Awards should note that it’s highly unlikely that the rule change affected the outcome any — Malzberg won by 400 votes, which would be a very comfortable margin, even without the doubling of the subscribers’ votes.  (For those of you who don’t obsessively follow the vagaries of SF awards, the Locus Award has historically been voted on by the readership of Locus magazine, although voting has been open to all on the Internet for close to a decade. This year, for whatever reason, the number of non-subscriber votes was much, much higher than subscriber votes, so the folks at Locus decided to double the value of subscriber votes. They decided to do this after the votes were cast, mind you, which naturally resulted in a brouhaha.  More details can be found here and here.)

BNW was named an Outstanding Reference Source for 2007 by the American Library Association. Here’s what they had to say:

Based on historic principles, this dictionary uses the methods of the Oxford English Dictionary while drawing on television, movie, and print media to establish definitions and provenance for science fiction terms. The 11 one-page essays for terms and concepts that require more discussion provide users with unique insight into the sci-fi world. An excellent source for any library, the volume is highly accessible and a joy to read.

As an added bonus, this accolade entitles BNW to wear a nifty little sticker:

Thanks, ALA!

Brave New Words has been chosen by the New York Library Association for this year’s “best of reference” list! This is a list compiled by a committee of librarians of books, websites, and other resources based on their usefulness in library collections. This year’s list is mighty impressive, and a lot of the items on it look like they’d be useful for anyone with a bad reference habit.  Thanks, NYLA!