relimarual writes sense on Guardian books blog

Today the Guardian print literary review includes some extracts from the blog. Also there is a comment from the original writer responding to the other contributions. This is not always the case with Guardian blog extracts and is rare with Comment Is Free. Some of the columnists were not consulted about online versions of their print writing in the first place.

Original story by Laura Miller on how novels come to terms with the internet. Miller appears as relimarual on the blog and claims to have mentioned science fiction. I tried to add a comment pointing out what she originally said, that writers who specialise in character based fiction have "ceded the field to authors of speculative fiction, such as William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, whose hacker and brand-ninja characters exist primarily to explain or propound ideas about bleeding-edge technology." Well, I am not sure this is actually the whole picture for SF. DavidMW has a point in claiming that SF has been largely ignored.

Anyway, it turns out that my comment is no longer anywhere near the one from rellimarual. She has the last one as first displayed (and as in print) but loads more appear as a new one is added. Still much better than Comment Is Free where comments are closed quite rapidly.

So repeating this in my own blog helps me to keep track of things. For the same reason I still like Guardian Talk. The readers can start a topic. Much better than CiF from my point of view. I don't know why Guardian staff do not join in. I have contributed to media topics on PDF and citizen journalism. Not sure how much provocation to mix in, the Guardian voice will never appear. Over the years there is less going on with Guardian Talk I think. some people move to CiF but more to Facebook etc. I would guess.

I am trying to study the plot structure of Timequake as a way to edit blog bits together. There may have been another Timequake for ebooks in the first decade of this century. Many topics just seemed to repeat. Has it ended? 2010 seemed far off for Vonnegut. I may have written about this on another blog but it seems to fit in here.

I think Laura Miller may be the same Laura Miller that Google finds as working for Salon, based in the USA. Most of the references are to novels from the USA. The Guardian in print makes no mention of this. Has the copy appeared somewhere else? My guess is that London publishing scene is still some time behind in web awareness.