2013 Awards

It’s been a while since I made any updates, but I’ve been thinking a lot recently about improving both the design and functionality of the site.  It’s time for an update and I decided to get the best of the best from 2012 entered by starting with the Awards.  Resources like Mark R. Kelly’s wonderful Science Fiction Award Database make this significantly less of a chore.

Orbit Short Fiction eBooks

SF Signal alerted me to the launch of Orbit’s digital short fiction program which seemed like a good thing to include in TagShadow. I have done so (I’ll add the Brent Weeks novella when it becomes available).

• Violet Tendencies by Jaye Wells
• Scouting Jasmine by Jennifer Rardin
• The Legionnaires by T.C. McCarthy
• Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box by Mira Grant

Locus Bestsellers (September)

I’ve started making sure that all the books on the locus bestseller list are represented on TagShadow. This has, in past months led to me adding entire series, just for good measure (see Dresden Files and Sookie Sackhouse). Be sure to check out the full list on the locus website. Even better, grab a copy of the magazine, which follows the list every month with a list of notable new books and short descriptions. This month’s issue is focused on Steam Punk, so be sure to keep checking back to the Steam Punk TagShadow as I update it with everything I learn from the issue.

All titles, authors and publishers link to the appropriate page on TagShadow. Explore from there and be sure to contribute your own tags!

HARDCOVERS

1. Naamah’s Curse, Jacqueline Carey (Grand Central)
2. Mission of Honor, David Weber (Baen)
3. Bullet, Laurell K. Hamilton (Berkley)
4. Dead in the Family, Charlaine Harris (Ace)
5. The Passage, Justin Cronin (Ballantine)
6. Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay (Roc)
7. WWW: Watch, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace)
8. Changes, Jim Butcher (Roc)
9. For the Win, Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen)
10. Mouse & Dragon, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller (Baen)

 

PAPERBACKS

1. The Enchantment Emporium, Tanya Huff (DAW)
2. Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
3. Naamah’s Kiss, Jacqueline Carey (Grand Central)
4. The Spy Who Haunted Me, Simon R. Green (Roc)
5. The White Road, Lynn Flewelling (Ballantine Spectra)
6. Dead and Gone, Charlaine Harris (Ace)
7. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (Tor)
8. WWW: Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace)
9. Skin Trade, Laurell K. Hamilton (Jove)
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (Del Rey)

TRADE PAPERBACKS

1. The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books) 
2. The Host, Stephenie Meyer (Back Bay Books)
3. The Magicians, Lev Grossman (Plume)
4. Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
5. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books)

The locus list links books to IndieBound and TagShadow always offers IndieBound as one of it’s purchase links. I’d always encourage you to support your local independent bookstore.

Hugo Winners 2010

The 2010 Hugo Award Winners have been announced, and I’ve updated Tagshadow accordingly (see links below).

• Best Novel: TIE: The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK); The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)
• Best Novella: “Palimpsest”, Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace, Orbit)
• Best Novelette: “The Island”, Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2; Eos)
• Best Short Story: “Bridesicle”, Will McIntosh (Asimov’s 1/09)
• Best Related Book: This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance (Subterranean)
• Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm Written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; Art by Phil Foglio; Colours by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Moon Screenplay by Nathan Parker; Story by Duncan Jones; Directed by Duncan Jones (Liberty Films)
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars” Written by Russell T Davies & Phil Ford; Directed by Graeme Harper (BBC Wales)
• Best Editor Long Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden
• Best Editor Short Form: Ellen Datlow
• Best Professional Artist: Shaun Tan
• Best Semiprozine: Clarkesworld edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, & Cheryl Morgan
• Best Fan Writer: Frederik Pohl
• Best Fanzine: StarShipSofa edited by Tony C. Smith
• Best Fan Artist: Brad W. Foster

And the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (presented by Dell Magazines): Seanan McGuire

Space Opera

First I entered the stories from The New Space Opera and The New Space Opera 2. Then I entered the recommendations from this SF Signal Mind Meld. The end result is that the Space Opera TagShadow is rather fleshed out. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Author and Random Links

I’ve been adding links to Author’s home pages. I’m about halfway through the Author Tag Could. I’m also adding links to the author’s page on the Free Speculative Fiction Online website. I’m constantly inspired by the work Richard has put into that website.

Google indexed the Read a Random Story (that particular link will redirect you to a random story published in 2010 and featured on TagShadow) and similar links. That resulted in some rather odd search results. I’ll leave the discovery of what I mean as an exercise to the reader. That was NOT my intended result, so I’ve updated my robots.txt file. Hopefully things will clear up. In a similar vein, I need to set up some 301 redirects to the shiny new “work” pages with the title in the URL.

Alphabetization by Last Name

People are an important part of stories. They write them, they edit them, they draw pretty pictures about them. The general convention is that we order people by their last name. I’ve updated the Author, Editor and Illustrator tag clouds to be sorted alphabetically by last name. Also I added some prominent links to this blog

Fantasy Magazine

The launch of Lightspeed this month also got me thinking about its fantasy sister zine, Fantasy Magazine. Also, the World SF blog pointed me at a recent Lavie Tidhar story. Fantasy Magainze has now joined Strange Horizons, Escape Pod and Futurismic as the online sources of fiction that are 100% represented in Tag Shadow. If you’ve enjoyed the stories at Fantasy Magazine stop by and tag them. I’ve gotten the ball rolling by labeling the author, publication year and story length (one novelette, a handful of flash fiction, but mostly solid short story length). Help me out by adding the sub genres, magical creatures, interesting story formats, point of view or any other way you can think of to group the stories.

You can find the Fantasy Magazine TagShadow here.

TagShadow Dreaming – Hadoop

I started the weekend watching through these Hadoop videos over at Cloudera. That led me to research manipulating large matrices with Hadoop. I found a spectacular paper about multiplying matrices with Hadoop. A random statement in that paper about sparse matrices sent me back to the documentation for JAMA (the java matrix library I used for TagShadow processing) and the competing library, Jampack. Turns out neither of them have algorithms optimized for sparse matrices. I did find some notes about how to optimize matrix multiplication for a sparse matrix

I’ve been considering pushing TagShadow to it’s very limits. Even if I just included the titles that have been added to ISFDB it looks like that’s pushing 500k entries. Of course I’d like to handle the online magazines that ISFDB doesn’t cover as well… Handling that much data will involve some real-time abstractions to remain functional. It’s these thoughts that have me investigating parallel computing solutions like Hadoop. This is rather stream of conscious at the moment, but I’m excited.

New Homepage for TagShadow

I’ve been feeling that newcomers to TagShadow need a quick introduction of what the website actually does. There is now a short slide show which does this. Let me know what you think.

I played around with Google’s new font API. I think Inconsolata gives the site a slicker feel.

I started pulling together a plan for general navigation on the site and updated the look of the search page to conform more with the new homepage.

[update] I also decided to add a “Most Recently Updated TagShadows” section on the homepage. This will update in real-time as I process TagShadows. This section was inspired by another small feature I added this morning. Works that have been tagged but not yet processed will now show up in the list of works on a TagShadow, even though they don’t yet show on the TagShadow plot. Check out the Space Opera TagShadow that I’m working on right now, as I read through The New Space Opera 2.