Friday Round-Up: SF Signal and SFFWorld Goodies

The Bagel Lord of SF Signal John DeNardo recently put SF Signal into a new magazine theme, and has dubbed the look as SF Signal 5.0, go take a look. In addition, John recently "promoted" Kristin Centorcelli (aka My Bookish Ways) as the New Associate Editor. Kristin is one of the most active bloggers in the genre so this is great news for both John/SF Signal and Kristin.

Over at SFFWorld, the forums are still alive, despite twitter, facebook, and reddit drawing conversation away from discussion forums. We've come to realize this is not localized to the forums at SFFWorld (for example, the once lively forums of Terry Brooks's Web site recently closed). But with SFFWorld having active  forums since 1999 or so, we (the moderators and members) don't want to see the place go away. So check out what other fans of the genre are talking about. Site owner Dag Rambruat is cleaning up the forums and layout based on some member feedback.

Back to SF Signal, I've posted a couple of articles/reviews over the past couple of weeks to SF Signal. Two weeks ago, my January Mind Meld was posted:

What 2015 Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Books Are You Looking Forward to Reading?

Participants included Amanda Rutter, Bob Milne, Carl V. Anderson, Foz Meadows, James L. Sutter, Jeff Patterson, Marianne de Pierres, Mark Chitty, Renay!, Sarah Chorn, and Tabitha Jensen.

Lastly, about a week ago, my January Completist column posted, which features Eric Brown's Bengal Station Trilogy:

Eric Brown has written and published just about one novel per year since his first in 1992. Many of those novels have published through Solaris Books, including his Bengal Station Trilogy. At their heart, the books of “The Bengal Station Trilogy” are a modern Psychic Detective novels, albeit set on a space station in the future and involving aliens. That “psychic detective” would be Jeff Vaughan, a cynical, distrustful man who, at times, is trying to run from his past. As the title of the series implies, the novels are set on (or launch from) Bengal Station, a space ship station above India and Thailand.

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What becomes clear over the course of these three books is how Brown sets up a framework for the series, but with each novel in the series, tweaks the dressing for that framework in fun and interesting ways. Part of the fun in reading such books is revisiting with the characters in each installment.