io9.com and Borderlands Books

If I was on the fence about Gawker's new io9.com blog, this piece on Borderlands Books has put me over the edge. This kind of support for /shout out to independent booksellers is fantastic. And Borderlands is the perfect store to kick it off. When I lived in San Francisco, I made a point of going weekly, and really miss the readings there.

But I wasn't really on the fence, after reading this from editor Annalee Newitz: “We don’t see it as a niche entertainment site. We see it as a pop culture site. So much of our mainstream culture is now talked about and thought about in science-fictional terms. I think that’s why people like William Gibson and Brian Aldiss are saying there’s no more science fiction because we are now living in the future. The present is thinking of itself in science-fictional terms. You get things like George Bush taking stem cell policy from reading parts of Brave New World. That’s part of what we are playing with. We are living in world that now thinks of itself in terms of sci-fi and in terms of the future.”