The Collecting Game: The Windup Girl for $950?
Collector prices are not always rational, as I think most collectors know. They can be fueled by hysteria. As many collectors have noticed, Clive Barker futures are very soft these days. Only the first British hardcovers of the Books of Blood and the British first of The Damnation Game have retained their value. There was a time, within a year or so of publication, when the advance galley of the American edition of Weaveworld could easily bring a hundred dollars. The last time I sold one, I bought it for $1.00 and got $10.00; but that was years ago. Nowadays you would be lucky to get five dollars for a copy. American firsts of Barker, or even galleys of same, are virtually worthless.
I will also mention with some trepidation that Harlan Ellison futures are weakening significantly, and I that have just concluded, on the basis of some research, that the bottom has fallen out of the Pogo market in the past few years. (I sold some Pogo first edition paperbacks for George Scithers maybe 5 years ago for $50-100.00. Now you can find the same ones on eBay for $5, and even the original comic books for $10 or so.)
Paolo Bacigalupi is clearly the hot writer of the hour, the hottest since William Gibson circa 1985. That means that investors are already latching onto him. Sorting the current Abebooks listings from the highest price on down, I find that the highest price for a first edition of The Windup Girl is $950.00, which is, I daresay, not bad for a book only published last year, even if it is a signed copy.
D&D in space. It’s an idea that has been around for a long while in the form of TSR/WotC’s Spelljammer.
I’m on vacation, but for the one or two (and I’m probably overestimating) of you whose Saturday is not complete without something from me in this space, you can read my 
Has anyone ever asked what you would grab out of your house if it was on fire and you could only make one trip? Or maybe the question was, if you knew you were going to be stranded on a deserted island, what would you take with you?
There sat a book that drew my hand toward its spine, and before I realized what I was doing, I was looking at the cover to CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN. Something in the back of my mind rose (squid-like) to the surface. I read the comments on the back of the book, and on the first few pages. There was something here…something I’d been looking for. To my amusement, the book itself validated my thought seconds later as I read the quote from Mr. Moorcock: “It’s what you’ve been looking for.”
. . . And the boy thought,
Bitch Slap the (unrated) film relates to fantasy fiction how, you may ask?
The Woman Who Loved Reindeer, by Meredith Ann Pierce
I don’t know what makes a novel great. Maybe every great book is great in its own way. I suspect, though, that a novel’s greatness resides most often either in its structure (not just its plot, but its balancing of themes and elements, its division into units like chapters, and its decision of what to describe and when) or its prose (its ability to make every word count, not only in depicting character and setting, not only in moving forward story, but in advancing the theme of the book, what it’s about, the idea that prompted the telling of the tale in the first place).