I'll be appearing at the Scarborough Literary Festival on Saturday 17th April (at 1 pm to be precise, with Tom Holt and Peter Guttridge; but otherwise just knocking about that fine town). I don't often do festivals or cons, so this is also quite a big deal for me. I'll need to get the train up and everything.

A note on my blogging: one New Year's Resolution of mine is to complete the Hugo translation I've been engaged in, off and on, for ages now. It has lain idle for half a year, but I shall restart it. Also, I've rethought Punkadiddle. I've removed the occasional pictures that appeared there, leaving it as a pure reviews blog. I don't have enough blogs, so I've set up another one, Tin Pics, on which to post any sketches or drawings or tinny little pictures I come up with; but I don't expect anybody to follow that, except, perhaps, those members of my immediate family whom I sketch. And even then will probably be uninterested in my Hugo doings. Which is all fair enough.

My three favourite novels of the year were probably Moxyland by Lauren Beukes, Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts and Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (going by UK publication dates, that is) ... Yellow Blue Tibia is from that interesting place where a new inflationary universe of SF has sprung up, amongst literary fiction. Some of that universe is formed by literary authors who look down on our ghetto and despise it, and some is formed by literary authors who simply don't see why they should enter a ghetto and prostrate themselves just to write about what they like. Adam Roberts, aside from both groups, is an SF writer who can decide, like Aldiss, Ballard, Priest and most of the others from the New Wave, to use the tropes of a literary novel, ambiguity most of all, to enter that universe himself. He's been, frankly, arrogant in the way he told this year's Hugo nominated authors (and artists, even!) that their work wasn't cutting edge enough. But that doesn't change the fact that he deserves more recognition, and that perhaps the SF ghetto should reach out more to embrace that new universe, and redefine, a little, its terms of engagement with literary quality. Yellow Blue Tibia is a wonderful collision between the Soviet way of seeing the world, the SF way of doing that, and the universe of flying saucers. It keeps its foot in the SF genre, right at the end, by offering not a dreamlike wandering off from its road trip through the Russian consciousness, but a nuts and bolts explanation, which might come as a bit of a shock to a literary audience expecting something more like The Magus or Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow. But who knows, they might have liked that shock, they might want more, and we should welcome them with more, and more like this from Adam Roberts.

London Evening Standard. The best books of the year: our reviewers name the titles that have meant the most to them over the past 12 months.

FRANCIS SPUFFORD I spent this year finishing a book set in Russia, so I was all ready to delight in the charcoal-black satire of Adam Roberts's Soviet UFO novel Yellow Blue Tibia (Gollancz, £12.95), even before it was tipped as a worthier winner of the Booker than anything on the actual shortlist.

May I not sound too Boraty as I say, in reply: 'nice!'. In other news, and also floated first on Twitter, this:

FORBIDDEN PLANET and Gollancz Publishing are delighted to be hosting an open-format, multi-author signing. Five authors, one event – at 6pm on Thursday November 26th, Forbidden Planet 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London will be playing host to: -

• David Devereux
• Paul McAuley
• Justina Robson
• Adam Roberts
• Chris Wooding

To promote the release of Justina’s new book CHASING THE DRAGON, Forbidden Planet and Gollancz Publishing have gathered a host of science fiction and fantasy talent into one event – an event to bring writers and fans together and to promote interest in new and different kinds of fiction.

This is a free-form and open signing, bringing the authors out from behind their tables and giving their readers a chance to meet them and talk to them about their work. An array of fantastic books will be on hand to be picked up and signed – including works by every one of the writers present.

And, as usual with these events, there are likely to be more than a few surprise guests...

...and a subsequent visit to the pub!

Be nice to see you there. Whomsoever 'you' may be.

28th Jan: No longer pending, now ponned: here's the link.

As a coda to my catch-up posts, and a prelude to some proper Book-and-Story-related posting over the coming months, I thought I'd say a little something about my blogging. There are two things to say here.

One is that I continue to contribute to the group-blog The Valve. If you go there right now you'll see a post about Sir Isumbras, crossing the ford, that has a little to say about Millais' spendid picture (above) and more to say about a medieval poem on the same subject. Though it sometimes gets a little crispy in the comments threads, The Valve is a first-rate and top-of-the-notch organ for a wide range of interesting posts. Here's what I do: about once a week--this last term, on account of my timetabling, it tended to be the Thursday or Friday of the week; over this summer it'll probably be earlier in the week--I'll put up a post on anything that takes my fancy, usually literary.

Now, in addition to that blog, I started three personal blogs sometime last year. You can see them over there on the right, listed in the sidebar as 'Other Roberts blogs' above the blogroll.

In the beginning I kept all three of these secret, not because there's anything particularly private in any of them, but because I was intrigued by the idea of something so very well hidden (perfectly unlocatable in the first month or so) in such very plain sight (visible to anybody in the entire world, provided only they were online and knew where to look ...) For about a month these blogs were invisible even to Argus-eyed google. Fine. Then little bits and pieces of them started--how, I know not--to show up on certain kinds of google search. Then various people found them, linked to them even. Nobody reads them, of course, and why should they? But that doesn't bother me: the long near-unbroken string of 'no comments' subtitles has a pure, unsullied look to me, and being unread stops me getting self-conscious about what I write. But the time has probably past when there's any merit in keeping them secret anymore. So, such as they are, here they be:

Europrogocontestovision is a blog of pretentious apothegms, vatic statements, general prog-ness and occasional, but not very well-written, poetry. Good for a writer to have an outlet for all that sort of stuff, I feel, and this is mine. It is updated daily.

Rambling Ad Rumpo is me rambling on, online-diary style. I trust the name of it doesn't need explaining to anybody. This blog is updated, give or take, weekly.

Punkadiddle is a blog of bits and pieces and orts and scraps of writing, writing-related stuff and some pictures. It is updated if and when. Which is not all that often, in fact.

So, the picture at the top there: three figures on the horse (a big pompously-dressed one, an alarmed-looking smaller one, and a tiny one clinging on just-about). The horse is the internet itself. The three figures are my blogs. The visual analogy is strained. The horse is too big. The ford looks shallow enough to walk across without needing a brobdingnagian horse to carry you anyway.

And that is probably enough about blogging for now.