Bits of news here and there:

I had the honor of co-hosting last night’s New York Review of Science Fiction Reading with Jim Freund, and I thought it went very well.  It featured Altered Fluid and the three readers (E.C. Myers, Devin Poore and N.K. Jemisin) all did a stupendous job.  Kudos, Fluidians!

The Czech Republic’s largest circulating SF magazine, Ikarie, is reprinting “Longing for Langalana” in its current issue (pictured above).  Or as they call it:  Desire for Langalaně. So cool!  And here’s a review, translated from Czech by Google, which makes it somewhat amusing:

The desire for Langalaně is readable story of people and wergenů on a strange planet. Shimera and Phineas are children who learn language tutoring for the second of them.  Immediacy of children during story turns into a mature adult and opinions by the way, we learn interesting information about wergenských relationships, marriage and reproduction.  Although Mercurio D. Rivera is a man, the narrator of the history of dueling Langalaně wergenská is just a girl who fell in love with the human boy.  Relatively normal plot is complicated by wergenským worship of human beings.

And here’s another Czech review:

Shimera Wergeňanka and is with his father and mother are working together to teraformaci Langalany planet.  Is responsible to pay his nephew Dr. significant, Phineas.  At first glance it seems that perhaps the children can resolve differences between two races. Remarkable story of the encounter of two civilizations, which prevents unilateral okouzlenost in full cooperation.  Alien eyes watching developments and thus becomes for us to fully understand the contradiction that can not be overcome with time.  The main character herself is aware of this situation, and yet it can not get rid of the desire for return and contact with people.

Finally, iconic SF editor Gardner Dozois devoted a nice little chunk of real estate (a full paragraph, which is quite a bit; his fiction reviews usually run a sentence or two) in this month’s Locus to my “In the Harsh Glow of its Incandescent Beauty” from Interzone #226.  He wrote:

“Also good here is Mercurio D. Rivera’s ‘In the Harsh Glow of its Incandescent Beauty’ about a man obsessively following his ex-lover to the ends of the solar system, convinced that she’s been stolen from him by the application of a mind-altering chemical aphrodisiac; this turns out to be both true and not true.  The motivations of the human-obsessed aliens here, the Wergens, who are willing to do almost anything for the humans they’ve become fixated on (and who remind me a little of Al Capps’ Shmoos, who will invite you to eat them and obligingly fall over dead if you look even the slightest bit hungry) may be a bit hard to understand if you haven’t read Rivera’s other story in this sequence, ‘Longing for Langalana'”

It’s quite a kick to think that the great Gardner Dozois — whom I consider the personification of SF — is familiar with my work.