Somewhat belatedly, I've realized that every single week has a Thursday, and so titling the news round-up posts with the day of the week might turn out to be less than helpful as the weeks pile up. So I think I'm going to go with actual dates for a while.

Reviews:

• Janet Maslin contributes an admiring review of Julie Phillips's James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon to the New York Times.
• Bookgasm really liked Off the Main Sequence, a big fat Heinlein book I edited last year.
• Bookgasm also reviewed The Burning by Bentley Little.
• Bookgasm also also says nice things about our new omnibus of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend & Hell House towards the end of this post, though it's not technically a review. (Honesty, though, requires me to mention that it was actually our colleagues at the Quality Paperback Book Club who  put that book together -- which explains why it's one of the few softcovers in the SFBC.)

Interviews:

• Italian novelist Giampietro Stocco has interviews with several SF writers on his home page, including Walter Jon Williams, C.J. Cherryh, and Vernor Vinge.

John C. Wright has thought long and hard about space piracy, and he has a long post today laying out everything you need to consider when choosing it as a profession. The money quote: "most married couples I know met during evil robot rampages."

Speaking of evil robot rampages -- as I often am -- Meme Therapy asks today if the First Contact with ETs is likely to be made by a robot.