Westerfeld shakes his fist at genre-bashing whippersnappers*, as in his smack-down of the Guardian’s dumb dumb dumb review of Chabon’s latest by Adam Mars-Jones. A sampling:

That’s right, young readers. About a million years ago, writing alternate history meant you could only change one thing: Confederacy wins, Ghandi hit by train, cheese not invented. And it was the singularity of this shift that proved how clever you were, by showing how many dinosaurs you could kill by stepping on one butterfly.

And yes, that’s still a perfectly glorious thing to do. But to assert that any book not hewing to this rule must be “flawed” is super-lame. Plus it means you probably haven’t read as many comic books as, say, Michael Frickin’ Chabon!

I think there’s a novel in cheese not invented. (That sentence is rich with possible meanings.) Read Scott’s whole post. He asks for your help disproving Mr. Mars-Jones’ thesis in the comments.

(I quite liked Jenny Diski’s review in the Guardian, however, drawing actual parallels to Raymond Chandler.)

*I have no idea who this guy is and whether he’s a whippersnapper or, really, what a whippersnapper is beyond my grandmother’s all-purpose term for a moron. (Okay, so really I did know, but wanted to use the word anyway. I’m slippery like that.)

Katherine Dunn, who wrote the immortal Geek Love (one of my favorite novels Of All Time), is guesting this week over at the inferior 4+1. She’s kicked it off by reposting an essay from Mother Jones, and apparently has a new novel almost ready, The Cut Man.

Check it out and submit questions.

Justine has FINALLY received the okay to announce her big news: her next two books will be published by Bloomsbury! I’ve had the great, great pleasure of reading The Ultimate Fairy Book and can report that it’s wonderful, fabulous, delightful, insert-more-adjectives-here, so I’m not surprised at all that they’re making room to get it out next fall. Yay! I say again, yay! Go over and congratulate her.

In the Boston Review, John Crowley writes a marvelous essay on the miraculous photographs of Rosamond Purcell:

Purcell’s ways of making sense—and eventually pictures—of her collections vary almost as much as the things themselves, systems of classification resembling those in Borges’s imagined Chinese encyclopedia. Some of her items take on meaning by juxtaposition. A mummified cat and a pitted one of concrete go together with pitted volcanic stones, because such stones falling from the sky were once called “lynx stones,” and their sulfuric odor was like cat piss. Or do the stones and the concrete cat go together with the piece of wormholed bread from France as “Things that have holes”?

An overarching category (if Purcell’s extreme nominalism can permit such a thing) is the category of the sublimely diminished, things that, as she says, are bereft of their original potential yet still familiar. “I have chipped these things from the matrix of the almighty thingness of our all-American world, and, as I did not stop to mourn their demise, why not revel now in their inevitable disintegration?”

(Via Sara Ryan.)