Here’s the new  installment of The Week That Was: an overview of my favorite SF&F-related articles and reviews of the past seven days. As always, I want to emphasize that this (obviously, I hope) isn’t meant to be a comprehensive summary of everything that happened. It’s just a quick look at some things I want to share in case you missed them, with my own rambling thoughts included!

I’m sure many of you already know about Baen’s free library of ebooks, but just in case, Only the Best SFF just wrote a brief post about it, and I thought it bears repeating here. I’m not crazy about the majority of Baen’s very prolific output because so much of it is military SF and alternative history (not my favorite sub-genres), but there are still many goodies to be found in their catalog — and the Free Library contains many of them for, well, a very attractive price. Worth a look!

Speaking of goodies in that library: The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold! Free and legal! If you’re not familiar, here’s a great review from Drying Ink. Miles Vorkosigan is one of my favorite characters in all of SF, and if you’re not familiar with this series yet, this isn’t a bad place to start.

I’m a pretty big fan of Lev Grossman. This is partly because I love his two Magicians novels (I’ll post my reviews here soon) and partly because he seems to be an intelligent guy with a good sense of humor and, not to put too fine a point on it, more or less exactly the professional life I always dreamed of. I don’t want to say that I want to be Lev Grossman when I grow up. So I won’t. Anyway, here’s Lev answering some frequently asked questions (wait, isn’t there an abbreviation for that?) in a way that had me snort with laughter a few times. On the other side of the coin, Lev got some bad news about the Magicians pilot this week. I really do hope these novels will make it to the screen at some point.

One of my favorite recurring features in all of SFF bloggery is sfsignal.com’s series of “Mind Meld” posts, in which a panel of writers all answer the same question. This is one of those series of posts that should be assigned reading in SF&F college classes, because the panelists’ answers and their bios makes for an excellent introduction to today’s spec-fic world. The Mind Meld this week asked: Whatever Happened to Interstellar Travel in Science Fiction?

And speaking of SF Signal, here something I might have missed completely if not for them: The Pulp Magazines Project has just posted the first six issues of Amazing Stories for your reading pleasure. Founded in 1926, Amazing Stories is the legendary magazine that, according to ancient lore, was the very first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. Plus, it was edited by Hugo Gernsback. (Yep, that Hugo.) Go take a look at some real pulp fiction that helped define the genre.

This next link is simply too cool for school. Justin at Staffer’s Musings shot video of an AD&D roleplaying session at Epic ConFusion 2012. No big deal, you say? Well, let me give you the list of participants: Joe Abercrombie, Elizabeth Bear, Peter V. Brett, Jim C. Hines, Jay Lake, Scott Lynch, Patrick Rothfuss, and Brent Weeks. The Dungeon Masters were debut authors Saladin Ahmed (Throne of the Crescent Moon, see below) and Myke Cole (Shadow Ops: Control Point, which I will review here soon). Interested yet? Thought you might be. There’s going to be a longer video of this epic session at some point, but for now you can enjoy this awesome trailer at Staffer’s Musings.

A debut novel I’ve been anticipating eagerly this year is Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon. If you’re not familiar with the book yet, Tor.com posted a review and an excerpt this week. So far I haven’t been able to get to my copy, so I can’t give it the much sought after Far Beyond Reality Stamp of Approval yet, but really, doesn’t that book just look like it’s made of awesome?

Locus goes digital. You can now subscribe to Locus via Weightless books and get the magazine DRM-free in epub, mobi or pdf formats. Back issues are also available.

And finally, because my The Week That Was posts seem to get a surprisingly (for me at least) large amount of readers, I thought I’d start including a list of the other articles and reviews I posted here in the past week. The Week That Was at Far Beyond Reality, so to speak.

So, here’s what you may have missed:

– Article: In Memoriam, My Laptop

– Review: Giant Thief by David Tallerman

– Interview: Bradley Beaulieu and Stephen Gaskell

– Article: Reading Journal, February 10th, 2012

… and that’s it for this week!