New rec: "A Samba for Sherlock" by Jose Eugenio Soares. Very dark fiction about Holmes and Watson (and Sarah Bernhardt) in 19th century Brazil. Two warnings: 1) Sherlock is NOT treated respectfully. He is not a good detective in this, not a master of disguise and socially awkward. 2) In spite of being very dark, it has a lot of 12-year old level humor (including at least one joke that actually circulated in my school when I was 12). Tragedy and darkness mixed with burlesque and farce. Which makes it all the darker. The dagger and the pratfall.

Note: new only to me. Ran across a copy while stuck in the waiting room after giving someone a ride to urgent care. The translation was published in the U.S. in 1997. Don't know how much earlier the Portuguese version was published.

A retelling of Cinderella - with robots! (Excerpt at the link.)

io9 compiled the rules of magic for dozens of magical universes: [link]

IO9 got some shit wrong. Hmmph.

The entry for The Witches of Eastwick is a little suspect, for sure. The plot of the book was very different than the movie, and in the movie the whole witchcraft aspect was a metaphor. It's been years and years since I read the book, but even there, it was satire, not serious.

Buffy's wrong, IMO, and Anne McCaffrey's Pern shouldn't even be on the list. It's not magic. It was an ambitious effort, and I think they depended too much on memory and not enough on research.

eta: Oh, and when did The Secret Circle become a "great fantasy saga"? They don't even think it's good enough TV to recap.

Oh, and when did The Secret Circle become a "great fantasy saga"?

It definitely seemed like a half-assed list to me. I don't even read fantasy and I know there's stuff they missed. The Dresden Files isn't on there, right? And if you're going to include The Secret Circle, why not Sanctuary or Warehouse 13 or Haven?

A retelling of Cinderella - with robots!

Hey, I've read that! I picked up an ARC at a booksellers show last month. It's really, really fun. Very well written, with detailed, complex worldbuilding (woven unobtrusively into the flow of the narrative without a single out-and-out infodump) and a really engaging heroine. I snarfed it down in two days and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Ooh, then I will be sure to get it when it comes out.

Ooh. That looks intriguing.