The World Fantasy Award winners for 2012 were announced in Toronto last night. The full list of winners is available from Locus. Many thanks to Fran & Liza for getting the results out so quickly. (I am, of course, now wondering whether the World Fantasy Board will devote time to discussing how they can prevent Locus from getting the award results out quickly, as they did for me. Somehow I doubt it.)
Much of the talk beforehand was about the possibility of Jo Walton’s Among Others becoming the first work to grab the hat trick of major award victories: the Nebula, the Hugo and the World Fantasy. As it turned out, Jo missed her chance to make history, and what’s more someone else beat her to it. Ken Liu’s story, “The Paper Menagerie” has won all three awards this year. That’s an amazing achievement, and very well deserved IMHO. Well done Ken, and many thanks to Charles Tan for being the first to spot history in the making.
(I’m assuming here that no other piece of short fiction has done this. I’m confident about the novels, but as no one had spotted Ken’s situation I’m not 100% sure that it is a record. Do let me know if I’m wrong.)
One person who will be very pleased with this year’s list of winner’s is Steve Jones. The only female winners share awards with men (apart possibly for KJ Parker whose gender is a fairly well guarded secret). At last the Evil Feminists have been banished from the World Fantasy Awards and it is safe for horror editors to show their faces in public again.
Or maybe not. There were plenty of women on the ballot. And sad as I am to see so few female winners, I can’t quibble much with the results. Indeed, I’m really very pleased with them, even though Clarkesworld didn’t win, and neither did the two stories that we published. The winners are all very fine people and works.
In particular the list of winners has something of an international flavor this year. Eric Lane of Dedalus Books took home a Howie as a reward for publishing fiction in translation. There are lots of translated stories in The Weird. Ken Liu won Short Story. And Best Novel was won by Lavie Tidhar’s Osama, which I loved. It is good to know that the sort of books that snobby elitists like myself put on their Hugo ballot can win awards elsewhere. I am, of course, looking forward to Lavie’s blog post in which he explains how this proves that the whole awards scene is deeply corrupt and biased against him, and I see that Tim Maughan has already accused him of being a sellout on Twitter. Well done Lavie, mate. Very well deserved.
Finally, and still on the subject of people who appear on my Hugo ballot but never make the nominee lists, I am absolutely delighted for John Coulthart. He’s a genius. Come on, Hugo voters, what are you waiting for?
That’s a gorgeous calendar. And, honestly, I’ve never heard of John until you mentioned him in this blog post–or I didn’t recognize his name qua name.
And Mr. Tidhar has to be considered a giant slayer, with Osama beating out Jo Walton AND George R R Martin to take the prize.
Remember this cover?
Oh, yes!
Nathing makes me happier than to see that Tim Powers has won any award, and The Bible Repairman is as deserving a winning as there ever has been!
Loved The Paper Menagerie, and while it wasn’t my favorite of the year, it was more than deserving. James has recommended Osama to me several times, so maybe that’ll be my book on the plane back from Toronto!
Chris
It would be interesting to know how many of the female nominees were a result of the attendees and how many actually came from the judges. (I think you can probably guess without much effort which are which.) However, without knowing that with any certainty, it’s a bit harder to work out if this was backlash against last year’s or not, or simply what the judges preferred, and that’s always the risk when you go with a group of people, I think.
Yes…there’s always a…risk…when you “go with a group of people.” ?! As a former judge, I’d say Sean that your speculation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. From the talk around the con after the awards were announced it was quite clear judges loved a lot of work by women.
As a former judge myself, it’s a risk (or an opportunity, or somewhere in the middle) in the sense that you can’t always predict how it’s going to go down, after all. It’s a bit easier, of course, to predict with a popular vote than it is with judges. That’s just the nature of the voting system. I’m fully aware of the biases, horse-trading, and the like that goes along with WFA. That doesn’t make it any less fascinating to speculate how it all worked out. :p In any case I heard completely otherwise from a number of people that Sunday, which conflicts with your impression. It would be interesting to know which entries were from voters, and and from the judges, which would prove it in any case. But we will never know. And it doesn’t invalidate the results in any fashion. It did seem overwhelmingly male and British, but there’s nothing wrong with that. If it happened every year, then it might be an issue, but that’s not the issue here.
What’s the story on Locus? I’m reading this as a hint they beat the official announcement. Was that the case with the WFC Awards? Was there an embargoed press release?
Everybody loves being first, including people in the audience using their phones. Even though I reported the WFC results on the same day they were announced, I was hours behind Facebook and must have looked like I was waiting for my clay tablets to dry…
Dear me no. Locus would not do anything like that. They just had Fran at the banquet tweeting the results. And Liza working on getting the announcement live the minute the ceremony had finished. At least two other people were tweeting the results as well.
World Fantasy have their own award site, and they do actually have the winners on there now, but in the past it has taken them weeks to get the site updated.
In 2009 I was running press office at the convention, and we had our own website and twitter account. The World Fantasy Board knew that I’d get the results out during the banquet, and I guess they thought that because I had the official convention site this would make them look bad, so they spent time at their Board Meeting discussing how they might stop me from announcing the results before they could update their site. Apparently people more up with technology pointed out that someone was bound to tweet the results, so just stopping me doing it was pretty pointless.
It was kind of like the Business Meeting discussing how they could prevent the seated WorldCon from posting the Hugo results before the HAMC got them on the official Hugo site, if you can imagine anything so bizarre.