I was pleased to discover yesterday that my Trinidadian friend, Rhonda Garcia, tied for second place in the SF/F/H category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards. The IPPYs are not an award I’m familiar with, but they appears to be interestingly international, and of course small press focused. In any case I’m delighted for Rhonda. Lex Talionis is a very promising debut. You can listen to my interview with Rhonda at Salon Futura.

Also yesterday the Arthur C. Clarke Award continued its journey away from science fiction and towards literary respectability. This year the award went to a beautifully written piece of sentimental twaddle aimed at the sort of pretentious hipsters who think that suffering an apocalypse means being unable to have iPhones, Sunday supplements and skinny flat lattes. It is a very long time since a book without a trans character made me as viscerally angry as Station 11 did. However, I don’t appear to have sent any death threats to the Clarke jury. Nor have I vowed to destroy the award, or even decided that it is “broken”. In fact I rather suspect that the Clarke will do better next year without any help from me. Clearly I am doing this social media thing all wrong.

Then again, I am confident that the winner of this year’s Hugos will be a far better science fiction novel than the winner of the Clarke.