This is something of an update on the Readercon story. As some of you will know, René Walling, now better known as the Readercon Creeper, was chair of the Hugo Award Marketing Committee. As Kevin reports here, René has resigned his post.
A couple of things worth noting here. Firstly I’m pleased to see that René did not try to brazen this out. Secondly, as Kevin notes, the HAMC is rather short-staffed at this point, so if any budding SMOFs would like to get involved, please let him know.
Firstly Mark R. Kelly has created a new website interfacing to his database of SF&F awards. This is a significant update of his work for the Locus website. I will doubtless be using it regularly. And because of the convention he has adopted for pages it ought to be easy to integrate it to other sites such as the SF Encyclopedia. Thank you, Mark!
And secondly James Nicholl has been looking at data from the Philip K. Dick Award. And he’s asking why, if 42% of nominees have been women, only 21% of winner and 23% of special citations have been women. Could someone with a bit of time and statistical skill run correlations between the gender balance of the jury and the gender balance of the results?
The nominees for this year’s World Fantasy Awards have been announced. The full list is here, and there is much to rejoice about.
In the Novel category I am delighted to see a nod for Lavie Tidhar’s Osama, a book I was very impressed with.
The short fiction categories see two nominees from Clarkesworld, both of them also on the Hugo ballot: Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente and “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu. I’m also delighted to see nods for “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu and “Near Zennor” by Elizabeth Hand.
The excellent VanderMeers have two nominees in the Anthology category: The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities and The Weird.
Collection looks particularly strong this year. I’ve heard great things about the Hannett, Kiernan and McHugh, and The Tim Powers book from my pals at Tachyon is excellent.
More cheering for the Artist category. There are two women on the ballot, including Julie Dillon whom we have showcased at Clarkesworld. My good friend Mr. Picacio is also there, but the nomination I’m really pleased about is John Coulthart, whom you may remember I chose for the cover of Salon Futura #1.
The VanderMeers are there again in Special Award: Professional for The Steampunk Bible, which is great because it would have been very sad if the other two books had got on but SJ Chambers had missed out. Also huge congratulations to Brett and the team at ChiZine whose very fine books I happen to sell. And I’m pleased to see Eric Lane pick up a nod for his work publishing translations at Dedalus Books.
Finally we have Special Award: Non-Professional, which sees nods for Charles A. Tan and Cat Rambo, and also for a certain Clarkesworld magazine. And because this is for work done in 2011, that means yours truly gets another Howie pin. I think there’s a reasonable chance that we got there by dint of the popular vote, so thank you to everyone who voted for us. I’m sorry I can’t be at the ceremony, but I’m sure Neil will do us proud.
We announced the winners of the SF&F Translation Awards at Finncon yesterday. The details are here. I’ve had very little to do with the jury, but I gather that they split into two groups, one doing short form and the other doing long form. We were all quite surprised when both groups picked a work translated from Chinese as their winner, as the variety of languages in the short lists was enormous. Today I get to answer happy emails from writers as translators, which makes me happy too.
I’ve more or less got my Hugo reading sorted now. I reviewed EmbassyTown and Among Others for Salon Futura ages ago. Leviathan Wakes got the treatment last week, and if you don’t know what a Song of Ice and Fire book is like by now then you probably never will. All that remains from the novel ballot is Deadline, and that’s now done too. You can read the review here.
And if you want to know which book I like best you need to come to the Hugos panel at Finncon. 😉
Here’s some more good news from Clarkesworld. E. Lily Yu’s wonderful story, “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees“, is a finalist for the Million Writers Award. This is a general award for online short fiction. SF&F stories have traditionally done very well in it, though this year the Clarkesworld story is the only one from a specialist genre magazine to make the short list. There’s a public vote for the winner, and you can participate here.
The last of my posts for Independent Booksellers Week takes us to Canada. The short lists for this year’s Sunburst Awards were announced recently. Our friends at ChiZine Publications have three novels in the running for the adult category. Sadly two of them are part of the exclusive distribution deal that I blogged about last month. Enter, Night by Michael Rowe and The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet should be back on sale soon, but in the meantime you can buy Eutopia by David Nickle. The Sunburst jury said:
“A harrowing story of eugenics, religious fanaticism, and the cruelties underlying dreams of utopia, Eutopia interweaves narrative threads to create a nightmare-inducing chronicle of humanity’s fearsome quest for perfection at any cost. The novel is set in 1911, in the small utopian community of Eliada, Idaho, where different kinds of monsters walk in the day as well as prowl the night, and where two complicated strangers come to discover just how terrible the marriage of prejudiced science and religion can be. The prose is spare but evocative, and the methodical and tightly crafted narrative creeps forward with cruel, inevitable certainty, offering up human and inhuman horrors alike that respect the readers’ intelligence while inducing visceral disgust and dread.”
The Locus Awards were announced in Seattle yesterday. China Miéville and George R.R. Martin took home the Science Fiction Novel and Fantasy Novel prizes (with Embassytown and A Dance With Dragons), which sets up a titanic battle for the Hugo. Erin Morgenstern won the First Novel prize with The Night Circus. But the big winner of the night was Cat Valente who took home the prizes for YA Novel (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making), Novella (Silently and Very Fast) and Novelette (White Lines on a Green Field). A clean sweep of all of the short fiction categories was prevented only by the presence of Neil Gaiman on the Short Story ballot. The full results are available here.
This is, of course, a good excuse to remind you that you can buy Silently and Very Fast from my ebook store.
The summer edition of Mslexia crashed through my door this morning and I’ve been reading it over lunch. There are several things worth noting.
First up there’s an excellent article on horror fiction by Sarah Pinborough. It includes a very positive review of Feed (and therefore a mention of the Hugos).
Also Bidisha interviews Sarah Hall, whose The Carhullan Army won a Tiptree. Bidisha is careful to use the term “speculative fiction” and to compare Hall only to respectable writers such as Margaret Atwood and PD James, rather than, say, Ursula Le Guin or Joanna Russ. Hall, however, is having none of this. She says, “I was really embraced by the science fiction community and invited to loads of conventions. It was great.” Thank you, Sarah!
Finally there is a long feature article by Suzi Feay about the lack of new lesbian writers in the UK. Feay is judge for the Polari Prize, which is a debut writer award for LGBT-themed work. She says that they are having trouble finding any lesbians (or at least anyone who will admit to being a lesbian) whose works they can judge. In comparison there’s no shortage of books by and about gay men. Even trans writers are more common than lesbians (though of course some of those may be lesbians).
There’s a short version of Feay’s article on the Guardian website. The longer version in Mslexia has interviews and goes into more detail about possible structural issues in UK publishing that may make it difficult for lesbians to get published. It was all very reminiscent of recent discussions about how hard it is for women SF writers to get published in the UK. It is starting to sound like if there is any way in which women writers deviate from gender expectations then the UK publishing industry won’t take a risk on them. There are, of course, good reasons for that, and for why there are no small presses taking up the slack, but I won’t bore you with economics right now.
What I will do is make a quick survey of the SF&F community. Writing in the US we have Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge, CaitlÃn Kiernan and Ellen Klages, to name but a few. There are plenty of gay male writers in the field too. In the UK we have Geoff Ryman, Patrick Ness and Hal Duncan. I’m struggling to think of a lesbian SF&F writer. (And my apologies if I have forgotten someone obvious).
Of course this year we’ll see a debut novel from Roz Kaveney, Rhapsody of Blood. I suspect that Polari will class her as a trans writer rather than a lesbian, though of course she is both. I’ve read some of the book and it is awesome. If all goes well I’ll get an ARC tomorrow. Here’s hoping that both the Polari and Green Carnation prizes take notice.
Several of the finalists in the short fiction category of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards are now available online, and I’m hoping the rest will follow soon. You can find links to them over at the Awards’ website. My thanks as always to the publishers for making them available.
The Lambda Literary Award winners for 2012 were announced in New York last night. These are for LGBT-themed books of all types. The SF/F/H category was won by The German by Lee Thomas, beating out a strong field that included a collection of short stories from Geoff Ryman. I’m delighted to be able to say that I have the book in my store. What’s more, the publishers, Lethe Press, are so delighted with their win that they have decided to put the book on sale for the rest of the month. Here’s how you can take advantage of their generosity:
Those of us who have memberships of recent World Fantasy Conventions need to get our act together and send off our ballots. Two places in each category of the short lists are chosen by popular vote, and if we want our views to be reflected in the results we need to participate.
The latest Coode Street podcast devotes most of its length to discussing potential candidates for the Lifetime Achievement Award, and lamenting the fact that it is never possible to give this to everyone who deserves it. Quite rightly, we only get to see the winners of this category, but for what it’s worth here are the people I am nominating: Jean Giraud (Moebius), Mary Stewart, Maurice Sendak, M. John Harrison, Hayao Miyazake. Note than candidates have to have been alive in 2011 to qualify.
For novel I’m tempted to just nominate Deathless five times, but I guess I’ll find four other books I like to keep it company. Equally in Anthology I can’t see anything challenging Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s titanic reprint volume: The Weird. There are lots of good collections around, but I find I’m really struggling with the short fiction.
Part of this is due to World Fantasy’s obstinate insistence on using different definitions for Novella and Short Story to every other award. All the usual guides to length are rendered unreliable. But also, looking through the Locus Recommending Reading List, I have been struck by how many of the stories that I like appear to be science fiction rather than fantasy or horror. Suggestions would be appreciated.
The same goes for the Special Award categories. I still stick doggedly to the campaign to get Deanna Hoak the award her copy editing so richly deserves, but thinking of other people who have done good work, and haven’t been honored in the past, can be hard. All feedback gratefully appreciated.
I’m somewhat more in the land of the living today. I still can’t breath through my nose, but at least I have a semi-operational brain. So of course one of the first things I’ve done is book my flights to another convention (Finncon in July). This, again, is on points, but these days “points” doesn’t excuse you from paying large sums of money in airport taxes. Here’s what I have been stung with for Lufthansa flights to Helsinki with plane changes in Germany.
UK – $60.10
Germany – $32.80
Finland – $15.10
Hmm.
By the way, with regard to Finncon, I’m delighted to be able to have my dear friend Irma Hirsjärvi announcing the winners of the Translation Awards both as a member of the jury and a Guest of Honor at the convention.
One of the things that makes me very happy about my bookstore is that it contains a book by Ursula K. Le Guin. Normally, of course, Le Guin gets published by the big multi-national companies who put DRM on their books and don’t want anything to do with little stores like mine. When it comes to non-fiction, however, even the greatest authors don’t always get big deals. Cheek by Jowl, “a collection of talks and essays on how and why fantasy matters”, is published by Aqueduct Press, and so we have it in store. And it is just been short-listed for a Mythopoeic Award. Find out more about the book here.
We have nominees for 2012. You can find them here.
Like Gary, I am delighted with the diversity we’ve got. There is some great fiction available in translation.
While I was talking about DC and Vertigo comics in Bristol, much excitement was happening in Sydney where the annual Aurealis Awards were being handed out. The full results are available here (PDF), but I want to highlight three particular winners.
The Science Fiction Novel category was won by Kim Westwood for The Courier’s New Bicycle, while the YA Short Fiction category was won by “The Nation of the Night” by Sue Isle from her collection, Nightsiders. Both of these books feature positive and sympathetic portrayals of trans people as the central characters in the story. This makes me very happy indeed. Thank you, Australia. And thank you Kim and Sue for writing such great stories.
Congratulations are also due to my pals Alex, Alisa & Tansy at Galactic Suburbia who have done so much to promote interesting writing about gender. They won the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award, which is given to people who have done something spectacular for the SpecFic community that doesn’t otherwise qualify for an award.
In the latest Coode Street Podcast Jonathan and Gary ruminate on the nominees for this year’s John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the consistent lack of female writers in that list over the years.
Part of this, I suspect, is that the Campbell jury sees so little change. As you’ll see from the award’s website, it is pretty much the same group of people ever year. If you change the jury every few years then inevitably there will be a few years in which results don’t go the way people might like, but equally if you hardly ever change them then there’s a danger that the jury will become set in its ways and reward the same type of books over and over again. That, in the current environment, means books by old, white men.
However, Gary touched on something interesting during the podcast when he mentioned that books by women tend to be less scientifically rigorous. Jonathan, quite rightly, chastised him for assuming that the award was for “hard SF”, and pointed out that many male SF writers are equally lacking in rigour. But they never quite got to the end of that line of reasoning.
How we classify books as “science fiction” or “fantasy” does change down the years. Back in the early days of Worldcon all sorts of things that nowadays we see as fantasy would have been called SF. That’s why fantasy has always been assumed to be part of the Hugos. The rise of fantasy as a marketing phenomenon has changed all that. It affects men too. One of the abiding mysteries of SF marketing is why Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun appears in the Fantasy Masterworks series, when it is so clearly set in a far future and the series is based around a real astronomical phenomenon. But these days classification issues appear to affect women disproportionately.
I’m firmly convinced that one of the reasons we see fewer women science fiction writers these days is because if a man writes an SF book that contains some fantastical elements it still tends to be seen as SF, but if a woman does the same it gets categorized as fantasy. I would argue, for example, that Debris by Jo Anderton would be seen as SF had it been written by a man. There is a good chance that The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells would too. I’m sure that some people argue that Kameron Hurley’s books are “really” fantasy. Or there’s Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fear’s Death, which is very clearly set in the future yet won the World Fantasy Award.
I find it hard to solely blame publishers for this. After all, they have to sell books, and if bookstores won’t stock SF by women, or readers won’t buy it in sufficient numbers, they need to react. Currently they are doing so quite successfully by slapping a YA label on SF by women. It’s all a game of smoke and mirrors.
However, when it comes to an award like the Campbell that requires a jury to make a decision as to whether a book is science fiction or not, then such issues come to the forefront. In the case of the Campbell I suspect this might be a question that the jury should talk about.
These were released last night shortly before I went to bed. You can see all of the lists here. Remember that these are not short lists. The winners are already known, and there is no additional round of voting. Locus simply releases the names of the top five in each category early so as to build interest in the awards.
I’m delighted to see Clarkesworld in the Best Magazine category, and “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu in the Short Story category. I’m also very pleased to see people like Cat Valente, Ian McDonald, Kameron Hurley, Ken Liu, Nnedi Okorafor, CaitlÃn R. Kiernan and Genevieve Valentine in the lists.
We have two finalists in the bookstore. Here they are:
| Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine (Best First Novel) |
Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente (Best Novella) |
Saturday began with my first ever TV appearance. Thankfully it wasn’t a live show, but we did record mostly “as live” so it was all a bit scary.
Attitudes towards science fiction are clearly very different in Croatia than in the UK. Later in the day the convention’s award ceremony was hosted by a young man who has a weekly SF show on national TV. I wasn’t on his show, however. Dmitry Glukhovsky and I had been invited to appear on a culture chat show. To put it in a UK context, it was like we’d been invited onto the Sky Book Show to talk to Mariella Frostrup. Can you imagine that ever happening?
The first thing that happened when we arrived was that I got whisked off into make-up to be made presentable. I’d expected this, and all I had done in the morning was wash my hair. I came out looking better than I’ve looked since 1999 when regular beauty salon in Melbourne got me done up for the Hugos (I could afford such things in those days).
The presenter, Vlatka, admitted that she knew very little about SF, though she had taken the trouble to read Dmitry’s book. She asked a few questions that some fans might find rather rude, but it was pretty clear that what she was doing was setting up popular stereotypes of SF and allowing us to demolish them. I was particularly pleased with the “isn’t SF just for boys?” question. Vlatka asked Dimitry to answer first, giving me time to cook up an extensive response that ranged from the Bronte sisters through Doris Lessing and Johanna Sinisalo to the current Ditmar short list.
Dmitry turns out to be a fascinating chap. The easy way to describe him is as the Russian Cory Doctorow, though I suspect that he’s heartily sick of the comparison, and Cory would be if people in the West knew more about Dmitry. The simple fact is that they both came up with the idea of promoting their work by putting it online for free at around the same time, and neither had heard of the other until recently. Dmitry mentioned on the show that some of the older Russian SF writers, who are very much in the Asimov/Clarke tradition, are a bit jealous of his success and complain that he’s just some kid with a website who doesn’t know how to write SF. Sadly Charlie has run out of t-shirts.
The program creaked a little on Saturday, in part because Dmitry and I were half an hour late back from the TV studio, but generally things continued to go well and the con was packed. There were a few very good costumes, the gaming room has been running pretty much since it opened, and the panel audiences are good. I missed half of the online fiction panel, but got back in time to give a good plug for Clarkesworld. Powers gave a great presentation on writing fantasy, and he and Milena did a fine double-act on the vampires panel. (Poor Milena has become known as someone who has actually read Twilight and can talk intelligently about it, which is a curse.)
My favorite panel of the day was Darko Macan’s cartoon history of Croatian SF. He did some great caricature sketches in chalk (Croatian universities still have chalk boards). I didn’t know most of the people he talked about, but the Croats were killing themselves laughing throughout. One anecdote I can relate involved an anthology he edited for SFera, the Zagreb SF club. This was back during the Balkan wars, and one of the stories, by Tatjana JambriÅ¡ak, told a tale of how all of the men of Zagreb went off to war and left the women to run the country. “This was very prescient”, said Darko, “because a few years later something very similar happened to SFera.” Yes, the club, and the convention, is now run by women.
In the evening we had an award ceremony, and the GoHs were asked to present some of the trophies. We started with a large number of awards for kids — anyone under 12 gets into the convention free, and there were literary and art contests for various age groups. After that we had the local SFera awards. And finally there were the ESFS Awards. The latter had a number of very pleasing wins. Jonathan Cowie got a nod for the Concatenation website. My French friends at Galaxies won Best Magazine. The team at the SF Encyclopedia won Best Promoter (a category that recognizes people who work selflessly to promote SF&F). Best Author was Ian McDonald, and the Grand Master award went to Brian Aldiss.
There’s a lot more I could talk about, but I have to be back at the convention for noon for a panel on electronic publishing.
The convention is now in full swing. Last night Charlie tweeted, “This convention is sort of like a unicorn on anabolic steroids – big, pumped up, energetic, and slightly scary!” I know how he feels.
Friday started quietly. No programming before noon, remember? I’m staying with a Croatian family, and yesterday grandma turned up and made crêpes for breakfast. Lovely people, Croats.
The first panel of the day was one I really wanted to see: “Women with swords, and girl cooties”. Author and translator, Milena Benini turned out to have a marvelous line in feminist snark. She’d been busily mining the Internet for pictures of women warriors and adding little comments to the pictures. For example, she started by reading us the description of Dejah Thoris from A Princess of Mars. As some of you will know, our heroine wears nothing except jewellery. The text makes this plain. The cover, mysteriously, has her clothed. That was the 1950s. Women warrior clothing has gone down hill since. Although the snark was a lot of fun, we did a lot of positive stuff as well, handing out recommendations for the likes of N.K. Jemisin, Laurie Marks, Nnedi Okorafor, Tansy Rayner Roberts and, of course, Mary Gentle.
After that I did two interviews: one for a Croatian magazine called Sirius B, the other for a feminist website.
For dinner Tomislav and I went back to the brewery that we’d visited briefly the previous night. It turns out that they have three types of beer: light, dark and half-and-half. The dark is the best option. My meal was Ćevapi, which is best described as minced meat fingers. It’s not that great on its own (unless, I guess, you have really good meat), but it is served with a spicy relish called Ajvar which makes all of the difference. I wouldn’t recommend the brewery for fine food, or fine beer for that matter, but two meals, and two half liters of beer, cost us around £10, which is ludicrously cheap by London standards.
Up until this point the convention had been taking place in a large hotel, and it felt very much like a Eurocon: maybe a couple of hundred people, from all over the continent. On Friday evening it moved into the main venue for SFerakon, the annual Zagreb convention, in a nearby university building. Suddenly all of the dealers turned up, and hundreds more Croatian fans. You can get some idea of the dealer tables from Monique’s posts on the con blog. I’m eying up the jewellery.
The evening GoH talks for Tim Powers and Dmitry Glukhovsky took place in a lecture theater. The seats were uncomfortable, of course, but it was a big room with built in tech and good views for all. Tim was interviewed by John Berlyne (of course) and was his usual entertaining self. The best story he told was about his German translations. When he got the books he found that they all had a section in the middle in a different font. He can’t read German, but eventually he found out what was going on. In the middle of the book, when the characters were placed in some urgent situation, one of them would say,
“Do we have time for soup?”
“What sort of soup?”
“It’s xxx soup, it’s very quick and easy to prepare.”
“Really, what flavors do you have?”
And so on. Once the soup had been made and eaten (and it was indeed very good soup), the characters got back to saving the world (or whatever else it was they urgently needed to save).
It turns out that Tim wasn’t the only author to have his work added to in this way. William Gibson had suffered similar treatment. Probably other authors did too. I’ve redacted the name of the soup company that paid for these ads, but the books are now a legend amongst translators and a prized collector’s item.
There was a brief power outage during Tim’s talk. I guess that proves that God is a Jehovah’s Witness, and still hasn’t forgiven him for the accidental Bible burning.
Glukhovsky turned out to be a very interesting guy. Born in Moscow, he has a degree in journalism and international relations from Jerusalem. He’s lived in more countries than I have, and is a committed internationalist. When his book, Metro 2033, became an international hit (partly on the back of the video game adaption) he was pestered for endless sequels. Not wanting to get trapped into a Robert Jordan like career, he started a shared world system in which authors from all over the world get to write their own books in the Metro universe. The basic idea is that a nuclear war has left Earth devastated, but small groups of survivors exist in underground locations around the world. The original book is set in the Moscow Metro, but lots of other major cities have underground railways too, so franchising is easy.
Today I am heading off to a TV studio where I will be interviewed about conventions and e-publishing for a popular culture show. After that I have a panel on online fiction with, amongst others, Glukhovsky, who was pioneering free online fiction in Russia around the same time that Cory Doctorow was doing so in North America.
Also today is the Eurocon 2014 site selection vote: Ireland v Romania. ESFS uses an electoral college system, with two delegates per country. Fluff Cthulhu is complaining loudly on Twitter that there are no votes for Elder Gods. Apparently Dave Lally has ruled that they are not part of Europe. This can’t end well.