Listening to Coode Street this morning, I heard Gary commenting that the nature of this year’s ballot may be something to do with the electorate being predominantly American (given that we have two US-Worldcons in succession). There’s a point there, but it’s not the one that people normally make about fans voting for writers from their own countries. American fans, in my experience, are not terribly nationalistic. They’ll buy books by people from any country. They may have cultural biases so that, for example, they might prefer the work of one British writer over another, depending on which is more accessible to them. But the main issue is that they vote for what is available. Two US Worldcons in succession means that the nominees will probably be drawn solely from books that are easily available in America.

Other people have been complaining that the choices this year are very “safe”, “traditional” or “middle-of-the-road”. That too is partially a function of being limited to books that are easily available in the US. But it is also a function of increased turnout. Back in the days when the number of people participating in the Hugos was very small, fans liked to grumble that their tastes were not reflected in the short lists because the voters were a small, unrepresentative clique. This year set another record for the number of people submitting nominating ballots, and yet there are still complaints. Everyone likes to think that their tastes are shared by the majority, but my guess is that most people who are serious about fiction will find that the majority doesn’t share their tastes at all. They certainly don’t share mine.

One interesting thing about this year’s ballot is the number of nominees with a connection to A Game of Thrones. Obviously Series 1 and A Dance with Dragons are nominated, but there are other nominees who might benefit from a strong turnout by GRRM fans. Anne Groell is up for her first ever nomination in Editor: Long Form, and the books she is most well known for editing are the Song of Ice and Fire series. John Picacio also has a GRRM connection, having recently completed illustrating a Game of Thrones calendar. But the most interesting connection is with another Novel nominee. James S.A. Corey is a pen name for a writing team composed of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Ty’s previous claim to fame is his work as GRRM’s personal assistant. This is probably the first time ever that an author and his PA are both up for the same award. (Your turn next, Lorraine.)

The other newbie in Editor: Long Form is Betsy Wollheim, but she’s by no means new to the business. She’s been working at DAW since 1975, and has been in charge since 1985, but she’s been in the business pretty much all of her life. Her father, Donald, was pioneer of paperback publishing and primarily responsible for the pirate edition of The Lord of the Rings that Ace put out in the early 1970s. There are some extracts with a Locus interview with Betsy available here.

The Fancast category is hugely competitive, with five very fine nominees. I’m still very dubious about the idea of separating categories by the method of delivery, but the category looks viable right now. Of course it could end up with the same nominees year after year — we can’t know that yet. But for now it looks healthy.

There was apparently an error in the embargoed press release sent out by Chicon 7 that led to Brad Foster being left off the Fan Artist nominees in many announcements. This was another of those “tie for 5th place” issues, and somehow one of the six nominees got dropped. Talking of Fan Artist, no one has been able to answer my question about Randall Munroe. I love XKCD as much as anyone, but as far as I can see it is a profit-making business and if that is the case I’d like to know what fan art Munroe does.

I’m totally bemused as to what Seanan McGuire’s Wicked Girls is doing in Related Work. It’s great to see a filk album get nominated, but music has always been eligible in the Dramatic Presentation categories. There’s no need for it to be in Related Work.

The gender balance in fiction is very good. 11 of the 21 nominated works are written by women. Elsewhere things are not so good. The Dramatic Presentation, Graphic Story and Professional Artist categories, for example, are almost entirely male.

And finally a quick nod to Orbit. According to Liza Trombi (also on Coode Street this episode), Mira Grant’s Countdown is the first stand alone published piece of short fiction from a major publisher to make the ballot. As far as I’m aware, it is only available as an ebook. This is a very interesting development in publishing.

The 2012 Hugo Award Nominees were announced this evening. You can find the full list here. Some brief commentary.

I am not on the ballot. I did not expect to be on the ballot. However, there are several Clarkesworld-related items on the ballot, and this pleases me greatly. Here they are.

E. Lily Yu’s fabulous “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” is on the ballot for Short Story, and Lily is a nominee for the Campbell.

Catherynne M. Valente’s magnificent Silently and Very Fast is on the Novella list. It is free online in three parts, but why not give Cat some thanks and buy the whole thing as an ebook.

Neil Clarke is a nominee in Editor: Short Form. That’s very well deserved.

And finally, my friend Daniel M. Kimmel is a nominee in Related Work for his book, Jar Jar Binks Must Die … and other Observations about Science Fiction Movies. Some of the articles reprinted in that book first saw the light of day in the column I edited at Clarkesworld. Sadly for Dan he’s up against the behemoth that is the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, so I don’t think he has much chance, but I wish him all the best and am very proud.

My friends at BASFA have done very well. Chris Garcia is all over the ballot, but congratulations are also due to Spring Schoenhuth and Maurine Starkey who get their first and second ever nominations respectively in Fan Artist.

Talking of Chris, he’s got four separate nominations (though two are in the same category). The most I ever got at once was three. Seanan McGuire is also up for four categories, two of them as her Evil Twin, Mira Grant. Cat Valente is in three categories, including a first ever nomination for Apex in the Semiprozine category.

Two other nominees I am very pleased to see listed are Ken Liu, who has candidates in Novella and Short Story, and Karen Lord who is on the Campbell ballot.

Finally on the personal stuff, I am very happy for another Bay Area resident, Charlie Jane Anders, whose novelette, “Six Months, Three Days” I particularly loved.

As I noted on Twitter, not one of my nominees made it to the Best Novel short list. NOT ONE! I am totally outraged and will now go off and get very drunk, after which I will write a lengthy rant about how the Hugo Jury has failed in its duty and should be taken out and shot. But, being mildly sensible, even when drunk, I won’t post it.

More seriously, there are some very good books on that short list, and it will be hard to choose between them. I’m kind of hoping that George gets The Big One at last, if only because I was at TorCon 3.

Yesterday Pat Cadigan posted an open letter to The Guardian in response to their coverage of the Clarke Award controversy. Pat has been a member of the Clarke jury, and as such has valuable insights into the way the process works. It is possible that the rules have been changed since her time in the job, but Tom Hunter hasn’t contradicted her, and did tweet to thank her for the letter, so I’m assuming that what Pat says still applies. This is the bit I want to highlight:

Jury members for the Clarke may serve for two years. During that time, they agree to keep deliberations confidential. That means not revealing who liked–or hated–what book, or which books narrowly missed the shortlist, or which books they favoured. The chairman is likewise expected to keep shut and is enjoined from trying to influence the five jury members in any way.

There are several things that arise from this. The first is that the jury undertook, when they agreed to serve, not to discuss their deliberations in public. Not all juries work this way. In stark contrast the World Fantasy Award jurors are expected to appear on a panel immediately after the award ceremony to defend their decisions. The Clarke jury, however, cannot say anything, no matter how much they might want to right now.

Secondly, while the title of Chair might suggest that Andrew Butler in some way controls the jury, Pat makes clear that this post is purely administrative. Even if Butler totally disagreed with the jury’s choices, he is bound not to interfere. Criticizing him for having failed in his duty by not ensuring a better short list, as Priest does, therefore completely misses the mark. Indeed, Butler may well have been gritting his teeth in anguish at the books chosen, but if he was it would still have been his duty to say nothing.

Finally, the fact that the Chair is prevented from attempting to influence the jury in any way is clear evidence that the Clarke Award does not have much in the way of a political agenda. Beyond picking the jury, there is nothing that the Award management can do to influence the result.

Note also that the jurors have to be able to get to meetings in London, be able to commit to a time-consuming, unpaid task, be knowledgeable about SF, and serve no more than two years each. That means that picking the jury is not necessarily an easy task. After this year, finding people willing to serve on the jury will be much more difficult.

Of course it doesn’t have to be this way. If British fandom would like the Clarke to be run in a different manner they can try to pressure Tom and his colleagues to make changes. But this is how things work now, and anyone criticizing this year’s short list should do so within the context of the current rules, not on the basis of how they imagine or would like the rules to be.

One of the interesting aspects I have noticed about the current Clarke Award furor is the sense betrayal being expressed in parts of UK fandom. What people seem to be saying is that Their Award, that could be relied upon to reward books that They Like, has suddenly taken to rewarding The Wrong Sort of Book instead. There appears to be an idea that the Clarke has a mission to undertake, and it has failed in its duty.

Here’s Ian Sales:

The Clarke shortlist does not just say, “here are the six best sf novels published last year” — because they are patently not. The shortlist also says something about what British science fiction is and should be.

And here’s Nina Allan:

When I look at this year’s shortlist, what I see is not an honest selection of the best SF novels of 2011, but a political decision to promote what is known as core or heartland SF at any cost, regardless of literary quality, regardless of how far the work goes to promoting speculative fiction as a credible artistic movement.

(My emphasis in both cases.)

Allen, indeed, is upset that only two of her picks made it to the short list. Apparently the Clarke jury has a duty to get all five right.

Really?

When I look at award short lists I’m generally very pleased if they include two of my picks. I’m usually happy with one. An aspect of the Clarke that I rather like is that it often comes up with a really good book that I’ve never heard of before. That’s less likely now that the submission list is published, but the jury still reads the unfamiliar books and tells me which ones I should look at. If the price of that is that there are usually one books on the list that have me rolling my eyes in despair, well, that’s a small price to pay.

I like to see diversity on award short lists. Sure I’m all in favor of voters and jurors widening the net, but if the Hugo list this year is all books by disabled trans lesbian non-English-speaking people of color I’ll be thinking that something has gone wrong. It is better than an all able-cis-straight-white-Anglo-male list, because we’ve had those before, but a mono-culture is still a mono-culture.

Given the opinions I’m seeing expressed, I was curious to see that the Clarke Award web site said about the mission of the Award. Here it is:

The Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction is awarded to the author who, in the opinion of the judges, has written the best, eligible full-length science fiction novel in English.

The prize is open to any full-length novel, written in English by an author of any nationality, provided that the novel is published for the first time in the United Kingdom between 1 January and 31 December of the year before the prize is awarded. Although the novel’s first UK publication must fall within these dates, it’s still eligible if it was previously published elsewhere or is translated into English for the first time in the judging year.

As you’ll see, there’s nothing about a mission or a political duty to a particular faction of the British SF community, no matter how worthwhile the goals of such a faction might be. All that the judges are asked to do is pick the books they think are the best from those submitted. If there is any control over the mission of the award, then it is in the selection of the jurors, and in any instructions given to the Chair of the jury as to what the award management is looking for. (And, unlike the Hugos, the Clarke does have a management that could set policy.)

Nevertheless, even when an award has a mission — for example the Tiptree — the way that the mission is interpreted from year to year can change radically if you change the jury. As I understand it, the Tiptree Mother Board revels in the confusion that this unpredictability sows.

However, if you really want a specific result, there are ways of achieving it. So, if you are listening, Tom Hunter, here’s what you might consider doing to make British fandom happy.

Firstly there’s that thorny question of “British SF”. Your award doesn’t use that term, but I see people using it a lot in reference to the Clarke. Your rules simply state that the books must have been published in the UK. That could be about British publishers, but all of the big ones are foreign-owned now so I’m not sure about the utility of such a definition. The Sunburst Award, which is very like the Clarke, has a clear mission to spotlight Canadian SF. The award is open to books by Canadian writers no matter where they are published, but not to foreign nationals even if they are published in Canada, unless they actually live there. You could adopt something similar.

Such a change might, of course, exclude Lavie Tidhar, who is an Israeli with a far more impressive record of living in a variety of countries than I have. Also his current book riffs off two very famous American writers. On the other hand, the change would exclude American writers, which might make some UK fans happier. If you want to be imperialist about it you can follow the Booker and go for current and former members of the Commonwealth as well (but not rebellious former colonies). And Tidhar is currently living in the UK, so maybe you could add a residency clause too.

As to the mission, the example to follow would be the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. The clever thing about this one is that it has kept more or less the same jury year after year. I guess some of them must be very tired by now, but also they will know exactly what they all like, and what is expected of them, so they can probably ditch a lot of submissions without reading the whole book.

With the same jury every year, you can encourage a consistency of taste. And if you pick the jurors carefully then you have a reasonable chance that they’ll all like the Right Sort of Book and will pick such books year after year after year.

And you know what fandom will say to that, don’t you.

Boooooooring!

I was planning to do a blog post last night, honest. Then I got distracted by a Twitter storm.

This is what happens when people take awards too seriously.

Yes, it is the Chris Priest thing. He’s unhappy about the short list for this year’s Clarke Award. In a nutshell:

We have a dreadful shortlist put together by a set of judges who were not fit for purpose. They were incompetent.

I should start by saying that I have a certain amount of sympathy for Priest’s categorization of the short list. I have by no means read all of the submitted works, or even all of the short list, but I did very much enjoy Priest’s The Islanders and Lavie Tidhar’s Osama. Had I been on the jury, I might well have argued strongly for the inclusion of those books. I liked Embassytown too, but despite being a big fan of China’s work I thought those two books were better in a number of interesting ways.

However, even if I had been involved, there’s no guarantee that either book would have made the list. Award juries work in mysterious ways, and by no means always the same ways. I remember listening to Nalo Hopkinson give a talk on how juries work once and it opened my eyes to the diversity of process. Some juries have a proper vote. Others talk and talk until they agree on a consensus. Yet others let each juror pick one book for the short list. There are probably other methods too.

I have no idea how this year’s Clarke Award jury worked, or even if the Clarke works the same way every year. That’s not important. What is important is that the process of coming up with a short list is fraught with complication. Priest’s suggestion that any juror who didn’t like what the others chose should storm out in a fit of pique is frankly silly. All it would do is ensure that person never got asked to be on a jury again.

Then there’s that vexed question of what you mean by a “good book”. Priest thinks he knows, and he has the track record as a successful and much-lauded writer to back up his opinions. But I’m guessing that if I locked him in a room with, say, M. John Harrison, Kelly Link, Gene Wolfe and Ursula K. Le Guin, and tasked them to come up with a short list, they would not all agree, despite all being great writers.

The members of this year’s Clarke jury have all been picked because they have some knowledge of books, mostly in a professional capacity. They have chosen the books they thought most suited the requirements of the Clarke. (And their opinion of what those requirements are can also change from year to year). I may not agree with them, but I respect their right to make their own decision. Provided they don’t go around telling other juries and award bodies that their choices are invalid, I’m perfectly happy to defend this jury’s right to its own view. Priest, however, says:

The present panel of judges should be fired, or forced to resign, immediately.

and

The 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award should be suspended forthwith, and the planned awards ceremony on 2nd May should be cancelled.

And so on …

Which basically amounts to, “The Clarke Award should stop giving out prizes until it agrees to give them to books that Christopher Priest approves of.”

You know what this reminds me of? Every year, it seems, someone, Mr. Angry, will respond to the Hugo results with an blog post or email complaining that the “Hugo jury” has “got it wrong”, that the “Hugo committee” should rescind the results and ensure that the trophies go to the correct winners, the names of which Mr. Angry is only too willing to supply. The very future of human civilization is at stake if this vital task is not undertaken forthwith!

Yeah, right. But there is no Hugo jury, there is no Hugo committee (at least Priest got those things right, there are people he can complain to about the Clarke), and as yet the world has not ended, despite the lamentable failure of WSFS to follow up on Mr. Angry’s instructions.

Look, awards are a lot of fun. They do, as I said in the recent SF Signal Mind Meld, give us a good excuse to talk about books. In particular they help bring good books by little-known authors, or from little-known publishers, into the spotlight. They also give intellectual snobs like Mr. Priest and myself the opportunity to argue endlessly over what makes a good book. But one of the delights of awards is that they are all decided by different groups of people in different ways. Inevitably they don’t often agree. And the fact that a jury happens to pick a group of books you don’t like is not a sign of massive moral turpitude on their part, let alone a sign of obvious corruption, as the more fanciful fannish complainers like to suggest.

I have no way of knowing what Priest’s motives were in writing that post. Yes, he may be upset that his book wasn’t listed. But he may feel that there’s a genuine issue of literary quality to be addressed. And maybe he just saw how much publicity Steve Jones got when he lambasted the British Fantasy Awards last year and thought he could follow suit. Certainly the whole fuss has kept the Clarke Award in the news.

Whatever his reasons, however, he sounds angry. He sounds like a man who thinks some great crime has been committed against the spirit of science fiction. He sounds like someone who is taking it all way too seriously. And by doing so he is encouraging everyone else who disagrees with the results of an award to follow suit and demand the jury’s heads be put on spikes and paraded around Eastercon as a warning to others. Well I exaggerate a little, but you get the point (pun intended). He’s given legitimacy to Mr. Angry and his mob of pitchfork-wielding complainers. And that, I venture to submit, is far more of a crime against science fiction than picking a short list that I might not agree with.

SF Signal has kindly chosen to include me in one of their Mind Meld columns again. This one is on the value of awards, which is rather embarrassing in a way, but I took up the opportunity because it was a chance to plug some awards I care about, and to make the point that award wins don’t mean the same thing to everyone. You can read what I had to say (right at the bottom) here.

Elsewhere someone managed to trot out the “not qualified to vote” meme (and once again it was a woman). Anyone who isn’t up to speed on this should read this, which I posted in January last year. I think I need to make a separate page for that argument and point at it every year.

SFWA have announced the winners of their 2012 Solstice Awards, given to people who have “had a positive, transformative influence on the genre of science fiction and fantasy.”

I’m delighted to see that one of the winners is my good friend John Clute. Hooray for critics!

Also delightful is the other award, which goes to the wonderful Octavia Butler.

Well done, SFWA.

The Translation Awards fundraiser is now over, and I’m delighted to report that it reached its goal, just. The aim was to raise $2000, and the ghost of Sir Arthur quietly guided us to $2001 and a few cents.

The official thanks are over on the official blog, but I’d like to add a few personal comments. As expected, by far the largest number of donors, and therefore the most money, came from the USA. If California was a separate country then it would have come second (thank you, BASFA). Next up was Finland, followed by the UK. Donations from Australia, Canada and NZ were few in number, but exceptionally generous. In all we received money from 13 different countries. Five of those were English-speaking. Ireland uses two main languages, and the others were from countries with main languages other than English. It is great to know that what we are doing is becoming more widely known around the world.

Huge thanks once again to everyone who donated. And Finndom, you are awesome!

The fund raiser for the SF&F Translation Awards closes at midnight tomorrow (Feb. 29th). There’s currently still a better than 50:50 chance of winning a prize, which makes it a very good deal. Full details are here.

If you can’t afford to donate anything yourself, please blog about it, tweet about it, post it to Facebook or whatever. There may be someone out there who has a dollar or two to spare.

My friends at the Bay Area Science Fiction Association have been busily thinking of possible candidates for this year’s Hugos. Kevin has now posted the results to the Hugo Recommend LiveJournal. If subsequent material has been posted, the top BASFA post is here and everything else follows.

Please note that these lists are not necessarily what people are nominating. Indeed, in some cases people have listed more than 5 works in a category. (Well I know I have.) The point here is to give people things to think about. And “people” includes you and me. I’m certainly grateful for the suggestions in the Dramatic Presentation and Fan categories, which I don’t have time to follow closely.