For those of you looking for Australians to nominate it the Hugos, here are a couple of artists. Nick Stathopoulos has been a favorite of mine for some time. And today Marc Gascoigne reminded me that Greg Bridges is also Australian. Unfortunately I have no idea what either of them have done in 2009. I wish people would update the wiki.
And to save you clicking through to Angry Robot, here’s what Marco was so excited about.
As usual I have been collecting links to pimpage pages over at SF Awards Watch. Mostly they are pretty standard stuff, but Walter Jon Williams has one of the best I have seen in a long time.
Oh, and if you have done a pimpage page and we haven’t linked to it, let me know.
Yes, I know I’m trying to stop talking about them, but last year I promised the Feminist SF folks an article on how to minimize the cost of voting in the Hugos. It went online yesterday and, as it has been all over Twitter today, I guess I should link to it. Much of the advice is actually applicable to anyone who is short of money, not just women.
Mind you, I discovered from a comment on Tor.com yesterday that Hugos get won by people whose writing appeals to rich people, so maybe I shouldn’t be writing that sort of thing. Check out the whole thread, as it also includes a comment from someone who wants to keep the Hugos exclusive, and a lovely quote from Langford from 1987.
By the way, there are approximately 10 times as many people in the USA than in the UK, so really the fact that Americans do better than the British in what is a popular vote award should not be entirely surprising. Really, I’m not bitter about Brits never winning fan Hugos. I don’t think Dave is either.
Talking of minimizing your Hugo participation cost, you can get a free ebook copy of one of the most talked-about novels of 2009 – Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (Juliet Ulman, ed.) – if you join the io9 book club.
And finally, Peggy Kolm has been talking about a very interesting short film made in Kenya. It is a 2009 production, and the trailer looks excellent, but at the moment the only way to see the whole thing is to go to Sundance. I’m hoping it gets online before the nomination deadline, and if not I’ll ask for an extension in Melbourne.
It is a good job I leave my iPhone by my bed at night. This morning I switched it on to check Twitter and found that the Aurealis Award ceremony was in full swing in Brisbane. I got the announcements all re-tweeted over SF Awards Watch, so managed to look very professional. Watching the reaction was interesting. All of my friends were cheering for Jonathan Strahan (winning for Best Anthology for Eclipse 3) and Justin Ackroyd (the Peter McNamara Convernors’ Award), but the big reaction in the Twittersphere was for Greg Egan’s win in Best Collection (for Oceanic). That got SFAW a bunch of new followers who, I think, are Japanese. (Associated blog post here.)
I must say I’m very impressed with the show that Fantastic Queensland puts on. Unlike certain other awards I could mention, they are very much part of the 21st Century and keen to have what they are doing recognized around the world.
I was also very impressed with Scott Westerfeld (who won the YA prize for Leviathan) was kept up a running fashion commentary. It sounds like Trudi Canavan (winner of Best Fantasy Novel with Magician’s Apprentice) is going to be a contender for the Emerald City Best Dressed Award at this year’s Hugos. A note to the Aussie girls, however: you don’t all have to wear black. My dress for Melbourne is green and gold (though definitely not the right shades thereof).
Yes, I have a convention penciled in for 2011 already. It is, after all, where we will be presenting the inaugural translation awards. But (if you enjoy academic discussion of SF) I think it will be a fascinating event. The theme of the conference is Global Science Fiction and you can find the call for papers here.
I’m thinking that someone should present a paper on the globalization of fandom. Ipa, we should talk.
I was up late last night waiting to see if Coraline would win in the Golden Globes. It didn’t — it lost to Up — but Neil and Amanda got to schmooze with the Hollywood glitterati and Amanda got to be dead on the red carpet in a totally speccy dress so I’m sure that the evening wasn’t a total bust,
Then I went to sleep. When I woke up I discovered that Avatar had won Best Motion Picture and people are now talking about it as a hot tip for the Oscar. That would be a first for a science fiction movie. But were the people I’m following on Twitter happy? No, of course not. They would have preferred to see another movie win than to have the prize go to an SF movie with a weak script.
It reminds me a lot of the interminable arguments over the Hugos. The bigger an award becomes, the less likely it is that quality writing will win out. And awards reflect the concerns of the people who give them. It didn’t surprise me at all to see Hollywood ignoring scriptwriting and giving one of their top awards to a movie with ground-breaking effects work that made a humongous amount of money.
I’ve not actually seen Avatar, and I probably never will, but I’m pleased for Norm Cates and the other folks at Weta that their awesome work is once again blowing Hollywood away. I also think that having a science fiction movie win major awards is yet another sign that we have won the culture war. It will help sell science fiction books.
People will, of course, still complain: about the Golden Globes, the Oscars and about the Hugos. I will mostly beg to disagree. I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there who think I only defend the Hugos because I have won two, and there’s nothing I can say that will disabuse them of that notion. For myself, however, I’d be quite happy to see my name expunged from the Hugo record if only it would stop people running the awards down all the time.
Of course it wouldn’t, so instead I put a lot of time and effort into promoting the Hugos, Worldcon, conventions, fandom and the science fiction industry. I do that partly because I love SF, and partly because I’m pretty much unemployable so I might as well do something with all of my spare time. And, as it turns out, once you get a reputation for doing hard work for free, there’s always a queue of people expecting you to do more. Often these are people in the industry who want me to work for free to help promote the work that they get paid to do.
So I spend a lot of time promoting and defending the Hugos because I believe that they are good for SF. There will always be plenty of things to complain about. The Hugos have a bunch of problems and the process of fixing them is long and tortuous. Also fans will never agree on what is “the best,” so there will always be complaints about who wins. Mostly they will be because the people in question care deeply about the works that didn’t win.
With industry professionals it is a bit different. Firstly they tend to have a much bigger audience, so what they say matters more. Secondly they often get paid for what they write, so if one digs up a tired old complaint about the Hugos that has been thrashed to death over the years and presents it as a shiny new controversy you are never quite sure if this is real or just someone shilling for eyeballs.
Also they should know better. It is not just that having a high profile set of awards is good for the industry in general, it is a question of understanding the process. These days industry professionals are very fond of complaining that fans and wannabe writers don’t understand how the industry works and make unreasonable complaints and demands for change. Mostly I support that. But in return if professionals want to criticize Worldcon or the Hugos or any other fannish endeavor they should at least find out a bit about how it works before lobbying for changes that have about as much chance of happening as tigers becoming vegetarians.
So if you are an industry professional and you are thinking of writing something that trashes the Hugos, here are a few things I’d like you to remember.
Firstly it won’t change anything for the better. The majority of Hugo voters will ignore you, and those who do like and admire you, or are convinced by your rant, will probably stop participating, meaning that fewer people who share your views will be involved in the process.
Secondly, having high profile awards is one of the best ways of getting the media to talk about your industry. By trashing the awards you are trashing something that is valuable to the industry as a whole.
And finally, when you trash the Hugos, you are making unnecessary and depressing work for me and people like me who give our time for free to promote the industry that pays your salary. You can be sure I’ll remember that next time you ask me to work for free on some commercial project of yours.
After much messing around with video files I have managed to get a short clip of the 1979 Hugo Award ceremony onto YouTube (and posted it to the official Hugo Award web site). Here it is.
Unfortunately it seems unlikely that the BBC will issue DVDs of the Time out of Mind series, and it would be unwise to tweak their tails by uploading more than this very short clip. However, I hope to get the rest of the material into a state where it can easily be shown privately.
However, for a little more proof that the BBC cameras were at Worldcon that year, here are a couple of very fuzzy photos. I think they are from the art show auction.
Once again many thanks to Arnold Akien for providing me with this material.
The excellent literary web site, Three Percent, has published the long list for the 2010 Translation Award. That’s for all books newly translated into English (and I think US publication only) in 2009. It is possible that one or two of these might qualify for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards, but I’m not familiar with most of them. Has anyone out there read any of the listed works?
Apropos the previous post, we are once again collecting recommendations and links to people’s publication lists over at SF Awards Watch.
In addition I’d like to remind editors and artists to update their pages at the SF Editors’ Wiki and SF Artists’ Wiki so that potential voters know what you actually produced in the year of eligibility.
Because everyone else is doing it, and because some people need a reminder not to nominate me in certain categories…
* The members of the Clarkesworld team that have the title “editor” are Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace and me. In 2008 Nick Mamatas held the job I now have, and he was on the ballot for 2009. Personally I think that Kate Baker deserves recognition for the podcasts, but I also know how much Hugo Administrators hate burgeoning credit lists. Ultimately it is up to Neil and Vince Docherty as to who to list. If we get a nomination and I’m not listed I won’t complain.
A new year, and a new issue of Clarkesworld Magazine goes online. In this issue we have:
The Peter Watts story is also available as a podcast. I’m particularly pleased to have a story by Peter in this issue and I hope everyone who reads it will leave an encouraging message for him in the comments.
Also in this issue, Neil has launched our annual reader poll. Everyone who votes is eligible to win a copy of the fabulous Wyrm Publishing anthology: Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy – 2008 Download, which highlights the best online SF&F of 2008. And when you are considering which stories and cover art to vote for in our poll, please also remember that Hugo nominations are now open. (Clarkesworld is, as usual, eligible in Best Semiprozine).
Finally we have some changes coming up in 2010. We will be publishing some longer stories, more fiction, and more podcasts. Neil has the details here.
I have already posted to SFAW about Vincent Docherty’s long and carefully considered article concerning the eligibility of online publications for various Hugo Award categories. John Scalzi has now picked up on the story, at least in part because he wanted to state that he does not believe that Whatever is a fanzine:
So I wouldn’t put it forward for consideration as a fanzine, and if it were nominated in the category — which to be clear I would consider a long shot anyway — I would decline the nomination.
John’s reasoning is contrary to general fannish orthodoxy. His original point was that he felt that Whatever was not sufficiently about science fiction to be eligible. It has since been pointed out to him that many SF fanzines have very little (or even no) SFnal content, but he still says he would be uncomfortable with a nomination.
Given that John has made this public statement I feel obligated to note that I don’t regard this blog as a fanzine either. Emerald City was always conceived as a fanzine, regardless of how many people still claim that it wasn’t. It was published in issues, had a clear identity and purpose, and was generally magazine-like in its behavior. It even had proof readers (and I continue to be indebted to Anne and Kevin for all of their help). This blog, on the other hand, is not at all magazine-like in its behavior. Granted there are fanzines that are just as much a random collection of the author’s thoughts as this is of mine, but I maintain that they are mostly not very good fanzines, even if individual pieces of writing in them may sparkle magnificently.
John also briefly mentions the possibility of Whatever being a “related work”, and again I am in general agreement with him. Continuing web sites should not appear year-after-year in the ballot, and a blog like Whatever or Cheryl’s Mewsings does not have sufficient identity to be regarded as a “work”. It is possible that something like SFAW might achieve nomination once, but if it does then it should never be so honored again because it is pretty much impossible for a long-running web site to have sufficient new material in any one year to classify as a “new” work. If John (or I) were to produce an annual anthology containing the best of that year, or several years’, blog entries, that might be different, but John has already done that and I have no intention of doing so (because, let’s face it, no one would buy it).
So when you are filling in your Hugo ballots next year, please try to find some new names to put on them. I have a few good suggestions here.
Kevin and I were busy doing many things at Word Fantasy. One of the things we did (together with Scott Dennis who is on the WSFS Mark Protection Committee) was conclude a contact with Sean Wallace of Prime Books to produce a series of Hugo Award Showcase anthologies. The books will be edited by Mary Robinette Kowal. More details are available on the Hugo Award web site.
Another Sekrit Projekt goes live. Yay!
World Fantasy has now started (though opening ceremonies are not for another hour). My office here is vast, and the Internet connection is good. Kevin has been out putting up signs to Registration because we sited it at the top of the escalators and anyone using the elevators will find themselves on the wrong side of the hotel and having to walk to the opposite side of a large square, around the outside. We were strongly tempted to put signs pointing both ways from the elevators.
Most of the tweetage has been about the size of the freebie book bag. Well, this is World Fantasy, a large book bag is expected. I weighed mine. It is 13 lbs. Members who complain about the weight will be reminded that someone had to get the books here and do bag stuffing (that’s a Hero of the Convention Medal for you, Rina!)
Blue Meanies have been sighted in the Dealers’ Room.
I’ve just seen Kevin tweeting which means he has managed to get the in-room Internet (free to President’s Club members) working. That means we should be fine for the live coverage of the Last Drink Bird Head Awards tonight. Hope to see you there.
Those of you who know Guy Gavriel Kay will not be surprised that he doesn’t take author spats over awards very seriously. However, his latest article in the Toronto Globe & Mail does reserve some special snark for John Mullan.
One of this year’s Booker judges, John Mullan, replied to Robinson’s comments with an almost definitively asinine comment. It was Hall of Fame-quality idiocy.
No mincing of words there.
Many people have complained to me over the years that voting in the Hugo Awards is too expensive. We have tried hard of late (thank you, Mr. Scalzi) to make Supporting Memberships worth the money, but what would be really good is if we could make them cheaper.
Unfortunately, as Kevin explains here, the cost of a Supporting Membership is tied in to other prices that Worldcons are allowed to set for memberships in a complicated way that gives conventions an incentive to set the cost of Supporting Memberships much higher than is justified by the cost of providing services to those members.
If we can cut through that tangle then we ought to be able to reduce the cost of a Supporting Membership, and hence the cost of Hugo Voting, to maybe $25. Kevin thinks we may be able to get sufficient support to make this happen.
Comments for preference on Kevin’s LiveJournal, please.
Normally when I write about awards I am talking about awards for literature, but this time the awards in question are for: “excellence in online communication, business practice and technology.” The particular awards in question are the SIME awards and they are awarded to online businesses based in the Nordic Countries (not Scandinavia, please – Finland is not part of Scandinavia). And my Finnish movie pals have found themselves on the short list.
It is quite a long short list — 36 nominees — but then again there must be an awful lot of online businesses and to be on that list is an amazing achievement. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in Stockholm on November 12th (at Café Opera where I had the most expensive glass of whisky I have ever drunk, and not because it was anything special). I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
In the meantime, in case you were not aware, you can now buy the original Star Wreck movie from Amazon. I’m also able to report that the studio on the moon where the guys are filming the lunar sequences for Iron Sky survived the recent NASA bombing mission. Will someone please tell Mr. Obama that they are not real Nazis, it is just a film set.
As per my comment on the Octocon affair earlier today, things seem to be moving forward in Dublin and I recommend that we leave them to talk in peace. However, those of you who haven’t quite eaten all of your popcorn might like to pop over to the Not the Booker thread where Rana Dasgupta appears to be throwing a significant hissy fit despite having been declared the winner.
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has, as expected, won this year’s Booker Prize. The novel, which was described by Adam Roberts as being like an epic fantasy without any actual dragons and the like in it, is a 600-page saga of ambition and double-dealing set in Tudor England. Rather as I expected, the book is already being decried as “genre”. In The Independent, Chris Schuler says:
Novelists should be engaging with the issues of the day – like Balzac, Dickens and George Eliot did – not indulging in high-class escapism.
The irony is, of course, that much speculative fiction deals very much with the issues of the day, and often does so far more effectively because it is set in an alternate world, allowing the author to concentrate on the actual issues without getting sidetracked by people’s entrenched views of the rights and wrongs of the individuals, countries, etc. involved. But speculative fiction is also “genre” so I doubt that Schuler is likely to ever try reading it, or to understand what the author is doing if he did.
Over at The Guardian book blog, Sarah Crown announces the winner of the Not the Booker context, and ruminates on the difficulties of running an award with public voting. Required reading for anyone who has ever run such a thing.