Following on from Sam Jordison’s excellent tour through past Hugo Award winners, Alison Flood has decided to conduct a similar odyssey through the British Fantasy Awards. The principal rationale for this is that they have a longer history (by 3 years), but I hope she does follow up on the idea of looking at the “World” Fantasy Award too. Both awards have produced some rather odd winners at times, and both have tended to go for pure horror novels (the BFA probably more often than the WFA). Mainly, however, I’d be disappointed to see a survey of top class fantasy novels that didn’t include the likes of Little Big, Mythago Wood, Thomas The Rhymer, The Physiognomy, Declare and Ysabel.
A rather more embarrassing piece of Britocentrism was provided yesterday by Stuart Jeffries who not only managed to irritate John Scalzi, but also inexplicably left Ian McDonald and Charlie Stross off his roll call of top British SF writers. I can only assume that SF coverage has proved so popular at The Guardian that their editors are scraping the barrel looking for more contributors. If this is the best they can do, I hasten to point out that the UK is home to a large number of top flight SF critics, any one of whom could have done better than Mr. Jeffries.
leaving Charlie off wasn’t enormously clever, was it?
No. Also Ian’s award record has been very strong of late. He was up for that Warwick prize thing.
And he should have included you as well. And possibly Chris Beckett though I’m not sure he writes any space opera.
Of course this wimpy near-future SF is all the fault of the Mundanes, who are all Americans, right?
Need I go on?
And Alaistair Reynolds, too.
IIRC, Jeffries normally reviews dvds and those cinema releases Peter Bradshaw can’t be bothered with.
While I was very happy to see two of our Odyssey 2010 guests included in that article and a third mentioned on the same page, there were certainly some glaring errors of omission in the article itself!
I’m not a regular Guardian reader, but I don’t recall Stuart Jeffries attempting any many SF reviews previously. Must try harder 🙂
I must look for those Peter F. Hamilton guidebooks. I’ve seen the notes he’s put on his Web site, but I never heard of any hardcopy reference guides before.
Hi Cheryl,
I’ve done my next fantasy winner, Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, and am now considering where to go next – would love your thoughts. Have you read the inaugural World Fantasy Award winner Patricia A McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld? I may go for that…