Chris Barkley in the Denvention 3 press office tells me that National Public Radio is looking to do interviews with Hugo winners after the ceremony on Saturday. This is excellent news.
Meanwhile I am slightly disappointed at the lack of reaction I am seeing to Sam Jordison’s article on the Guardian book blog. Fandom has been complaining for ever that the mainstream media doesn’t care about us, and now we get a preview of the Hugos in a national newspaper and no one says anything. Get on over there and say “thank you”, people, and let The Guardian know that covering science fiction gets them readers.
a copy of my comment to the GU blog, nice mention for you Cheryl!:
Keep up the good work on the coverage of the Hugos.
Chabon’s going to be hard to look past for the Hugo, but is that really because of ‘the lure of literary credibility will be hard to resist’ or just the fact that it is really good?
It seems to me that SF / fantasy community cannot on the one hand complain about being looked down upon by the ‘mainstream’ and on the other ghetto-ize itself by not shortlisting well-written books with Sci Fi / Spec Fic / Alt History /Fantastic elements that happen to have been launched as mainstream by publishers. (either shelved in general fiction because of a marketing decision like Harkaway’s ‘Gone Away World’ [which I enjoyed], or because the writer is already a ‘proper’ literary writer.)
Obviously Atwood / Winterson et al doing back-flips to avoid being tarred with the genre brush is hilarious but not to include books like Chabon’s would be small-minded in the extreme, and make the SF community guilty of the same mistakes that the mainstream literary world is considered to be guilty of.
but the serious question is can the Fanglord continue to sweep all before him?
Thanks Cheryl,
It was most pleasing to have a note from Chris Barkley… and the debate is very interesting at least, if not one of my most populated blogs… Thanks for your contribution Will… Hope you’re all enjoying worldcon…
S