Nominations for the World Fantasy Awards are due by the end of this month. Details here.
If you are short of ideas, the SF Awards Watch Recommendation Lists may help.
John Picacio has put some suggestions in his Twitter feed. I liked his suggestion of nominating some artists for the Lifetime Achievement Award. The names he put forward are Jean “Moebius” Giraud and Michael Whelan.
There are some obvious novel candidates, starting with Cat Valente’s Palimpsest. Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch was also on the Locus Award ballot, and is a wonderful book, though it does have a lot of science fiction in it. And Caitlin R Kiernan’s The Red Tree is a magnificent horror novel. I have no idea why Locus thought that The City & The City is fantasy, or that Boneshaker is science fiction, but such debates can never be resolved. Personally I’d like to suggest Dragon in Chains by Daniel Fox (Chaz Brenchley).
Looking through recommendation lists and ballots I have been surprised at how many of the successful short fiction stories from last year have been science fiction. That’s in marked contrast to the domination of fantasy in the bookstores. From Clarkesworld I’d like to suggest “Of Melei, of Ulthar”, Gord Sellar (Clarkesworld #37) and “White Charles”, Sarah Monette (Clarkesworld #36)
The successful anthologies from last year have also been mainly science fiction, though Lovecraft Unbound from Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse) is an obvious candidate. On the collection front We Never Talk About My Brother, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon) and The Best of Gene Wolfe, Gene Wolfe (Tor) seem likely nominees.
Artist is always a difficult category because of the tendency to vote for the same people each year. I’m by no means perfect in that regard, but here are my suggestions: John Picacio, Charles Vess, Jon Foster, Kinuko Y. Craft, John Coulthart. If you are not familiar with Coulthart despite my persistent championing of him, go take another look at the cover of Finch.
Jacob Weisman of Tachyon was nominated in Special Award (Professional) last year and I see no reason not to keep on nominating him until he wins. I’d also like to suggest nominating Bill Willingham for Fables.
Clarkesworld was a Nominee in Special Award (Non-Professional) last year and I’m hoping to see it on the ballot again this year. I suggest you credit it to Neil Clarke & Sean Wallace. There’s no need to wind the World Fantasy Board up by putting my name on the ballot. On the other hand, if you do want to wind them up, I can think of nothing more likely to succeed than a nomination in this category for SFSFC for the 2009 World Fantasy Convention.
We have a couple of days before ballots are due, so feel free to make suggestions, especially in the short fiction where I’m very short of inspiration.
On the SF / Fantasy genre issue, maybe it’s just no longer possible to differentiate the two. I’ve always been in the camp that believe that they are two dialects of the same language, but they are so interwoven now that I’m not sure what need there is to distinguish them.
That’s the view I tend to take as well. However, when submitting nominations to the World Fantasy Awards there’s no point in suggesting works that the award administrators are likely to disqualify.
Hey, thanks. One note, if you’ll forgive me…I don’t lobby for awards, but I don’t want anyone to have the impression Finch is not a fantasy novel. It is. Veniss Underground made the WF ballot and that arguably was SF. The adminstrators do not disqualify things on that basis anyway to my knowledge–whether a fantasy novel has too many SF elements.
Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical by Robert Shearman for best Collection. He won the award a couple of years back for Tiny Deaths and his follow up collection is even better.