And what an interesting year it is! Via Locus:
LIFE ACHIEVEMENT Stephen Fabian and John Crowley
NOVEL Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami (Harvill; Knopf)
NOVELLA Voluntary Committal, Joe Hill (Subterranean Press)
SHORT FICTION "CommComm", George Saunders (The New Yorker 1 Aug 2005)
ANTHOLOGY The Fair Folk, Marvin Kaye, ed. (SFBC)
COLLECTION The Keyhole Opera, Bruce Holland Rogers (Wheatland Press)
ARTIST James Jean
SPECIAL AWARD, PROFESSIONAL Sean Wallace (for Prime Books)
SPECIAL AWARD, NON-PROFESSIONAL David Howe & Stephen Walker (for Telos Books)
Judges for this year’s awards were Steve Lockley, Barbara Roden, Victoria Strauss, Jeff VanderMeer, and Andrew Wheeler.
All in all, no way to really argue with any of these even if I was pulling for different horses in some of the races; CommComm was one of my fave stories last year, Kafka on the Shore’s a beautiful novel and Joe Hill rocks. Congratulations, all. And now, let Bittercon resume for those of us not in Austin.
p.s. Scalzi points out the winners are all men this year. I noticed that too and went browsing through the history of winners. I got to 1994 before I found an all-male fiction year, and even so, there were female winners on the anthology editing side. (Note: I was browsing, so I could have missed something.) I figure this is a fluke year in an award with pretty decent gender equity (in recent history, anyway).
Has anyone actually read The Keyhole Opera?
I went to the judges panel, which was very cool (people send them books! I want people sending me books!) They said they felt it was the most cohesive and consistent of the collections–others had really fabulous stories, but also suckier ones, but it held together overall. Your mileage may vary, of course, but they were definately a united front on that argument, and I thought it was an interesting slant on the pick (well, in theory, at least, as I’ve read none of the works in question.)
The judges also cited Bruce Holland Rogers’ experimentation with the formal structure of stories, which they found admirable.