Scientifiction

Justine won the Andre Norton Award for her fabulous book Magic or Madness! Yay! I say again: Yay!

Here’s what I said about the sequel last year (with a little bit about this one too).

Congratulations are also in order to Liz Hand and Jim Kelly on their Nebula wins!

From an interview with one John C. Wright at Sci Fi Weekly:

So, no. The work was written long before I ever heard of Harry Potter. Through no design of my own, Branshead is the opposite of Hogwarts: a school where magical beings learn how to be muggles. The students want to break out of school and return to lives and families at home.

Nor is this book anywhere nearly gross enough to qualify for YA status. To win awards in YA fiction, one needs to describe rapist elfs sodomizing boys with thorn bushes, or a father having sex with the ghost of his little son he murdered. Incestohomopedonecrophilia, we might call that: One needs special names to describe the new perversions. I wish I were making those examples up.

Wow, I’m going to have to add some thorn bushes, AT LEAST.

Dave Itzkoff visits MidSouth Con and the result is actually not all that awful. Too bad he didn’t go to one of the regional conventions where books are a more prominent feature, but so it goes — the characterization of fiction as an increasingly marginalized aspect of the SF scene is undeniably true, as anyone who’s been to a WorldCon or looked at the Hugo voting stats can attest.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a month now, but keep forgetting. I’m chairing the extremely awesome 2007 Tiptree Award jury, with my fellow jurors being Geoff Ryman, Meghan McCarron, Charlie Anders, and Sheree Thomas. Anyway, I say this because we want you to submit recommendations for "SF and fantasy published this year exploring gender roles that should be considered for the award." The nomination form is here, or you can drop me an email (Gwenda007ATGMAILDOTCOM), with recs for novels and short stories that might fit the bill.

And, yes, for those of you less familiar with the award, this includes stuff published outside the genre, so long as it has a fantastical or SF bent. (The 2006 winners are Shelley Jackson and Catherynne M. Valente, for instance — Half-Life was published as literary fiction and The Orphan’s Tales as fantasy.) Oh, and yes, children’s and YA books are absolutely eligible for consideration, so kidlit bloggers pony up any relevant titles too.

Recommend early and often, por favor.

And in honor of the big day, a pointer to the story I wrote for a blogthology a couple of years ago FOR FREE, which has been up online FOR FREE ever since: "Unflappable." (It’s a YA story about spirit animals.)

Ellen_Kushner has a thoughtful reaction from Geoff Ryman on the lack of women nominated for this year’s Hugos. A taste:

We seem to have reverted to type. It’s time at least to ask the question: is there something fundamental to the SF tradition that excludes many things women live through and write about? Or which tolerates those writers and their works while delivering an essentially masculine dream? Maybe in ORDER to deliver that masculine dream. Is this dream so deep and enduring that no amount of conscious political correctness can undo it? Is it the case that men find SF easier to write? Or do fine writers like Liz Williams, Gwyneth Jones, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Suzy McKee Charnas simply write material that is regarded as fantasy or slipstream and so doesn’t make the cut?

Please do go read the whole post and the comments; there are no easy answers, that’s for sure.

While others have announced their write-in candidacies for SFWA president today, I choose not to pursue the means of electioneering. Instead, I declare war on SFWA.

This will involve:

– continuing to post opinions openly
– reading publications that SFWA doesn’t deem worthy of counting (you know, like Small Beer Press and Golden Gryphon stuff)
– continuing to mostly not pay attention to the ongoing election slapfights
– reading whatever the damn hell I want and not pretending that SANE people still automatically think all genre work is second class stuff

Hmmm… It appears I’ve been at war with SFWA for awhile now.

p.s. Lots of April Fool’s fun at the Inferior 4.

It was this easy to get so many women nominated for the Hugos. (Via Sharyn.)

I also love that Geoff Ryman stays Geoff Ryman. That’s what wearing that Tiptree tiara will get you…

The 2006 Nebula Award ballot has finally been made public. Good year!

Yay, Barzak! Yay, Jeff Ford and Ellen Kushner and Mary Rickert and RICK BOWES and everybody!

From Locus Online:

Finalists for this year’s Crawford Award, for the best first book by a new fantasy writer, are Daniel Abraham’s A Shadow in Summer, Alan De Niro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, Keith Donohue’s The Stolen Child, Theodora Goss’s In The Forest of Forgetting, Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora, Naomi Novik’s Temeraire, and M. Rickert’s Map of Dreams. The award has been given annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts since 1985 and was originally funded by a gift from Andre Norton. Nominators for this year’s award included Kelly Link, Graham Sleight, Niall Harrison, Jonathan Strahan, Farah Mendlesohn, and Gary K. Wolfe. The award will be presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, March 14-18 in Fort Lauderdale.

Yay for Alan, Mary Rickert and Dora Goss! (Thanks, Gavin!)