Tagged: Awards

Even More Awards You Probably Know About Already

Even More Awards You Probably Know About Already

Once again, those few benighted souls relying on Antick Musings for their skiffy-world news have been poorly served, but here’s the most recent clutch of awards given out in our realms:

Robert A. Heinlein Award

This is both a fairly new award — barely a decade old — and one given for a body of work, rather than a specific piece of fiction, which means it has gone to pretty much exactly who we all would have predicted it would, in pretty much the same order. The award is given, officially, for “outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space” — NASA propaganda, essentially.

This year’s winner is Stanley Schmidt, long-time editor of Analog, and, in best Heinlein fashion, the award itself is a whopping great medallion that Schmidt will be expected to wear as much as he can — or, at least, the matching lapel pins for when the medallion “is impractical.”

Arthur C. Clarke Award

This is the one that Christopher Priest made such a fuss about a few weeks back — it’s one of the major UK “Best SF Novel” awards, given to “the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom” as decided by a panel of judges from the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the SCI-LONDON Film Festival. (Because who better to judge the merits of a novel than people who both organize a film festival and can’t afford a shift key?)

This year, the award went to the only work Priest found barely tolerable, Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb, which may, perhaps, fill Priest’s heart [1] with something vaguely like happiness.

John W. Campbell Memorial Award

This one is a US “Best SF Novel” award, given — at least, this is how it’s seemed to most outsiders for the past thirty-plus years — to the good SF novel that the late Campbell would have hated the most. (The tone was set early, with with the very first winner, Barry Malzberg’s grim Beyond Apollo, a novel about sex-crazed and just plain old crazed astronauts.)

This year’s slate of nominees has just been announced, and they are:

  • Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (Crown)
  • Kathleen Ann Goonan, This Shared Dream (Tor Books)
  • Will McIntosh, Soft Apocalypse (Night Shade Books)
  • China Miéville, Embassytown (Ballantine Books/Del Rey)
  • Christopher Priest, The Islanders (Gollancz)
  • Joan Slonczewski, The Highest Frontier (Tor Books)
  • Michael Swanwick, Dancing with Bears (Night Shade Books)
  • Lavie Tidhar, Osama (PS Publishing)
  • Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse (Simon & Schuster)
  • Gene Wolfe, Home Fires (Tor Books)
  • Rob Ziegler, Seed (Night Shade Books)

I haven’t read several of these books, so my judgement may be off, but I expect that Osama will be hard to beat: I can feel Campbell already spinning in his grave just because of the nomination. Congratulations to all of the nominees.

I could have sworn there were more than that, but I seem to be at the end of the list for now. Congrats to those who have already won, and good luck for those jostling their way on the very long Campbell list — remember, most of you have already lost!

[1] I originally typed “hard” here — my fingers sometimes have better jokes than I do.

Awards! Awards! Awards!

Aurealis Award for best illustrated book or gr...

The lingering memory of my year of blogging for the SFBC — which ended five years ago, so I really should be over it by this point — still compels me to post SFnal awards, even when I do so far too late to benefit anyone. What can I say? I’m a flawed person.

Anyway, here’s some recent awards that you probably already know about:

2011 Aurealis Awards

The Australian national awards for SF and other imaginative literature were given out three weeks ago (I know, I know!), and the full list has been available since then.

Here’s the novel-length awards, just because:

  • YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: Only Ever Always, by Penni Russon
  • FANTASY NOVEL: Ember and Ash, by Pamela Freeman
  • SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL: The Courier’s New Bicycle, by Kim Westwood

(via SF Signal)

Analog and Asimov’s Reader’s Awards

The same weekend as the Nebulas (suddenly suspicious — did I blog about the Nebulas? Yes, I did!), the editors of Asimov’s and Analog announced the winners of their respective reader polls for the most popular features of the past year:

Analog’s Analytical Laboratory (AnLab) Awards:

  • Best Novella: “With Unclean Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro (11/11)
  • Best Novelette (Tie):
    • “Jak and the Beanstalk” by Richard A. Lovett (7-8/11)
    • “Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in the Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms” by John G. Hemry (3/11)
  • Best Short Story: “Julie is Three” by Craig DeLancey (3/11)
  • Best Fact: “Smart SETI” by Gregory and James Benford (4/11)
  • Best Cover: December 2011 (for “Ray of Light”) by Bob Eggleton

Asimov’s Readers’ Awards are:

  • Best Novella: “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” by Kij Johnson (10-11/11)
  • Best Novelette: “All About Emily” by Connie Willis (12/11)
  • Best Short Story: “Movement” by Nancy Fulda (3/11)
  • Best Poem: “Five Pounds of Sunlight” by Geoffrey A. Landis (1/11)
  • Best Cover Artist: October/November, by Paul Youll (for “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”)

Note that Analog readers are scientists, carefully weighing the validity of each piece in their “Analytical Laboratory,” while Asimov’s  readers just vote for stuff they like.

(also via SF Signal — you really should read them, and get this stuff quicker)

Sturgeon and Campbell Finalists

Finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards were also announced around Nebula time. These are juried awards for the best SF (generally interpreted broadly) story and novel of the prior year, and this year’s nominees are:

Sturgeon:

  • Charlie Jane Anders, “Six Months, Three Days,” Tor.com, June
  • Paul Cornell, “The Copenhagen Interpretation,” Asimov’s, July
  • Yoon Ha Lee, “Ghostweight,” Clarkesworld, January
  • Kij Johnson, “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Asimov’s, Oct / Nov (Note: removed from consideration because Johnson is a Sturgeon juror, though it still appears on the official list of nominees.)
  • Jake Kerr, “The Old Equations,” Lightspeed, July
  • Ken Liu, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” Panverse Three
  • Ken Liu, “The Paper Menagerie,” F&SF, March / April
  • Paul McAuley, “The Choice,” Asimov’s, Dec / Jan
  • Catherynne M. Valente, “Silently and Very Fast,” Clarkesworld, October

Sixteen (named) people nominated for the Sturgeon, many of them the editors of the short-fiction venues of the field. My eyebrow is cocked as I type this, but I really don’t know the process. I’m also surprised to see a story by a juror appear on the shortlist, even though it has a note saying it was removed from consideration.


Campbell:

Both awards will be given out during the Campbell Conference in early July.

Compton Crook Award

This award goes to the new SF author of the best novel of the prior year — not to the book itself, but to the author. (It’s also not quite clear if it has to be a first novel, or if newness persists in a writer for some extended period.)

This year’s winner is T.C. McCarthy, for Germline.

(via SF Scope, for variety)

Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees, and thanks to all of the various nominators, judges, voters, and other functionaries that make these various awards run.

The Final Eagle Awards have Landed

The Final Eagle Awards have Landed

By ‘UK Correspondent’ Steve Morris

The last-ever Eagle Awards have just concluded here in good ol’ Blighty (that means Britain), with the ceremony due to switch names over to “The MCM Awards” in 2013. End of an era, awards-fans! In lieu of us not liveblogging the awards ceremony Oscars-style (complete with a drinking game in which you have to down a pint every time Scott Snyder wins something), here is the complete list of winners:

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Hugo Deadline Fast Approaching

Hugo Deadline Fast Approaching

I always leave these things to the last minute, so I just submitted my nominating ballot. It’s not as full, or as well-informed, as I’d like to be, but this process works best the more of us take part — however much, and however well, we can.

So, if you’re eligible, and you haven’t yet done it, take a few minutes before midnight PDT tonight and fill out some of your favorites from 2011. The nominating ballot is here. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read or seen “everything;” none of us have. You’ve read or seen some things, and if you thought some of those are good enough, nominate ’em.

DENNIS O’NEIL: Celebrating Will Eisner

Well, I didn’t see you at the Will Eisner panel/celebration, held last Thursday, March 1st, at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, which, if you need to ask, is located at 594 Broadway, New York City, in the district known as SoHo. (And if you did need to ask…let’s just say that any comics reader, casual or otherwise, who is in lower Manhattan and has not yet visited MOCCA, and continues not to visit MOCCA just may have condemned themselves to an eternity of having Seduction of the Innocent read aloud to them by Bobcat Goldthwait.)

But back to the panel/celebration: you weren’t there and we didn’t miss you because we had what was pretty nearly a full house and that was gratifying. The “we” to whom I refer was three people who knew, or knew a lot about, Will, who died in 2005; Judy Hansen, Karen Green and your humble servant. Moderator was the always reliable and excellent Paul Levitz, so pertinent questions were asked, both of the panelists and the audience (of which you were not a member). I left knowing more than when I came, and I suspect that most of the other folk there did, too. I was particularly interested in Ms. Green’s discussion of Will’s business practices, which helped confirm my belief that Will Eisner was what Mark Twain wanted to be: a successful capitalist as well as a superb storyteller.

Did I mention gratifying? For openers, it’s always nice when someone of genuine merit gets recognized, especially when that person was a friend. And the fact that the venue for such recognition exists is nice, too. It indicates that the (always) artificial demarcations between “high” and “low” culture are going the way of the dinosaurs, and some would say, amen and about time.

(But not you because you probably wouldn’t be where amen and about time was being said.)

It might be possible, humbly, hat clutched in whitened fingers, to suggest that respectability does not always benefit what becomes respectable, but that is a pretty damn complicated topic for another occasion.

As we comics geeks continue our gradual trek toward the nicer parts of town, and the world outside our borders comes to recognize that the great comics guys – Eisner, Jack Kirby, Walt Kelly, and, no doubt, young others who are too busy at their boards to wonder about plaudits…these guys were as accomplished in their ways as Dickens and Michaelangelo were in theirs, we’ll have further opportunities to pay them the homage they deserve Is a televised awards ceremony too much to expect? Oh lordy, I hope so. (As I told you last wee, televised awards shindigs are, I boldly state, post-industrial versions of the Inquisition.)

Not that any of this concerns you. Awards? Panels? Not for you. You’re too busy watching Cops reruns. Bad boy bad boy.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

 

WEIRDNESS, ADVENTURE, AND AN EXCLUSIVE STORY FROM WHITE ROCKET BOOKS! ALL IN PRO SE PRESENTS #7!

Pro Se Productions announces the latest issue in its Award Winning Magazine line!   Recognized as the Best Pulp Magazine for 2011 by the Pulp Ark 2012 Awards, Pro Se Presents #7 Brings Thrills and Chills Like None You’ve Ever Seen! Fan Favorite The Silver Manticore returns for another story! Noted New Pulp Author Van Allen Plexico debuts his latest novel character, HAWK, in a story exclusive for Pro Se! And Frank Schildiner’s newest Weird Hero, Lee Cohen, Monster Mobster, debuts and is featured on this stunning cover by Sean E. Ali! Get Scared, Spaced, and Masked all in this issue of PRO SE PRESENTS! 

Pro Se Presents #7 is now available in print for $6.00 at Amazon, at https://www.createspace.com/3807811, and at www.prosepulp.com!  Also available for $1.99 as an Ebook on Kindle via Amazon, on the Nook via Barnes & Noble, and in all formats at www.smashwords.com!

Featuring the fantastic Formatting and Design work of Sean E. Ali, including a stunning cover spotlighting Schildiner’s story, as well as interiors by Ali and Rowell Roque,  Pro Se Presents #7 continues the Pro Se Mission of Puttin’ The Monthly Back Into Pulp!

National Cartoonists Society Adds Webcomics Award

ncs-logo-300x265-9483854Nation Cartoonists Society president Tom Richmond announced this week that the venerable organization was adding a web-comics division for this year.

According to Richmond’s blog post, he and Awards membership chairman Sean Parkes had been working on this for some time. They received feedback from several industry experts including Dave Kellett (Sheldon, Drive), Andrew Farago (curator of the Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco), Michael Jantze (The Norm, Professor of Sequential Art and Animation, Savannah College of Art and Design).

Richmond went on to explain that the category, Best Online Comic Strip, will be narrowly focused and based on the following criteria:

  1. Comic-strip format only (no single panels, long-form narrative. etc.)
  2. Must be web only publication (any syndication in print would make it eligible for the Best Syndicated Comic Strip Division)
  3. Must be at least a weekly
  4. Must have shown consistent publication based on determined time-schedule (i.e. it being a daily, twice-a-week, weekly, etc.) over the course of the 2011 calendar year
  5. Creator must earn the greater part of their living directly from the strip/property

Submitted work itself must be:

  1. No more than 12 samples, submitted as physical prints along with submission form and bio or as PDF with 2-4 strips per page and including bio/submission form
  2. Work must have been published (posted) during period from Dec. 1, 2010 to Dec 31, 2011 (archive.org links must be provided for each strip for verification).

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NOMINATIONS NOW OPEN FOR PULP ARK 2012 AWARDS!

NOMINATIONS NOW OPEN FOR PULP ARK 2012 AWARDS!

Nominations for the PULP ARK Awards are now open and will close January 15th, 2012. The awards are given in conjunction with Pulp Ark, the convention/creators’ conference and the official New Pulp Convention to be held in Batesville, AR, April 20-22, 2012!  The Awards are given for excellence in the field of Pulp, including books, stories, comic books, magazines, and characters as well as creators. 
To determine if a work or creator qualifies for these awards the definition for works that qualify is as follows-New Pulp is fast-paced, plot-oriented storytelling of a linear nature with clearly defined, larger than life protagonists and antagonists, creative descriptions, clever use of turns of phrase and other aspects of writing that add to the intensity and pacing of the story.
Tommy Hancock, Coordinator of Pulp Ark explains additions to the Awards this year.  “We have,” Hancock stated, “added two awards, both by popular requests and thanks to our donor who supports and provides the awards.  Best Book has now been broken into two separate awards-Best Novel and Best Collection/Anthology.  Also, there is now a category for Best New Character.  This can include any New Pulp character created in 2011.”
Hancock also states, “We will also give a Lifetime Achievement Award again this year as well.  A Ten Person committee selected from well-known Creators in New Pulp currently will decide the recipient of this award.  This award is given to someone who has contributed to Pulp, not simply New Pulp, but to the continuation of the interest and promotion of Pulp in all its forms.” Last year’s winners of the first Pulp Ark Lifetime Achievement Award were Tom and Ginger Johnson.
The only works eligible for the Pulp Ark 2012 Awards are those produced between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2011. Anyone can make a nomination and anyone that makes a nomination will receive a ballot. The only people voting in these eleven awards will be those who made a minimum of one nomination. Also, each individual is allowed only ONE NOMINATION PER CATEGORY. A person may nominate someone in all nine categories, but may only nominate once in each category. All nominations are confidential and sources of nominations will not be revealed. All nominations should be mailed to Tommy Hancock at proseproductions@earthlink.net.The categories open for nomination are (in no particular order and this can be cut and pasted for your nominations ballot):
1. Best Novel (This includes E-books as well as print books)
2. Best Collection/Anthology (This includes single author story collections and multi author anthologies.  This includes E-publications as well as print books)
3. Best short story (this includes stories that appear in short story collections, anthologies, magazines, and e magazines. If from an e-mag, the story must appear on a site identified as an e-magazine, not simply be posted on a site or blog. It includes e-publications as well as traditionally printed works.
4. Best Cover Art (This is restricted to prose book publications, including e-books)
5. Best Interior Art (This is restricted to prose book publications, including e-books)
6. Best Pulp Related Comic (This refers to a series, complete run, one shot, etc. This award is for art, writing, and all other work associated with the nominated comics and the winner. This includes e-publications as well. )
7. Best Pulp Magazine (This award is for art, writing, and all other work associated with the nominated comics and the winner. This includes e-publications as well, but the e-publication must be identified as an e-magazine on the site supporting it. )
8. Best Pulp Revival (The Revival nominated must be published within the calendar year of 2010. This includes epublications as well.)
9.  Best New Character (This must be a character that debuts in a New Pulp work published in 2011.  This included e-publications as well)
10. Best Author (This reward refers to the author and any published author is eligible, including novels, short stories, etc. This includes e-publications as well).
11. Best New Writer (To be nominated, a writer must have been published for the first time in the pulp field in the calendar year of 2011. This includes e-publications as well).

2011 World Fantasy Award Winners

They were announced this past weekend at the World Fantasy Convention (where else?), held this year in beautiful, sunny San Diego.

Since I’ve been a judge for this award (a few years back now; the scars have completely healed), I’ve got a higher regard for the winners, and now I really need to track down a copy of Who Fears Death.

Congratulations to all of the winners. And, to the judges: you can relax now, and read something you want to, for a change.

Novel: Who Fears Death? by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
Novella: “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All-New Tales)
Short Story: “Fossil-Figures” by Joyce Carol Oates (Stories: All-New Tales)
Anthology: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Gimenez Smith (Penguin)
Collection: What I Didn’t See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)
Artist: Kinuko Y. Craft
Special Award, Professional: Marc Gascoigne for Angry Robot
Special Award, Non-Professional: Alisa Krasnostein for Twelfth Planet Press
Life Achievement:Peter S. Beagle and Angélica Gorodischer