Amazing Stories, the World’s First Science Fiction Magazine, is preparing for its return and is now seeking experienced bloggers with interests in science fiction, fantasy and horror, their sub-genres and their impact on or relationship to film, television, gaming, anime, comics, audio works, visual arts, fandom, publishing and science.
Since completing two well-received Volume Zero Relaunch Prelaunch issues (required for Trademark registration & to honor our friends) the Experimenter Publishing Company has been notified by the USPTO that it will be granted its marks; during that same time work was begun on the first stage of the Amazing Stories website, Frank Wu has completed the artwork for Amazing Stories’ first new cover in over seven years and numerous other great things have been happening.
In anticipation of the forthcoming roll out of the new website, Amazing Stories is now seeking the assistance and participation of fans and bloggers from across the genre spectrum.
If you think you might like to write for Amazing Stories, now is your chance. Please email (Steve.Davidson33@comcast.net Amazing Stories and request an information packet.
Although closeted in the interim report of the 1954 comic book hearings, race was not an issue that America really wanted to deal with and perhaps that above all is why race had been given little more than a nod in the hearing.
Race was however one of the major reasons that 2.5 million black Americans registered for the draft between 1941-45. Hoping that by helping their country win the war the United States would at last make the “Four Freedoms” a real part of their lives and not something they had to aspire too. Freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear were offered to every American by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in one of the greatest speeches in the history of the United States of America.
Black people were well aware that those freedoms were not being offered to us, not without some serious mind changing by many in the country. Enlisting and fighting in World War II was going to change those minds that at least what a great many black people believed or wanted to believe. During WW II Japanese propaganda ridiculed America’s so called great society by pointing out the hypocrisy that existed therein. They pointed to the exclusion of black players from baseball, the national past time, as proof of that hypocrisy.
And they were right.
The great society that was America where “all man are created equal” and where “land of the free, home of the brave” originated was anything but to black people in the United States. Other American ideals such as opportunity, rights, liberty, democracy and equality were a rallying cry from America to the world. Baseball has been the national pastime almost since the first ball was thrown out at the first game. Nothing says America like Baseball.
Japan’s propaganda aside, WW II saw the best of America. The war produced many heroes and many more books and films based on those heroes which trilled the American public.
During World War II there were plenty of black heroes, but even today those heroes are slow to be recognized. As late as 1993 there were no black Medal of Honor recipients. That was rectified in 1997 when Bill Clinton awarded the medal to seven African American World War II veterans. This only after an Army commissioned study that showed clear racial discrimination in the awarding of medals.
Perhaps with an acknowledged black hero from the war the civil rights struggle would have been given the push that could have garnered patriotic pride in the county. That push may have given way to needed awareness that blacks were just as American as the next guy. Unfortunately, the war was not to be the event that would level the playing field for black people.
Perhaps the playing field needed to be an actual field.
Baseball had that black hero that would be recognized. Hell, he had no choice but to be recognized. He was the only black man playing in the major leagues.
That hero would be Jackie Robinson and 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of Jackie’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Jackie Robinson was the first black player to play professional baseball.
Wrong. If you believed Jackie Robinson was the first black player to play professional baseball, and after Robinson it was easy for blacks in the majors, then you are in for a bit of a surprise.
In 1867, just two years after the end of the Civil War, organized baseball made its first attempt to ban blacks. The National Association of Baseball Players refused to allow an all black team from Philadelphia to join the league.
In what was the brave new world of Post Civil War America it’s puzzling (at least it is in retrospect) that the great state of Pennsylvania where the railroad system, iron and steel industry, and its vast agricultural wealth contributed greatly in the North’s victory did not protest this snub.
Maybe, now that I think of it, it’s not so puzzling after all since there are currently some funny voter restrictions going on in the once great state of Pennsylvania. But (Peter, I love you dude) I digress…
Bud Flower is the first known professional black baseball player. He played on an integrated team in 1878. During the next twenty-five years, more than 50 blacks managed to play on white teams and John ‘Bud’ Fowler was the first when he joined a white professional team in New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1878.
Being able to “play” was clearly a double edge sword.
Making a living as a black man playing a game must have surly been a dream come true in an era when having a career and not just a job was a dream realized by very few in the days following the Civil War. To many, having any income and not just trying to live off the land was a godsend.
However, post Civil War America after blacks were freed was anything but the Promised Land that blacks thought it would be.
In the south, lynching black people was not only a possibility but in some areas it was an assurance. Blacks had little to protect themselves with while playing a game that was ripe with racism and danger for most if not all of them. Some players made it a habit to carry a bible as a way to comfort them. It’s not known if Bud carried a bible, however, what is known is Bud is credited with inventing the first shin guards. White players were spiking him so often that he began to tape pieces of wood to his legs to protect himself.
Religion to many African American slaves was sometimes the only saving grace that could be embraced with little fear of outrage from their masters, when freed, African Americans continued to embrace their faith for the strength they would need facing Jim Crow America.
Upon his entrance to the game many blacks considered Jackie Robinson a savior of sorts. Jackie’s arrival on the world stage, lifting them out of the bondage of separate but clearly unequal treatment at least in baseball.
Jackie Robinson was the first black player in the modern age. The end of the golden age of radio and the advent of the age of television helped usher in this ebony knight in shining armor. Much like the early days of baseball, an African American making a living in the beginning of the comic book or related industries would have been a dream come true.
What, pry tell does this have to do with comics?
This…
Baseball, with its barriers to entries, talent, skill and perseverance to name but a few mirrored the comic book business regarding race. Baseball has moved on and so has comics but there still exists a great many who think those obstacles are still in full effect for blacks in comics.
America during the 50s and Jackie Robinson’s story is a perfect parallel for African Americans in the comic book industry even today.
Too many fans of the great American pastime there was nothing more offensive than a Negro ball player. When Jackie broke the color barrier in 1947 there were organized revolts around the country as well as within baseball. By 1954 Jackie had pretty much won over baseball fans and a great many Americans. In spite of the fact that victory was being waged and won on the baseball field, African Americans were still fighting on many other fronts.
Some of those battles were public, a great many more private and some in utter secretly.
Like Jackie Robinson and his journey but deep in the background so far off the radar of anyone black or white was the battle over blacks in comic books. Utter secretly may even be an understatement. It’s safe to say that in 1954 people concerned about civil rights be they black or white were not giving any thought to comic books as a tool for social change.
Except there were a few people in comics who were fighting the very fight that Branch Rickey had fought for Jackie Robinson. At the forefront of that battle in 1956 was the two-year old Comics Code Authority on one side and EC Comics on the other.
The Code tried its best to stop EC from publishing a particularly offensive (to them) comic book. The book they were trying to stop was an issue of Incredible Science Fiction the story was called “Judgment Day.”
What was objected to was not a gory scene of a space monster under orders from a criminal ripping to pieces an earth girl who, clad in scant bra and panties was an obvious sexual tease for young 50s era boys.
What was objected to was the main character, an astronaut, was revealed on the last page in the last panel to be a black man.
Martinez has been writing humorous SF novels for close to a decade now, all of which have looked like fun to me, but Emperor Mollusk versus the Sinister Brain is the first one I managed to actually read. It’s the SFnal story of a world-conquering squid from Neptune (a super-genius squid from Neptune) in a very comic-booky universe, where every planet in the solar system has an indigenous race with their own high technology.
Emperor Mollusk narrates his own story, starting well after he’s conquered Earth (for its own benefit; he’s a very benevolent tyrant) and mostly focusing on his battle with a new would-be conqueror, who may be even smarter than he is. It’s quick and zippy and colorful and amusing, filled with quips and explosions and last-minute escapes and triple reverses and more high-tech gadgets than all of the Bond movies put together.
And if I even wanted to do a serious critical take on it — and who would want to do such a thing to a book like this? — I read it too long ago to remember any of the pertinent details. Emperor Mollusk is fun, and smart about its generic materials, and thoroughly amusing. I’d be very happy to read more by Martinez if this is the way he usually works.
The annual running of the bad prose has come again, with the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest announced Monday. (Yes, that page is apparently official, even though it looks like something that crawled out of 1996, and not before dying, either.)
In honor of the “dark and stormy night” feller, the judges of the Bulwer-Lytton contest every year choose the most lousy opening sentence they can from among a myriad entrants. This year’s winner was:
As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.
And it was extruded by one Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England.
Since there are always more bad sentences, there are also category winners. Those of genre interest are:
Fantasy: “The brazen walls of the ancient city of Khoresand, situated where the mighty desert of Sind meets the endless Hyrkanean steppe, are guarded by day by the four valiant knights Sir Malin the Mighty, Sir Welkin the Wake, Sir Darien the Doughty, and Sir Yrien the Yare, all clad in armor of beaten gold, and at night the walls are guarded by Sir Arden the Ardent, Sir Fier the Fearless, Sir Cyril the Courageous, and Sir Damien the Dauntless, all clad in armor of burnished argent, but nothing much ever happens.” from David Lippmann of Austin, TX
Science Fiction: “As I gardened, gazing towards the autumnal sky, I longed to run my finger through the trail of mucus left by a single speckled slug – innocuously thrusting past my rhododendrons – and in feeling that warm slime, be swept back to planet Alderon, back into the tentacles of the alien who loved me.” from Mary E. Patrick of Lake City, SC
I think I have too many RSS feeds in my reader; I keep getting behind and then leaving things unread to deal with “later” — but then there’s too much new stuff I haven’t even looked at, which pushes “later” much further than I’d like.
That’s all prologue to the fact that these awards came out some time ago, and, if I’m going to blog about them at all, I should do it more quickly. Nevertheless, here’s what’s happened recently in award-land:
Locus Awards for 2012 Locus magazine, the newspaper of the skiffy field, has polled its frighteningly well-read readers yet again, and these are their choices for the best of the year past:
Science Fiction Novel: [[[Embassytown]]], China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
Fantasy Novel: [[[A Dance with Dragons]]], George R.R. Martin (Bantam; Harper Voyager UK)
First Novel: [[[The Night Circus]]], Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday)
Young Adult Book: [[[The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making]]], Catherynne M. Valente (Feiwel and Friends)
Novella: Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente (WSFA; Clarkesworld)
Novelette: “White Lines on a Green Field”, Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean Fall ’11)
Short Story: “The Case of Death and Honey”, Neil Gaiman (A Study in Sherlock)
It is simply impossible to declare a novel “not funny.” Humor is so personal that all any person can really do is declare whether he laughed or not.
And so I’ll say this: John Scalzi‘s new novel, Redshirts, has four quotes on the back cover (from luminaries Melinda Snodgrass, Joe Hill, Lev Grossman, and Patrick Rothfuss), all of which make a point to note how funny this book is. On the other hand, I didn’t laugh or smirk before page 120 out of 230 pages of the novel proper [1], and, even after that point, there were only a couple of wan smiles and some light chuckles. This reader must then humbly submit that Redshirts did not strike him as funny as it did the blurbers, and that will inevitably color the rest of this review. Please set your expectations accordingly.
I’ve read all of Scalzi’s novels to date, and grumbled about all of them, which proves something, I suppose. (Probably about me, and probably nothing good, either.) I’ve come to realize that I’m engaging in the common but fruitless effort of wishing that Scalzi was a different writer — or that he were interested in writing different kinds of books — than is actually the case. He clearly has it in him to write “serious” SF of weight and rigor — the mostly-successful novella The God Engines (see my review) shows that, as does his best novel, The Ghost Brigades (which I covered in a more cursory manner) — but it’s also becoming clear that he doesn’t want to be a “serious SF writer,” that he’s more in the vein of Keith Laumer, James H. Schmitz or H. Beam Piper, writing zippy novels set in mildly generic universes with wisecracking heroes who always win out in the end. (I didn’t review his first novel, Agent to the Stars, but I did also cover Old Man’s War, The Last Colony — and then a follow-up on the Old Man’s War-iverse in general — The Android’s Dream, Zoe’s Tale, and then last year’s Fuzzy Nation, so the really devoted reader can trace my history of looking for things in Scalzi novels that I should not expect to find there.) Thus, Redshirts — a novel set in a deliberately generic medium-future setting, with plenty of elbows to the reader’s ribs and references to SF media properties that we are all already familiar with [2], that almost but not quite turns into a giant fuzzy-dog story along the way — is exactly the novel we should have expected from Scalzi, and the reaction to that novel (it’s already hit the New York Times bestseller list) bears that out.
Which is all a long way around saying that Scalzi’s work is deeply resistant to criticism (if not entirely invulnerable to it) and that I, personally, am not well-placed as a critic to do justice to Redshirts in the manner it deserves. (Which would either be an excoriating attack on its flabby second-handedness — though that would also be entirely missing the point; it’s second-handed on purpose — or a loving appreciation written either entirely in Klingon or in quotes from famous TV sci-fi shows, a la Jonathan Lethem’s “The Anxiety of Influence.”)
Redshirts is a slobbery sheepdog of a novel, eager to show off its good nature — it’s a quick, easy read, full of snappy dialogue delivered by characters without too many attributes to confuse the reader and delivered, for the most part, in little-described interior spaces, so as to keep the narrative from being cluttered up by action or description. It’s set in a very Star Trek-y future — very original series Trek, to be precise, for maximum audience identification with the premise and the least amount of friction for Scalzi’s few twists in the tale.
The year is 2456, and the Federation Universal Union has just assigned young Ensign Andrew Dahl to the flagship, EnterpriseIntrepid, where he soon learns that junior and low-ranked crew members — whom we know as “Redshirts,” though Dahl doesn’t — die at an unusual rate, and because of exceedingly unlikely events, during “Away Missions.” Dahl, and his fellow not-terribly-well-characterized Ensigns [3], do not want to die, and so they try to figure out why this is, eventually turning to the creepy loner Jenkins (who lives, alone and hidden, in the Jeffries tubes cargo tunnels deep within Intrepid), who has a theory So Crazy that it just might be true.
That theory is amusing, and would be even more amusing at about 2 AM in some convention party, anytime in the past forty years. But it doesn’t lead — in my opinion, of course — to anything really funny afterward, just another succession of scenes of not-well-characterized people shooting mildly-witty dialogue at each other in some more undescribed rooms for another hundred pages until the novel ends. The first half of Redshirts isn’t frightening or ominous enough — and God Engines is proof that Scalzi can do really ominous danger-on-a-starship, when he wants to — and the second half isn’t as big or funny as it should be, either. (It resembles, more than anything else, a rewrite of one particular Star Trek story.)
Redshirts is content to be amusing and pleasant, rather than digging any deeper. It is not a failure in any possible sense of the term, but it may leave some readers wanting more, particularly if they’re long-time SF readers who have seen Redshirt‘s Phildickian premises used more evocatively and subtly by other writers. If you just wondered what a Trek redshirt might have thought about his predicament, and aren’t expecting much, you will enjoy Redshirts. If you hoped for a more complicated, interesting answer to the predicament of high-casualty crewmen, I’d suggest instead looking for the excellent (and mostly ignored) novel Expendable by James Alan Gardner.
[1] There are also three “codas” — related short stories — which add another 90ish pages to the book. They’re in different modes, though, and none of them are funny — none of them seem to aim at being funny, either. They’re the best writing Scalzi does in this book, and that plus the example of God Engines implies that Scalzi is deliberately tuning his novelistic output to a particular market.
[2] My reaction to the use of these as “jokes” is approximated by this T-shirt.
[3] Scalzi eventually has a clever in-universe explanation for this; Redshirts is quite cleverly designed to be precisely the way it is, though one must wonder if spending that much energy emulating mediocrity is really worthwhile.
New Pulp Author, Win Scott Eckert shared the following with All Pulp. Win spoke about this project on Earth Station One Episode 114, which you can listen to here.
PRESS RELEASE:
The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 3 – Now Available for Preorder! Includes my novelette “The Wild Huntsman,” the secret origin of the Wold Newton Family! The tale is a direct sequel to “Is He in Hell?” and takes place in Wold Newton on the momentous day the Wold Newton meteor fell, Dec. 13, 1795, spawning the sprawling family of pulp heroes, the Wold Newton Family!
The “Summer of Philip José Farmer” continues — preorder now at $5 off the cover price!
The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 3 Portraits of a Trickster
Preorder volume 3 now! Not only will you save $5 off the cover price, but if you are one of the first 100 people to preorder, you will get a custom laminated bookmark, just like the ones sent out with the first 100 copies of The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 2. It is hard to describe the amount of awesome in this collection: the secrets revealed, the heartfelt tributes, the mysteries you can help solve, the tricks that may or may be played on you, the secrets revealed, the never before seen material by Farmer, the stories continued (with even more secrets revealed)… The most exciting volume of The Worlds of Philip José Farmer yet!
Publication will be in late summer, hopefully in time for FarmerCon VII, August 9 – 12. Here is the working table of contents (subject to change).
Foreword by Frederik Pohl
Peoria-Colored Worlds Missing the Wit and Creativity by Michael Bailey Down in Phil Farmer’s Basement by Steven Connelly Over All, After All by Philip José Farmer
Of Friendships and Influences The Holy Spirit of Science Fiction by Bruce Sterling The Robert Traurig Letters by Philip José Farmer A Box of Influence by Chris Garcia Wild Weird Clime by Philip José Farmer To Be, or Not to Be by Tom Wode Bellman
Worlds in Disguise Trout Masque Rectifier by Jonathan Swift Somers III Kilgore, Kurt, and Me by David M. Harris The Many Dooms of Harold Hall by Charlotte Corday-Marat Desires Denied by Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor
Classic Worlds Osiris on Crutches by Philip José Farmer & Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor The Genuine Imposter by Rick Lai The Long Wet Dream of Rip van Winkle by Philip José Farmer Up, Out, and Over, Roger by Philip José Farmer
Expanded Worlds The Wild Huntsman by Win Scott Eckert Dakota’s Gate by Heidi Ruby Miller The Last of the Guaranys by Octavio Aragão & Carlos Orsi Trickster of the Apes by S.M. Stirling
The September 2012 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction (appearing via online sources and in bookstores in mid-July) will feature a new novella about the variously named character from William Preston’s “Helping Them Take the Old Man Down” (Asimov’s, March 2010) and “Clockworks” (Asimov’s, April/May 2011), who was conceived in part as an homage to Doc Savage.
The new story, which takes place in 1925, sends readers back to the first adventure of the man who will, in time, become “the Old Man.” Be sure to look for “Unearthed” in the September Asimov’s. For those who want to read the stories in the sequence they’re intended to be read, you can now purchase “Helping Them Take the Old Man Down” and the prequel “Clockworks” in ebook format at Amazon. Both novelettes appear bundled together for $2.99 at the following links: http://www.amazon.com/Helping-Them-Take-Clockworks-ebook/dp/B008BC4EME/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8
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:
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 exactlywho 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.
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)
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.
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 AurealisAwards
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.
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.
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.
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.
is the first one I managed to actually read. It’s the SFnal story of a world-conquering squid from Neptune (a super-genius squid from Neptune) in a very comic-booky universe, where every planet in the solar system has an indigenous race with their own high technology.
It is simply impossible to declare a novel “not funny.” Humor is so personal that all any person can really do is declare whether he laughed or not.
, has four quotes on the back cover (from luminaries Melinda Snodgrass, Joe Hill, Lev Grossman, and Patrick Rothfuss), all of which make a point to note how funny this book is. On the other hand, I didn’t laugh or smirk before page 120 out of 230 pages of the novel proper [1], and, even after that point, there were only a couple of wan smiles and some light chuckles. This reader must then humbly submit that Redshirts did not strike him as funny as it did the blurbers, and that will inevitably color the rest of this review. Please set your expectations accordingly.
by James Alan Gardner.
, by Penni Russon
, by Pamela Freeman
(Crown Random House)
(Tor Books)
(Night Shade Books)
(Ballantine Books / Del Rey)
(Gollancz)
(Tor Books)
(Night Shade Books)
(PS Publishing)
(Simon & Schuster)
(Tor Books)
(Night Shade Books)
.
