SF Tidbits for 1/6/09
By John DeNardo |
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at
12:08 am
- Over at Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine, Joe R. Lansdale reads from “Dirt Devils” from his upcoming collection Sanctified and Chicken-Fried: The Portable Lansdale.
- Wyrdsmiths interviews Joshua Palmatier (The Vacant Throne).
- David Brin is (hopefully) featured on the History Channel’s two-hour special First Apocalypse (a.k.a. What Really Killed the Dinosaurs) set to air on Wednesday, January 7, 2009.
- Kristine Kathryn Rusch tells us that Fantasy & Science Fiction Editor Gordon Van Gelder is celebrating F&SF‘s 60th anniversary by reprinting classic stories from the magazine’s first 59 years.
- Boing Boing points us to Bruce Sterling’s state of the world 2009: “Last year was the first year when I’ve felt genuinely sorry for responsible, well-to-do people. Suddenly they’ve got the precariousness of creatives, of the underclass, without that gleeful experience of decades spent living-it-up.”
- Locus Online has posted the Table of Contents for the January issue of Locus Magazine.
- Carl Vincent from Stainless Steel Droppings reminds me that Locus maintains an excellent gallery of 2008 cover art.
- You can now watch the complete 1967 Prisoner series online at AMCtv.com.
- Free Fiction [courtesy of QuasarDragon]
- @The Author’s Website: “Secret Histories: Peter R. Bonaventure, 1885” by Chris Roberson.
- @Fantasy Magazine: “Leningrad” by D. Elizabeth Wasden.
- @Feedbooks: “The Right People” by Adam Rukunas.
- @Strange Horizons: “Sisters of the Blessed Diving Order of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew” by A.C. Wise.
- Audio Fiction:
- @Pseudopod: “Bone Sigh” by Tim Pratt, read by Alasdair Stuart.
- Spider on the Web has “In Fading Suns And Dying Moons” by John Varley, and of Chapter 1 of Bad News by Donald E. Westlake, both read by Spider Robinson.
- Zombie Astronaut has audio versions of Gilgamesh, Jaws, Blaze, and Man In Black.
- Signs of the Apocalypse:
- John Scalzi declines Hugo nomination for Best Fan Writer. John Scalzi tells people to nominate someone else for Best Fan Writer.
- This Cory Doctorow plushie.
- Lists:
- @Dvice: The 8 most absurd devices from sci-fi movies. OK, I’ll give them the AT-AT, but the hoverboard in Back to the Future II was cool.
- @Geeks of Doom: 13 WTF Moments From The Day The Earth Stood Still remake. Oddly, the casting of Keanu fails to make the list.
- @Neatorama: 10 Sci-Fi Books That Even Non-Geeks Would Love (Nicked from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.)
- @Mental Floss: H.G. Wells and Ayn Rand make the list of 10 Bedroom Quirks of 10 Great Authors. (Be sure to read the part about the H.G. Wells Hat story. What a hoot!)
Related posts:
- SF Tidbits for 2/15/06
- SF Tidbits for 3/2/07
- SF Tidbits for 12/24/06
- SF Tidbits for 3/1/08
- SF Tidbits for 2/3/08
Filed under: Tidbits
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
I’m so glad you found the cover art link for me…and of course for everyone else who will hopefully take advantage of it here. Thanks. I’ve already spent some time over there and will again over the next few days, looking for books that somehow escaped my notice.
Glad to hear John Scalzi is asking not to be nominated in the fan category. Admittedly that is a hard category to nail down by definition but it seems weird to me when professional, paid, and especially successful writers win this award. Not that they are not fans and not that they don’t deserve it, they do. It just seems odd to me and tends to give more credibility to the idea that the Hugos are a popularity contest rather than a well-reasoned out system of handing out awards. Just my opinion.
“John Scalzi declines Hugo nomination for Best Fan Writer.”
I can’t decline what’s not been offered, actually, and a nomination hasn’t been offered to me this year (or anyone else, at this point). So, you know. The sentence above makes me sound like pretentious dick. More accurate: “John Scalzi tells people not to nominate him for Best Fan Writer,” or “John Scalzi tells people to nominate someone else for Best Fan Writer.”
Carl V:
“it seems weird to me when professional, paid, and especially successful writers win this award.”
You mean, like Dave Langford, who writes quite successfully and professionally (Hugo Award for Best Short Story, a recent book on Harry Potter that sold more than most science fiction novels)? In which case the award will have seem to have been weird to you for two decades.
A number of fan writer winners and nominees have written professionally and successfully. They also and independently write fannish stuff. Neither fact is particularly weird, although in my opinion an arbitrary division between fan and pro is weird, particularly in science fiction.
I have to admit that I’ve only really paid serious attention to the Hugos for the past few years, but in that time I have went back to read over past winners. When the same person wins a ‘fan’ writer award (or anyone in any award category) year after year after year, regardless of how truly deserving they may be, I think it does cast the system of judging in a negative light (I mean, doesn’t it become something akin to a ‘joke’ when every year an award is won by the very same person, year in and year out?).
Perhaps ‘weird’ wasn’t the right word but I think I pointed out pretty clearly that I understand that professional writers are also fans. Certainly someone who is paid to do something is still allowed to be a ‘fan’ like the rest of us. What I think bothers me about the award being a category at all is that it essentially is just another professional writer category and the word ‘fan’ doesn’t paint it in that light.
Ultimately I don’t have any deep seeded agenda against the Hugo awards or any other awards. I certainly don’t have any ‘fans’ in mind that I think should be nominated for the awards, let alone win. Fiction awards will always be a source of delightful argument among the fans. I am thrilled for my favorite authors when they win awards and am disappointed for them when they do not.
“When the same person wins a ‘fan’ writer award (or anyone in any award category) year after year after year, regardless of how truly deserving they may be, I think it does cast the system of judging in a negative light”
Personally I think the system is fine; the Hugos are pretty fair in the way they’re set up and judged, and since I’ve lost more of them than I’ve won, I feel I’m qualified to say that with a measure of equanimity. The issue is whether the people nominating and voting look beyond their own ruts.
I do agree having the same winners year in and year out in any category is a problem, which is why I am actively encouraging people not to nominate me and instead look at people for the category who are new (yet qualified) for it, or to look at people who have deserved the award but have not won it. There are lots of excellent folks writing excellent stuff about science fiction and its community, and the award could easily go to ten different people in ten different years. And I hope it will.
Whoops! Didn’t mean to offend. Wording corrected.
“The issue is whether the people nominating and voting look beyond their own ruts.”
That makes sense. The nominations, probably even more than who wins, is where I could see that the potential problems for any awards can come into play. I certainly do not think variety for the sake of variety makes an award any more legitimate, though perhaps that is what I implied.
Speaking entirely from a fan perspective, we all want to see our favorite books and favorite authors there on the nominations list and on the winners stand. It is that bias that I myself have to set aside when the book/author that I wanted to win does not, or is not even nominated. I cannot judge the legitimacy of an award simply based on whether or not I agree with who won.
I’ll be interested to see if your request for not being nominated in the fan writer category is honored. I honestly do not know how those things work and am curious if the author’s request is known or considered when the nomination process takes place.
The hoverboard in Back to the Future II might be insane, but the design of McFly’s Nike sneakers was remarkably prescient.