What about the short stories of 2011 so far? Three months in, and what highlights have stuck with you? What short stories have you read recently, from this year, which you would seriously consider nominating for next year’s science fiction awards?
P.S. Thank you for all your award nomination suggestions so far!
What has caught your attention amongst potential non-fiction nominations for next year’s science fiction awards? Any journal articles? Magazines? Podcasts or radio shows? Blog posts? Any notable books of criticism or new collections of essay from the first quarter of 2011?
With all the awards discussion, I have spent much of the past three months looking back to last year’s publications. But here we are, already a quarter of the way through 2011. In theory, this should mean that a quarter of the year’s novels which are eligible for next year’s award cycles have already been published.
So tell me – of the science fictional novels already published in 2011, which one(s) might you consider nominating for next year’s awards?
And so it’s 2003.
2003 yielded a bumper crop of admirable science fiction novels written by women, with three books. 2004 was the only other year with more than one on the final list of 11.
I wonder to what degree this might be a reflection on human memory. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not arguing with the merit of the works on the list so much as musing on being human. Five of the books were published in 2003 or 2004. Is six or seven years the necessary length to digest, judge, and yet still remember reading a given book?
Back in January, I scrounged around with the months of 2003. Which book had been published first? I ignored place of location and went for global first publication. Plenty of people were importing buzzy books in both directions. My notes tell me that Natural History came out in April of 2003.
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I’d like to invite you to join us in reading Justina Robson’s Natural History this month, part of a year-long chronological reading of the novels nominated as the best science fiction novels written by women in the last ten years.
The book was well-received, collecting a group of notable award nominations, if no wins. It was shortlisted for the BSFA for the best book published in 2003; nominated for the Campbell award in 2004; and for the Philip K Dick Award in 2005. It was Robson’s third novel.
Apropos of Chris Priest’s Clarke Award-winning novel that year being dedicated to Paul Kincaid, the award’s administrator, David Langford commented, “Justina Robson, already twice nominated for the Clarke Award, thoughtfully provides future gossip-bait for The Spectator in her third novel Natural History – featuring a vast, lumbering, obsolete and not very bright terraforming engine, called Kincaid.”
Coincidentally, this month is a good one for focusing on a work by Justin Robson. She’s going to be one of the Guests of Honour at Swancon, in Australia, over Easter weekend.
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On 23 January 2003, NASA lost contact (as expected) with Pioneer 10, the first space probe to go beyond the asteroid belt. In February, the shuttle Columbia burned up during atmospheric re-entry. The first Chinese manned space mission was completed, and Mars was as close to Earth as it will be for another 50,000 years. Wars in Darfur and Iraq were just beginning. The Human Genome Project completed sequencing human DNA, and Dolly-the-Cloned-Sheep passed away. There was the SARS scare, Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, the Concorde made its last commercial flight, and in the UK, mobile phones had become common enough that their handheld use while driving was specifically outlawed.
I will be leading the discussion later this month. I hope you will join me in reading and discussing it.
Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark was the second of the poll-topping best science fiction novels written by women in the last ten years that we’ll be discussing here at Torque Control over the course of this year. It was the only one of them published in 2002. Notably, where Bold as Love was written before 9/11, as Niall observed, Speed of Dark was finished after it, and reflects that in a scene in an airport, where security is not quite as we know it. Major airports now have separate access to the gates for arriving and departing passengers (much as international transfers have long had):
This is not the way it used to be. I don’t remember that, of course – I was born at the turn of the century – but my parents told me about being able to just walk right up to the gates to meet people arriving. Then after the 2001 disasters, only departing passengers could go to the gates. (41)
But that’s not what the book’s about, merely an observation of a way in which it is part of its time. Speed of Dark is set in our near future, when space exploration and brain manipulation are both somewhat more advanced than they are in our world. It’s about Lou and his distinctive, wonderful, evocative voice which positions the reader so clearly in his head. It’s the clarity and accomplishment of that voice which meant the ending disappointing me: Moon doesn’t give her readers a chance to get to know the revised version of Lou, and so I didn’t feel the ending was earned. I liked and admired the journey; I stumbled on the destination.
Niall hosted this month’s discussion, exploring Lou’s voice, the arguably brittle construction of the book’s antagonists, and the ways in which Moon resolves the book’s major narratives. That last post in particular resulted in a number of thought-provoking comments as to why the ending does or does not work for some people.
My thanks to Niall for hosting the discussion, and to all the commenters who joined in reading (or re-reading) the book.
Niall’s Discussion: Part I, Part II, and Part III
Discussion and reviews from December, when Speed of Dark
Recent Reviews
David Hebblethwaite’s Review
Alex Ward’s Review
Kilroy bounced off of it
Speed of Dark was a March Group Reads suggestion on GoodReads
This contest is now closed! The winning book will be announced on the evening of 27 April and a winning entry chosen at random from those who guessed correctly at some point after that.
In just over four weeks, we’ll find out which book has won the Arthur C Clarke award for the best work of science fiction published in the UK in 2010. The jury will meet for a second time, to whittle the six shortlisted novels down to a single winner.
The jury doesn’t yet know who will win. I don’t know who will win; but perhaps you do? Or at least have a hunch about it?
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The Clake Award has a second contest for you this year! A month ago, we asked you to guess which six books would be on the shortlist. Three of you correctly guessed four of the six books. This time around, you need to guess only one book.
There’s a real prize for this contest too. It consists of two books, both generously donated by NewCon Press.
The first is Fables from the Fountain, the forthcoming anthology edited by Ian Whates from NewCon press. Fables is a collection of all-original stories written as homage to Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart and published in honour of the Clarke Award’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The volume includes new stories by Stephen Baxter, Ian Watson, Paul Graham Raven, James Lovegrove, Neil Gaiman, Colin Bruce, Liz Williams, Charles Stross, Eric Brown, Steve Longworth, Henry Gee, Andy West, David Langford, Andrew J Wilson, Peter Crowther, Tom Hunter, Adam Roberts, and Ian Whates. If you can’t wait on the off-chance you’ll win it, you can order a pre-copy of Fables here, with a share of profits going directly to support the Clarke Award’s current fund raising efforts. (A good cause!)
The second part of the prize is Celebration, an anthology of all-original stories published in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the BSFA (which publishes Vector, of course), also edited by Ian Whates. It includes stories, original to this volume, by Ken MacLeod, Kim Lakin-Smith, Ian Watson, Tricia Sullivan, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, M. John Harrison, Molly Brown, Brian Stableford, Dave Hutchison, Liz Williams, Brian Aldiss, Martin Sketchley, Alastair Reynolds, Ian R. MacLeod, Christopher Priest, Adam Roberts, and Stephen Baxter.
To enter, comment on this post. Your comment must contain two things: the name of a single one of the six shortlisted books; and an explanation of why you think that book will win. No entry is valid without both parts.
Your explanation can be anything you like: your personal favourite, the one you think the judges will pick, a random guess, or a simple ‘because’. We want some kind of justification for the choice, whether minimal or essay-length.
You may not enter this contest if you are a current Clarke award judge, a family member of a current judge, or if you are on the board of Serendip or the BSFA. You may not enter the contest multiple times: only your first entry will be entered into the contest. You are welcome to enter from wherever you are: the prize can be shipped internationially.
The winner of the prize randomly drawn from among all the correct, valid entries. This contest will be judged by Tom Hunter, director of the Clarke Award, and his decision in all aspects of the contest is final.
Tom writes that
“The recent guess the shortlist competition with Torque Control was so much fun we thought we’d do it again. The secret aim with the last comp was to show that guessing the right shortlist combination is much harder than it looks, and with something like 25 million combinations of books possible, guessing 6 books from a selection of 54 you can see why.”
“Now the odds are shorter, but I don’t think that makes the choices involved any easier…”
The deadline for your guess and explanation, posted as a reply to this post, is Tuesday, 26 April 2011 at 23:59 BST.
I was so sorry to wake up to the news that Diana Wynne Jones died early this morning. It was not unexpected – she came off of treatments for cancer last year when they were no longer really helping her – but I am still sad that it’s actually happened.
Over her many books (more than 50), the one which has most influenced me in recent years was The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, thanks to its discussions of food. Her parodic skewering of lazy and derivative fantasy writing begins each chapter with a ridiculous ‘Gnomic Utterance’ (“no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes”). Here is the one for D, by the fictional sage Ka’a Orto’o, as most of them are:
Doras II was a somewhat absentminded king. It is said that, when Death came to summon him, Doras granted Death the usual formal audience and then dismissed him from his presence. Death was too embarrassed to return until many years later.
But Death did return.
With only about a month left until voting closes for the BSFA Awards, it’s time for the annual BSFA Award Discussion at the London Meeting. Our panelists this year year will be Tom Hunter, Clarke Award Director; Martin McGrath, BSFA Focus Editor; and Donna Scott, the BSFA Awards Administrator.
As a reminder, here are the shortlists. I hope many of you will be able to come and join in the discussion there!
Date: Wednesday 23rd March 2011
Venue: The Upstairs room at the Antelope Tavern. 22, Eaton Terrace, Belgravia, London, SW1W 8EZ. The nearest tube station is Sloane Square (District/Circle) A map of the location is here.
All are welcome! (No entry fee or tickets. Non-members welcome.) The Interview will commence at 7.00 pm, but the room is open from 6.00 (and fans in the downstairs bar from 5). There will be a raffle (£1 for five tickets), with a selection of sf novels as prizes.
Future London Meetings
Wednesday 20th April 2011 ** – DAVID WEBER: Interviewer TBC
Wednesday 25th May 2011 – SARAH PINBOROUGH: Interviewer TBC
Saturday 4th June 2011 – BSFA/SFF AGM
Thursday 30th June 2011 ** – GILLIAN POLACK: Interviewer TBC
Interest in the art category was down this year compared to the year before. Or perhaps there were just fewer works which happened to catch the eyes of BSFA members.
This year, a total of 24 BSFA members nominated a total of 44 works of art for the art category of the BSFA awards. That means that it was the second-least nominated-in category, although non-fiction trailed well behind it with both sets of numbers. Only 4% of the BSFA’s total members nominated in this category.
It’s important to note that this isn’t a consistent pattern. Last year, about as many entries were nominated for this category as for the art entry, although a larger number of nominators – 30 – nominated the same number of works, 44. Still, that makes it far more competitive than two years ago, when nominators agreed on only 22 works to nominate.
It strikes me every year how dominated this category is by cover art. There’s nothing wrong with that! But it is the common way by which imagery reaches the households of voting Eastercon and BSFA members, arriving on the cover of an anthology, a magazine, or a novel. Perhaps that’s even what tipped the balance to buying it, judging a book by a quite magnificent cover. There is plenty else out there though, from the artwork for board and card games to artists’ published collections to the work shown in the art shows at conventions such as Eastercon itself or Novacon.
In any event, this too is a category about which prospective BSFA award voters might like to be more mindful for potential nominees as they go through the coming year.
Sooner than next year’s ballot is this year’s vote however: as a reminder, here are the shortlists for the four BSFA awards. Ballots were sent out with the most recent BSFA mailing, and will be available at the forthcoming Eastercon, Illustrious, where the votes will be tallied and the awards presented.
Thank you for all your enthusiasm in trying to guess what the jury would choose for the Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist!
Out of the six most-voted for novels, only two of them were on the shortlist the jury actually chose which just goes to show, yet again, that it is a challenging award to second-guess. Of the actual list, The Dervish House received 40 guesses, Zoo City 30, Lightborn 14, Monsters of Men 4, Generosity 3, and only one person thought that perhaps Declare, originally published a decade earlier in the US, might make it onto the shortlist. I suspect that most people didn’t necessarily vote for what they would personally have nominated for the award (based on what they have read in the last year) but the books which, thanks to buzz and pre-existing awards and nominations, seemed most likely to be respected by other people. Not that there isn’t overlap between the two categories!
Of all the entries in last week’s contest, no one guessed the whole shortlist. No one even guessed five out of the six books. Three different people, however, submitted guesses which correctly identified four of the books which were on the actual shortlist: Niall, Lal, and Kev McVeigh. Good instincts, all of you, and congratulations on getting more right than everyone else who entered the contest!
With a three-way tie and only one set of prizes, our contest judge, Clarke Award Director Tom Hunter, put all three names into a hat and had an independent assistant blindly pull one of the slips of paper out of it.
And that is how we now have a winner of copies of all six of the short-listed books, plus a copy of the forthcoming anthology, Fables from the Fountain, edited by Ian Whates and being sold in honour of the Clarke Award’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The prizes were generously donated by the Clarke Award and NewCon Press.
And so – congratulations to Lal, our contest prize winner! Tom Hunter will be in touch with you soon if he has not already done so to arrange for prize delivery.
vector-bsfa.com 