Author: Shana

Vector 265

Saturday morning’s post brought with it Vector 265, at long last. Not just Vector: the mailing includes a booklet in memory of Rob Holstock, edited by Niall Harrison; the BSFA Awards booklet, with all of the shortlisted short stories; and a ballot for voting on the BSFA awards.

Vector 265 is the last one edited by Niall, and it’s a hefty one, a rich tribute to Stephen Baxter, plus book reviews, edited by Martin Lewis. For those of you not currently BSFA members, here is what you’re missing out on:

Table of Contents
“That Cosmological Feeling: An Interview with Stephen Baxter”
“Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee Cycle: No Coming Home”, Jonathan McCalmont
“The Settee and the Stars: Stephen Baxter and the Dilemma of Scale”, Gary K Wolfe
“An Atomic Theory of Baxter’s Fiction”, Adam Roberts
“Three Colours NASA: Reflections on Stephen Baxter’s ‘NASA’ trilogy”, Simon Bradshaw
“Putting the Past into the Future: The Time’s Tapestry sequence”, Tony Keen
“Foundation’s Favourite: Stone Spring”, Andy Sawyer
“Baxter’s People”, Niall Harrison
“Giant Killer Rodents in Space Armour, With Guns: the other side of Stephen Baxter”, Graham Sleight

“First Impressions”, Martin Lewis
Book reviews edited by Martin Lewis
Orgasmachine by Ian Watson (Newcon Press, 2010) – reviewed by
Justin Robson
Shine, edited by Jetse de Vries (Solaris, 2010) – reviewed by
Anthony Nanson
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz, 2010) –
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz, 2010) – reviewed
by Tony Keen
The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod (Orbit, 2010) – reviewed by
Michael Abbott
The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross (Orbit, 2010) –
reviewed by Martin Potts
Escape From Hell by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (Tor, 2009)
– reviewed by Dave M Roberts
The Turing Test by Chris Beckett and The Last Reef by
Gareth L Powell (Elastic Press, 2008) – reviewed by Dave M Roberts
The Holy Machine (Corvus, 2010) and Marcher (Cosmos
Books, 2008) by Chris Beckett – reviewed by Jim Steel
Inside/Outside – Chris Beckett interviewed by Paul Graham Raven
Major Carnage by Gord Zajac (ChiZine Publications, 2010) –
reviewed by Shaun Green
Nexus: Ascension by Robert Boyczuk (ChiZine Pubications, 2010)
– reviewed by Graham Andrews
The Nemesis List by RJ Frith – reviewed by Ben Jeapes
The Noise Within by Ian Whates (Solaris, 2010) – reviewed by
Stuart Carter
Brave Story and The Book Of Heroes by Miyuke Miyabe
(Haikasoru, 2007 and 2009) – reviewed by Cherith Baldry
WE by John Dickinson (David Fickling Books, 2010) – reviewed by
Donna Scott
I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore (Penguin, 2010) – reviewed by CB Harvey
Monsters Of Men by Patrick Ness (Walker Books, 2010) – reviewed
by Anne F Wilson
The Iron Hunt, Darkness Calls and A Wild Light by
Marjorie M Liu (Orbit, 2008-10) – reviewed by Amanda Rutter
The Poison Throne by Celine Kiernan (Orbit, 2009) – reviewed by
Alan Fraser
Shadow Prowler by Alexey Pehov (Simon & Schuster, 2010) –
reviewed by Sandra Unerman
The Office Of Shadow by Mathew Sturges (Pyr, 2010) – reviewed
by AP Canavan
Lord Of The Changing Winds by Rachel Neumeier (Orbit, 2010) –
reviewed by Lynne Bispham

BSFA Awards Shortlist 2011

Anyone who joined the BSFA recently may end up with the wrong impression as to how frequently mailings occur, inasmuch as we expect the next one to be sent out within the next month-or-so. It’s all still quarterly, however.

Vector welcomes letters of comment, or feedback on the forum.

The 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist

The shortlist for the Arthur C Clarke Award is, gratifyingly, never quite what anyone thinks it will be in advance. I doubt even any given juror could have correctly guessed what their consensus would determine when they met to collectively choose the shortlist for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the award.


Here is what they chose:

  • Zoo City – Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
  • The Dervish House – Ian McDonald (Gollancz)
  • Monsters of Men – Patrick Ness (Walker Books)
  • Generosity – Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)
  • Declare – Tim Powers (Corvus)
  • Lightborn – Tricia Sullivan (Orbit)

The Arthur C Clarke Award is a juried award for the best work of science fiction published in Britain in the previous year. It’s judged from the works submitted by publishers so it’s theoretically possible for the award to miss out on options they would have liked to consider had they only been submitted. The “published in Britain in the previous year” is why an award-winning novel published in 2000 made it onto the shortlist this year: Tim Powers’s Declare only had its first UK publication in 2010.

These are six books from six different publishers (out of the twenty-two which submitted books this year), by four men and two women, one culmination of a trilogy, and five standalones. As more than one has already commented, the list features four authors of American origin (although some of them have lived in the UK for years) and one South African, Lauren Beukes. Only one of them, Ian McDonald, has been British and lived in Britain for the majority of his life. This is a point worth mentioning because the Clarke Award is specifically a British award, albeit for what’s published in the country rather than where those authors come from. In more trivial statistics: one-word titles make up 50% of the shortlist, but that’s not too disproportionate – they made up 27% of the list of eligible submissions. It was also a good year to have the last name “Powers”.

The shortlist was chosen by this year’s judging panel: Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Martin Lewis for the BSFA, Phil Nanson and Liz Williams for the Science Fiction Foundation, and Paul Skevington for SF Crowsnest.com. Paul Billinger chaired the judges on behalf of the award. They will all be busy re-reading the shortlist in the coming weeks, in preparation for the jury’s final meeting to choose the winner.

I’m looking forward to reading this list too; from the reviews I’ve read and initial reactions to the shortlist, it looks like quite a good one. I’ve only read Lightborn so far, although conveniently, I started Zoo City yesterday and have The Dervish House handy since I’m reading the BSFA novel shortlist, and those three books (but no others) overlap with the Clarke shortlist.

In the weeks between now and the 27th of April, when the jurors, having reread the shortlist, will meet again to decide on the winner, and the award will be given at the SCI-FI London Film Festival, I look forward to reading all the discussion, speculation, and guesswork about just which of these books will take the prize and why it’s worthy of doing so.

See also comments on the shortlist from:

David Hebblethwaite at Follow the Thread
Cheryl Morgan at Cheryl’s Mewsings
Graham Sleight at Locus Roundtable
Nic Clarke at Eve’s Alexandria
Amanda Rutter at Floor to Ceiling Books
Niall Harrison at Strange Horizons

Clarke Award 2011 Eligible Submissions Data

If, instead of guessing the shortlist, entries in the contest which closed last night were voting on it, here’s what it would be. (But this is not the shortlist, so far as I know.)

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Orbit)
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (Corvus)
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz)
Kraken by China Miéville (Pan Macmillan)

Tomorrow, I’ll post the actual Clarke shortlist. It’ll be interesting to see how closely – or distantly – this year’s Clarke jury’s choices matches up with those of the contest entrants!

Martin, Vector‘s reviews editor, over at his own blog, has been number-crunching this week from the Clarke Award eligible submissions list. He’s one of the judges this year, so his data isn’t just drawn from titles-authors-publishers, but from surveys of the contents of the fifty-four books on the eligible submissions list, since he has read them all.

His statistics are at their most interesting, for me, when he’s dealing with the content of the books, in part because he’s on surest ground there, and in part because it’s data which is a payoff from having read all those books. (His statistics on the race and sexuality of the authors may be approximately right, but it’s data that no author should need to publicly share, and thus it’s very easy to assume wrongly for those numbers. Still, the idea of seeing how much representation there is in these kinds of diversity is an important one.) Specifically, he’s looked at how many of these books show killing, whether of the protagonist or of other characters, compared to how many of them show sex scenes. Descriptions of death far outweigh descriptions of sex. (This is why at least one blogger notes that she’s increasingly drawn to the romance hybrid genres: she generally prefers sex to death, given the choice.)

More broadly, Martin also looked at the setting of the books and the nature of the narrators. Thus, I can report that that only 54% of the novels passed the Bechdel test, 30% of the books are written in the first person, and that 33% of them were not set in the future.

His examination of how many of the books were parts of series and their length features the chart I keep coming back to: length of book by page count. I’m not sure why I’m finding this so interesting. Perhaps it’s the reassurance that the largest number of books are a physically manageable 250-300 pages long. Series do not dominate the list – standalones comprise 57% of the list, and genre imprints are more likely to submit series titles for consideration in the award than non-genre imprints are.

It’s not a full snapshot of the state of British science fiction publishing in 2010, but it’s a fairly broad one nevertheless and worth taking a look at.

March: Speed of Dark

I’d like to invite you to join us in reading Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark 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.

Published in 2002, Speed of Dark went on to win the Nebula Award the following year, and it was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke award. Elizabeth Moon was long-since well-established as a science fiction author, with several series under her belt. She’d been published for fourteen years at the time it came out.

I mail-ordered my copy a few weeks ago, and when it arrived, I found a UK mainline rail train ticket tucked into it, a long-forgotten book mark. It’s an open single from London Terminals to Stansted Airport for the 7th of March, 2003, bought the same day. I wonder if it was a domestic flight that ticket-holder was on with his or her full-priced single ticket. Wherever they were going, I can envision them sitting on that train, reading while en route to further-flung places. I love knowing that this book went somewhere, all those years ago.

***

In 2002, Astrid Lingren died. Gwyneth Jones won the Clarke Award for Bold as Love, her fifth time being nominated for the award. The Euro came into use, and the Mars Odyssey probe found signs of water on Mars. In the US, criminal proceedings against Enron began, the Department of Homeland Security was established, and WorldCom went bankrupt.

Appropriately enough, given the book’s topic, the UK designated 2002 as Autism Awareness Year.

Niall will, again, be leading the book discussion in the later part of March.  I hope you will join us in reading and discussing it.

Bold as Love: Recap

So that was 2001.

Bold as Love is a high-paced meander through several years of England’s potential future after the dissolution of the UK, as shaped by rock n’ roll. It’s not quite quest, and it’s not quite romance. It’s a thought experiment, it’s a tour of England, it’s about the messiness of change. It’s not a book which put me in the main characters’ heads: they might have known how the rest of the world was getting on, but they only shared in the ways it impinged directly on them. It’s not nearly as much Arthuriana as I feared, based on reading reviews. (It’s not that I dislike Arthuriana per se. It’s that I’m a medievalist, so it makes me picky.)

Gwyneth Jones’ Bold as Love was the first 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 2001.

Niall hosted the discussion February discussion, and, speaking of 2001, he noted that the book could not really have been written any later than it likely was. After 9/11 that year, “terrorism” could no longer be conceived of the way it is in this book. But that’s not much of a distraction in the scope of such rich, intense, focused world-building. Much of the intensity it has is in the music, the festivals, the performances. Music is a central focus because, in this book, “what’s significant is the potential of music to be a vehicle for belief, at a moment when belief in all other systems of the world has been shattered by catastrophic cynicism.” Ax Preston, the guitarist/leader of the book and cultural icon, curates concerts as a means to his end of making the best of a difficult political situation. I can’t quite bring myself to call him Counter-Cultural, as the movement within the book is called because, cynical as the book is, it knows full well that this is just a label, and that the Counter-Culture are mainstream cultural avatars, in effect.

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: Context, Part II: Characters, Part III: Music, Part IV: Utopia
Overview of Bold as Love and some of its reviews from December
Abigail Nussbaum on Bold as Love and other of Jones’ books.

Contest: Guess the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist

This contest is now closed and no more entries will be accepted. The results will be posted on Friday, March 4th.

It’s that time of year. The list of eligible submissions for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award is out! And this year, in honour of the award’s twenty-fifth anniversary, we’re pleased to be able to run a contest with real prizes (not just glory) in conjunction with the list’s release.

The goal is straightforward: guess the shortlist for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award.

The prize is quite a good one, thanks to the generousity of the Clarke Award and NewCon Press! If you win, you will receive copies of all six of the shortlisted works, plus a copy of Fables from the Fountain, the forthcoming, limited-edition 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.

To enter, comment on this post. Your comment must contain a list of six (no more, no fewer) novels from the full list of eligible submissions. Pingbacks won’t be accepted.

You may not enter this contest if you are a current Clarke award judge, a family member of a current judge, someone who has access to the currently-embargoed press release containing the shortlist, 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.

If no one guesses all six entries correctly, then the prize will go to whoever guessed the most correct winners. If there is a tie for the most correct winners guessed, then the winner will be picked from a hat from among the tied 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.

As Tom observes,

The idea behind releasing the full submissions lists is pretty simple. Every year we reveal our shortlist of the six best science fiction books of the previous year, as decided by our panel of independent judges, and every year we enjoy, well, passionate conversation around those choices.

For me this is exactly how things should be, but at the same time I’m keen for people to understand just how complex the judging process is, and how many different variants there can be when you have 54 great books in play and you have to narrow those down to just six of the best as it were.

Personally, I’ve never managed to correctly guess all six in advance, and I’m the Award Director, so just to warn you this game is harder than it looks, and good luck everyone.

The deadline for your six guesses, posted as a reply to this post, is this Wednesday, 2 March at 23:59 GMT.

2011 Arthur C Clarke Award Submissions

I am the bearer of exciting news today.

Firstly, I bring you tidings of fifty-four novels, the eligible submissions for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Secondly, as has been the case for the last two years, the submissions list comes with a contest. For the last few years, here at Torque Control, the contest has been informal, a lively round of guessing the longlist from their miniaturised covers.

This year, the competition is rather more, well, competitive: guess the shortlist, before it is released this coming Friday. The lucky winner will receive copies of *all* the shortlisted novels, plus NewCon press’s forthcoming short story collection, Fables from the Fountain, published in honor of the 25th anniverary of the Clarke Awards! For full details – and to enter the contest – see the separate contest details post.

The Clarke award doesn’t have a longlist as such; what follows is a list of the 54 eligible novels, submitted by 22 different publishers and imprints, one of the highest submissions rates the Clarke award has had. From these the jurors pick the shortlist and, once they have all read them again, they will choose the winner in time for the prize to be announced on Wednesday, 27 April at SciFi London.

Submissions include two past winners (Tricia Sullivan and China Miéville), 11 previously-shortlisted authors (Stephen Baxter, Ian McDonald, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Chris Wooding, Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, Peter F. Hamilton, William Gibson and James Lovegrove), and one past judge (Francis Spufford). To add to the statistics collection, the list below is sorted by publisher.

And here is this year’s eligible submissions list:

Black Hand Gang by Pat Kelleher (Abaddon Books)
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
Generosity by Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)
Declare by Tim Powers (Corvus)
Finch by Jeff VanderMeer (Corvus)
Holy Machine by Chris Beckett (Corvus)
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (Corvus)
On the Third Day by Rhys Thomas (Doubleday)
Salvage by Robert Edric (Doubleday)
Bring Home the Stars by Jennifer Kirk (DS Press)
Sylvow by Douglas Thompson (Eibonvale Press)
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber)
The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna (Faber & Faber)
Paradise by Glenn Myers (Fizz Books)
A Matter of Blood by Sarah Pinborough (Gollancz)
Above the Snowline by Steph Swainston (Gollancz)
Absorption by John Meaney (Gollancz)
Eve: The Burning Life by Hjalti Danielsson (Gollancz)
Guardians of Paradise by Jaine Fenn (Gollancz)
New Model Army by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz)
Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz)
The Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding (Gollancz)
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz)
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz)
The Silent Land by Graham Joyce (Gollancz)
Veteran by Gavin G Smith (Gollancz)
Watch by Robert J Sawyer (Gollancz)
Zendegi by Greg Egan (Gollancz)
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (Granta)
For the Win by Cory Doctorow (Harper Voyager)
Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steve Amsterdam (Harvill Secker)
C by Tom McCarthy (Jonathan Cape)
Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan (Orbit)
Surface Detail by Iain M Banks (Orbit)
The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross (Orbit)
The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
The Unit by Terry DeHart (Orbit)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Orbit)
Version 43 by Philip Palmer (Orbit)
The Passage by Justin Cronin (Orion Books)
Blood and Iron by Tony Ballantyne (Pan Macmillan)
Empire of Light by Gary Gibson (Pan Macmillan)
Kraken by China Miéville (Pan Macmillan)
The Evolutionary Void by Peter F. Hamilton (Pan Macmillan)
The Reapers Are The Angels by Alden Bell (Pan Macmillan)
The Technician by Neal Asher (Pan Macmillan)
Zero History by William Gibson (Penguin)
Pornogram by Osric Allen (Robert Temple)
The Meat Tree by Gwyneth Lewis (Seren)
The Age of Zeus by James Lovegrove (Solaris)
The Noise Within by Ian Whates (Solaris)
Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness (Walker Books)

So, what do you think of this year’s submissions?

If you’d like to guess and potentially win the award’s shortlist this year, see the contest details post. (Entries must be received by the end of this Wednesday, so submit your guess sooner than later!) Guesses posted in the comments to this post may make good conversation fodder, but won’t be eligible entries for the contest.

BSFA Award Nominations: Non-Fiction Statistics

The non-fiction shortlist for this year’s BSFA Awards is easily the most diverse of the shortlists, at least in terms of media. There’s a podcast, lots of blog posts, and a controversial nomination which may not even be non-fiction, depending on who is doing the nominating. What counts as non-fiction for the BSFA awards is up to the nominators, not the award administrator.

This year, every person who nominated in the non-fiction category had far more influence than anyone who only nominated in other categories. That’s because a total of eighteen people nominated a total of only sixteen candidates for the non-fiction shortlist. 3% of the BSFA’s membership nominated in this category.

Fewer people nominated in this category than the others – over twice as many people nominated for the best novel and for the best short story shortlists. The proportions, however, are not necessarily typical of the category. Last year, twenty-nine people nominated a total of forty-three works! Even the year before that, twenty-nine different works were nominated for the shortlist.

This is the only category for which there were fewer nominations than nominators which, superficially, may suggest a greater initial consensus on appropriate works than in other categories. There weren’t a whole lot of eligible non-fiction books published compared to some recent years, but there were plenty of other ways in which eligible non-fiction is produced, as is clear from the diversity of this year’s ballot.

To simplify a more complicated situation: Novels have publishers, bookstores, and reviewers to raise awareness of them. Short stories have magazines, online and off, to promote them. Artwork is promoted via novel covers, and thus bookstores, and magazines (which, although it’s a fraction of genre artwork being produced, at least gives it venues for publicity). Non-fiction doesn’t have so many built-in mechanisms for advertising. Collectively, I think, we consume a fair amount of it, but it requires a bit more effort to step back from reading and consider a work’s longer-term importance, and to track casually-read essays, reviews, and criticism for their nomination potential.

London Meeting: Matt Brooker (D’Israeli)

Febraury’s London meeting will feature Matt Brooker (D’Israeli) (Eagle Award-winning artist of Stickleback and Scarlet Traces) will be interviewed by Tony Keen (London meetings organizer).

Date: Wednesday 23rd February 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

23rd March 2011 * – BSFA Awards Meeting
20th April 2011 ** – DAVID WEBER: Interviewer TBC
25th May 2011 – TBC