Attention BSFA Members!

It is now officially the end of the year season, which means you no longer have an excuse: it’s time to start nominating for the BSFA Awards. The eligibility criteria are here. General points to note are:

Science fiction, fantasy, and any other speculative works are eligible.
You can nominate as many works in each category as you want. The works with the highest number of nominations go forward to the shortlist.
The deadline for nomination is midnight on Saturday 13th January 2007. That’s a fortnight tomorrow.

The nominations so far are here and copied below. Note that a consequence of point 2 is that just because something is on this list doesn’t mean you don’t have to nominate it — works on this list may have only received one nomination. You should email your nominations to BSFA.Awards@gmail.com.

Artwork

Cover for Interzone 206: “Droid” by Fahrija Velic
Exiles by Mark Garlick, cover of Interzone #203
Cover of Farthing magazine, issue 2, Spring 2006. Credited to ‘Vertebrate Graphics’.
‘The Lucid Moment‘, Chris Mars. (Chris Mars Publishing)
Cover for Nova Swing by M John Harrison
Cover for Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
“The Return to Abalakin” by Alexander Preuss
Publicity still for A Scanner Darkly
Cover of “The Servicing and Maintenance of Wayland Snowball”, by Terry Cooper. (Novel by Steve Dean.)
Poster for Superman Returns
Cover of Time Pieces, Fangorn
Cover of Whispers of Wickedness #12, Marcia Borell

Short fiction:

The Angel of Gamblers, Hal Duncan (Eidolon #1)
The Barrowlands’ Last Night, Philip Raines & Harvey Welles (Extended Play)
Bizarre Cubiques, Hal Duncan (Fantasy #4)
The Codsman and his Willing Shag, Neil Williamson (The Ephemera)
The Disappeared, Sarah Singleton (Time Pieces, edited Ian Whates, published NewCon press)
Gin, Holly Phillips (Eidolon #1)
Hieronymous Boche, Chris Lawson (Eidolon #1)
The Highwaymen, Ken MacLeod
Palestina, Martin J. Gidron (Interzone 204)
Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter, Geoff Ryman (F&SF)
The Revenant, Lucy Sussex (Eidolon #1)
Saving for a Sunny Day, or, The Benefits of Reincarnation, Ian Watson (Asimov’s Science Fiction #369/370)
The Unsolvable Death Trap, Jack Mangan (Interzone 202)
“Soulkeepers” by Steve Dean (Hadesgate Publications)
Sounding, Elizabeth Bear (Strange Horizons)
State Your Name, Jon Courtenay Grimwood (Time Pieces, edited Ian Whates, published NewCon press)
This Happens, David Mace (Interzone #205)
2+2=5, Rudy Rucker and Terry Bisson (Interzone 205)
Weather, Alastair Reynolds (Galactic North)
Willy and Topsy, William I. Lengeman III (Farthing #4)

Novel:

The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier (John Murray)
End of the World Blues, Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Icarus, Roger Levy
Keeping it Real, Justina Robson
The Last Witchfinder, James Morrow (Weidenfield & Nicholson)
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
The Osiris Revelations, Andrew Marshall (MPress Publishing)
The Servicing and Maintenance of Wayland Snowball, Steve Dean (Hadesgate Publications)
Shriek: An Afterword, Jeff Vandermeer
The Voyage of the Sable Keech, Neal Asher

BSFA Awards: Best Artwork

It’s that time of year again. At last night’s meeting, Ian Snell, the BSFA Awards Administrator, handed round forms to remind everyone to start nominating for the BSFA Awards. For any new members reading, it works like this: there are awards for Best Novel, Best Short Story, Best Non-Fiction, and Best Artwork; for Best Novel the work has to be published in the UK, otherwise they can be available anywhere; you can nominate as many things as you want in each category; the five in each category with the most nominations go forward to form the shortlist, which is subsequently voted on (by STV). In short, you don’t have to wait until the end of the year; you can nominate whenever you encounter something you think is worthy of shortlisting. Continuing the theme of last night’s meeting, I thought I’d throw up some potential artwork nominations.

The artwork award is open to any single science fictional or fantastic image that first appeared in 2006. Again, provided the artwork hasn’t been published before 2006 it doesn’t matter where it appears.

As with most things related to the BSFA, the definition of “single science fictional or fantastic image” tends to be pretty flexible. Admittedly, the last couple of winners (Pawel Lewandoski’s cover for Interzone 200, and Stephan Martiniere’s cover for Newton’s Wake) have been traditionally science-fictional landscapes, but in the same period nominees have also included a Frank Quitely double-spread from We3, and even a photograph of the Millau Bridge.

So here’s what’s been catching my eye.

Magazine covers, left to right: Interzone 206 (let’s be honest, you can’t go wrong with a giant robot), Farthing 2 (although covers for the other issues have been nifty, too) and Postscripts 6 (probably the least exciting of the three, but nicely composed, I think). Illustrations for individual stories (such as those occasionally used by Strange Horizons, or as standard in recent issues of Interzone) are also worth looking at.

Book covers, left to right: US cover for River of Gods; Stephan Martiniere doing what he does best. I love the washed-out look of the Rainbows End cover (if you ignore the text all over it, anyway), and the UK cover of Black Juice struck me as being much more evocative of the stories it contains than the US or Australian editions. The cover for Nova Swing left me cold the first time I saw it, but it’s grown on me. Irene Gallo’s blog often features rather lovely covers … but fairly often they’re rather lovely covers for books that aren’t published yet.

And finally, whatever the merits of the film, I do love this poster:

Now, here’s where I throw it open to the floor. What artwork has been grabbing your attention this year? Don’t worry if you’re not a member; maybe someone who is will like your suggestion, and end up nominating it. That email address in full: BSFA.Awards@gmail.com.

Awards

So after being cheered by Ian. R Macleod’s Sidewise Award for the wonderful The Summer Isles, and wryly amused that Ken Macleod picked up a third Prometheus Award with Learning the World, I woke up this morning (absurdly early, considering what time I got home last night) anticipating the main event: the Hugo Award results.

It’s not as satisfyingly rightheaded a slate of winners as we got last year. The short fiction categories are a bit of a mess—the idea that Connie Willis’ “Inside Job” and David Levine’s “Tk’tk’tk” are better than, respectively, Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners” and Margo Lanagan’s “Singing My Sister Down” is, without wishing to offend, ludicrous; Peter S. Beagle’s novellette win is defensible, but it wouldn’t have been my pick—but other than that it’s not too bad. Serenity‘s win in Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form is well-deserved, and Steven Moffatt’s Doctor Who two-parter was the best thing on its ballot. Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller wasn’t (I was rooting for Gary K. Wolfe’s Soundings), but it is a good book—and perhaps more impressively, it beat a book by The Mighty Langford.

Actually, it seems to have been a year for results that go against the common complaint that Hugo voters are swayed by name recognition, at least in some categories. Sure, Locus and Langford picked up their annual awards, but David Hartwell, editor of everyone from James Tiptree Jnr to David Marusek, finally converted a nomination to a win, and in doing so became the ~~first~~ second non-dead book editor to win a Hugo (somewhat ironically, given that his omission from the winners’ list was one of the reasons behind the motion to split Best Editor into two categories).

More refreshingly still, the Best Novel winner is impossible to snidely dismiss as having gone to the author with the biggest publicity campaign, or the most vocal fanbase, or the most popular blog, as has become somewhat de rigueur when discussing recent winners, or when trying to predict this year’s (I was not immune to this). The award has gone to a book that I haven’t read, but which I have heard almost exclusively good things about from people I trust who have; which is to say that it seems to have gone to a book that (get this) can only have won because a population of informed voters liked it best. Whether or not I end up agreeing that Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin was the most deserving book on the shortlist, it strikes me as, at the very least, a good result for the health of the Hugos as an institution.

EDIT: the nomination and voting stats. Headlines: Neil Gaiman declined a nomination for Anansi Boys; World of Warcraft and Lego Star Wars were the top nominees in the ‘Interactive Video Game’ category that was dropped due to lack of interest; in the final vote, “Magic for Beginners” ran “Inside Job” pretty darn close, but Spin had a comfortable lead from the start and John Scalzi wasn’t far off winning the Campbell Award outright; and Andrew M. Butler’s last year on Vector got six nominations for Best Fanzine, which is nice to see. Further commentary here and here.