September BSFA Meeting: Robert Shearman interviewed by Simon Guerrier

On Wednesday 26th September 2012, Robert Shearman (author, playwright, Doctor Who writer) will be interviewed by Simon Guerrier (Doctor Who writer).

ALL WELCOME – FREE ENTRY (Non-members welcome)

The interview will start at 7 pm. We have the room from 6pm (and if early, fans are in the ground floor bar from 5ish).

There will be a raffle (£1 for five tickets), with a selection of sf novels as prizes.

Location: Cellar Bar, The Argyle Public House, 1 Greville Street (off Leather Lane), London EC1N 8PQ. Map is here. Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane (Central Line).

Please note that this is now the new permanent venue of BSFA Meetings. It would be nice if we could get a good turnout for the first meeting.

FUTURE EVENTS:
10th October – Special Meeting: Han Song, interviewed by Lavie Tidhar
24th October** – Nina Allan, interviewed by Niall Harrison
28th November – Paul Cornell, interviewed by Roz Kaveney
(There is no BSFA Meeting in December).
23rd January 2013** – TBC

** Note that this is a month with five Wednesdays. The meeting will be on the fourth, not the last, Wednesday of the month.

London in 2014 party

The London in 2014 Worldcon Bid are holding a party on Sunday 2 September, to coincide with the announcement of the 2014 site selection. It’s at the Green Man & Porter’s Bar, on the corner of Great Portland Street and Euston Road, from 4 pm onwards. You are encouraged to arrive promptly, as the announcement is expected soon after 4.

The BSFA supports the London in 2014 bid.

Details here:

http://www.londonin2014.org/content/london-party

August BSFA Meeting: Shaun Tan interviewed by Judith Clute

On Tuesday 28th August 2012, Shaun Tan (artist, illustrator, author, film-maker, Academy Award winner) will be interviewed by Judith Clute (Canadian/British artist).

Please note the date change! This event is taking place on the fifth Tuesday, due to the availability of Shaun Tan.

ALL WELCOME – FREE ENTRY (Non-members welcome.)

The interview will start at 7 pm. We have the room from 6pm (and if early, fans are in the ground floor bar from 5ish).

There will be a raffle (£1 for five tickets), with a selection of sf novels as prizes.

Location: Cellar Bar, The Melton Mowbray Public House, 18 Holborn, London EC1N 2LE. Map is here. Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane (Central line).

FUTURE EVENTS:
26th September – Rob Shearman, interviewed by Simon Guerrier
24th October** – Nina Allan, interviewed by Niall Harrison
28th November – Paul Cornell, interviewed by Roz Kaveney

** Note that this is a month with five Wednesdays. The meeting will be on the fourth, not the last, Wednesday of the month.

July BSFA Meeting: Roz Kaveney interviewed by Pat Cadigan

On Wednesday 25th July 2012, Roz Kaveney (multi-talented writer) will be interviewed by Pat Cadigan (award-winning author and critic).

The event is the UK launch of Rhapsody of Blood 1: Rituals, Roz Kaveney’s debut novel and the first volume of her new fantasy tetralogy.

Roz is also a poet, critic, editor, political activist, and author of Reading The Vampire Slayer (2001/2003), From Alien to the Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film (2005), Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film and Television from ‘Heathers’ to ‘Veronica Mars’ (2006), and Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films (2007), and others.

ALL WELCOME – FREE ENTRY (Non-members welcome.)

The interview will start at 7 pm. We have the room from 6pm (and if early, fans are in the ground floor bar from 5ish).

There will be a raffle (£1 for five tickets), with a selection of sf novels as prizes.

Location: Cellar Bar, The Melton Mowbray Public House. 18 Holborn, London EC1N 2LE. Map is here. Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane (Central line).

FUTURE EVENTS:
28th August* – Shaun Tan, interviewed by Judith Clute
26th September – Rob Shearman, interviewed by Simon Guerrier
24th October** – Nina Allan, interviewed by Niall Harrison

* Note the date change. This event is taking place on the fifth Tuesday, due to the availability of Shaun Tan.

** Note that this is a month with five Wednesdays. The meeting will be on the fourth, not the last, Wednesday of the month.

June BSFA Meeting: Paul McAuley interviewed by Paul Kincaid

On Wednesday 27th June 2012, Paul McAuley (multi-award winning author, most recently of In the Mouth of the Whale) will be interviewed by Paul Kincaid (BSFA Award winning critic).

Due to circumstances beyond the control of anyone involved, Tanith Lee will be unable to appear at our June meeting. We will make every effort to book her for a future meeting. Please accept our apologies for any disappointment or inconvenience. We are grateful to Paul for stepping into the breach to appear as our guest in June.

ALL WELCOME – FREE ENTRY (Non-members welcome.)

The interview will start at 7 pm. We have the room from 6pm (and fans in the ground floor bar from 5ish).

There will be a raffle (£1 for five tickets), with a selection of sf novels as prizes.

Location: Cellar Bar, The Melton Mowbray Public House. 18 Holborn, London EC1N 2LE . Map is here. Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane (Central line).

FUTURE EVENTS:
25th July – Roz Kaveney (interviewer TBC)
28th August* – Shaun Tan (interviewer TBC)
26th September – Rob Shearman, interviewed by Simon Guerrier

*Note that this is event is taking place on the fifth Tuesday, due to the availability of Shaun Tan.

2012 BSFA Lecture at Eastercon

The 2012 BSFA Lecture at Eastercon will be given by Dr Marc Morris, and is entitled ‘Regime Change in England, 1066’. It draws on his recently-published book The Norman Conquest. The lecture will be given at 2.30 on Saturday April 7th, in the Commonwealth Hall of the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, Heathrow. The lecture is open to any members of Eastercon (if you’re not already a member, I’m afraid membership is now closed).

Marc is a mediaeval historian and broadcaster. He presented the television series Castle in 2003, and wrote the accompanying book (a new edition comes out in May 2012). He is also the author of The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century, and A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain. His new book, published on March 29, is a history of The Norman Conquest. Copies will be available to purchase at Eastercon. He also appeared in the most recent episode of Time Team.

The BSFA lecture is intended as a companion to the George Hay Lecture presented at the Eastercon by the Science Fiction Foundation. Where the Hay Lecture invites scientists, the BSFA Lecture invites academics from the arts and humanities (with a particular bias towards history), because we recognise that science fiction fans aren’t only interested in science. The lecturers are given a remit to speak “on a subject that is likely to be of interest to science fiction fans” – i.e. on whatever they want! This is the fourth BSFA Lecture.

2012 Clarke Award Contest Update

If entrants into the 2012 Guess-the-Clarke Award shortlist contest were voters, only half of the actual shortlist would have made the cut: Embassytown, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, and Rule 34.

Here are the six books which received the most guesses among all the books on the submissions list which were not on the shortlist:
By Light Alone by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
Osama by Lavie Tidhar (PS)
Reamde by Neal Stephenson (Atlantic)
Savage City by Sophia McDougall (Gollancz)
Wake Up and Dream by Ian R. MacLeod (PS)

Six people guessed that The End Specialist would be on the shortlist; four guessed Hull Zero Three would be on it; and Amanda and John clearly have special insight or instincts, as they were the only two people who guessed that Sheri Tepper’s The Waters Rising would make it.

Forty-four people submitted valid entries to the contest, of which only two failed to guess any of the books which the jury chose for the shortlist. Thirteen people correctly guessed one book, sixteen guessed two books, and a very respectable ten people guessed half of the shortlist correctly.

Three people tied for guessing most the shortlist, with four correct guesses each. Which one will formally win the contest and its prizes? That will depend on Tom Hunter, the Clarke Award director. We’ll let you know shortly.

Meanwhile, the discussion about the award which began with the release of the submissions list and the contest continues with various posts and articles. (Here’s Abigail Nussbaum’s roundup of critical reviews of the books.)

If you’re going to be at Eastercon, you can participate in the conversation in person (in addition to online before and after that!) at the SFF’s Not the Clarke Award panel at 17:30 on Saturday, of which Maureen Kincaid Speller has written, “Clearly, *the* panel to go to at Eastercon will be the Not the Clarke Award panel. Hope it’s in a decent-sized room.” Come join the crowd and the conversation.

Do Vector readers read comics?

In the next issue of Vector, #270, columnist Terry Martin (of Murky Depths) writes,

When I recently asked one of our prolific comic writers if he was enjoying these columns he answered that I should be giving the mainstream titles, such as those published by Vertigo, more publicity. In actual fact I have covered the likes of Fables and The Unwritten, both Vertigo titles – and the later is one of my favourites. Most Vector readers, he claims, aren’t comic readers, and that I should be directing you to the ‘popular’ comics. I’d be interested to know if you read comics. If you don’t, you‘re missing out.

So, Vector readers: do you read comics?

Should Vector consider providing more coverage of mainstream comics? Obscure comics? Ever since Matrix ended, Vector‘s mandate has de facto encompassed media other than novels and short stories, even if it hasn’t been the magazine’s biggest strength. But rather than getting sidetracked on the bigger issue of representing a broader diversity of media: what about comics in particular?

SFF Readership Data Challenges

I had a really satisfying conversation with my sister earlier this week. She told me she’d been on a real dystopian literature kick in the last year, that her favorite books currently include The Hunger Games, Never Let Me Go, and The Handmaid’s Tale.

I told her she was a science fiction reader. “Really? Just because they’re set in the future?” It’s more complicated than that, but the brief version is that I explained dystopias were just her preferred subgenre within sf.

That my sister has never thought of herself as a science fiction reader, and yet clearly – to me – is one exemplifies one of the many problems in trying to survey just what kinds of humans are reading genre. Farah Mendlesohn, in The Intergalactic Playground, made her readership survey feasible by focusing on those who 1. Self-identify as science fiction readers and 2. Filled out her survey.

We really do need more data about who reads genre fiction, because so many central discussion of how to present it center around just who it is who’s reading it. Who the market is. How large a percentage of readers are women.

D.H. Rowan is adding to that data through a survey posted today, on “Female:Male Readership of SF/F, UF, PNR”. You can see some of the problems with it already just in the title. The subgenres it focuses on – Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance – are those known to have a larger female readership than most of, say, science fiction. There are more methodological problems with the survey itself: it only allows for a binary choice between male and female, for example. It assumes that Urban Fantasy and PNR are subgenres which have been around for decades, long enough that it would have been possible to start and stop reading one or both decades ago. It focuses on age ranges rather than how long ago a given interaction with genre occurred.

And yet – I still think you should go fill it out. It’s a short poll. It won’t take long. And so long as any analysis of the resulting dataset is conscious of these limitations, it’ll still add to the data we have about what kinds of people read what kinds of SFF – and whether or not those people are being adequately represented at conventions*, among other places.

* See also Sophia McDougall on the SFX Weekender and the Nudes in the Metropolitan Gallery.

Vector 269

What a welcome sight! The post just arrived, and with it, the latest BSFA mailing. In addition to Vector, there’s an issue of Quantum, the BSFA’s occasional newsletter; and a paper copy of the ballot for the BSFA Awards (also available online).

There’s also a NewCon Press sampler which includes excerpts from The Outcast and the Little One by Andy West and Kim Lakin-Smith’s BSFA best novel-nominated Cyber Circus. Ian Whates assures me that the booklet went to press well before the BSFA Award nominations for best novel were known and announced.

Lest the prompt arrival of the paper copy of the ballot worry anyone, we’re still planning to do a short story booklet of stories nominated for the BSFA award for the best short story of 2011; but the logistics of that take just long enough that it’ll be coming in the mailing after this one.

This issue of Vector is partially a followup to the poll which Niall ran last year, on the best sf novels by women written in the previous decade. It also has Adam Roberts’ reflections on writing music entries for the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, and Andrew M Butler’s review of the three versions of the John Martin: Apocalypse show which recently closed at the Tate Britain. (The review was printed here on Torque Control in late December to make sure it would be read before the show closed!)

Vector 269 is labeled the Spring 2012 issue, which means we seem to have skipped winter entirely, despite what today’s chilly weather seems to imply.

Vector 269 contains…

Women SF Writers: An Endangered Species? – Cheryl Morgan
Death and Transcendence in the “Forged” Novels of Justina Robson – Tony Keen
Telling the World: The Exodus Trilogy by Julie Bertagna – Niall Harrison
Single-Gendered Worlds In Science- Fiction – Better For Whom? – Victor Grech with Clare Thake-Vassallo, and Ivan Callus
On Science Fiction Music – Adam Roberts
John Martin: Apocalypse – A Review – Andrew M Butler

Kincaid in Short – Paul Kincaid
Resonances – Stephen Baxter
Foundation Favourites – Andy Sawyer
Picture This – Terry Martin

The BSFA Review – edited by Martin Lewis