Prodded by an observation from chilperic, I make the following provisional and contentious list of Hugo winning fiction which is clearly fantasy rather than sf:

1959: "That Hell-Bound Train", Robert Bloch (short story)
1964: "The Dragon Masters", Jack Vance (short story)
1967: "The Last Castle" by Jack Vance (novelette)
1971: "Ill Met in Lankhmar" by Fritz Leiber (novella)
1974: "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", Ursula K. Le Guin (short story)
1978: "Jeffty Is Five", Harlan Ellison (short story)
1981: "Grotto of the Dancing Deer", Clifford D Simak (short story)
1982: "Unicorn Variations" by Roger Zelazny (novelette)
1987: "Gilgamesh in the Outback" by Robert Silverberg (novella)
1990: "Boobs" by Suzy McKee Charnas (short story)
1991: "Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson (short story)
1994: "Death on the Nile" by Connie Willis (short story)
1997: "Blood of the Dragon" by George R. R. Martin (novella)
2001: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling (novel)
2002: "Hell Is the Absence of God" by Ted Chiang (novelette)
2002: American Gods by Neil Gaiman (novel)
2003: Coraline by Neil Gaiman (novella)
2004: "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman (short story)
2004: Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (novel)
2005: "The Faery Handbag" by Kelly Link (novelette)
2005: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (novel)

So chilperic is right to say that four of the last five Hugos for Best Novel - and none previously - have gone to fantasy novels; and taking all the categories into account, more Hugo awards have gone to works of fantasy rather than sf in the last six years than in the previous twenty.

Does it matter?

John Scalzi puts me 35th out of the top 51 blogs on science fiction and fantasy. That's very nice of him, considering the things I said about his book! Of course, you don't have to believe him; you just have to believe in the power of Technorati.

Well, never again will I dare to express an opinion on other people's book reviews without first familiarising myself with professional standards of book reviewing. Just imagine! I thought that it was enough to be a simple reader, and make judgements as if they were a matter of taste! But nihilistic_kid has opened my eyes, with the force of reasoned argument, and I now realise that those of us without his extensive experience can say nothing worth listening to on the subject.

Wow, lots of blood spilt over this review, this reaction (supported here, the author himself reacting somewhat more mildly) and the reviewer's defence. I'm simply baffled by the fuss: I don't understand how anyone could have taken Morrison's speculation that reviewers are bribed to lie as anything other than hyperbole. If there have been muttered accusations round the blogosphere, or any part of fandom, to this effect then I missed them completely.

Anyway, that's beside the point I wanted to make, which is to respond to Nick Mamatas' renewed attack on Strange Horizons and its review policy, as personified by coalescent. (To whom, Happy Birthday!) To declare my own exposure here, I have had three reviews published on Strange Horizons myself, with a fourth in the works; which represents roughly 1% of all the books I have reviewed on-line. I have not been paid for any of them (indeed, did not even get review copies for all of them).

I have to say that my experience of Strange Horizons' editing process is that they are more thorough than any other on-line publication outfit I have been associated with, with the sole exception of my own current employers. Deadlines are serious; feedback is meticulous and timely; and thought is given to which reviews are published when. So in terms of the mechanics of the reviewing process, and given that few of the reviewers are being paid (despite rumours to the contrary), I give them pretty close to top marks for professionalism and for effort in editing.

As for content: it seems to me that the criticisms I've seen directed at Strange Horizons' reviews are on the whole not very substantial. I wrote about this before, but just to condense the argument: I am not sure where those who want to see better reviews are going to find them, and from reading their complaints I don't have a good idea of what they are looking for in a review anyway. I like the fact that Strange Horizons encourages its reviewrs to write entertainingly, even if this means they sometimes raise hackles - indeed, especially if this means they sometimes raise hackles.

I subscribe to sh_reviews, and suggest that you do so too, if you haven't already.

In 2005, 2004 and 2003 I listed my preferences among the stories nominated for the Hugo Award, also including as many links as I could conveniently include to other people's thoughts on the nominees. It seems to have been a popular move, so I have repeated it this year and the results are below. (I also listed just my own preferences among the nominees in all categories in 2002, and for the novels in 2000. My website also has various other statistics on Hugo and Nebula awards.)

I'd thought of doing it a little differently this year, by starting with the short stories and working up to novels, as indeed the Hugo ceremony itself does. However, I then realised that it meant the incoming reader would hit my acerbic remarks about Michaels Resnick and Burstein first, and might therefore be put off science fiction for life. The novels are a far better starting point, so it is business as usual after all.

Last year, pressed for time, I wasn't able to add review links for the novels. This year there has been so much to choose from that I was only able to add the first few dozen that caught my eye from Google and Icerocket. My apologies if you feel you have been unfairly omitted, but there is an element of chance in all this.

I've also made one other significant format change. In previous years I have striven to supply the real names of reviewers, and the name of the website where the review first appeared, wherever possible. This year I have given up; for blogs in general I've used the nom de net if the blogger's real name isn't obvious, and for LiveJournal users, who are by far the biggest group of bloggers writing about sf books, I have adopted the LiveJournal format for their identities, and given real names in only a very few cases. Indeed I drafted this web-page using a LiveJournal client. In contrast, I have only linked to one myspace blog entry (there were very few of relevance anyway, and too many of them play annoying music at you). If you are one of those I have quoted or linked to, and would prefer me to identify you in a different way than I have done below, please do let me know.

The version of this mega-meta-review on my website should be considered the primary source (though feel free to contribute to discussion threads here or on the usenet partial version).

Having said all that, on with the show...
( Read more... )

Continued here.

Continued from this post.

( Novellas, Novelettes and Short Stories )

Very very nice to catch up with people last night, and exchange words, however brief, with alexmc, coalescent, despotliz, flyingsauce and gummitch. Particularly nice to have long chats with annafdd, clanwilliam, daveon, gmh, purplecthulhu and most of all deborah_c after many years (apart from family, the lj-user I have known for longest, jointly with nickbarnes). Sorry not to have even managed to exchange words with dougs, seph_hazard, greengolux, and anybody else who I knew who was there - come ten o'clock the week's travels caught up with me and I just had to disappear off to bed.

It's a crazy debate.

This was a longlist, not a shortlist, let alone an actual award. All it means is that one person thought the piece worthy of note. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't; I haven't read it, and don't especially intend to (and I believe it's been taken down so I can't now anyway), but I would bet that most readers would rate it as of higher quality than the worst stories on the Hugo or Nebula shortlists (let alone longlists). People make choices and sometimes other people disagree with them. There are many, many examples of stories and novels on the Hugo or Nebula long lists which are really bad; which fail to meet the criteria we would like to associate those awards with, in other words. Why should it be at all surprising that the Tiptree long list suffers from the same deficiency?

I don't read fanfic myself but it is obviously a part of the genre and it is good to see, however grudgingly, the gatekeepers of the genre starting to acknowledge that.

Edited to add: OK, I've now read "Arcana". It is slightly worse than the two Burstein stories on the Hugo short-list. It's not that much worse (the Burstein stories also evoked my sub-editing instincts pretty forcefully). Its being unfinished should not really be an issue. To be honest I find Liz Henry's defence largely convincing.

I don't actually read many sf magazines. I am a subscriber to Interzone (which arrived yesterday) and occasionally pick up F&SF or Asimov's or Analog if I see them in the bookshop (rare) and have the impulse. Finding time to get though them is difficult, and I tend to leave my short stories reading to a) the Nebula nominees (some of which are usually pretty dire), b) the Hugo nominees (fewer of which are usually dire) and c) the various Year's Best compilations (which often seem to make better selections than the awards processes).

ccfinlay posted about Gordon Van Gelder's offer of a free copy of the next issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction a couple of weeks ago - free, in return for a commitment to blog about it. (Incidentally I thought Van Gelder's instructions were pretty clear - "email me, I send you the magazine, you blog about it" - and it is a bit depressing how many people misinterpreted the instructions). But I digress.

I don't think I would have necessarily bought this issue on impulse if I had seen it in the shop. The cover art - an imagined landscape of one of the moons of Saturn - is striking, but I only really feel familiar with one of the six authors listed, Terry Bisson, and while sometimes I like his writing, sometimes I don't. However I'm glad to have read it. As well as eight (not six) stories, it also includes Charles De Lint's short reviews of three new books, James Sallis' (entirely right-minded) rave review of Ian McDonald's River of Gods, and a rambling, poorly written film column by Kathi Maio that turns out to be about Nanny McPhee while making some fair points about nannies on page and screen.There are also four one-frame cartoons, of which the only one worth reporting here has the tag line, "My client is a zombie, Mr. Davis. He's not intimidated by threats of mind-numbing protracted litigation." As I recall, both Asimov's and Analog tend to have more non-fiction material, and it is usually better.

The quality of the fiction is, however, pretty good - up to the average for the Hugo nominees in the shorter categories, I would say, which makes me wonder what is wrong with the system. In brief, my thoughts on each story:

• R Garcia y Robertson's "Kansas, She Says, Is the Name of the Star" is a story of interplanetary sex slave traders, loosely structured around the plot of The Wizard of Oz; it is the only story whose title is given on the front cover of the magazine. I liked the pacing and characterisation, and I felt the author managed not to allow Baum to interfere too much with the story he wanted to tell.
• Steven Popkes' "Holding Pattern" is a nearer-future story of international crime and cloning, which didn't quite hold together for me.
• Terry Bisson's "Billy and the Unicorn" packs a nice amount of lyrical weirdness into only five pages.
• I also liked Matthew Hughes' "The Meaning of Luff", which has some Resnick-style criminals in a decadent far-future Earth setting, and a wonderful gizmo called the "salience indicator", which reveals your true purpose in life and therefore causes chaos and dismay to those who use it.
• The longest story in the magazine is "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire", by Ysabeau S. Wilce, a lushly described story of dynastic misbehaviour in a magical city which seems to include roughly equal meaasures of Byzantium, Regency London, and the sinister fantasy environment of your choice. I see this is the second story in this setting; I hope there will be more - Ms Wilce's control of world-building from such disparate elements is impressive.
• Robert Onopa's "Republic" tells an old story of the astronauts who go to explore a planet and are fundamentally changed by it, with a couple of new riffs; done well enough but not spectacular.
• I had the oddest feeling of deja lu with Jerry Seeger's "Memory of a Thing that Never Was", an obliquely told story of two veterans of a hidden war. Some great scenes, assembled out of sequence to good effect, but (even though it is such a short story) I felt he had run out of steam by the end.
• Heather Lindsley's "Just Do It" is a near-future tale of injectable mind-control: this dystopic situation is told for laughs, and it very nearly works - and probably will work for people who are bigger fans of, say, Connie Willis than I am. (For whatever reason, she and Seeger are not named on the front cover.)

So in general, I felt there were no actively bad stories here, and a couple which were very good. Next time I see F&SF in the bookshop, I will not just judge it by the cover but look inside to see what it has to offer: more by Garcia y Robertson, Hughes or Wilce would certainly tempt me to pull out the wallet.

I make that roughly four times as many sf and fantasy stories set on Titan (here and here) as are set in Belgium (here and one more here).

But Ireland still wins.

Some of you will have seen my list of sf and fantasy novels set in Ireland. I have been living in Belgium now for over seven years, and it occurred to me that there must be a similar list possible of sf and fantasy set here.

I have two items to start off with:

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (2004): one of the nested stories is set in Zedelghem.

The Guns of Avalon, by Roger Zelazny (1972):

"From Antwerp we had traveled to Brussels, spending several evenings at a club on the Rue de Char et Pain before the man I wanted found me."

Anything more?

(I'm specifically thinking of written sf and fantasy. If we expand the scope out to comics there are an awful lot more, starting with Tintin.)

Edited to add: sammywol reminds me - as I should have remembered perfectly well - of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke (2004) which features the Battle of Waterloo.

Michael Ross raises the question of Kate Elliot's "Crown of Stars" series. As far as I can tell these are set in a rather distorted Europe, to the point that you couldn't really count it as "set" in France, Belgium, etc. Same goes for the Kushiel trilogy (though as far as I remember they avoid the Low Countries entirely).

Now that Margo Lanagan's "Singing My Sister Down" is on-line, I have read it and agree with everyone else that it is a beautifully written, intense, powerful and surprisingly short piece that will probably win any award for which it is nominated.

But is it actually sfnal?

I seem to be on a number of panels at P-Con this weekend:

Saturday

10:15 Just a Minute Quiz with Paul Cornell, autopope, Leah Moore (moderated by Frank Darcy)
Panellists must speak on a given topic for 60 seconds without hesitation, deviation, or repetition

13:00 Fantastic! The Doctor Who Panel, with Paul Cornell and Colin Greenland, with me moderating (note to self - make sure I have eaten something first).
The enormously successful relaunch of Doctor Who under the microscope, with one of the series’ scriptwriters on hand to give an insight into how it all happened.

17:00 The Sow That Eats Her Own Farrow: How the Book Business is Destroying Itself, with pnh, Ariel, Juliet E McKenna, Bob Neilson, Colin Smythe, and me moderating again.
As bookshops continue to sell more books for less money, and publishers only want guaranteed bestsellers, is the book trade in danger of destroying itself?

Sunday

11:00 Is It About a Bicycle? Flann O’Brien: Ireland’s Master Storyteller, with Leah Moore, Colin Smythe and John W Sexton moderating
Flann O’Brien is Ireland’s most popular writer, according to a recent BBC poll. Now, sales of The Third Policeman have soared after the book appeared in an episode of TV series Lost. Here’s an introduction to his work.

15:00 Awards? We Don’t Need No Steenking Awards!, with Colin Greenland and autopope, and me moderating.
Do awards serve any useful purpose, or are they simply good for the winner’s ego? A few award winners tell it like it is.

I'm glad that slovobooks and the team have such confidence in my moderating skills! Though I think I will have one or two things to say about the topics in question myself...

See some of you there, perhaps?

Almost two months ago, truepenny came up with a meme - to list all the novels which have won the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, Tiptree, Dick, Stoker and  World Fantasy Awards and, as so often, bold the ones you have read. It was a pretty short-lived meme; in the next couple of days 34 people did it (all but one on livejournal) and then it died a death as these things do.

I thought it would be intertesting (well, interesting for me, anyway) to crunch through the numbers and see how many people of this self-selected group have actually read each of the award-winners. Excluding the Stoker winners, which seemed to have far less take-up, and the Sidewise Awards, which only one person listed, the results for the other 169 books are as follows (top twenty-ish above the cut tag, and the three which nobody had read below it):

32 (1st): Frank Herbert, Dune

29 (2nd): Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

28 (joint 3rd): Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

27 (5th): J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

26 (joint 6th): Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
William Gibson, Neuromancer

25 (joint 8th): Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Larry Niven, Ringworld
Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

24 (joint 12th): Connie Willis, Doomsday Book
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

23 (joint 14th): David Brin, Startide Rising
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

22 (joint 16th): David Brin, The Uplift War
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

21 (19th): Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

20 (joint 20th): Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

( others, all the way down to... )

0 (joint 166th): Carol Emshwiller, The Mount
Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife
Stepan Chapman, The Troika

I confess that I have never heard of either Louise Erdrich or Stepan Chapman, let alone their respective award-winning novels. Howver, I have read the top forty or so. The first I haven't yet read is China Mountain Zhang, followed by Little, Big and Mythago Wood, and then Thomas the Rhymer and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

That Dune came out on top overall is not so very surprising. I'm pleased by Le Guin's performance. Slightly surprised that Flowers for Algernon did not do even better - I thought it was a standard high-school assignment (certainly the most-visited page of my own website) but perhaps if you strictly count the novel rather than the original short story the count goes down. Other interesting data there as well, but I have been working on this for long enough.

(Thanks very much to agrumer, apotropaism, badgerbag, blue_condition, http://browriter.blogspot.com, burger_eater, communicator, ellen_fremedon, feyandstrange, firecat, gummitch, hollowpoint, jodawi, jry, kangeiko, katlinel, kerravonsen, ladyoflight2004, lenora_rose, linda_joyce, marykaykare, nhw, nickeyb, pariyal, peake, pigeonhed, sbisson, shsilver, sooguy, spacedoutlooney, tensegrity, tinaconnolly, vierran45 and especially truepenny for putting it into its standard form - user names link to the relevant entry in each case.)

A few weeks back (maybe even a few months back) someone asked me, or else I saw a question posed to the internet at large, about the World SF Writers Conference held by Harry Harrison in Ireland in 1978 and whether there was any information about it on-line.

While looking for something else today, I discovered that John Brosnan's contemporary write-up of it has been republished here. (Presumably not by Brosnan himself, as the livejournal entry is dated September and he died last April.)

If you asked me the question, sorry for not remembering who you are and replying directly.

[Edited to add: I see the person responsible for putting it online is kimhuett.]

F astonished me yesterday, on our way to cygny's, by announcing: "On the planet Mercury, there is no day or night. Mercury always has the same side facing the Sun. This side is always light and hot, the other always dark and cold."

I gently put him right, and further investigation revealed that he was quoting word for word from Marie Neurath's Let's Look at the Sky, passed on to us by his grandmother, who won it as a prize in a Farmer's Weekly competeition, shortly after it was published in 1952. I am looking through the book now, to find out what other out-of-date information from over half a century ago is corrupting our child's mind.

Having said that, he had in fact read somewhere else that Mercury's year is 88 days and its rotation period is 59 days; he just hadn't quite realised that this was inconsistent with the information from the first book, which is, of course, written in terms a six-year-old finds easier to understand, as well as being a better story, just wrong (as we have known since 1965).

Some of the sf stories of yesteryear depended on Mercury's supposed behaviour - the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction lists Clifford D. Simak's "Masquerade" (1941), Isaac Asimov's "Runaround" (1942), Lester Del Rey's Battle on Mercury (1956), Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956), Mission to Mercury (1965) by Hugh Walters, Alan E. Nourse's "Brightside Crossing" (1956) (of course), Larry Niven's "The Coldest Place" (1964), and Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan (1959), not to mention Lionel Fanthorpe's first published book, Menace from Mercury (1954); add to that, from Wikipedia, Asimov's "The Dying Night" (1952), Arthur C. Clarke's Islands in the Sky (1956) and Ray Cummings' Tama of the Light Country and sequel Tama, Princess of Mercury (Wikipedia says 1966 but in fact first published in 1930-31).

That's a dozen novels and short stories in the quarter century from 1940 to 1965 (not even counting the Cummings efforts). I have to say I can't think of anything like that number of stories and novels set on the planet, published in the 40 years since we found out what its real rotation period is (David Brin's Sundiver, Ckarke's Rendezvous with Rama; Wikipedia mentions Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mercurial" (1986) and Blue Mars (1996) and, barring TV and film, that's it). The old story may not have been true, but it was perhaps more beautiful.

(Hmm. Anyone remember Kinvig? Never mind.)

(PS - did you know that the entire Mariner 10 book is on-line thanks to NASA?)

Finally got around to reading the various thought-provoking pieces linked to by ninebelow here.

Myself, I read sf primarily for escapism. I have an intellectually demanding day-time job dealing with horrible things happening in the world. I want a hobby that takes me out of myself a bit and isn't too demanding. If a writer produces material that is a bit more difficult, or requires a bit more concentration, to appreciate it, then I want to be additionally rewarded; I am normally reading to relax at the end of the day when my energy levels are low. That makes me a bit more unforgiving of experimental literary techniques than perhaps I should be.

I write about sf because I feel compelled to do so. It's not so much because of the community aspects of fandom (though they are increasingly important to me) but because it's a way of turning my hobby into easily quantifiable projects: this year's nominees, previous years' winners, all the joint Hugo and Nebula winners (that last a long-term project which I have been working on for five and a half years now). I also have found that since I resolved to write up every book I read (whether sf or not) on this blog, I have been reading in a more profound way, with at the back of my mind the thought that I must find something to say about what I have read once I finish.

Does this make me a critic? I don't know. I don't come to anything as a neutral reader; as well as not liking difficult writing, I am easily bored by military sf and have a distaste for horror, and am easily pleased by tales of time-travel and alternate history.

( the cases in point )

Thoughts towards a future web page for my site:

I just read the first story in Gardner Dozois' 2004 collection - Pat Murphy's "Inappropriate Behaviour" - and it is about a girl with autism. Two of the stories in the Hartwell/Cramer collection also featured brilliant academics with autism - Terry Bisson's "Scout's Honour" and Brenda Cooper's "Savant Songs".

There are a number of other sf stories, some well-known, others less so, featuring autism. Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark of course won the Nebula Award two years ago, and deals specifically with a "cure". Most of the others feature an autistic child as the centre of some almost (or even explicitly) magical events: Mary Doria Russell's Children of God, Zoran Živković's short story "The Whisper", Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip, William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties. I also rather liked Brenda Clough's "Tiptoe, On a Fence-Post" where the autistic child was marginal to the story but gave the author an excuse for some sensitive character-building.

Other sf stories that I understand feature autism which I haven't read: Greg Egan, Distress; Dean Ing, "Portions of this Program…"; Diane Duane, A Wizard Alone; James B. Johnson, Daystar and Shadow; Megan Lindholm, The Reindeer People and Wolf's Brother; Jane Lindskold, "Brother To Dragons, Companion To Owls"; Charles Sheffield, Putting Up Roots; Elizabeth Hand, "Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol" and Winterlong; Jeffery D. Kooistra, Dykstra's War; Ian Watson, "The Boy Who Lost an Hour, the Girl Who Lost Her Life"; Kathleen Anne Goonan, Light Music; Kathryn Lasky, Home Free; Celia Rees, The Truth Out There; Mira Rothenberg, Children with Emerald Eyes; Eric Brown, New York Dreams; apparently the new Thomas Covenant series; Kathleen Burns, Something's At My Elbow; Lucius Shepard, "The Emperor"; Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, "The Meeting"; Paul Park, "The Breakthrough"; Robert Silverberg, Thorns; Alan E. Nourse, The Universe Between.

Anyone want to particularly recommend (or dis-recommend) any of those, or add to the list? I don't know for sure if autism is a subject which crops up more often in sf than in "mainstream" literature, but it seems rather likely; I can't think of any non-genre novel dealing with it apart from Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but then I don't read an awful lot of non-genre fiction.

For the sf writer, different ways of perceiving and sensing the world are of profound interest, and the enigma of the autistic experience is perhaps an attractive topic. (Of course, this tends to mean that the autistic characters are rather bunched towards the high-functioning end of the spectrum.) For a writer with personal experience of autism, projecting this crucial experience into a fantasy or far-future milieu may also be an important part of the coping mechanism. (I find it interesting that writer Nick Hornby, who has an autistic son, has never used autism in his fiction, which is set in the gritty contemporary world.)

shame, by Pam Noles

( extract )

And

As We Mean To Go On, by Kelley Eskridge & Nicola Griffith

( extract )

The first on sf and race; the second on being two writers in a relationship. Both excellent and thought-provoking reading.

( SF (79) )

( Comics (8) )

( Other fiction (10) )

( Non-fiction (40) )

* = reread

Copying ninebelow's statistics:

Short story collections and anthologies: 15 - 19% of my sf reading, 11% of my total reading
Non-fiction: 40 - 29%
SFnal - 79 fiction, plus 8 non-fiction (and Bone; not so sure about Clowes) = 64% of my total reading.
By women (counting books edited by women or where at least one named author of several is a woman): 28 = 20%

I am struck that apart from the non-fiction tally, these figures are very close to ninebelow's.

Best books of the year in each category:
( Non-fiction )
Non-sf fiction: ( Read more... )
Comics: ( Read more... )
SF: With great difficulty I have pruned the list down to thirteen best books, excluding rereads, here listed in no particular ranked order:
( Read more... )

I'm surprised to see that I don't appear to have picked up Dozois' or Hartwell's Best of 2004 collections. They did come out, didn't they? And I just missed them somehow.

Just been re-watching Dopplegängland, surely one of the greatest Buffy episodes.

Giles: She was truly the finest of all of us.
Xander: Way better than me.
Giles: (nods decisively) Much, much better.

Buffy: Giles, planning on jumping in with an explanation any time soon?
Giles: Well, uh... something... something, um, very strange is happening.
Xander: Can you believe the Watcher's Council let this guy go?

Anya: Vampires. Always thinking with your teeth.

Willow: (appalled) It's horrible! That's me as a vampire? (Angel closes the door) I'm so evil and... skanky. (aside to Buffy, worried) And I think I'm kinda gay.
Buffy: (reassuringly) Willow, just remember, a vampire's personality has nothing to do with the person it was.
Angel: (without thinking) Well, actually... (gets a look from Buffy) That's a good point.

Percy: Okay, so I did the outline for the paper on Roosevelt. (hands it to her) It turns out there were two President Roosevelts, so I didn't know exactly which one to do, so I did both.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I really enjoy these stories of playing with people's identity, including also of course Buffy 4:16, Who Are You. (Perhaps this is some kind of counter balance for my animus agains anthropomorphic robots.) For that reason, among others, I enjoyed the last Doctor Who novel I read; also Zelazny's little-known Today We Choose Faces has always been among my favourites of his novels, though it seems to be a minority taste. Any more recommendations along the same lines?

The top 21 as scientifically determined by cassiphone:

The Earthsea Trilogy - Ursula Le Guin
Ash - Mary Gentle
Cyteen - CJ Cherryh
Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone - JK Rowling
The Warrior's Apprentice - Lois McMaster Bujold
Nylon Angel - Marianne de Pierres
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
Slow River - Nicola Griffith
1610: A Sundial in the Grave - Mary Gentle
Deep Secret - Diana Wynne Jones
Dark Lord of Derkholm - Diana Wynne Jones
China Mountain Zhiang - Maureen McHugh
Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link
Wildseed - Octavia Butler
Oryx & Crake - Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Doomsday Book - Connie Willis
Dragonflight - Anne McCaffrey
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Tam Lin - Pamela Dean
The Lioness Quartet - Tamora Pierce

She has a long list too.

I see that Harlan Ellison has been named the next SFWA Grand Master. I'm not an especial fan of his, but I predicted last year that he was the obvious next candidate (admittedly I made the same prediction the previous year when the title went to Robert Silverberg).

So, who will be next? The list of award-winning authors, excluding those who are deceased or who are already Grand Masters, ranked by the length of time since they won their first Hugo or Nebula, looks like this (first 11, with date of birth - those who have been Worldcon guests of honor are asterisked)

1960 Hugo: Daniel Keyes (b. 1927)
1966 Nebula: Samuel R Delany* (b. 1942)
1967 Hugo: Larry Niven* (b. 1938)
1967 Nebula: Michael Moorcock* (b. 1939)
1968 Nebula: Kate Wilhelm* (b. 1928)
1968 Nebula: Alexei Panshin (b. 1940)
1971 Nebula: Katharine MacLean (b. 1925)
1972 Nebula: Joanna Russ (b. 1937)
1973 Nebula: Gene Wolfe* (b. 1931)
1973 Nebula: Vonda N. McIntyre (b. 1948)

McIntyre is much younger than the others, so I guess she's out of the running. I'm inclined to think that Keyes, Panshin and MacLean are excluded for not really having written very much. After that, it's a pretty interesting choice. All the others can reasonably claim to have been pretty influential in the field. I don't really envy SFWA having to make the choice for next year (if they choose to make the award at all), or the years to come.

The Guardian's list of top 20 geek books: bolding the ones I've read.

( no surprise )

There are many problems with this list, not least that all the authors are male. cassiphone is therefore seeking advice on what should be in the canon by and for Geek Girls. Will be interesting to see what she comes up with.

Just in case anyone reading this has not already seen it:

The SCI FICTION website has been publishing excellent science fiction stories, both old and new, since 2000. It is to stop publishing at the end of this year, alas. Some of its fans have had the excellent idea of compiling a tribute, by asking for volunteers to write an appreciation for each of the 320-odd stories on the site.

The first few of these have been done already - Pete Tillman's appreciation of the Nebula-winning "Goddesses", by Linda Nagata, Ben Peek's appreciation of "Jailwise", by Lucius Shepard, Jay Lake's substantial essay on "The Wages of Syntax", by Ray Vukcevich, and Lois Tilton's brief (but heartfelt) note on "The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode In On)", by Howard Waldrop. But there is still plenty of room for more. You could more or less pick any story and find you had something to say about it.

And if you just want to read the reviews as they come in, you can get them via ed_sf_project.

Am now reading Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett's take on "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and pondering the similarities and differences with Neil Gaiman's version from Sandman. The two of them have often tackled similar themes in different ways, witness Hogfather and American Gods.

And of course, both of them have anthropomorphised Death as a recurrent character who likes to wear black, with an extended family. Though if you look at the two pictures below, you may spot certain subtle differences in the way each author portrays the character.

Death, by Pratchett	Death, by Gaiman

See what I mean?

Via grahamsleight and Cheryl Morgan, the sad news that the SCI FICTION website is to stop publishing sf at the end of this year.

I have a weekly reminder to tell me to look at it, and never quite remember to unless someone jogs my memory, but Ellen Datlow has published a number of superb stories and I think has maintained an impressive level of quality overall, at least matching the print magazines and ahead of several of them. I hope someone does/has a backup archive.

From Bookslut:

75 questions for the budding fantasy writer.