Awards

This is embarrassing. Neal Barrett Jr. has been named author emeritus by the Science Fiction Writers of America. It's not him that is embarrassed. It's me. I call myself a science fiction fan and I've never heard of the guy and here he is getting such a major honour, but that might be the point.

The award is meant to honour writers who have made significant contributions to the field, but may no longer be active or have works that may no longer be widely known. Judging from the list of previous winners, I think that a lot of them qualify as obscure.

Previous winners were Emil Petaja, Wilson Tucker, Judith Merril, Nelson S. Bond, William Tenn, Daniel Keyes, Robert Sheckley, Katherine MacLean, Charles L. Harness, William F. Nolan, D.G. Compton, Ardath Mayhar and M. J. Engh. I recognize several of them and have even read many of their works, but wouldn't exactly call them household names.

One science fiction author who's name is known to just about all fans is Robert Heinlein. His name came up recently on SciFi Wire where they posted a letter he mailed to Forrest J. Ackerman  where he criticized self-righteous science fiction fans who did nothing to help America's war effort in World War II. It's interesting reading and I wish more of his correspondance would be published. I think it would be a great insight the man's thought processes.

It's not uncommon for the collected letters of famous literary figures to be published, but I wonder what will happen in the future. Will we see collected emails, tweets and blog posts get archived for study by scholars? I imagine we will, but it's going to be awfully hard to verify them, let alone locate them.

I see that China Miéville has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his book The City and the City, becoming the first person to win the award three times.

I guess that moves the book up as the next title on my to-read list which, at this point, consists of this year's Hugo nominees of which it is one.

A few weeks ago, an American author named C.L. Anderson won the Philip K. Dick Award. That's the award for the best science-fiction or fantasy novel to be released as a mass market paperback that year.

I have always been a keen follower of book awards as they are often, although not always, a decent barometer of quality and given the huge number of titles out there the awards lists act as a decent filter.

An even bigger honour than individual book awards is to be named in to the Science Fiction Museum and SF Hall of Fame. You can't go wrong reading many of their books. This year's entrants to the Hall are a deserving lot.

After checking off the awards winners, the next place to find worthy books to read is from book reviewers. Not many mainstream publications review SF, but a few still do.

I suspect most people these days get their recommendations from friends, real and virtual, or from non-traditional online sources, like this unlikely outlet, Daily Kos.

Where do you get your book recommendations from?

I'm sure James Cameron is bummed out that his movie Avatar didn't win an Oscar last night, but he's probably more annoyed at the steady stream of people who want to sue him for allegedly stealing their ideas for the script.

I suppose the sheer number of such allegations is proof that the plot is far from original and possibly one of the reasons it didn't grab the big prize, although it did get some recognition with wins for technical categories at the Academy Awards.

The latest person to sue Cameron is a Vancouver restaurateur who sent his script to several movie studios, including Cameron's.

Someone in China also took Cameron to court for the same reason, but the court overturned the lawsuit. I'm sure we'll see even more suits as the movie continues to rake in the dough.

As for the Avatar sequel, don't call it Avatar 2, says Cameron. For reasons that are obvious to anyone who has seen the movie, the word avatar no longer makes sense in a follow-up story.

Cameron's next project is to find a director for a remake he's written of the classic 60s film, Fantastic Voyage. It will be cool if that one is filmed in 3-D.

Even if neither Avatar or District 9 win the Academy Award for best picture, the one thing their nomination has done is to elevate the profile of science fiction among mainstream movie-goers.

That's got to be a good thing as it means even more science fiction movies will get made. The hope is that they will be as high quality as Avatar and District 9. Don't be worried that Hollywood is unleashing a Space Invaders movie on us soon. They'll always be crap like that.

It's possible that more mainstream movie directors might give their hand at helming science fiction films in coming months and years. Of course, that's nothing new. There have been other examples of big-name directors who have made sci-fi, although their success has been mixed.

As Oscar night approaches, it seems less likely that Avatar will win the big prize as there has been a torrent of backlash against the film. This article is a prime example. Considering the weird voting mechanism for this year's movie, there's a chance that a dark horse like District 9 could end up winning it, despite the steep odds.

And if you were wondering why the Na'Vi women have boobs, James Cameron explained it to a journalist who asked. It's because the audience for the movie is human. Duh.

The Hurt Locker keeps racking up best-picture awards at the expense of science fiction film Avatar. The latest was this weekend's BAFTA. If I was a betting man, I'd say that the odds of Avatar taking this year's Oscar as best picture seem pretty remote.

A best picture award that Avatar is more likely to win is the Saturn, which is the award handed out by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films. It's among this year's nominees, although it has been curiously slotted under the best fantasy film against such contenders as  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Lovely Bones, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Watchmen and Where the Wild Things. It is not running in the best science fiction film category that has nominees like Moon and Star Trek.

Maybe director James Cameron can shoot for the Nebula Award when he publishes the book prequel that he's planning. This year's nominees were recently announced and I can't say that I'm surprised to see no media tie-in novels on the list.

As you probably know by now, two science fiction movies were revealed Tuesday to be among the nominees for an Academy Award for best motion picture. Those films were Avatar and District 9.

They most likely slipped in there since the number of nominees was doubled this year from the usual 5 to 10.  I think a good indicator of the front-runners are the movies which also received nominations for best director. Avatar was the only one of the two that did so you can probably scratch District 9 off your prediction list.

Tellingly, Avatar has no other nominations for any acting awards or screenplay awards, but instead has nominations in the usual technical categories which are the bread and butter of genre movies at the Oscars. Star Trek and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince are the only other genre movies to get any recognition and they are for technical awards.

I think the lack of acting awards will probably work against Avatar and there just might be a backlash against James "King of the World" Cameron who already cleaned up at the Academy Awards the year he won it all with Titanic. My money is on the Hurt Locker.

Do you think Avatar has what it takes to win the Best Picture Award this year? Do you think any other genre movies were snubbed? What about Moon? It could have received a nod for best adapted screenplay or best actor for Sam Rockwell.

Don't forget to vote in our Oscar poll.

I'm glad to see that Joe Haldeman is being honoured by the SFWA with a Grand Master Award this year.  He's written some great books over the years and seems to be a genuinely nice guy. He deserves it. I'm glad to have met and chatted with him a bit at Worldcon last summer.

Another Worldcon attendee who is a nice guy and is also a Grand Master is the venerable Robert Silverberg. I've always thought that he was too often overshadowed by other big names in the genre and, despite the SFWA award, never truly got the recognition he deserved from fans. He recently spoke about his time writing for the pulps in this fascinating interview.

SF Signal recently posted a batch of video interviews with previous Grand Master winners. They are fascinating artifacts from the past.

One writer who surely deserves the Grand Master title, but never received it is none other than Philip K. Dick. The L.A. Times recently wrote about his last decade when he lived in Orange County, California. During that time he wrote some of his best books, including VALIS and A Scanner Darkly.

Interest in Dick's works seems to grow with each passing year. One of his short stories will soon be published as a graphic novel by Marvel.

I guess they don't hand out the award posthumously.

Something notable about the recently passed Hugo Awards was the new category for graphic stories. The first winner of this category was an online comic called Girl Genius. Not being much of a comic fan, I had never heard of it, but it was praised frequently during any comics discussion I sat in on.

They have an interesting approach to make money. They give away the comics online for free, but occasionally bound them in a print collection to sell. The audience for the online comic probably surpasses many of the print comics you can buy at your local comic-book store.

The creator of the comic couldn't attend the worldcon, but put an acceptance speech online in comic-book form.

Another overlooked winner was that for the fanzine category. It was taken this year by Electric Velocipede. Here's a short article about a writer who submits her work to the zine.

Those of you who have attended conventions know that costumes are a big part of the gathering. The first person to wear a costume at a worldcon was the dearly departed Forrest J. Ackerman who wore an outfit at the very first convention. This small-ish gallery from 1954 shows that the practice has been going on for a long time.

Worldcon is over, but I've been stumbling across links today related to the convention, so I thought I'd dump them here before moving on to other topics.

One of the highlights of the weekend was the conversation between Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman and Hugo-winning author Charlie Stross. I've already mentioned it in the comments elsewhere, but I am repeating myself for those that don't dig that deep. A transcript of the interview can be found here and you can even download audio of the event.

Krugman admits that he was inspired to get into economics because of science fiction, specifically Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

Wired wondered whether it's time for the Hugo to open up a videogame category. If makes sense to me. Now if only they'd dump the semiprozine category.

AMC trumpeted the Hugo win of John Scalzi, who blogs for them. He won in the non-fiction category.

We'll trumpet our own Thoth for winning an Aurora. Wait, we'll let him do it himself. Congratulations, Thoth for a job well done!

The winner of the Aurora for best novel was Edward Willett for his book Marseguro.

The Canadian Press reported on the event saying how it was a great showcase for Canadian talent in the science fiction field.

In case you missed the news, the SFWA announced this year's Nebula Award winners. The winning novel was Ursula K. LeGuin's Powers which is the third of a series of YA novels called the Annals of the Western Shore. I wonder why it wasn't on the ballot for the Norton award which is handed out at the same time for best YA genre novel.

More interesting to me are the Hugo winners. The Nebulas winners are usually worthy of the award, but there are times that they seem to select obscure books for the sake of being obscure.

I'm especially interested in this year's Hugos since I will be attending the Worldcon in Montreal and am eligible to vote for them. I intend to read as many of the nominees as possible and was pleasantly surprised to receive my electronic voting packet by email the other day which contained electronic versions of most of the nominated books, including four of the novels.

The packet was the brainchild of one of the best-novel nominees, John Scalzi. He recently listed the contents of the packet in his blog. Even if you don't want to attend the convention, you can pay for a supporting membership for $50 US which gives you the right to vote for the award and will qualify you for the collection of ebooks and stories. That's quite a deal.

The Hugo Awards committe is also looking for a logo that could be used to officially label books, DVDs and other items as award-winners. If you've got some design sense, they have opened up the logo design as a competition. The deadline for entries is the end of next month.