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All the awards that’s fit to print

I found myself completely uninterested in genre awards this year, despite being nominated for two last year (and it’s not like I had anything eligible for any of this year’s awards anyway – well, my one published piece was a spoof coda to the Apollo Quartet, but it was probably unreadable unless you’d actually read the quartet). I suppose my indifference is partly a result of the lacklustre shortlists generated by the various awards last year. But there’s also the increasing disconnect between what the awards mean and the works they’re rewarding. Yes, yes, popular choice wins popularity contest, news at ten and all that. And, true, there’s always been a bit of personality cult about the popular vote awards, which is why so few people keep on winning so many awards, and currently it’s a different set of faces to those of ten or even twenty years ago. A more diverse set of faces, which is good, but given the size of the field these days it would not be unreasonable to expect more variety.

And then there’s the way social media has completely fucked up awards, not to mention the cutting back on promotion by publishers which has normalised the sort of grasping self-promotion bullshit, as epitomised by elegibility posts, that is now common. There may have been an element of awards going to people not to works in the past, but now it’s pretty much nakedly out there.

I suspect I’m not alone in my apathy. I saw almost no conversation about the BSFA Award longlist, and last year’s Clarke Award was notable for its lack of commentary…

Which neatly leads into a recent development which plans to address that last: the Clarke Award Shadow Jury, put together by Nina Allan and hosted online by the Anglia Rusking University’s Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy. Shadow juries are nothing new – hell, we even have a Shadow Cabinet in our government – although I think this is the first time it’s been done for a genre award. And it’s a really strong shadow jury – I actually know more people on it than I do on the actual Clarke Award jury – and I’m looking forward to seeing their thoughts on the books that have been submitted (there’s a list of submissions here).

A quick scan down that submission list, and I can see a number of interesting books… but I can also see a lot of commercial crap that I hope gets nowhere near the shortlist.

And speaking of shortlists… the BSFA Award shortlist has now been announced. And there are some… odd choices. (And they still haven’t sorted out whether it’s named for the year of elegibility or the year the award ceremony takes place. It’s fucked up at least two year’s worth of trophies in the past. It’s not difficult. Fix it.) I understand the BSFA has around 800 members (yes, I’m one of them), and few of them actually bother nominating or voting. I mean, I’m sure Adam Roberts: Critical Essays is an excellent book, but I doubt more than a handful of people have read it – and yet two of the essays in it have made the non-fiction shortlist. And I count six appearances of NewCon Press across the four shortlists.

But the big one is the novel shortlist, and it looks like this:

The Beckett is the third book of a trilogy, the first of which won the Clarke Award in 2013, and both books one and two were also shortlisted for the BSFA Award. The Chambers is also a sequel, and the first book seemed to make every English-language genre award shortlist in existence… except the BSFA Award. Europe in Winter is the third book of a trilogy, and both books one and two were previously shortlisted for the BSFA Award (and the Clarke Award). Sullivan has made the BSFA Award twice previously, in 2004 and 2011, and Occupy Me is her first sf novel since that 2011 nomination. Azanian Bridges is Wood’s first novel.

Quality of the various books aside, that’s an unadventurous shortlist. Seriously, two book threes from trilogies, of which all the previous installments were also shortlisted? True, some of those earlier volumes have also been picked by Clarke Award juries. Yes, I know, small pool of voters, large field, familiar names – and even faces, as half of the shortlist regularly attend the Eastercon (members of the convention also get to vote on the shortlist). And yes, the nominees are good people (and some of them are friends of mine). But I’m not voting for them, I’m voting for the work.

bsfa2012

The BSFA Award is a popular vote award, so I shouldn’t be all that surprised that the same old names keep on cropping up. I look to juried awards to give a better indication of what’s good in the genre in a particular year. But I also remember when the BSFA Award actually used to be a pretty good barometer of what was good in the British sf field in a year. Not so much for the short fiction category, that was always a bit of a crapshoot, but certainly the novel category. And now I find myself wondering: when did that stop being true? I don’t doubt the books shortlisted this year are good books – well, except for the Chambers, as I wasn’t at all impressed by A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – since I’ve read and enjoyed those earlier installments by Beckett and Hutchinson, and have heard good things about the Sullivan and Wood. But I can also see several novels on the longlist (see here) that were more than good enough to make the shortlist. Even then, only thirty-five novels were longlisted. Thirty-five! The Clarke Award submission list is eighty-six novels. (And only twenty-seven nominations in the BSFA Award short fiction category!).

I honestly don’t see the point of awards for short fiction anymore – I wrote as much in an editorial for Interzone back in 2015. I get that awards are a celebration, but what exactly are we celebrating? Back in the day, sf was a ghetto, and it was all reverse snobbery elitism. Awards were an affirmation of that. But it’s been open season on sf tropes now for several decades, and science fiction is still playing the same old game. And this during a period when the field has exploded, not only all over the internet, with way more fiction venues out there now than there were twenty or thirty years ago, but also serious efforts to bring non-Anglophone sf to Anglophone audiences. It’s almost becoming axiomatic that the only people reading genre short fiction these days are other writers of genre short fiction. Sf has always been self-fertilising, it’s one of the genre’s strengths, but that’s ridiculous.

They’ve tried revamping the BSFA Award a couple of times over the last few years, but I’m not convinced their changes have had much impact. For what it’s worth, I think they should drop the short fiction and non-fiction categories, institute a new award for non-fiction/criticism separate from the BSFA Awards, and limit the BSFA Award to best sf novel published in print in the UK and best piece of sf artwork to appear in print in the UK. But leave the definitions of genre up to the voters. No longlist or two-stage nomination process. Just keep it simple. December and the following January each year to nominate five novels and five pieces of artwork each. Top five in either category makes it to the shortlist. Then it’s business as usual: voting and an awards ceremony at the Eastercon. Let’s not just celebrate science fiction, let’s celebrate science fiction in the UK. And with the most visible forms of it – novels, which appear in book shops; and art, which can be plastered all over the internet. That sounds horribly Brexit-ish, which is not my intention at all – I voted Remain, and am hugely pissed off by all this Brexit shit – but the fact remains that when you’re addressing a parochial electorate it’s best to keep it parochial. And let’s not forget that authors from many other nations get published in the UK (although perhaps not as many non-Anglophone ones as we’d like).

I started out this post documenting my apathy toward genre awards, and ended up getting a bit excited about what they could be. And I guess it’s that disconnect, that sense of disillusionment, that fuels my annual awards annoyance. But in the world we have today, and all the shit that’s going to go down in 2017, praying for an asteroid strike is too much of a long shot. And, short of causing every Nazi newsaper in the UK to spontaneously combust, or Corbett and May to give the finger to the Nazi cabal pulling all the strings, we can at least do something positive in the world of science fiction and make a proper job of this celebration-type thing we call an award.


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Reading diary, #4

I need to catch up on documenting my reading, before this blog turns into a movie blog. So even though most of the books I’ve read recently have been for review elsewhere, I’m posting this. (And also, I promised the Hook Quartet to a friend and I want to get my thoughts on it written down before I mail the books to him.)

The Bridge, Pamela Frankau (1957). I read this as part of my informal project to read some postwar British women writers and I wrote about it here.

flowersFlowers in the Minefield, John Jarmain (2012). I forget where I stumbled across John Jarmain’s poetry – it was probably through his connection to the Cairo poets during WWII (Lawrence Durrell was also one, and the group are mentioned in Olivia Manning’s The Levant Trilogy). Wherever it was, I liked the samples I read enough to hunt down a copy of his posthumous collection, Poems – Jarmain was killed in 1944 – and even a copy of his one novel, Priddy Barrows, which I wrote about here. While Flowers in the Minefield claims to offer more than just Jarmain’s poetry – which is reason enough to buy it, of course – the ancillary material is not up to much. There’s a brief biography, and a few reminiscences by people who knew him. But the poems are the real content, and they’re as good now as they were in 1945 when they first saw print. Jarmain is not as well known, nor was he as prolific, as Keith Douglas, but I find his poetry better-tuned to my tastes. It was, in fact, Jarmain who led me to explore WWII poetry – where previously I had read only WWI poetry, and then mostly that by Wilfred Owen – and I now own several volumes on the topic. Recommended.

secret-history-omnibus-volume-3-9781608864423_hrThe Secret History Omnibus Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3, Jean-Pierre Pécau and Igor Kordey (2005 – 2010, trans. 2010 – 2014). Back in prehistory, twin sisters Reka and Aker, and their brothers Dyo and Erlin, are each given a rune by the tribe’s shaman to safeguard the runes from an attack by a tribe of… Neanderthals? The Secret History follows the four, who are now immortal, through human history, their various struggles, between themselves and against others, and their attempts to direct human history toward their own ends. During the fourteenth century, William of Lecce is born, and proves to have similar powers… and becomes their enemy (although Dyo occasionally fights on his side). Later, the  mythical city of Kor, located either in the Empty Quarter or another dimension, begins to influence human affairs. Pécau has done an extremely clever job of tying his story of secret magical combat by immortals into real history, but unfortunately the story skips about so much it’s often hard to figure out the actual narrative. This is not helped by Archaia’s decision to only translate and publish The Secret History and not the two pendant bandes dessinées, Arcanes majeur and Arcanes. They’re also some way behind – Volume 3, published last year, covers albums 15 to 20, but the series is actually currently up to 32. (Volume 3 was a recent purchase, incidentally, but I had to reread 1 and 2 before tackling it.) I suppose if I’m going to keep on reading bandes dessinées there’s little point in doing so in English – I should get the original French editions instead. Anyway, for all its faults I like The Secret History and plan to keep on reading it.

hook4Hook: Virility Gene, Tully Zetford (1975). I suspect Bulmer was hoping he’d be able to churn these out forever – the book is dedicated to Ted Tubb’s Dumarest, and that series managed 31 novels before DAW stopped buying them (and then only because Donald A Wollheim passed away). Fortunately for us, Virility Gene was the last we saw of Ryder Hook, and the novel’s open ending will remain forever open. Deciding which is the worst of the Hook quartet is a difficult call, but this one is possibly the frontrunner. Hook, and friends Shaeel and Karg, are travelling on a liner when they become embroiled in a plot to find the semi-mythical world where the Virility Gene can be found. It all goes a bit wrong, and Hook comes to in a lifepod, accompanied by Brett, an alien, and a dwindling supply of, er, supplies. Fortunately, they’re rescued in time. Hook gets a message to Shaeel – who gives “ver” destination as… Shyle, the planet where the Virility Gene is harvested (Shaeel is a Hermaphrodite, with pronouns to suit). On Shyle, there are lots of prospectors, but no one seems to know how or where the Virility Gene is harvested or manufactured or what – and the native Shylao guard the secret zealously. Zetford doesn’t even reveal what the Virility Gene actually is until around page 69 (of a 111pp novel). Apparently it’s an extremely potent aphrodisiac. Or something. Anyway, after various adventures, Hook finds himself in the secret compound where the Virility Gene is bought and sold to wealthy buyers. The point of Hook is that he’s a prototype Boosted Man, although he fell out with the programme and is now hunted by them (and the Boosted Men are a thoroughly bad lot). While Hook’s various implants (detectors, stuff to eavesdrop on comms, etc) work all the time, his super-strength and super-speed are only activated when he’s in the vicinity of an actual Boosted Man. But this time, his powers are, er, boosted to a degree he has never before experienced. He also meets a woman and it’s love at first sight between the two… And you can see where this is going, can’t you? Yup, to THE END… with Hook chasing after the love of his life, a Boosted Woman, and a story arc never to be resolved. And I almost forgot to mention the two inept thugs who set upon Hook called… Line and Synker (and from the description they promise to be regular characters); or indeed one of Synker’s lines of dialogue, which gives a pretty accurate flavour of the book’s prose – read it and weep:

“Oxymoron, Line! He’s only an eczema-sniffing spirochaete sap! You should be able to rubberise him before your first tutorial!”

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers (2014). I read this for review for Strange Horizons. It’s been getting quite a bit of press this, a self-published novel which has been shortlisted for the Kitschies and has also been picked up by Hodder. Of course, self-published works on genre awards shortlists are not exactly a new thing. I seem to vaguely recall one winning the BSFA Award a couple of years ago…

Chanur’s Homecoming, CJ Cherryh (1986). The final book of the original Chanur saga – the actual final book, Chanur’s Legacy, didn’t appear until 1992. I read this for SF Mistressworks. A review will appear there in a week or two.


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BSFA and Kitschies – the shortlists

Two genre shortlists announced in one day, UK ones too. First, the BSFA Awards, for which I nominated works (see here), and usually vote. The four shortlists look like this:

Best novel
The Race, Nina Allan (NewCon Press)
Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge, (Macmillan)
Europe in Autumn, Dave Hutchinson (Solaris)
Wolves, Simon Ings (Gollancz)
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit)
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North (Orbit)
Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor (Hodder)
The Moon King, Neil Williamson (NewCon Press)

Well, three of my nominations made it – Hutchinson, North and Williamson. The Allan and and Leckie are no surprise – the first because it’s probably the most talked-about UK sf novel of 2014 among the people who nominate for the BSFA, and the Leckie because of Ancillary Justice‘s huge success. Also, is this the first time the BSFA Award has more women than men on the novel shortlist? I think it might well be. The large shortlist does, however, suggest that the actual number of nominations to make it through were somewhat low. Which, if true, is in one respect slightly worrying, but also heartening in that it demonstrates last year was pretty damn good for UK sf novels.

Best short fiction
‘The Honey Trap’, Ruth EJ Booth (La Femme, Newcon Press)
‘The Mussel Eater’, Octavia Cade (The Book Smugglers)
Scale Bright, Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Immersion Press)

None were nominated by myself. In fact, I’ve read none of them. An all-female list, too. The less said about Sriduangkaew’s presence, the better.

Best non-fiction
Call and Response, Paul Kincaid (Beccon Publications)
‘Deep Forests and Manicured Gardens: A Look at Two New Short Fiction Magazines’, Jonathan McCalmont (Ruthless Culture)
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers and the First World War website, Edward James, ed.
‘The State of British SF and Fantasy: A Symposium’, Strange Horizons
Greg Egan, Karen Burnham (University of Illinois Press)

Surprisingly, two of my nominations made it through – Kincaid and Strange Horizons – and while I nominated another blog post from Ruthless Culture, it’s good to see McCalmont getting some recognition.

Best artwork
Cover of The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley, Richard Anderson (Angry Robot Books)
Cover of Bête by Adam Roberts, Blacksheep (Gollancz)
The Wasp Factory sculpture, Tessa Farmer
Cover of Wolves by Simon Ings, Jeffery Alan Love (Gollancz)
Cover of Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall, Andy Potts (Egmont)

Another surprise: two of my choices made it onto the shortlist. I didn’t attend Loncon3, so I didn’t see the Wasp Factory sculpture. Blacksheep won the BSFA in 2013, for the cover of… an Adam Roberts novel (and this is Blacksheep’s third time on the shortlist with a Roberts cover). The Mirror Empire has been much discussed since its publication, although I admit I can’t see the appeal of its cover art. And I see there’s now a hardback edition of Mars Evacuees (US, perhaps?), with much inferior cover art.

Congratulations to all the nominees, and I know who I hope will win each category.

The other UK genre award announced today is the Kitschies, a juried award, which also has four categories: Red Tentacle (novel), Golden Tentacle (debut novel), Inky Tentacle (cover art) and, new this year, Invisible Tentacle (“natively digital” fiction). The shortlists look like this:

The Red Tentacle
Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor (Hodder & Stoughton)
Grasshopper Jungle, Andrew Smith (Egmont)
The Peripheral, William Gibson (Viking)
The Way Inn, Will Wiles (4th Estate)
The Race, Nina Allan (NewCon Press)

I’ve read only the Allan and I didn’t think it quite gelled as a novel – which was why I didn’t nominate it for the BSFA.

The Golden Tentacle
Viper Wine, Hermione Eyre (Jonathan Cape)
The Girl in the Road, Monica Byrne (Blackfriars)
Memory of Water, Emmi Itäranta (Voyager)
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers (self-published)
The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara (Atlantic Books)

I’ve heard of the Byrne and Itäranta, but the others didn’t even ping on my radar. The Guardian is making a big thing of a self-published novel being shortlisted for the award, conveniently forgetting that a self-published novel won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel in Australia last year and a self-published novella won the BSFA in 2013. Oh well, yesterday’s news and all that.

The Inky Tentacle
Cover of The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin, X (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Cover of A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar, Ben Summers (Hodder & Stoughton)
Cover of Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, Emily Carroll and Sonja Chaghatzbanian (Faber and Faber)
Cover of The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber, Rafaela Romaya and Yehring Tong (Canongate)
Cover of Tigerman by Nick Harkaway, Glenn O’Neill (William Heinemann)

The only one of these I own is the Tidhar, and  didn’t really like the cover (I liked the book, though). The Faber and Harkaway I’ve seen.

The Invisible Tentacle
@echovirus12 (Twitter fiction), created/curated by Jeff Noon (@jeffnoon), Ed (@3dgriffiths), James Knight (@badbadpoet), violet sprite (@gadgetgreen), Richard Biddle (@littledeaths68), Mina Polen (@polen), Uel Aramchek (@ThePatanoiac), Graham Walsh (@t_i_s_u), Vapour Vox (@Wrong_Triangle)
Kentucky Route Zero, Act III, Cardboard Computer
80 Days, Inkle Studios
Sailor’s Dream, Simogo

Again. congratulations to all the nominees.