Here are my photos from the city of Épinal, which bills itself as the Home of Comics.
Today’s show mainly features small businesses talking about how they are coping with Lockdown.
I started with Tara from Talk to the Rainbow, a new psychotherapy service catering to members of marginalised communities. Understandably, they are in a lot of demand right now, but are having to learn to do therapy remotely.
Next up were Graham and Esmerelda from My Burrito, who seem to be doing OK on remote ordering, but are having a lot of trouble with Deliveroo. If you can order your food via a different delivery service then they, and many other restaurants, will be very grateful.
Finally I talked to Dan from Storysmith Books, who are finding that people’s interest in reading has not waned, and may even be increasing.
For the final segment of the show I had a chat with Kevin about this year’s Hugo finalists. We didn’t manage to cover all of the categories, but hopefully we will have generated some interest in the Awards. Plus it was a chance for me to point out how female-dominated they Hugos are these days.
You can find the show on the Ujima Listen Again service.
The playlist for today’s show was:
The results of this year’s Otherwise (formery Tiptree) Award have been announced. The winner is Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. The Honor List is as follows:
I’m not familiar with Emezi’s work at all, but clearly I should be. Nor do I know much about the short fiction (the Hurley and Motoya are both collections). I have reviewed The Calculating Stars and The Deep. I reviewed Fire Logic and Earth Logic back in Emerald City and loved them both. Both books won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Now that all four books are out I have been meaning to re-read the entire series, but of course I have no time. Meg Elison won the Philip K Dick Award with The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, the first volume in the trilogy that The Book of Flora concludes. I have The Book of Flora on my TBR pile, and it has just got a boost up towards the top.
I am, of course, delighted to see so many works with trans themes on the list.
Today has been Publication Day for Unjust Cause, which means that you can now buy the ebook from our store. Our authors make more money if you buy direct. Also we give you both the ePub and Mobi, DRM free. Please buy from us rather than that big river place if you can.
There is going to be a new free short story going up tomorrow. This one is by me. I don’t normally push my own fiction, but I have good reason this time. All will be explained tomorrow.
Because I was busy I missed the Hugo Finalists announcement last night. I gather from Twitter that most people are very pleased, which is a relief. Personally I’m pleased to note that there are at least 6 trans people on the ballot. I’m also really pleased to see that all of the nominees for Fan Writer are first-timers. That shows that the field is really healthy.
Of course the big question will be whether a man manages to win a fiction award this year. It won’t happen in Novel because all six finalists are women. Ted Chiang, of course, has an excellent chance of winning. I will laugh myself silly if the only man who wins is Yoon Ha Lee.
Aside from pushing the new book, and the radio show, today has been more day job. I have no idea what is happening in the outside world, but I’m assuming that if the PM had died I would have heard about it.
Today has been mainly day job. Tomorrow probably will be as well, though I will be on the radio as well thanks to the magic of pre-records.
It is also Hugo Day. The announcement of the finalists is due to start in under an hour. I won’t be able to watch as I have work to do.
The outside world continues to be grim, and social media has descended into poltical point-scoring so I’m mostly avoiding it.
As most of you will have heard by now, this year’s Eastercon has finally been cancelled. That must be a huge relief to the organisers who were potentially on the hook for the cost of the event if it hadn’t been possible for the hotel to claim on insurance for the cancellation. It is a risky business running a convention in the UK, because creating a corporate shield is much harder than it is in the USA.
However, this now raises the question of what happens with the BSFA Awards. Thankfully the folks at the BSFA are well on top of things. It is now possible to vote online, as long as you are a BSFA member or had an Eastercon membership. Full details here. Don’t forget to vote for Juliet. (What, biased, me?)
The latest issue of Salon Futura went online at the weekend. Here’s what you can find in it:
I guess I should remind you that Salon Futura is eligible for the Best Fanzine category in the Hugos. Not that I need another Hugo, but I do want you all to vote in the Fanzine category. If I do get on the ballot I suspect it will increase interest in the category.
I am a very proud publisher today. Getting The Green Man’s Heir on the short list for the Bristish Fantasy Awards was a pleasant suprise, but something I thought had a chance of happening. Getting The Green Man’s Foe on the short list for this year’s British Science Fiction Association Awards is veering into “beyond wildest dreams” territory. I mean, just look at the company the book is keeping:
All of the other books on that list are on the Locus Recommended Reading List. That is pretty special company to be keeping.
Congratulations are also due to Ben Baldwin for the cover, and to Toby Selwyn who edited the book.
So I guess I might have to be at Eastercon after all, though I will be very jet lagged because I’ll be fresh off a plane from British Columbia.
In the meantime, if you want a copy of The Green Man’s Foe, there are links here. If you are buying the ebook, Juliet gets most money if you buy direct from Wizard’s Tower. You’ll also be able to get copies from me in person at Foyles, Bristol later this month, and at Swecon in March.
I’m sure that no one is unduly surprised that Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth won this year’s Crawford Award. Well, apart from the silly people who insist that because it is set in the future and has spaceships it can’t be fantasy, even though it is a story about sword fighting and necromancy.
As you may know, I am part of the group of people that the IAFA Awards Committee consults with regarding the Crawford. We are not exactly a jury, and the makeup of the group varies from year to year depending on who is available. It is a huge honour to take part, and my thanks are due especially to Gary K Wolfe who administers the whole thing.
It was a special joy to have Mimi Mondal as part of the group this year. She has a very different perspective to offer, and got us reading books we would not otherwise have heard of.
There are more details about the award at Locus. Commiserations are due to Alix E Harrow whose The Ten Thousand Doors of January put up a very valiant fight. We don’t often specifically name a runner up.
Anyway, congratulations Tamsyn. I’m very much looking forward to the sequel, and to seeing Gideon on the Hugo ballot in Wellington.
This time last year I was telling you about this fabulous book which I had the honour to make a small contribition to. Most of the work was done by the amazing Ardel Haefele-Thomas, but part of the plan for the book was to have a whole lot of “voices from the community” contribitions. One of those was me, talking about trans Romans.
Since then the book has been quietly on sale. Ardel and I did an event at Gay’s the Word in London late last year. Then I hadn’t thought to much more about it. But this morning I awoke to the amazing news that the American Libraries Association had voted it one of their top 10 queer books of 2019. They normally pick 5 works of fiction and 5 of non-fiction. And that means that Ardel’s little book (well, rather hefty book actually) is on the same list as books by Marlon James, Tamsyn Muir, Carmen Maria Machado and Samantha Shannon.
Which is awesome!
I’m absolutely delighted for Ardel. I’ll be seeing them in Canada in April at the trans history conference. I suspect that a few other contributors will be there. There might be a little celebrating.
The lovely people at Vector asked me if I wanted to do an article looking back on the decade. This gave me the opportunity to crunch some Hugo data. The results are really quite remarkable. If you take a look here you will see why I titled the article, “The Decade That Women Won”.
I should dedicate that article to Joanna Russ. I wish that she was still alive to see it. We still have a long way to go, but the fight is not impossible.
The British Science Fiction Association has released their long lists for awards for works published in 2019. I’m deighted to note that The Green Man’s Foe features twice on the lists. Juliet McKenna is listed for the novel, and Ben Baldwin for the cover. There is, of course, a long way to go yet. There are two more rounds of voting to go before they end up with winners. But hey, this is unexpected and much appreciated success for Wizard’s Tower. I am really pleased.
Unless you have been avoiding social media, you will probably know that Hugo Award voting is now open for this year. If you are eligible to vote you should have had email from CoNZealand explaining how to nominate. If you haven’t then you should contact them.
As a reminder, here’s my eligbility:
The only one I’m really concerned about is Fanzine, and that’s only because participation in the category was very low last year and I’m hoping to encourage people to take an interest in it again. If you have a fanzine that you think is eligible, let me know and I’ll tell my readers about it.
Well this is embarrassing. When I did my Hugo Eligibility Post last week I completely forgot one of the stories I had published this year. That story was “The Poet’s Daughter” in Rainbow Bouquet from Manifold Press. I have updated my original post to take account of that.
Not that I expect to get anywhere near the final ballot for either of them, but if you are going to do an eligibility post you might as well get it right.
It is that time of year again, so what have I been up to in 2019?.
Firstly I have published two Short Stories. They are:
Secondly, as I have now published four issues, Salon Futura is eligible in Fanzine.
Thirdly, as I write most of Salon Futura myself, I am eligible in Fan Writer.
For those just catching up on all this, the main reason why I am tossing my hat into the fan awards ring again, despite having plenty of shiny rockets to keep me company, is that interest in the Fanzine category has been waning of late. I’m hoping to boost participation. If you have a fanzine and want people to nominate it, let me know and I will signal boost for you.
(This post was updated on Dec. 9th to add the second short story.)
My first guest on today’s radio show was Kate MacDonald of Handheld Press, a wonderful local publisher based in Bath. Kate will be familiar to people on the UK SF&F circuit as she was at FantasyCon and BristolCon. She doesn’t just publish SF&F, but when she does it is pretty spectacular. You will have heard me enthusing about her Vonda McIntyre reissue, and she has had great success with a Nicola Griffith book. On the show we talked about a book by Rose Maculey which inspired Brave New World. John Clute gets a starring role in the story of how Kate got to publish that one. And if we’d had more time we’d have talked about the new Sylvia Townsend Warner book, Of Cats and Elfins, which has a Greer Gilman introduction and a Neil Gaiman front cover blurb.
That was hard to top, but for the second section of the show I welcomed Nick Young from Creative Youth Network and two wonderful young actors who will be performing in The Edge, a play about the dangers of reality TV. The play is written by my friend Edson Burton, and will be staged at Colston Hall later this month. As the advertising says, it will be an immersive live performance. You’ll have to listen to the interview to find out just how clever they have been.
In part three I welcome Lowie Trevena, the new LGBT+ Affairs correspondent of Bristol 24/7 to talk about the upcoming Trans Pride South West. Lowie did a preview of the event for the paper yesterday, and we went a lot more into detail on that. We also talked about what it means to be a non-binary person, and how non-binary does not mean androgynous.
Finally I re-ran parts of my 2014 interview with Tobias Buckell to celebrate his win (along with Paulo Bacigalupi) in the World Fantasy Awards last weekend. Their book, The Tangled Lands, won the Best Collection catageory. In the 2014 piece Tobias and I talk about hurricanes in the Caribbean, climate change, and some interesting regional politics that allowed Tobias to create a unified Caribbean state for some of his work.
You can listen to the show here.
The playlist is as follows:
One of the fun features of the late, lamented SF Signal was the Mild Meld column, in which various people were invited to opine independently on some topic. I participated in several of them and was always happy to do so if I had something worth saying.
I am pleased to report that Mind Meld now has a new lease of life. It has moved across to Nerds of a Feather where it is once again edited by Paul Weimer. The debut column asks people to name their favourite Hugo-winning novel. If you want to know which book I picked, you’ll need to read the column.
As a hint, Charlie Jane Anders and I picked the same book, so we must be right, yes?
The annual European Science Fiction Society Awards were presented as part of the closing ceremony of TitanCon yesterday. Congratulations are due to Carolina Gómez Lagerlöf for getting through the entire suite of awards in under 20 minutes, and to Peadar O’Guilin who shouldered most of the burden of hosting the event as Pat Cadigan has Con Crud.
The full list of award winners, as per Awards Administrator Carol Connolly, is as follows:
European Grand Master : Ian McDonald (United Kingdom)
HALL OF FAME
Best Author : Charles Stross (United Kingdom)
Best Artist Nicolas FRUCTUS (France)
Best Magazine : WINDUMANOTH (Spain)
Best Publisher : Future Fiction (Italy)
Best Promoter : Petra Bulić (Croatia)
Best Translator : Mihai-Dan Pavelescu (Romania)
The ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS:
Best Work of Fiction : The Spire Trilogy, by Laurent GENEFORT (France)
Best Work of Art : Daniel Egneus’ Cover for Neil Gaiman (Sweden)
Best Fanzine : Find a Lumberjack/НайдиЛесоруба (Russia)
Best Internet Publication, other than a fanzine : ORIGEN CUÁNTICO (Spain)
Best Dramatic Presentation : Game of Thrones (Croatia, Iceland, Malta, Spain, United Kingdom)
Best Work For Children : Begone the Raggedy Witches by Celine Kiernan (Ireland)
The CHRYSALIS AWARDS
Croatia : Dalen Belić
France : Floriane SOULAS
Ireland : Sarah Davis Goff
Italy : Franci Conforti
Russia : Andrey Kokoulin / Андрей Кокоулин
Spain : MAR GOIZUETA
Sweden : Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersén
Ukraine : Svitlana Taratorina
And the official website is here.
Obviously I am absolutely delighted for Ian and Charlie, both of whom I know well I am equally delighted for Petra Bulić and Francesco Verso. Petra has been busy in Croatian fandom, and internationally, as long as I can remember. Some of you may remember her from the Zagreb in 1999 Worldcon bid. Francesco is the person behind Future Fiction. As well as being a tireless champion of fiction in translation, he is also enormously kind. He helped out both Alisa Krasnostein and I by giving Twelfth Planet and Wizard’s Tower space on his table at Eurocon and Worldcon respectively.
The illustration above is one of the covers that Daniel Egneus did for Neil Gaiman. George presumably has rather a lot of awards for A Game of Thrones, but it is nice to be able to give out an ESFS Award that is the work of multiple European countries.
The Chrysalis Awards are encouragement awards for fans just starting out on their careers. I hope to hear a lot more from them in future.
This year’s Hugo Administrator, Nicholas Whyte, has written a lengthy blog post looking at some of the interesting features of this year’s voting. The thing that sticks out to me most obviously from the post is his comments on the Fanzine category.
The lack of enthusiasm for Best Fanzine is notable. We were surprisingly close to not giving a Best Fanzine award in both 2019 Hugos and 1944 Retro Hugos this year. The total first preference votes for Best Fanzine finalists other than No Award in both cases was 26.9% of the total number of votes cast overall (833/3097 and 224/834).
The threshold is 25%, so with 59 fewer votes for 2019 or 16 fewer votes for 1944 we would have had to No Award the category. Best Fanzine was also the category with the best percentage for No Award in the final runoff for both 2019 and 1944. (84.4% in 2019, 81.7% in 1944.)
On Twitter Aidan Moher has been calling for more appreciation for video fanzines. (Booktube appears to be the name for such things.) People making them certainly deserve recognition, but they belong in the Fancast category which is for:
Any generally available non-professional audio or video periodical devoted to science fiction, fantasy, or related subjects
Aidan also suggests collapsing Fanzine and Fancast to create a single category of fan-created works. Much as I would like to see fewer Hugo categories, I can’t see that happening. Neither the podcast people nor fanzine fandom would be happy.
There is, of course, also the question of what we are judging. Abi Brady mischieviously suggested that we also collapse Best Novel and BDP: Long Form, which makes the point very neatly. The trouble is that on the Internet it is very easy to mix media. Most “newspapers” already include video and podcasts in their websites. When I started Salon Futura I deliberately set out to include all three formats: text, audio and video.
But that doesn’t solve the problem. What shall we do about Poor Little Fanzine? Well for starters you should all be nominating Rachel Cordasco’s magnificent Speculative Fiction in Translation. Hopefully we can also get a lot of folks doing fanzine reviews between now and the next nominating deadline. And finally, Salon Futura is still a thing. It is no longer semi-pro because I can’t afford to pay people. The website desperately needs a re-vamp. If I were to put all my book reviews and con reports on there, and maybe give it some sort of issue structure, it would most definitely be a fanzine. And then you would all have to rush around finding other fanzines to vote for, because no one wants me winning any more Hugos, do they?
(And yes, it would still include audio. You can’t expect me to pass up the chance to mess with the category police.)
In the wake of Jeannette Ng’s fantastic acceptance speech, lots of people on social media are asking whether John W Campbell’s name can be removed from the Best New Writer award.
The problem with this is that the award does not belong to WSFS. We merely administer it on behalf of Dell Magazines, who were the original publishers of Asimov’s and Analog. So WSFS cannot change the name of the award without risking them withdrawing funding for it.
The most obvious way forward is for people to write to Dell asking them to change the name of the award. Changing the name to the Dell Magazines Award for Best New Writer would solve multiple problems. It would get us away from any association with Campbell. It would give proper recognition to Dell for their sponsorship. And it would make it much less necessary for WSFS to keep having to explain why the award is Not a Hugo. So get writing, people, and please be polite about it.
Of course it is entirely possible that the senior management at Dell will refuse to do so. If they do the next step would be to bring a motion to the Business Meeting asking that we strike the Campbell from the list of awards, and replace it with a Hugo Award for Best New Writer that has exactly the same rules. That would doubtless make Dell unhappy, and be awkward for anyone involved with Asimov’s and Analog, but if the company refuses to budge we don’t have much choice.
There should be no additional burden on Worldcon for converting the Campbell to a Hugo, except the cost of one more trophy. All of the administration, including eligibility checking, is already done by the Hugo Administrators.
Updates: I have corrected the spelling of Jeannette’s name. Profuse apologies for the error.
Also, if you come here thinking that arguing about the meaning of the word “fascist” can somehow absolve Campbell of all of the awful things he did then I will a) laugh at you; and b) not approve your comment because I will assume you are trolling.