A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Just got back from the banquet and World Fantasy Award Ceremony.

Winners in BOLD:

Best Novel: This category had a tie.

The House of the Stag, Kage Baker (Tor)
The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford (Morrow)
The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HaperCollins; Bloomsbury)
Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)
Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin; Knopf)

Best Novella:

“Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel,” Peter S. Beagle (Strange Roads, DreamHaven Books)
“If Angels Fight,” Richard Bowes (F&SF 2/08)
“The Overseer,” Albert Cowdrey (F&SF 3/08)
“Odd the Frost Giants,” Neil Gaiman (Bloomsbury; Harper Collins)
“Good Boy,” Nisi Shawl (Filter House, Aqueduct Press)

Best Short Story:

“Caverns of Mystery,” Kage Baker (Tales of Dark Fantasy, Subterranean)
“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” Kij Johnson (Asimov’s 7/08)
“Pride and Prometheus,” John Kessel (F&SF 1/08)
“Our Man in the Sudan,” Sarah Pinborough (The Second Humdrumming Book of Horror Stories, Humdrumming)
“A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld 5/08)

Best Anthology:

The Living Dead, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Night Shade Books)
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Del Rey)
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008: Twenty-First Annual Collection, Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, & Gavin J. Grant, eds. (St. Martin’s)
Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, Ekaterina Sedia, ed. (Del Rey)
Steampunk, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Tachyon Publications)

Best Collection:

Strange Roads, Peter S. Beagle (DreamHaven Books)
The Drowned Life, Jeffrey Ford (HarperPerennial)
Pretty Monsters, Kelly Link (Viking)
Filter House, Nisi Shawl (Aqueduct Press)
Tales from Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan (Allen & Unwin; Scholastic)

Best Artist:

Kinuko Y. Craft
Janet Chui
Stephan Martiniere
John Picacio
Shaun Tan

Special Award, Professional:

Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant (for Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House)
Farah Mendelsohn (For The Rhetorics of Fantasy)
Stephen H. Segal & Ann VanderMeer (for Weird Tales)
Jerad Walters (for A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft)
Jacob Weisman (for Tachyon Publications)

Special Award, Non-Professional:

Edith L. Crowe (for her work with The Mythopoeic Society)
John Klima (for Electric Velocipede)
Elise Matthesen (for setting out to inspire and for serving as inspiration for works of poetry, fantasy, and SF over the last decade through her jewelry-making and her “artist’s challenges.”)
Sean Wallace, Neil Clarke, & Nick Mamatas (for Clarkesworld)
Michael Walsh (for Howard Waldrop collections from Old Earth Books)

Lifetime Achievement Awards went to Ellen Asher and Jane Yolen.

Jay Lake did a wonderful job of setting up the ceremony and the award presenters did a great job of keeping things moving. Every category was strong and there were no losers in any of these categories as all people, books, and stories were more than worthy of the nominations.

Congratulations to all the winners.

I spent most of today trying to catch up on all the TODO notes I have hanging about my workspace. Tomorrow is our last day to get stuff done for the November issues of SFRevu and Gumshoe Review before leaving for San Jose, CA and the World Fantasy Convention.

We leave in the middle of the night on, or early Thursday morning, depending on your point of view. We’ll be posting about the convention because we’re attending specifically to cover it and to talk with other people in the field (and hopefully get a chance to get to know the Capclave 2010 Guests of Honor).

I’m really looking forward to the convention but dreading the ordeal of airport security. I don’t do really well standing in lines and not being able to pace. For some reason I get dizzy and feeling weird if I have to stand in one spot for any length of time. It would be easier to face if I actually believed that all their security theater actually made me safer but let’s face it, most of us know it doesn’t make us safer, it just is so inconvenient that we start to believe it must have some positive result. Anyway, that’s just my opinion and I haven’t seen any thing to make me change it lately.

So, now I have to decide what to bring to read on the plane/in the airport/while waiting in long lines. I’ll most likely end up with the books that I haven’t gotten to yet and I’m supposed to review by November 1st. This month has been unreal in its ability to gobble up my time. More about time in another post.

The Washington Science Fiction Association is pleased to announce the winner of the 2009 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction: “The Absence of Stars: Part 1” by Greg Siewert, published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, edited by Edmund R. Schubert, Hatrack Publishing.

The award honors the efforts of small press publishers in providing a critical venue for short fiction in the area of speculative fiction. The award showcases the best original short fiction published by small presses in the previous year. An unusual feature of the selection process is that all voting is done with the identity of the author hidden so that the final choice is based solely on the quality of the story. The award consists of certificates for both the author and publisher as well as a trophy and $250 for the author.

The other finalists were:

“Drinking Problem” by K.D. Wentworth, published in Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams, Prime Books (August, 2008).”

Hard Rain at the Fortean Café” by Lavie Tidhar, published in issue 14 of Aeon Speculative Fiction Magazine, edited by Bridget McKenna.

“His Last Arrow” by Christopher Sequeira, published in Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Jeff Campbell and Charles Prepolec, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, (October, 2008).

“Silent as Dust” by James Maxey, published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, edited by Edmund R. Schubert, Hatrack Publishing.

“Spider the Artist” by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, published in Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams, Prime Books (August, 2008)

“The Toy Car” by Luisa Maria Garcia Velasco, (translated from Spanish by Ian Watson) published in April 2008 edition of Aberrant Dreams, edited by Joseph W. Dickerson.

The winner is chosen by the members of the Washington Science Fiction
Association and is presented at their annual convention, Capclave, held this year on October 16-18 in Rockville, Maryland. Present to accept their awards were Greg Siewert and Edmund R. Schubert, the editor of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.
Also present to accept their Honorable Mention certificates were: James Maxey for his story “Silent as Dust” and John Joseph Adams editor of Seeds of Change accepting for Nnedi Okarafor-Mbachu and K.D. Wentworth.

Capclave starts tomorrow. Today, we had to drive in to deliver the boxes of books filled with Reincarnations by Harry Turtledove (foreward by Sheila Williams). The book debuts at Capclave.

We also helped stuff the registration packets so they’ll be ready when registrations opens. We didn’t stay at the hotel tonight (or should I say this morning) since we have to drive back in tomorrow with the car filled with the SFRevu stuff for our table in the Dealers’ Room. It was a busy and active day but satisfying in that we got to talk to people and catch up on what’s happening in people’s lives, discuss Capclave items and what still needs to be done and what has been done, make some plans for next year based on this years experience, and to just appreciate being with friends.

If you’re in the DC area and enjoy science fiction and fantasy, check out Capclave. Conventions are a great place to meet people who enjoy the same reading material that you do. I’ll be posting daily coverage of the convention here — or as much coverage as I can and still manage a few hours sleep each night.

If you do come to Capclave — say hello if you spot my name tag or see the SFRevu table in the dealers’ room stop and say Hi.

The Washington Science Fiction Association is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2009 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction (for stories published in 2008):

“Drinking Problem” by K.D. Wentworth, published in Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams, Prime Books (August, 2008).

“Hard Rain at the Fortean Café” by Lavie Tidhar, published in issue 14 of Aeon Speculative Fiction Magazine, edited by Bridget McKenna.

“His Last Arrow” by Christopher Sequeira, published in Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Jeff Campbell and Charles Prepolec, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, (October, 2008).

“Silent as Dust” by James Maxey, published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, edited by Edmund R. Schubert, Hatrack Publishing, January 2008.

“Spider the Artist” by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, published in Seeds of Change, edited by John Joseph Adams, Prime Books (August, 2008)

“The Absence of Stars: Part 1” by Greg Siewert, published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, edited by Edmund R. Schubert, Hatrack Publishing, December 2008.

“The Toy Car” by Luisa Maria Garcia Velasco, (translated from Spanish by Ian Watson) published in April 2008 edition of Aberrant Dreams, edited by Joseph W. Dickerson.

The award honors the efforts of small press publishers in providing a critical venue for short fiction in the area of speculative fiction. The award showcases the best original short fiction published by small presses in the previous year (2008). An unusual feature of the selection process is that all voting is done with the identity of the author (and publisher) hidden so that the final choice is based solely on the quality of the story.

The winner is chosen by the members of the Washington Science Fiction Association (www.wsfa.org) and will be presented at their annual convention, Capclave (www.capclave.org), held this year on October 16-18th in Rockville, Maryland.

Tonight we watched Lady in the Water directed and written by M. Night Shyamalan and starring: Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeffrey Wright, Bob Balaban, Sarita Choudhury, along with many others.

I really enjoyed The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but Signs just left me wondering what the point was other than to be scary. Since Lady in the Water appeared to be marketed as horror, I decided to skip it. But, it popped up on Netflix as one of those “if you liked these you might want to try this” — so I did. Boy, am I glad I did.

Basically, the story takes place in an apartment building complex. Someone is swimming in the pool at night and the building/grounds manager, Cleveland Heep, keeps hoping to catch the swimmer. However, once he does, the swimmer submerges and doesn’t come up. He starts to run around the pool and slips and knocks himself out and falls into the pool. He comes to, to find the swimmer has carried him into his apartment — essentially saving his life. However, the swimmer is not who or what she seems. For the lady in the water is a narf named Story. It’s up the Heep to help her achieve her goal and to return to her world.

The entire movie is a story in a story in a story. The folk tale of the water people and the land people drives the film framing the entire narrative. But Heep must learn the story since Story can’t tell him anything about her world — it’s against the rules (as telling useful information so often is in these types of folk tales).

Most of us grew up listening to and then reading fairy tales and legends ourselves. Many of those stories teach morals or behaviors or lessons, a carry over from our oral traditions of years gone by. But the stories that resonant with us and that we remember vividly are those that touch our hearts. In Lady in the Water, Heep calls together a varied group that are touched by this story and want to believe. The film touches that part of us that wants to believe in good triumphing over evil, or at least breaking even. That each person can find their purpose and accept the responsibility of stepping up to be the person they were always meant to be.

We can’t all be princes or princesses in disguise and that wasn’t the point of those tales of orphans finding out they were special. It’s that each of us is special and not in the way we seem to have now, of everybody being special so that no one is. No, everyone is special, but were not all equally gifted — someone may be a gifted dancer and the rest of us can barely walk and talk at the same time without falling over. That’s doesn’t make us klutzy ones less, it just means that physical coordination is not our gift. Everyone, no matter how common and ordinary, has a purpose in life. Some of us might find that purpose and some of us may never make the effort to examine our own skills and abilities to find that uniqueness that makes us special.

In Lady in the Water, a group of ordinary people come together to help someone. They are told that only they can help, and that they have a role to play in saving Story. They may not totally believe in her story but they are willing to help. Nevertheless, they take a stand to help someone in need. A person they don’t know in a situation that is frankly unbelievable.

Should the human race be saved? Some days when I watch the news I wonder if maybe we should just give the Earth a break. On other days, I can see the spark that makes humanity definitely worth saving. It seems that crises and upheaval bring us together to help others in a way that peace and prosperity don’t.

Lady in the Water makes a clear case for the inherent goodness within the heart of man. It’s a movie that definitely will be bought and added to our watch many more times collection. I hope, if you haven’t seen it yet you’ll give it a try.

As many of you know, I’m a fan of science fiction and fantasy among other forms of entertainment and enjoyment.  Usually, hubby and I attend the World Science Fiction Convention which this year will be held in Montreal and is called (this year) Anticipation.  Members of the convention get to nominate and vote for the Hugo Awards which are given out at a ceremony held at the convention.  A friend pointed me to this great article on voting for the Hugo Awards. Kate Heartfield has raised many of the issues that have niggled at me for a long time.

We attend Worldcon every year that we can manage it. We attended our first as our honeymoon — we’d gotten married the weekend before the convention. Ever since, we celebrate our anniversary by attending the world science fiction convention and we’ve only missed three since that first one. We’ll be missing Anticipation this due to a variety of events including the current economic situation in the US. This year, because we were attending members of the last convention, we did nominate for the Hugo awards but we’ll be ineligible to vote for them.

Each year it has been a bit of work to figure out what to nominate (it has to have been published or first presented during the previous year), and once the nominees are announced to gather all the works and view and/or read them. But we, as do many others, take this privilege seriously. Hugo awards are presented to the best work of the previous year. The list of winners is impressive and many of the books, stories, and media that has won has withstood the test of time and is still remembered and read by fans of the genre.

Yet, each year when the numbers are published it seems that only about five hundred people (plus or minus a couple of hundred depending on the category) take the time and effort to nominate and vote for these awards. When the convention is in the US, membership (those attending is in the thousands (4-6,000) when the convention is outside the country the numbers are fewer but still many buy supporting memberships in order to nominate or attending in order to vote (whether they attend or not). Yet the numbers who actually nominate and vote remain fairly constant.

[NOTE: I’m not bothering to look up the actual numbers. These numbers are out there in the internet but I’m going from my memory and impressions and I’m fairly sure I’m only off on specifics and it’s the generalities that I’m talking about.]

When we first started attending the conventions, we had to go out and find all the nominated works and read them and then vote. One rule we’ve had is if you don’t read/watch it you don’t vote in that category. These awards are for the best and if you don’t know that category and haven’t read in it or haven’t read anything published in the appropriate year then you can’t make an informed decision.

Over the last several years, publishers and authors have been making the works available to members of the convention so that they can read all the nominated works for free. Of course finding and viewing the nominated works in the media categories is a bit trickier but the advent of Hulu, NetFlix and other sites have made this easier also.

So, why don’t the members who are eligible nominate or vote? I don’t know. For the last several years, I’ve been asking and some of the reasons I’ve been given are:

• I don’t have time
• My vote won’t count, it’s sewn up before we even get to nominate/vote
• I’m not an expert on the field, I just read it for fun
• No one cares what I think
• I don’t read any of the people who get nominated (follow-up question: did you nominate the ones you do read — answers is usually, No, why bother)
• Why bother, the best stuff never wins (follow-up question: did you nominate or vote — answer, No)

In point of fact, these answers are pretty similar to why people, in the US at least, don’t vote in their political elections. What I can’t understand is how you can expect that your choices would ever win if you don’t bother to get out there and nominate (too late for this year) and vote. I get truly baffled by the people who say “my opinions/wishes/vote doesn’t count” and then a follow up shows that these same people don’t nominate or vote or let their opinions/wishes be known. Seems to me if you sit and do nothing, you can’t expect to have your opinion/wishes taken into account.

Many years none of my nominees make the ballot. Many years people on the ballot are ones that I’ve never read before — and who have later become favorite authors. By taking part in the process, I’ve found authors I might not have found otherwise. I’ve at least done my part to see that the best in the field gets a fair chance at the spotlight.

So, why do so few chose to exercise their option to make a difference and to celebrate the best in the field?

Every month, I think I’ll have enough time to get everything done without a huge crunch as we approach the deadline to get things up and live. But, somehow there’s my plan and the world’s plan or the universe’s plan — and I missed posting for several days due to extreme lack of time.

So, in order that I don’t feel like I’m up to 3 am on the last day of the month for nothing, please, check out the zines and let me know what you think.

SFRevu.com for science fiction, fantasy, and related coverage, book reviews, etc.

Gumshoe Review similar coverage but of the mystery genre.

Also, check out TechRevu which gives you news and reviews of technology, gadgets, and related material.