Award Season

Some ideas for Best Related Work:

ERIN HORÁKOVÁ, Boucher, Backbone and Blake: The Legacy of Blakes 7 (Strange Horizons)
JONATHAN MCCALMONT, Nothing Beside Remains: A History of the New Weird (Big Echo) [McCalmont: "I have decided to decline any and all future award nomi" -- whatever shut up]
VARIOUS HANDS, #BlackSpecFic: A Fireside Fiction Company special report (Fireside Fiction)
MANU SAADIA, Trekonomics

... having a category which includes big non-fiction books and online articles together doesn't make much sense (see Note).

By the way, since this is a time of year people read things, or remember things that they have read, I would be really interested to know of any genre fiction you've come across that touches on themes of economics and finance. For the Economics Science Fiction & Fantasy database, of course. Drop me an email, a comment, or let me know on Twitter.

For Best Editor:

A joint nomination for ANN VANDERMEER and JEFF VANDERMEER for The Big Book of Science Fiction.

Elsewhere:
Renay's Hugoogle sheets
The Sputnik Awards

Note:
For instance, perhaps also GEOFF RYMAN, 100 African Writers of SFF, Part One: Nairobi for Best Related Work? Although this is a fragment of a much larger ongoing project, so probably it deserves to be considered at a later stage. But I'm not sure. If an online article has a better chance of getting the award than a book into which it is later assimilated, surely that's a glitch in the award taxonomy?

Question:
How do literary awards fit in among other titles and title-like attributions, such as your professional qualifications and certifications, or the letters after your name, the letters before your name (such as Ms. or Colnel), your names, your nicknames, and your pronouns? I'm interested, for example, in how easy or how difficult it is for individuals to disentangle themselves from these public attributions.

Eligibility Posts:
Ian Sales was saying on Twitter the other day, if I saw and remember rightly, that he doesn't think eligibility posts are a good idea, and would simply quietly not nominate work by anyone who has written one. I've written in the past about why I think they are on the whole an OK idea, mainly because it's quite difficult to distinguish what is one and what isn't one (and any author who categorizes their shorter fiction according to the "short story / novelette / novella" wordcount taxonomy is to some extent swanning around eligibly), and because I think taking eligibility posts too seriously in the wrong way can be the first step to taking literary awards too seriously in the wrong way, and because they probably, on the whole, help to surface writing from the margins (although I'm on the fence about that).

That said, if you've only got a few nominations to make, I guess I would usually factor in my sense of the intensity and success of an author's self-promotion. So in a rough way I guess I do partly agree with Ian.

You could imagine a more hawkish version of his rule-of-thumb, where you refuse to vote for anyone who has not proactively sabotaged their writing career in the year in question.

Marta and the Demons

Marta is free! The demons are free! Marta and the Demons is free, for the next couple days anyway, on Kindle and Smashwords. This may be the last time for a little while, since I'll be removing it from both platforms to contemplate its absorption into something larger, currently invaginatingly indecipherable, but perhaps a novel?

Also, more free or free-ish fiction:

• Another novelette, Cat, I Must Work! ... at Big Echo SF, or on Kindle
• A short story, Froggy Goes Piggy ... at The Long+Short

UPDATE: Invocation will shortly be free as well. I kind of now think the six individual books need titles. Maybe these: (1) The Moot Hoot; (2) The Cuddle in the Puddle; (3) Within a Buddy Grove; (4) It's My Party & I'll Scry If I Want To; (5) Thank ABAB for the Mnesic; (6) Off By Heart.

Interzone Guest Editorial

This week we announced the two finalists of the Sputnik Awards 2015/2016. Here's a guest editorial I wrote about the prize for Interzone 265 back in July (slightly tweaked).

BEST IN SHOW

After two years of faintly fusty Hugo Awards, the announcement came as a breath of fresh air with a zesty tang. In June, at WisCon 40, Nalo Hopkinson launched The Lemonade Award, to be presented for kindness and positive change in science fiction. The trophy is truly sublime. In fact, SubLEMON: each winner gets a sleekly fluted silvery Alessi® PSJS Juicy Salif Citrus Squeezer, a monstrous twelve-incher straight out of H.R. Geiger. When life gives you lemons, no one can hear you scream. Nalo Hopkinson should probably get the Lemonade Award for starting the Lemonade Award.

Meanwhile, signs of life are everywhere twitching. The Clarke Award, celebrating its 30th birthday, energetically contemplates future evolution. The new Eugie Foster Memorial Award plans to celebrate the best in innovative short SFF. Schneier and Quinn’s mathy analysis of mooted Hugo reforms show how things learnt in the context of fandom might have wider application. At File 770, Catherynne M. Valente and others toy with the notion of a new swarm of fine-grained smart prizes: ‘Best Action Sequence,’ ‘Best Twist,’ ‘Best Ending,’ ‘Best Villain’? ‘Best New Award’? Call them the Spoilers, Bruce Baugh suggests: “Make the trophy like a sci-fi hot rod’s spoilers. Seriously.” On YouTube, ambient SFF love reaches dangerous critical density and the BooktubeSFF Award bursts into existence.

And Sam Walton and I – from an original inkling by Ian Sales, and with assistance and dazzle from some dozen brilliant others – have created the Sputnik Award™. The winner receives a generously donated one year supply of Interzone. To delimit the Sputnik constituency, we’re adopting Valente’s procedure: “vote if you want, who gives a shit.” Voting is now open at www.thesputnikawards.com.

In fact, everything about the Sputnik Awards™ is open. It’s entirely experimental, and hopefully next year it will be a new experiment. We have settled on two themes to guide its evolution. One is digital democracy, or perhaps more generally, social media. Literary awards build spaces where fun and interesting conversations can occur, right? But you can say that about a lot of stuff. Perhaps a more compelling analogy is with user-driven content ecologies such as TV Tropes or Wikipedia. We collectively get back what we collectively put in, but that content is incentivised and transformed by a carefully-designed infrastructure. So could inputs be more varied than ‘books and votes,’ and the outputs more varied than ‘cultural capital’? We’ll see.

The second is politics, perhaps particularly left-wing politics. In 1843, after Arnold Ruge overheard Marx and his friends throwing him shade, Marx wrote to Ruge claiming that, “Ruge babes, our task is the ruthless criticism of everything that exists, babes.” Later that day, he wrote Capital. With Marx’s maxim in mind, perhaps the Sputnik Award™ trophy should be an almost traumatically vituperative critique of the winning novel. It could be, in Theodor Adorno’s words, written “from the standpoint of redemption,” and embedded in plexi-glass. Politics hasn’t decisively informed this year’s selection, but starting with next year, we’d like the Sputnik Award shortlist to give special attention to SFF with radical democratic themes, promoting social and economic justice, and celebrating not just individual freedom, but also collective freedom.

Oh and it’s Dungeons & Dragons themed, except with hedgehogs and stuff. It’s kind of dumb. Check it out.