Monthly Archives: October 2008

Hamit Signing to Benefit Fisher House

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Francis Hamit, author of the Civil War novel The Shenandoah Spy, will do a Veterans Day fund raising book signing benefit for the Fisher House at the CalNational Bank branch in North Hollywood on Saturday, November 15, 2008, between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. The book will be offered at its suggested retail price of $18.95 (plus sales tax). Hamit will donate ten dollars for every book sold to the new Fisher House facility at the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Hospital. Fisher House is a long term residential facility for the families of wounded and critically ill veterans. It is privately funded and run by a non-profit corporation. Additional donations for Fisher House will also be solicited during this event.

“It’s not really about selling a lot of books,” Hamit said. “The book is available at most bookstores and on Amazon.com. It’s about a way to give back to the community of military families that I come from. My father was a Colonel in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, and forty years ago I was in Vietnam, serving in Military Intelligence.

“This novel is about Belle Boyd, who was a Confederate Army spy and scout and the first woman in American history to be formally commissioned an army officer. Belle was a forerunner of the military woman of today and women today serve in combat at equal risk with men the way she did. It seems like an appropriate way to draw attention to this new Fisher House, which is badly needed and deserves wide public support. So while I hope people will want to read the book, I am more interested in raising money for Fisher House with this event. CalNational Bank, where I have been a customer since 1985, has generously provided a place where we can do that. We will have a container for other donations – a very large container.”

2008 WSFA Small Press Award

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[Press release.] The Washington Science Fiction Association is pleased to announce the winner of the 2008 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction: “The Wizard of Macatawa” by Tom Doyle published in issue 11 of Paradox magazine (www.paradoxmag.com), publisher and editor Christopher M. Cevasco. “The Wizard of Macatawa” tells the story of how the life of a young girl intersects with that of L. Frank Baum.

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 trophies for both the author and publisher and $250 for the author.

The other finalists were:

“Bufo Rex” by Erik Amundsen published in issue 347 of the magazine Weird Tales (http://weirdtales.net/wordpress/); publisher John Gregory Betancourt, fiction editor Ann VanderMeer,

“Orm the Beautiful” by Elizabeth Bear published in the January 2007 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine (http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/bear_01_07); publisher and editor Neil Clarke; senior editor Sean Wallace,

“Harry the Crow” by John Kratman published in issue 12 of the magazine Aeon Speculative Fiction (http://www.aeonmagazine.com/); editors Marti McKenna and Bridget McKenna,

“Mask of the Ferret” by Ken Pick and Alan Loewen published in the book Infinite Space, Infinite God by Twilight Times Books (http://www.isigsf.com); publisher Lida E. Quillen, Editors Karina Fabian and Robert Fabian, and

“The Third Bear” by Jeff VanderMeer published in the April 2007 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine (http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/vandermeer_04_07); publisher and editor Neil Clarke; senior editor Sean Wallace.

The winner is chosen by the members of the Washington Science Fiction Association (www.wsfa.org) and is presented at their annual convention, Capclave (www.capclave.org), held this year on October 17-19 in Rockville, Maryland. Present to accept their awards were Tom Doyle and Chis Cevasco, the editor and publisher of Paradox. Also present to accept their Honorable Mention certificates were: Alan Loewen; Neil Clark, publisher of Clarkesworld, accepting on behalf of Elizabeth Bear and Jeff VanderMeer; and John Gregory Betancourt, publisher of Weird Tales, accepting on behalf of Erik Admundsen.

Hugos in Jeopardy!

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Deb Geisler reports that October 16’s episode of Jeopardy! featured a category called “Complete the Hugo Award Winning Title.” As everyone knows, this quiz show reveals a clue — an answer — and makes contestants supply the appropriate question. Deb says the contestants only got two of the questions right.

Hugo Award winners have occasionally been showing up as Jeopardy! answers for years. A quick Google search returns these examples.

A clue in the show aired October 31, 2006 was: “Isaac Asimov won a 1977 Hugo Award for this novelette about a robot named Andrew who lives to be 200 years old.” The right question was: “The Bicentennial Man.”

In the episode aired October 25, 2005, a clue in the “Classic Television” category was: “This is the first Television show to receive the Hugo Award for Dramatic Presentation.” The appropriate question was: What is the Twilight Zone?

On November 7, 2000 contestants were given this answer: “10-time Hugo Award winner Kelly Freas is famous for illustrating the magazine called ‘Astounding’ in this genre.” The question: “Science fiction.”

The earliest example I found appears in the online bio of Harlan Ellison:

On 22 June 1998, Ellison’s career reached a dizzying summit when he became the answer to a clue in the Double Jeopardy round of that evening’s broadcast of the television game show, Jeopardy.

Don’t ask me why Ellison omits the mandatory exclamation point after Jeopardy!

The Quick and the Dead

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A lot of people want to know how they can win a Hugo Award. I don’t think any of them are looking to win one posthumously, which is just as well, because it would be a terrible strategy. In fact, you could say that Hugo Seeker Tip Number One is: Don’t die.

Here’s how strong the bias is in favor of the living. Bill Rotsler died in October 1997 after winning two consecutive Best Fan Artist Hugos. Fanzines printed dozens and dozens of previously unpublished Rotsler cartoons in the year of his death, yet he was not even a Hugo nominee in 1998.

Voters want to see happy winners appearing on stage at the Hugo Ceremony.

Voters are even impatient with living proxy accepters. Emily Mah said she found Denvention 3 a cause for mourning, partly because “The [Hugo] ceremony was dominated by other people reading acceptance speeches of little slips of paper.”

The voters’ preference for live winners has been reinforced by bad experiences with the other kind.

Lester del Rey, in a letter read by a spokesman, declined the Best Professional Editor Hugo voted posthumously to Judy-Lynn del Rey in 1986, saying that she would have objected to the award being given to her just because she had recently died.

When the late Jim Baen appeared on the 2007 Hugo ballot as a nominee for Best Professional Editor in 2007, there was a bit of suspense until the Hugo administrator made public that she had the approval of Baen’s exectors Toni Weisskopf and Jessica Baen. (However, in a comment posted at Whatever, James Nicoll forcefully advocated honoring the living by dismissing the Baen nomination: “He’s dead now and no matter [what] his fans do, he will never experience winning a Hugo.”)

Stewart Awarded Norton Rights and Royalties

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Tennesee’s Court of Appeals has ruled on a lawsuit between two heirs of Andre Norton, with caregiver Sue Stewart being awarded the copyrights and royalties to most of Norton’s works, valued at $250,000 by the estate.

Specifically, the judges ruled that Stewart would control copyrights to books published during Norton’s life, but Dr. Victor Horadam would retain royalties on works published after her death. Stewart also will get the royalties for reprints.

The Court of Appeals of Tennessee did affirm the lower court’s decision to remove Sue Stewart as executrix of the Norton estate in favor of an independent third party.

Stewart publicly presented her side of the case last July, saying in part:

On behalf of myself and Andre I feel that I must speak out now regarding the litigation lodged by Victor Horadam against myself and Andre’s estate. For 3 years now I have tried to refrain from making any comments concerning this matter. I feel I must respond to an article that was published last week in several newspapers across the country. This article essentially dealt with Victor Horadam and his relationship with Andre as he saw it. While I contend that he was a friend and a fan, I do not necessarily agree with his assumption that he was her “dearest friend” or “leading fan”. Andre had countless fans through out the world. She also had extensive correspondence over the years with many of them, one who received 1062 letters. ([Mr. Horadam] says he received 500).

[Via Crotchety Old Fan.]

Paper Books Will Vanish,
But Not Publishers?

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Publishing industry professionals gave extremely polarized answers about the future of books in paper when surveyed for the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The Earth Times reports: “The poll asked which book industry players would still exist half a century from now, and 25 per cent forecast that bookstores would largely disappear, with online distribution of paper books by firms such as Amazon taking over … Of those polled, 21 per cent predicted literary agents would disappear as publishers learn to find authors online.” Interestingly, though, “only 14 per cent thought publishers themselves would vanish.”

The survey was notable for a wide disparity in views, with 12 per cent of publishers convinced the new e-readers will prove a short-lived flash in the pan, just like earlier e-readers that never caught on because their batteries ran flat so quickly.

In fact, 30 per cent of those surveyed were convinced that sales of digital content would never exceed those of paper books, whereas 40 per cent predicted this would happen within the next 10 years.

The survey was not a scientific one, since it was mailed to 35,000 people and only 1,000 replied. The Frankfurt Book Fair’s press release adds:

When asked who was driving the move towards digitisation in the book industry, only seven per cent felt that publishers were leading the way:
• 22 per cent said that consumers were pushing the move towards digitisation
• online retailers like Amazon (21 per cent), Google (20 per cent), and the telecommunications sector (13 per cent) were not far behind
• only two per cent felt that authors were driving this aspect of the industry – and governments lagged even further behind with only one per cent

[Thanks to John Mansfield for the links.]

Looking Out the Starship Window

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The Sloan Digital Sky Survey isn’t your father’s planetarium show:

Known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, it is a remarkable three-dimensional model of the universe that allows an observer to travel, as if by rocket ship, from the dwarf galaxies hugging the skirts of the Milky Way to the frontier campfires of the most distant quasars, blazing billions of light-years away.

In its 5 terabytes of data are 217 million individual objects, including 800,000 galaxies (which themselves contain billions of stars and planets) and 100,000 quasars — creatures once so rare and strange that they weren’t even detected until 1962.