Keene Named 2014 World Horror Grand Master

Brian Keene has been selected to receive the 2014 World Horror Grand Master Award. The announcement was made March 25 on Facebook by this year’s World Horror Convention committee.

Keene is the author of over 40 books. His 2003 novel The Rising is one of the main inspirations for pop culture’s recent obsession with zombies.

He expressed gratitude for the award on his website:

I was a fan of this genre long before I ever began making my living from it, and every one of those previous winners inspired or entertained me at some point in my life. That I am lucky enough to call several of them friend or mentor has always been a blessing and a dream, even after all these years. That I am somehow now considered worthy enough to accept this honor alongside them is, quite simply, astounding.

Keene will receive the award at the convention, being held over the May 8-11 weekend.

Sawyer Longlisted for Lifetime Achievement Libris Award

Robert J. Sawyer is among the 10 people longlisted for a Lifetime Achievement Libris Award voted on by the Canadian bookselling community and presented by Retail Council of Canada.

Last year’s winners were Alice Munro (prior to her winning the Nobel Prize in Literature) and philanthropist Jack Rabinovitch, founder of the Giller Prize.

Toronto’s Bakka Phoenix Books, renowned among sf fans, has been longlisted in the Specialty Bookseller of the Year category. ChiZine Publications, which issues weird fantasy, is up for Small Press Publisher of the Year.

See all award nominees here [PDF file].

Proof of Life

Someone on eBay is auctioning an advance uncorrected proof of the second volume of William H. Patterson’s biography Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century.

If you absolutely can’t wait til June for the hardcover, you have until March 27 at 13:42 PDT to get down your bid.

Of course, you’ll be taking pot luck – Patterson says this version has thousands of copyediting errors that will be gone from the final version.

Anubis Gates on Stage at Loncon 3

A stage adaptation of Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates will receive its world premiere at Loncon 3, the 2014 Worldcon.

Current Theatrics, a theatre company based in Las Vegas and New York, will bring 15 characters and a 400-page time travel novel to life — ancient Egyptian wizards, modern American magnates, holes in the river of time, Horrabin the Clown’s puppet show, werewolf-like creatures, cheeky urchins, and California literature professors, not to mention famous Romantic poets Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Ashbless.

Formed in 2010 by Ruth Pe Palileo and Thomas Costello of New York, Current Theatrics specializes in travelling theatre, and has previously brought French absurdist classic The Chairs to Las Vegas, seven new Irish plays to Cleveland, and a gender-swapped Merry Wives of Windsor to Pittsburgh. Pe Palileo has previously produced and directed stage adaptations of Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog and Neil Gaiman’s Troll Bridge.

The Las Vegas-based cast have been in rehearsal since Tim Powers approved the project in December 2013. The six-member cast comprises Erik Amblad, JJ Gatesman, Brandon Oliver Jones, Johnny Miles, Ariana Helaine, and Geo Nikols, all of whom are playing several roles—a task made easier by the novel’s story line, which involves body switching.

The full press release follows the jump.

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2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award Winners

hans christian andersen awardThe International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) has named author Nahoko Uehashi (Japan) and illustrator Roger Mello (Brazil) winners of the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award.

Uehashi is best known in the English-speaking world as the author of Seirei no Moribito, and through its anime adaptation Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit which aired several ago.

The Andersen medals and diplomas will be presented to the winners at the 34th International IBBY Congress in Mexico City, Wednesday, 10 September 2014. 

Also announced were winners of the IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award: The Children’s Book Bank (Toronto) and PRAESA (South Africa).

Green Named Semifinalist on The Reel Deal

Ed GreenCongratulations to Ed Green! He got a callback from The Reel Deal and is in the semifinals. (Here is a link to his official page.)

Producers say over 27,000 actors, directors, composers and writers applied.

The callback procedure varies by category. As one of the actors, Green will have to post a video monologue to YouTube during a 2-hour window on April 5.

The finalists will be announced April 24. The public will have two weeks to vote and entrants selected as on-air contestants will be announced May 22.

James Rebhorn (1948-2014)

James Rebhorn, American character actor, died 21 March aged 65, after a lengthy battle with skin cancer. Genre appearances include Cat’s Eye (1985), Heart of Midnight (1988), Independence Day (1996, as the Secretary of Defence), From the Earth to the Moon (tv miniseries, 1998), The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) and The Box (2009).

[Thanks to Steve Green for the story.]

Outer Limits Exhibit at Creature Features

Window

Creature Features has moved back to Burbank. John King Tarpinian paid a visit –

This is the shop I just discovered that has been around, in one form or another, for thirty some odd years.  I was only in there for ten minutes but the shop has promise.

Creature Features hosted a signing of Outer Limits at 50 by David J. Schow on March 22 and is attracting attention with an Outer Limits themed gallery exhibit that will be open through April 12.

Tarpinian picked up a copy of the Schow book —

The book is a soft-cover coffee table book and the reason I just HAD to have it, other than the geek factor, is that a neighbor of mine, when growing up in Toluca Lake was on the back cover, Ralph Meeker…actually the episode he was featured.

The exhibit is an art tribute featuring newly commissioned paintings, illustrations and sculptures alongside original props and vintage memorabilia from the show.

bookParticipating artists include Steve Bissette, Tim Bradstreet, Norman Cabrera, Monte Christiansen, Ken Daly, Ricardo Delgado, Frank Dietz, John Fasano, Wolf Forrest, Garrett Immel, Phil Joyce, Bob Lizzaraga, Rebecca Lord, Gregory Manchess, Ken Mitchroney, Kemo (aka Ken Morgan), Rafael Navarro, Greg Nicotero, Mike Parks, Jeff Pittarelli, Eric October, Tim Polecat, Mike Soznowski, William Stout, Woody Welch, and Bernie Wrightson.

Sign

Creature Features is located at 2904 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank, CA 91506. Regular store hours are: Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the photos.]

Gallifrey 2015 Fully Booked

Every year I read about the San Diego Comic-Con selling out its passes as fast as people can get online – as it did again last week but with fewer complaints thanks to a new system capable of accommodating the vast demand.

However, I was surprised to discover Gallifrey One, the annual Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles, performed the same feat on Friday, selling all its memberships in 75 minutes.

While Gallifrey One reportedly has an attendance limit of 3,700 and Comic-Con hosts over 130,000 – I was impressed just the same.

People who can’t get in are asking if the committee plans to move to a bigger facility. The answer is

No.  Gallifrey One is a fan convention. Let’s explain how fan conventions work. Every human being involved in this convention is a volunteer – we do this on our spare time.  We are not paid employees.  We are fans just like you, with one minor difference… we got off our butts and put on a show 25 years ago, and never stopped. Doing this sort of thing takes personal money; tons of meetings; hours behind our computers on evenings & weekends; valuable vacation time away from work; making promises to dozens of guests in writing that require large sums of money (and losing sleep over it in the process; ask our program director who literally doesn’t sleep for six weeks prior to the convention each year!); and so forth. We do this not for money (we certainly don’t make any; we are a registered California 501(c)(3) non-profit organization) but for the love of the show only. We do not and cannot serve the entire Doctor Who fan community. Our convention is, simply put, at the maximum size it can be that allows our all-volunteer staff to run it every February without it adversely impacting our jobs, our lives, our families (at least, any more than it already does)… and we have ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in growing the convention beyond its current size.

The Invisible Fanwriter Hugo

The Hugo nominating deadline is March 31. And I was wondering if, on Easter weekend when the Best Fan Writer nominees are announced, there will be the usual cuckoo in the robin’s nest – an established pro novelist?

Over the past few years the category has been won by pro writers John Scalzi, Frederik Pohl, Jim C. Hines, and Tansy Rayner Roberts, with actual fans Cheryl Morgan and Claire Brialey breaking through, too.

Every time I approach this subject lots of you write to say, “Oh no, Mike, you’re crazy — pros can be fans too!”

This is such a very important ideological axiom – to fans. Those eager to win the argument that “pros can be fans too!” never seem to recognize that it isn’t fans who are stopping this from happening, rather, that they are trying to force a kind of egalitarianism on writers that never really takes, however interested or polite the writers may be while the award is on the table.

Because once everyone’s done marching around waving their hands as confetti falls from the rafters and the brass band blows like mad and the world has once again been made safe for fannish egalitarianism, nobody pays attention to the implicit message we get back from the pros that people were so hot to give a fan Hugo —

People who are building careers as writers do not want to identify their brands with anything that hints of the amateur.

And the Fan Writer Hugo that was a big deal for six months gets swept under the rug.

You look at their bios and here’s what you find.

The “Brief biography of John Scalzi” on Whatever has this to say about his awards:

Bibliography: It’s here. New York Times best seller in fiction. Awards won include the Hugo, the Locus, the Seiun and Kurd Lasswitz. Works translated into 20 languages.

Where is it?

The late Frederik Pohl had two online bios, one at his official website and the other on his blog, and neither acknowledges the Best Fan Writer Hugo. The pro site speaks generally of winning the Hugo “six times; he was the only person ever to have won the Hugo both as writer and as editor….” The blog says of his awards: “He has received six Hugos, three Nebulas and forty or fifty other awards, some of which he has given himself.”

Six Hugos. Did you know Pohl, in fact, won seven Hugos? The seventh was his Best Fan Writer Hugo.

Now at the time he was nominated Pohl was gracious about it, clearly understood the honor he was being paid, said “I couldn’t be more pleased,” and was unquestionably qualified to compete in the category. I still thought his response was pretty much along the lines of “if you insist” – rather like Robert Silverberg’s attitude toward winning the 1950 Retro Hugo for Best Fan Writer.

Silverberg also doesn’t list his Retro Hugo on his official page, but that comes as no surprise if you remember what he wrote to File 770 the time I left him off a list —

I take umbrage at your omitting Me from your list of winners of the Best Fan Writer Hugo who have also sold pro fiction. May I remind you that I was the (totally undeserved) winner of the 1950 Retro-Hugo in that category, beating out such people as [Walt] Willis and [Bob] Tucker? Of course I would not have won the award if I hadn’t had a few stories published professionally along the way.  But I did get the Hugo.

That’s the thing. A Best Fan Writer Hugo added nothing to the career Pohl already had, and made Silverberg feel fans must be completely clueless about what he truly values.

Then, last year’s winner, Tansy Rayner Roberts, has a lengthy bio on her website that mentions three awards won by her fiction but is silent about her Best Fan Writer Hugo. The site’s landing page does call out her involvement in “the Hugo-nominated Galactic Suburbia podcast.” Not said is that the nomination is in the Best Fancast category.

Surprisingly, Jim C. Hines bucks the trend. His bio says right in front of God and everybody

Jim is an active blogger about topics ranging from sexism and harassment to zombie-themed Christmas carols, and won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2012.

Respect to you, Jim.

Invisible little men are one of science fiction’s motifs. Invisible Best Fan Writers we can do without. Let’s do something revolutionary in 2014 – vote the award to a fan.