27 thoughts on “2015 Locus Awards”

1. Yay!

2. Well, that’s going to make Puppies choke on their dinners.

3. Are they going to boycott Locus, now?

4. Nah. They’ll justify how it’s not really a popular vote somehow.

   Thus my not caring what they think.

   Congratulations to the winners!

5. What a lot of wonderful, wonderful works! Congratulations to the winners.

6. The lurkers support Tor in online votes, clearly.

7. Go go Goblin Emperor!

8. Yippee!

9. Congrats to the winners!

10. OMG ROFLMAO…and congrats to the winners!

11. Very neat! 🙂

12. I’m particularly happy to see Abercrombie get a win here.

13. COLLECTION Last Plane to Heaven, Jay Lake (Tor)

    I’m so glad to see this. I miss Jay.

14. Source Decay on June 28, 2015 at 4:42 am said:

    COLLECTION Last Plane to Heaven, Jay Lake (Tor)

    I’m so glad to see this. I miss Jay.

    🙁

    🙁 🙁 🙁

15. Wow… Is Nancy Kress’s Yesterday’s Kin going to win every Novella award its eligible for? I think it has Locus and Nebula so far. Hmmmm, I wonder why it’s not nominated for the Hugo? Ohhhhhhh, right!

    Anyway, very happy to see that Ancillary Sword won. I think it would be great if the Hugo Awards had separate Fantasy and Science Fiction categories for Novel. Has this been discussed before? I understand something’s would be difficult to place, like Mieville’s Bas-lag stuff, but if nominated for both let the nominee choose which category they prefer.

    One happy result from the Sad Puppies kerf ugly for me is that I didn’t even know the Locus Awards were selected by a free public online vote. Are vote totals released after the fact?

    And since the Gemmell Fantasy Awards are also selected by a free public online vote why does fandom need both? Isn’t there a lot of overlap between the two?

    Just wondering….

16. Mad Professah on June 28, 2015 at 7:13 am said:

    Wow… Is Nancy Kress’s Yesterday’s Kin going to win every Novella award its eligible for? I think it has Locus and Nebula so far.

    I know, right? I do a little happy dance every time one of Nancy’s wonderful stories wins something.

17. Huge congrats to all the winners (and nominees!) This was Amal El-Mohtar’s first award for writing, and hopefully the first of many more!

18. I was there and it was lovely.

    The Jay Lake win got me bawling a little.

    Connie Willis also had a story about getting bitten by a bat that turned out not to be rabid.

19. “Yesterday’s Kin” does seem to be the novella to remember this year. Unfortunately I won’t see it until I receive YBSF 32, which is out soon.

    But it did miss the Sturgeon Award, and it will of course miss that other one that everyone’s fighting about . . .

    There was one sad moment that I noticed: for the first time in the history of the Locus Awards, a fiction magazine other than F&SF or Asimov’s won the Best Magazine category. Congratulations to Tor.com. I think the award is deserved, but I still subscribe to the digests.

20. Mad Professah on June 28, 2015 at 7:13 am said:

    I think it would be great if the Hugo Awards had separate Fantasy and Science Fiction categories for Novel. Has this been discussed before? I understand something’s would be difficult to place, like Mieville’s Bas-lag stuff, but if nominated for both let the nominee choose which category they prefer.

    It’s been discussed many times before. While “letting the nominee decide” is a fine solution for works nominated in both categories simultaneously, how do you propose to handle edge-case novels that split their votes and therefore appear in neither category even if the combined nominations (after accounting for people who voted the work in both) would have been enough for it to appear on the final ballot in one or the other?

    Yes, we have an existing rule for moving nominations between categories, but it applies to objective standards (word count or running time), not subjective standards like “is this SF or Fantasy?”

    You can have separate categories in the Locus Awards because the Editor can decide on her own whether a work is SF or F, without a bunch of members of WSFS looking over her shoulder. She’s only responsible to the directors of the Locus Foundation, and I highly doubt they’d ever give her grief over that sort of decision.

    And since the Gemmell Fantasy Awards are also selected by a free public online vote why does fandom need both?

    There’s no sanctioning body to give people permission to give awards. Heck, if someone wanted to set up their own awards that paralleled the Hugo Award categories but ran the way they seem to think Real Fans want to run it, there’s nobody stopping them as long as they don’t call them “Hugo Awards” which is a registered service mark of WSFS.

    I used to help run Science Fiction AwardsWatch (now moribund). There are lots of awards. But anyone who doesn’t think there are enough, or that the current ones are not being done right, is surely welcome to set up new ones, even if they overlap existing ones.

21. Accepting for Jay Lake was his daughter (in his blog, the child). It was beautiful. Tears were shed.

22. Meanwhile, it looks like the Locus Award process is able to decide What Is Young Adult Anyway?

23. Cool to see The Goblin Emperor win. Now that I’ve read it, Ancillary Sword, and The Three-Body Problem, I think it’s the best of the three. Although it wasn’t, IMO, better than City of Stairs. Nothing I’ve read lately has been as good as City of Stairs.
    It’s reeeeeally good.

24. @Whym:

    I agree that City of Stairs is memorable. It took me two or three false starts (and stops!) before I stuck with it all the way to the end and I’m glad I finished it. I still don’t LOVE it. (Sadly, I could not complete The Goblin Emperor— I don’t know why. I do know why I couldn’t finish <i.The Darl Between The Stars–it’s awful. I had no problem finishing Jim Butcher’s Skin Game.) But my pick among the three Best Novel Hugo contendahs is The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.

    I also just recently finished David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and that would probably be my vote for Best Science Fiction novel of 2014. It completely blew me away. I got it for Christmas but thought it was going to be a slog so I just took it off my TBR pile only recently. I’m very glad that I did. It is similar in style but much more compelling than his renowned Cloud Atlas.

    But of course, reading 2014-released novels in June doesn’t actually help them get nominated for the 2015 Hugos. How do people get that much reading done so early in the year?

25. @Kevin Standlee

    Thanks for replying to my comment with:

    It’s been discussed many times before. While “letting the nominee decide” is a fine solution for works nominated in both categories simultaneously, how do you propose to handle edge-case novels that split their votes and therefore appear in neither category even if the combined nominations (after accounting for people who voted the work in both) would have been enough for it to appear on the final ballot in one or the other?

    Yes, we have an existing rule for moving nominations between categories, but it applies to objective standards (word count or running time), not subjective standards like “is this SF or Fantasy?”

    To me, if something is an edge case (or perceived by the voting public as an edge case) then it behooves THEM to publicly tell fans which category they would prefer. In the Oscars the voters get to decide whether performances get put in Best Actor/Actress or Best Supporting Actor/Actress and generally what happens is that the studio makes a decision as to which category to go for.

    I think if a book is caught between categories so that if you added up all its nominations it would have made one or the other that is simply too bad. It should still either be nominated or Best Fantasy Novel or Best SciFi Novel depending on how many people nominate it for a specific category.

26. Yes, we have an existing rule for moving nominations between categories, but it applies to objective standards (word count or running time), not subjective standards like “is this SF or Fantasy?”

    Well, an objective answer is to look at which category got the most nominations and transfer all votes to that category. Might be a bit more work for the volunteers, I suppose, but the awards already rely on people agreeing what is/isn’t SFF in the first place, which isn’t necessarily clear cut (Dinosaur, for a recent example).

27. Why aren’t the puppies fond of Kress? From Beggars in Spain and some of her other work, I got the impression she’d had a bit of a lover’s quarrel with Ayn Rand over that whole “total lack of empathy” thing but was still a fan and hoped they’d work it out somehow. Admittedly, I haven’t read much of her stuff beyond “Beggars in Spain.”

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