Monthly Archives: June 2010

The Terry Pratchett Prize

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Sir Terry Pratchett (and isn’t that title inspiration for a fantasy tale just by itself?) with the help of Transworld Publishers has created a new award for debut novelists.

The winner of the “Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now Prize” will be offered a publishing contract with a £20,000 advance.

What will the winning novel be about? Pratchett says —

Anywhere but here, anywhen but now. Which means we are after stories set on Earth, although it may be an Earth that might have been, or might yet be, one that has gone down a different leg of the famous trousers of time (see the illustration in almost every book about quantum theory).

We will be looking for books set at any time, perhaps today, perhaps in the Rome of today but in a world where 2000 years ago the crowd shouted for Jesus Christ to be spared, or where in 1962, John F Kennedy’s game of chicken with the Russians went horribly wrong. It might be one day in the life of an ordinary person. It could be a love story, an old story, a war story, a story set in a world where Leonardo da Vinci turned out to be a lot better at Aeronautics. But it won’t be a story about being in an alternate Earth because the people in an alternate Earth don’t know that they are; after all, you don’t.

I was getting enthusiastic until I realized that authors living in every English-speaking country in the world except the U.S. are eligible to enter. Specifically, an author must be over 18, have no previous published full-length works of fiction and live in the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth. (If not all of these countries are predominantly English-speaking, it should come as no surprise that the publisher’s rules require all entries to be written in English.) Ah, well, what would I have done with all that money anyway?

Judges for the award will be Pratchett, Tony Robinson, Mike Rowley of Waterstone’s and two members of the editorial team at Transworld Publishers. Submissions should be emailed to [email protected] by December 31, 2010. A shortlist of six entries will be announced on March 31, 2011. The winner will be announced in May 2011.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Everett Bleiler (1920-2010)

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Everett Bleiler, compiler of the monumental Checklist of Fantastic Literature, died June 13 at the age of 90.

Occasionally the death announcement of a major historical figure in the sf community brings with it the implicit surprise that the person has been alive all along despite having made no news for years. At least, that’s how I reacted to reading that Bleiler passed away. I never met him, however, I heard his name in many fannish conversations over the years, brought up by “completist” collectors who found his Checklist invaluable and aspired to own everything it listed.

The full title was: The Checklist of Fantastic Literature: A Bibliography of Fantasy, Weird and Science Fiction Books Published in the English Language. Shasta Publishers issued it in 1948 with a dramatic cover by artist Hannes Bok. Harry Warner Jr. said in his fanhistory All Our Yesterdays that in the eyes of his contemporaries,

…[T]his was found to be a first-rate accomplishment: a listing of more than 5,000 titles, well-indexed, with essays by Korshak and Bleiler on relevant subjects. Ackerman called it “the single greatest contribution ever made to the field of fantasy enjoyment.”

Seventy people helped assemble the information, beginning by listing the holdings of major collections and later consulting the Library of Congress and the British Museum. Shasta printed 2,000 copies and charged $6.00 — a princely sum in 1948.

If 1940s fans were the people best-equipped to appreciate the magnitude of this project, they also were the people most likely to nitpick the result. Warner himself wrote that the 5,000-title figure included some “books of whimsy or way-out humor rather than genuine fantasy.”

He had some major credits as an editor before going into a corporate publishing career. With T.E. Ditky he edited the first annual Year’s Best anthology series. The Best Science Fiction Stories appeared annually from 1949-54. Later in his career, he produced two massive reference books: SF: The Early Years (1990) and SF: The Gernsback Years (1998).

Then, Bleiler worked at Dover Publications from 1955 to 1977, becoming executive vice president, and after that at Charles Scribner’s Sons until 1986.  

Michael Dirda in a post on Washingtonpost.com compared Bleiler to the late Martin Gardner and called him a polymath. Dirda writes:

I myself worked with him once, when he was overseeing reference volumes devoted to supernatural fiction for Scribners. For one, I wrote essays about Balzac, Merimee, Maupassant and the great Jack Vance. When I was going over them with Ev, he was kind and attentive as an editor, but I soon recognized hat he could have done much better pieces right off the top of his head. He was a phenomenon.

Lundrigan Wins Baen Writing Contest

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Patrick Lundrigan of New Jersey has won the 2010 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest with his entry “Space Hero.” 

The result was announced on May 11, but had largely gone unnoticed til Baen copied the press release to news bloggers this week.

First runner-up was “Citizen-Astronaut” by David Levine of Portland, Oregon and second runner up was “High Ground” by Australian writer Stuart Gibbon.

The full press release follows the jump.

[Thanks to Laura Haywood-Cory for the story.]

Continue reading →

Back on the Air

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My home internet connection went into suspended animation for a couple of days, making things here very quiet. I’m glad to have access again.  

Logging in from work isn’t an option — all blogs are blocked, which doubtless is a good thing for me. However, I’ve been a little grumpy that about two weeks ago they started blocking Google Analytics, depriving me of the guilty pleasure of tracking hits on this blog during the day.

Want a Real Lights-Out NASFiC?

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Smofs have noticed that a total eclipse will be visible from North America on August 21, 2017. Speculating that the Japan in 2017 Worldcon bid will succeed, they’ve been looking over prospective sites for a NASFiC along the path of the eclipse. Unfortunately, the only decent convention city with even a partial view will be Nashville. Its Gaylord Opryland Hotel, damaged by flooding this past May, once was pursued by Louisville & Nashville fans who wanted to bid it as the 1994 Worldcon site. When the hotel management downgraded their option, the committee was forced to bid for another city. So there are lingering hard feelings, making it unlikely anyone would bid for a Nashville NASFiC.

Opryland Hotel flooded in May 2010.

Great Balls of Fire

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Don Wesson realized his favorite rock might be more than just a curiosity after viewing a TV show about meteorites. He talked about it with a Washington Minerological Society club member at a county fair. He showed it to the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University. And he learned that it came from space.

“A truly amazing story,” commented David Klaus. “An elderly guy out of the Dukes of Hazzard finds an interesting rock by the roadside, puts it in the back of his truck, and sticks it in his garden for eleven years. They think it landed in Oregon 200-800 years ago, and it’s actually 4.5 BILLION years old, part of the formation of the solar system!”

I’ve been accused before of publishing Chicken Little stories before, but scientist Dick Pugh says the sky really is falling. Part of it, anyway.

Pugh is one of several PSU faculty members who contribute to the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory website, a fascinating place to visit.

To gain skill in distinguishing genuine meteorites from terrestrial junk, take the interactive meteorite ID exercise.

And another online exhibit displays commonly misidentified rocks called “meteor-wrongs.”

[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]

The Politically Correct Constitution

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Wilder Publications disclaimer text.

We’ve found out what the Tree of Liberty is fertilized with.

FOXNews reports that Wilder Publications, a print-on-demand operation, adds a warning to its paperbound reprints of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the Articles of Confederation, and the Federalist Papers telling readers that “This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today.”

Fans ordinarily are just as divided over FOXNews as the country at large, but many have been fascinated by network coverage of the Wilder Publications controversy because the imprint is owned by Warren Lapine, someone well-known in the sf field.

Wilder Publications, which mainly offers non-genre works, is a venture Lapine started following the disintegration of his sf & fantasy magazine empire in 2007. Among the casualties was Science Fiction Chronicle, sold to Lapine years earlier by founder Andrew Porter, and Porter greeted news of Lapine’s 2009 return to sf publishing with a suggestion that the story be headlined “Sauron Not Dead After All.” 

In the wake of the latest controversy a Facebook page has been created to encourage people to boycott of Wilder Publications. And a number of bloggers have called for people to put the heat on Amazon.com, presumed to be a significant market for Wilder.  

While I agree with those who feel it’s silly to add disclaimers to historic texts warning about their lack of political correctness, the publisher must have taken this step with serious intent. The warning doesn’t read like satire. And that makes me curious about the thought process — it could easily have a Queegian geometric logic of its own. After all, in this country history increasingly is viewed without context — think of all the bloggers who claim to be shocked to discover that Abraham Lincoln’s racial views weren’t proper for a 21st century politician. Might Lapine have imagined product liability claims being filed against the publisher of a document that perpetuates the slave trade?

[Thanks to Elspeth Kovar for the links.]

Roddenberry Estate Auction Features 1967 Hugo

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A full catalog of personal effects, costumes, keepsakes and even furniture from the estate of Gene and Majel Barrett Roddenberry will go to auction on June 27 at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino Las Vegas, with all proceeds turned over to charity.

Items include an ST:TNG script hand-annotated by  Gene Roddenberry, costumes worn by Majel Barrett Roddenberry in character as Lwaxana Troi, a copy of Bradbury’s I Sing The Body Electric inscribed to Gene by Ray Bradbury, and a Peabody award for an episode of ST:TNG, “The Big Good-bye.”

Of exceptional fanhistorical interest is Roddenberry’s Hugo Award, which he earned for his script “The Menagerie” at NyCon3 in 1967. The auctioneers predict the award might go for $600-800. The winning bidder gets the certificate Roddenberry received, too.

Incidentally, this is one of the Lucite Hugo rockets produced for NyCon III and a couple of the fins on Roddenberry’s copy look chipped — or so it seemed to me when I compared the photo on catalog page 105 with the canonical 1967 Hugo photo at HugoAwards.org.

[Via Bill Burns, thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]

Happy Birthday “Nerdagassing”

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Two years ago, in June 2008, John Scalzi coined the word “Nerdgassing”. All you students of fanspeak will remember the definition:

Nerdgassing: The venting nerds emit when some (often minor) detail of a book/movie/TV show/comic book/etc either conflicts with canon and/or handwaves through some some suspect science.

John declared at the time, “I coin this word in the name of humanity,” a bit of impudent humor that resonated with me, so I wrote a post that put the new word through its paces.

Lately I’ve wondered — did the word catch on? Who uses it?

A Google search returned 1,980 hits, though only 84 in the past year and just 2 in the past month. John himself last used it on Christmas Day 2008.

On the other hand I know the word remains in fannish memories yet green — as I was researching this post it suddenly popped up in a lively exchange of comments on Joseph Mallozzi’s blog, here and here.

So I learned — nerdgassing is still likely to break out at any moment.