Kevin J. Anderson holding his Lifeboat To The Stars Award.
Keith Stokes’ photos of the Campbell Conference awards banquet are now online.
[Via Jeff Orth.]
Campbell Conference Photos
Monthly Archives: June 2013
The JayCon Report
If I piqued your interest by mentioning JayCon in a post the other day, you can enjoy several fun photos of the just-concluded event on Jay Lake’s LiveJournal.
Bram Stoker Award Winners
The Horror Writers Association announced the winners of the Bram Stoker Awards from the 2012 eligibility year in New Orleans on June 15.
Superior Achievement in a NOVEL
The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)
Superior Achievement in a FIRST NOVEL
Life Rage by L.L. Soares (Nightscape Press)
Superior Achievement in a YOUNG ADULT NOVEL
Flesh & Bone by Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster)
Superior Achievement in a GRAPHIC NOVEL
Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times by Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton (McFarland and Co., Inc.)
Superior Achievement in LONG FICTION
The Blue Heron by Gene O’Neill (Dark Regions Press)
Superior Achievement in SHORT FICTION
“Magdala Amygdala” by Lucy Snyder (Dark Faith: Invocations, Apex Book Company)
Superior Achievement in a SCREENPLAY
The Cabin in the Woods by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard (Mutant Enemy Productions, Lionsgate)
Superior Achievement in an ANTHOLOGY
Shadow Show edited by Mort Castle and Sam Weller (HarperCollins)
Superior Achievement in a FICTION COLLECTION (tie)
New Moon on the Water by Mort Castle (Dark Regions Press)
Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco Press)
Superior Achievement in NON-FICTION
Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween by Lisa Morton (Reaktion Books)
Superior Achievement in a POETRY COLLECTION
Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls by Marge Simon (Elektrik Milk Bath Press)
In addition, HWA presented its annual Lifetime Achievement Awards and its Specialty Press Awards.
Robert R. McCammon was on hand to accept his Lifetime Achievement Award, and Mark Miller accepted on behalf of Lifetime Achievement Award winner Clive Barker.
The Specialty Press Award went to Jerad Walters of Centipede Press.
The Silver Hammer Award, for outstanding service to HWA, was voted by the organization’s Board of Trustees to Charles Day. The President’s Richard Laymon Service Award was given to James Chambers.
Gaiman Interview on NPR
NPR posted excerpts from an on-air interview with Neil Gaiman in “Gaiman’s New ‘Ocean’ Is No Kiddie Pool”, plus a link to the full podcast.
Having just finished a deadline assignment yesterday, I was especially sympathetic to Gaiman’s comment about journalism. As he told NPR’s Scott Simon:
“I was never a very good journalist, but I loved being a journalist, and I loved it because it taught me two really, really important things about writing. It taught me compression: If I was interviewing somebody, and I talked to them, and I’d wind up with 3,000 words, 4,000 words, and I’d need to get that down, I learned how to compress what they’d said while still keeping speech patterns, which became incredibly important later when I was writing comics. And even more important than that, I learned about deadlines.
“I do remember once, getting a phone call one evening from an editor, saying, ‘Your book review, it’s due in tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘No no no no no, it’s due in on Tuesday.’ And they said, ‘Yes, today is Monday.’ And I hadn’t written it, and I looked around the room and I couldn’t see the book. And I said, ‘What happens if I don’t get it in?’ And they said, ‘Well, then we’d have a blank page, and we’d have to run a little photograph of you, with your address and your telephone number that anybody could call up if they wanted to find out what that book was like.’ And that concentrated the mind wonderfully.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]
2013 DUFF Winner
Bill Wright has been elected the 2013 DUFF Delegate and will attend LoneStarCon 3 in San Antonio.
DUFF administrator David Cake announced the voting results on Facebook.
|
North America |
Australasia |
Total | |
| Bill Wright | 32 | 34 | 66 |
| Clare McDonald-Sims | 18 | 46 | 64 |
| Hold Over Funds | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| No Preference | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Total | 52 | 81 | 133 |
Update 2013/06/15: Corrected Bill Wright’s NA vote count per later information from David Cake.
Awards Given at Campbell Conference
Winners of three awards were announced at the 2013 Campbell Conference on June 14.
Molly Gloss won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for her short story “The Grinnell Method.”
Adam Roberts won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Jack Glass.
Kevin J. Anderson and Steven Savile’s novella “Tau Ceti” won the first ever Lifeboat to the Stars Award.
[Via Ruth Lichtwardt.]
Behind the Kerfuffle Kurve
And sometimes we publish yesterday’s news, because it’s always news to somebody…
Vox Day sounds just like one of those overly talky, self-congratulatory villains from a 1940s serial, and his flock of followers could profit from a dose of what Manly Wade Wellman used to write about.
He was called out, not by name, in N.K Jemisin’s guest of honor speech at Continuum delivered in Melbourne, Australia on June 8.
She devoted the beginning of the speech to a comparison and contrast of racism in Australia and the US in which the US came off second.
So: admitting that the land we live on was stolen from hundreds of other nations and peoples? Acknowledging that the prosperity the United States enjoys was bought with blood? That’s a pipe dream.
For all America’s other shortcomings, the purchase with blood is confessed in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, one of the country’s most widely-studied pieces of political writing —
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
But as for those other shortcomings, Jemisin targeted several in her discussion of the sexism in the SFWA Bulletin controversy, and remarks about the last SFWA presidential election where Theodore Beale (Vox Day) was a candidate and received several dozen votes.
Beale’s idea of a terrific comeback helped make Jemisin’s point and inspired another round of indignation, including Amal El-Mohtar’s call for the expulsion of Theodore Beale from SFWA.
Many who commented stated they had deliberately omitted a link to Beale’s post.
For a blogger with 30,000 readers, providing a link effectively turns over a greater platform to a pathological attention-seeker. For those of us with followings only about 1% that size, I find Carrie Cuinn’s reasoning persuasive:
All courtesy of Theodore Beale, writing as Vox Day. For those who don’t know, Beale is an active member of SFWA, and even ran for President this year. Though he repeatedly says things like women are ruining SF, except for those few who write like men, or women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, or women should be ignored entirely if they’re not attractive, not to mention his views on people of color (as evidenced above, and elsewhere in his public site), he still managed to get roughly 10% of the vote.
That’s the genre community for you, right there. But we ignore trolls like him, right? That’s what I’ve been seeing all day. Ignore him. Ignore his post. Don’t read the comments. Stay off the Internet for an hour until the unpleasantness passes.
You know what? Fuck that. Go read his post (it’s linked above).
In the meantime, SFWA has announced a Four Step Plan for Moving Ahead with the Bulletin. Chris Gerwel makes sense of both controversies in his post about Personal, Professional, Official? Standards of Professionalism in SFWA.
And it should not take much effort to find dozens of other posts
[Thanks to DB, David Klaus and Ansible Links for the story.]
Ellison Raises The Bar
Harlan Ellison is interviewed by Damien Walter in the Guardian in an exchange far surpassing what I called the Best Ellison Interview Ever just last year.
When you can get quotes like this, what interviewer wouldn’t — as Walter offered — kill for the opportunity?
Lots of good answers, including this adamant restatement of Harlan’s insistence on being paid for his work:
DW: I think I know what you’re going to say as the answer to this question, but I want to ask you anyway. Because a lot of writers today – and I’m thinking of people like Cory Doctorow, and Neil Gaiman, who set up this interview for us – say that they can give their work away for free, and they can still sell it. Do you think there’s any chance that they’re right?
HE: I think without question they are wrong. I don’t know that Neil has ever said that. I think I’ve known Neil so many years, that I think I’ve whipped him, flayed him, and browbeaten him enough that he knows that he gives nothing away for nothing. But he has a kind heart, and so people can touch him, and they will ask him to do something for nothing because, “Well, we don’t have the money.” They have the money to buy drugs, they have money to go to the movies, they have money to buy themselves new shoes, but they don’t have the money to pay the writer. Cory Doctorow’s philosophy I find egregious. Egregious in the extreme. Stephen King tried to give things away for free on the web, and was screwed. I think any writer who gives away his work demeans himself, demeans the craft, demeans the art, and demeans the buyer. It is not only caveat emptor, it is caveat lector. I don’t mean to be crude when I say this, but I won’t take a piss unless I’m paid properly.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]
No, That’s Not Too Much Jay
Jeff Baker has a terrific interview with Jay Lake in The Oregonian. Of course, it’s terrific. Jay makes it that way:
Online and in person, Lake is available, honest and articulate. His sometimes funny, always-frank reports on his medical condition attract tens of thousands of followers to his blogs and Facebook page. He’s been writing publicly about his cancer since the second day and hasn’t backed off as the prognosis has gotten grimmer.
The interview publicized JayFest, held June 8 at Powell’s bookstore in Portland.
There are details of the “Acts of Whimsy” fundraiser that brought in $50,000 for Lake’s medical expenses. And about what he’ll do with the copy of his genome that was made when doctors were hoping to find genes implicated in the cancer that might be affected by other drugs than the ones he was already taking.
“I’m open-sourcing my genome so that scientists and doctors as well as hobbyists and students can have access to a full human genome, which is very difficult to find right now,” he says. “I haven’t been able to help myself very much so maybe I can help some other people.”
Somebody could study that and come up with something that will save the world.
“That’s exactly right. That’s why I want to give it away, so that somebody else can help save the world. If that becomes true then I have triumphed over my disease. Even if I’m not here to know it. My daughter will know. You will know. Everybody will know.”
There’s been a JayCon, a JayFest and there will be a JayWake — a memorial service and roast to be held while he’s still around to enjoy it, and which he intends to enter being carried in a coffin and pop out at the right moment. The interviewer teases, “Isn’t that a lot of Jay?” But he gets a great answer, because Jay makes it that way:
“Most writers are a neurotic mess, including me if you catch me on the right day, but at the core of it you really have to believe in what you’re thinking and doing to think anyone else (cares). You’re a little bit like the 3-year-old who walks onstage during the church play and says ‘look at me!’ … There’s a level at which I’m perfectly happy to hear my name. It gives me something to be happy about at this time when most things that make me happy are being stripped away, piece by piece, never to return.”
Hugh Daniel Memorials Scheduled
Several memorial celebrations for Hugh Daniel are in the works. Daniel died on June 3 from an apparent heart problem.
There will be a Celebration of Life in Pacifica, CA on June 23, a celebration in Ann Arbor, MI on August 24, and a memorial in July at the Ohm2013.org conference in the Netherlands.
The family will send Daniel’s remains into space aboard a Celestis flight in the fourth quarter 2014.
See full details after the jump.
[Thanks to Bill Higgins for the story.]