Sofia Samatar on Winning the World Fantasy Award

Although she was scribbling changes to her acceptance speech up to shortly before the ceremony, when she was named winner of the World Fantasy Award for Novel Sofia Samatar didn’t refer to her notes and could only approximate what she said when it came time to blog about it.

She knows what people are interested in, of course. What was it like to be a writer of color and be given an award in the image of H.P. Lovecraft, whose correspondence is riddled with racist statements,after a season when many have called for the design to be changed?

2. The Elephant in the Room I think I used those words. I think I said “I can’t sit down without addressing the elephant in the room, which is the controversy surrounding the image that represents this award.” I said it was awkward to accept the award as a writer of color. (See this post by Nnedi Okorafor, the 2011 winner, if you are confused about why.) I also thanked the board for taking the issue seriously, because at the beginning of the ceremony, Gordon van Gelder stood up and made an announcement to that effect: “The board is taking the issue very seriously, but there is no decision yet.” I just wanted them to know that here I was in a terribly awkward position, unable to be 100% thrilled, as I should be, by winning this award, and that many other people would feel the same, and so they were right to think about changing it.

After the con Samatar shared her explicit views about the issue:

a) Nobody’s post about winning an award should turn into a post about controversy! Everyone should be able to announce their awards with unadulterated joy! And unless the statue is changed, there will be a lot more posts like this. Can we not?

b) I don’t think the statue should be an image of any person.

c) I am not telling anybody not to read Lovecraft. I teach Lovecraft! I actually insist that people read him and write about him! For grades! This is not about reading an author but about using that person’s image to represent an international award honoring the work of the imagination.

d) I discovered, with a horror I’m sure Lovecraft would share, that we look a lot alike.

WFA Novel winner Sofia Samatar.

WFA Novel winner Sofia Samatar.

[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh for the link.]

Tayler Sets An Example

At World Fantasy Con this past weekend Howard Tayler lent a hand to assure someone got the medical attention they needed.

I was engaged in a late-night conversation in the lobby bar when one of the bikers with whom we shared the hotel approached our group.

“You guys, man… you guys gotta take better care of your own.”

“I’m sorry, what’s wrong?” I was puzzled. He seemed frustrated and worried.

“One of your girls, she’s sick drunk outside. She needs her friends to care of her.”

Tayler checked on the person, found she was slumped over and couldn’t be wakened, then went and alerted the hotel staff who promptly sent security to take care of the situation. An even worse ending was avoided.

As Tayler says, “All I did was take ownership of the problem for just long enough to hand it off to the folks who knew how to solve it,” but he calls on anyone who encounters such a situation to do the same in his blog post  “They Know What To Do But You Have To Tell Them”. (“They” meaning hotel security.)

Incidentally, the bikers sharing the hotel with World Fantasy Con were part of the Rolling Thunder Run, which keeps alive the memory of service members left behind after the Vietnam War and “strives to affect national policy in a way that will assist POW/MIA’s.” WFC co-chair Michael J. Walsh says “WFC and Rolling Thunder got along quite well.”

Signature Art

Marilyn Dahl at Shelf Awareness reminisces about Leo and Diane Dillon’s Ace Specials book covers:

I began with Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness–I was not a science fiction fan, but I couldn’t resist the cover. And then Keith Roberts’s masterwork Pavane (just reissued by Old Earth Books with the same cover), Harlan Ellison, Joan Vinge, Roger Zelazny–drawn in by the Dillons’ art, I explored science fiction. I also embarked on collecting picture books, with the Dillons making up a major percentage or my purchases.

Dahl’s passing reference to Old Earth Books is quite enough reason to mention this post, don’t you agree, Michael Walsh?

Walsh: BSFS Founder Ettlin in News

By Michael J. Walsh:  David Ettlin, one of the founders of the Baltimore SF Society is the subject of an article in the Baltimore Sun this Sunday celebrating the 175th anniversary of the paper where he worked as an editor:

The wardrobe was disastrous. He made the rest of the slumming metro veterans look almost plausible. His laugh was a cackle, employed liberally against the farts and foibles of the important and famous. From humanity, he expected farce and scandal at all points, adoring an absurd, senseless murder most of all. He never lost at Scrabble, he had 10 different ways of saying anything in print, and yeah, if he acted as if he’d seen it all without ever leaving a newsroom, it was only because he had.

He also had a large end-of-row house here in Baltimore called “Toad Hall” that many a fan stayed in. I was one of them.

He retired from the Sun a few years ago, they made him a retirement offer he couldn’t refuse.  His last day on the job was 40th anniversary of his hire!

Waldrop Book Gets Another Rave

Ed Park has penned a superb review of Howard Waldrop’s Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 for the Los Angeles Times:

It is probably inadvisable to consume Howard Waldrop’s Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 (Old Earth: 280 pp., $15 paper) in one gulp. Waldrop has a pleasing style and wears his learning lightly; he pokes fun at those books “full of two-dollar words,” in which “the sentences were a mile long, and the verb was way down at the bottom of the page.” But the works gathered here make hay with so many ultraspecific cultural moments that the unwary reader might contemplate suing for whiplash.

[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh for the link.]

Shorter Improving

Mike Walsh posted here that he and Elspeth Kovar visited Elliot Shorter on September 18:

He’s in good spirits. He’s been hearing from folks he hasn’t heard from in … well, decades. High school friends even.

A few days earlier, someone copied me on Mark Blackman’s month-old e-mail with another visitor’s encouraging words after seeing Shorter on August 20. Due to markups from multiple forwards, he wasn’t quite sure who to credit for writing it:

I visited Master El today, and when I walked in he was sitting up in bed, and eating real food!!  Ok so, it was kinda mooshed up, but it was real peas, rice, some kind of meat with gravy, juice, and sherbet. This was the first real solid food he has had since May 1st! Oh, yeah, and feeding himself, not being fed, he was actually able to hold the spoon and getting it to his mouth….

So, anyway, in my not so humble opinion, El is getting somewhat better, getting good care, and is eagerly accepting his physical therapy. Another cool thing is that the relatives of his roommate are actually old friends of his too.

Oak Hill Rehab Center
544 Pleasant Street
Pawtucket, RI 02860
Room 314A

Keep those cards, letters & visits coming, gang, because each one seems to make him stronger.