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It might be hard to remember, because there have already been two bigger and more bitter slapfights since, but the first genre kerfuffle of 2014, lo these six or seven weeks ago, was about award-pimping.  More specifically, it was about the increasing prevalence, in the last half-decade, of "award eligibility posts," those lists posted by authors around the beginning of the year and of

This evening will see the announcement of the winner of the 2013 Clarke Award, after the more than normally contentious response to this year's shortlist.  At Strange Horizons, I take on the traditional task of reviewing the shortlist (in two parts)--for the first time since 2008, which means I've had five years to forget how exhausting a task this is, but also how much fun.  At the Strange

My plane from the US landed on Friday afternoon, and yet I'm still not wholly back: piles of papers and books are still where I left them while unpacking, my photographs are uncatalogued, and a stack of emails remains to be answered.  I promised myself, however, that at least the traditional con report would be done before the convention itself was more than a week over (update: well, close

I'm not sure that I've mentioned it here before, but I'm a member of Chicon 7, the 2012 Worldcon that will be held at the end of August in Chicago.  It's a bit up in the air yet whether I'll actually be able to attend, but for the time being I'm a member, which gives me nominating rights for the Hugo awards.  The deadline for submitting nominations is fast approaching--March 11th--and I'm afraid

The Arthur C. Clarke shortlist review is a tradition of long standing, first at the now-defunct Infinity Plus, and in the last few years at Strange Horizons.  For the second year running, Dan Hartland has reviewed the year's shortlist, and parts 1 and 2 of his review are now up.  See also comments on the shortlist from Niall Harrison, David Hebblethwaite, and Maureen Kincaid Speller. Another

The list of nominations was announced two hours ago and is by now all over the internet--for example.  Some comments. The pleasure of seeing four women on the best novel ballot (to match the female-dominated, yet hardly overlapping, Nebula ballot) is undercut by how thoroughly unappetizing I find the actual ballot.  I was looking forward to reading Ian McDonald's The Dervish House (which just

The voting form for the Locus Award is online, and for the second year running, Locus continues in its policy of giving its subscribers a full vote, while non-subscribers' votes count for half (the policy was actually introduced three years ago, but in the 2008 awards it was decided upon only after the votes were counted).  I wrote last year about why I think this is wrong, but just to recap

My review of the essay collection With Both Feet in the Clouds, edited by Hagar Yanai and Danielle Gurevitch, has been nominated for the 2010 BSFA award in the best non-fiction category.  It joins a ballot made up of two blogging projects (Paul Kincaid's four-part discussion of the 2010 Hugo nominees at the group blog Big Other and Adam Roberts's epic review cycle of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of

Yet another reason that this year's Hugo shortlist reviews are going to be on the brief side: my thoughts about this year's novelette shortlist are almost exactly what they were last year.  To wit, that one of the worst consequences of taking one's Hugo nominating duties seriously enough to read through a substantial portion of the year's genre short fiction output is that it becomes a lot harder

After two years of being a Hugo nominator, I've come to the conclusion that you can have interesting, in-depth discussions of this award and its nominees before they're announced or after, but that there isn't really enough to say to justify doing both.  For example, I've already written at some length about two of the stories on the short story ballot.  Which leaves me not only with less to say

Coming to you straight from Eastercon 2010, piping hot Hugo nominations--unless you've already got them from one of the people who were tweeting or liveblogging or webcasting the event, which I considered doing before deciding that that would just not be the AtWQ thing, and that I'd much rather add my thoughts about the nominees to the lists. It has been confirmed that there will be a Hugo voter

The deadline for submitting Hugo nominations is still two weeks away, but following in Niall's footsteps I thought I'd put my preliminary choices up as a way of encouraging others to give them a try and maybe nominate them as well, or to try to talk me out of them and into others.  I'm not quite done with my reading yet: there are several novellas I still want to get to, and in the best related

This whole thing started in the summer of 2008, when Neil Clarke reported the results of that year's Locus award poll, as published in the July 2008 issue of the magazine, and noted with alarm a retroactive change to the award's vote counting system.  "Non-subscribers outnumbered subscribers by so much," the magazine's writers explained, "that in an attempt to better reflect the Locus magazine

Writing in The New Scientist several weeks ago, Kim Stanley Robinson caused a bit of a stir when he argued that the Booker juries were ignoring the best and most vibrant British literature by neglecting science fiction. These juries, Robinson wrote, "judge in ignorance and give their awards to what usually turn out to be historical novels."Sometimes these are fine historical novels, written by

I'm back! And a mere 38 hours after walking through my front door (after 37 hours of wakefulness), feeling more or less recovered. Worldcon was, well, you name it--fun, exhausting, weird, illuminating, disorienting and invigorating. I feel very motivated to dive right into writing and talking about genre with a redoubled enthusiasm, and hopefully that feeling will last as I get back into the

I have a shocking confession to make: I did not read all of the best novel Hugo nominees before the July 3rd voting deadline. I have an even more shocking confession to make: this was not because I didn't have the time to read these novels, but because of a lack of inclination. I'd read the two nominated novels I was actually interested in--Neal Stephenson's Anathem and Neil Gaiman's The

This post has been a long time coming, partly because I was waiting to see if Ian McDonald's "The Tear" was going to be posted online along with the other nominated novellas. I waited so long, in fact, that I ended up losing one of the other stories--Charles Coleman Finlay's "The Political Prisoner" is no longer available. Both stories can still be found on the Hugo voter packet, and as much as I

Of the three short fiction categories, the novelette shortlist is the one I most look forward to in my annual Hugo reviews. It's where the best stories are generally found, and its overall quality is consistently high. So I sort screwed myself this year by reading so many novelettes and nominating for the Hugo, because though this year's novelette shortlist is pretty impressive, it's also made

I made a slight tactical error in my reading of this year's Hugo-nominated short stories when I prefaced it with a reading of Jhumpa Lahiri's recent collection, Unaccustomed Earth. The forced comparison with Lahiri's achingly immediate, scrupulously detailed prose would be unkind to almost any author, and the stories on this year's short story ballot--traditionally the weakest of the three short

The Hugo nominations are also out this week, somewhat sooner than I had expected. In all the fun and exasperation of trying to figure out what my own nominees were going to be, I sort of lost sight of the fact that the shortlist would be what it has always been--stodgy, middle-of-the-road, and old-fashioned. So I'm probably a little more disappointed than I ought to be by a ballot that does

Another cool thing that happens in the spring is the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the most consistently entertaining, interesting, and, judging more by its winners than its nominees, rightheaded major genre award. Torque Control posted the list of novels submitted for the judges' consideration last month, and today has the shortlist (with many links to reviews of the nominated novels):Song of Time by

The deadline for submitting Hugo nominations is this Saturday, and at this point my ballot is more or less complete. I'm hoping to get the chance to finish reading Matter before I have to send in my nominations, though at this point that seems unlikely, and of course any short fiction that suddenly gains great acclaim (and is available online) will warrant a glance (so by all means make your

The credit card bill (if not, just yet, the convention itself) confirms that I am a paid-up member of Anticipation, the 2009 WorldCon.  This does not quite mean that I will definitely be in Montréal next August, but that is certainly the plan, finances and life events permitting.  Long-time AtWQ readers will perhaps have guessed just what kind of bind this puts me in.  It's a little difficult,

So, we've had a not-so-great short story ballot, and an excellent novelette ballot--both as expected. The novella ballot, as I've already said, is the wild card. Though I've never read an excellent one, some years offer an impressive crop. This year, sadly, is not one of them. There's only a single story on this ballot that I'd like to see win the award, and it almost certainly won't. Of the

If you make your way through the short fiction Hugo nominees for long enough (which is not very long at all--I've been doing it for maybe five years), you'll start to learn what to expect. The short story ballot will be a mixed bag. The novelettes, generally strong. At least one nominated story (usually a short) from either Mike Resnick or Michael A. Burstein, for our sins. Connie Willis, if