Spanish Anthology Award

The anthology Cuentos para Algernon: Ano X, which includes the Spanish translation of my story Five Ways to Accidentally Save the Earth from Alien Conquest' has won the Ignotus award for Best Anthology.

The Ignotus awards are the premier Spanish speculative fiction awards. Along with the other 12 authors and the editor, this means I can happily claim one fourteenth of the award.

Slovakian Fantazia Award

I'm honoured to have been invited to serve on the jury for this year's Fantazia award, the Slovakian speculative fiction awards. I don't speak Slovak, but I'll be helping judge the 'Best story translated into English' category.

Stalker Award 2021 Long List

 The long list for the 2021 Stalker Awards - the Estonian genre awards  - is out. My story The Sound of Death has been long-listed for best short story translated in to Estonian. It was published in Reaktor in July 2020. 

Estonian Stalker Award 2020 Voting List

The voting list for the 2020 Stalker award has appeared. It includes my story 'The Righteous Indignation of the Naked Mole Rat' along with, I presume, every other SFF story translated into Estonian last year.

Parsec Award Finalist

My story 'The Long Afternoon of Sir Rupert Moncrief' is shortlisted in the Best Speculative Fiction Story: Small Cast (Short Form) category of the Parsec Awards!

Parsec Award Nomination

I'm rather excited to hear that the podcast of my Victorian time-travel story The Long Afternoon of Sir Rupert Moncrief on Gallery of Curiosities has been nominated for a Parsec Award in the Best Speculative Fiction Story: Small Cast (Short Form) category.

Classic Book Stats

In several previous posts I've mentioned some of the 'classic' SF books that I've read over the past few years. I decided to quantify how many of the 'best' or 'classic' books I've read, with the aid of Goodreads. This is what I came up with:

List	Number	Read	%
Best	100	55	55%
Hugo	71	30	42%
Locus	47	18	38%
Nebula	54	20	37%
SF Masterworks	170	53	31%
BSFA	48	12	25%
Campbell	45	8	18%
Clarke	29	3	10%

The 'Best' list at the top is the Best Science Fiction top 100 on Goodreads, which is probably as valid as any other 'Best of' list. The others obviously refer to the major Science Fiction awards, and I've also included the SF Masterworks imprint.


These various lists give me some idea of books to add to my to-read list and I've decided to start with some that appear on more than one list.

German SF

At EasterCon I picked up a copy of Andromeda SF Magazine #152, a special bilingual edition of the German magazine that was produced for WorldCon and is full of information about the German SF scene. On the cover is a picture Exodus #30, which contained the German translation of my story The Gondolier, which I was excited to see.

I discovered as I read the magazine that this same cover received the 2014 KLP Award for best artwork. This award is the equivalent of the Nebula - voted for by professional in the SF field.

Catching Up With the Classics

There are lots of novels hailed as classics of the genre – those that won the Hugo and/or Nebula awards, those that were reprinted a lot, or that have been included in the SF Masterworks series, or that are often included in various ‘best of’ lists. In recent years I’ve made an effort to get hold of as many of these ‘classics’ as possible to fill in the gaps in my literary heritage. They haven't always lived up to their reputation. Here’s a brief review of what I’ve read recently:

Childhood’s End – Arther C Clarke – it was OK but rather dated now.

Desolation Road – Ian McDonald – wonderfully lyrical

The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin – Pretty good, but a little dated.

Non-Stop – Brian Aldiss – Brilliant.

The City and the Stars – Arthur C Clarke – Good but slow.

The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin - Brilliantly evocative.

Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein – Don’t know what the fuss was about.

Ringworld – Larry Niven – Didn’t enjoy at all.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert Heinlein – Enjoyable, but not great.

Gateway – Frederick Pohl – Genius.

The Songs of Distant Earth – Isaac Asimov – It was OK.

Hyperion – Dan Simmons – Brilliant.

Lined up on my shelf I have Helliconia Spring

World Palindrome Championships

After some delays' I've heard that issue #8 of The Palindromist magazine is due out next month, including my palindromic story of time travel and bio-engineered lycanthropy entitled Time Did Emit. I discovered The Palindromist when it was featured on Have I got News For You? last year.







Meanwhile, The Palindromist's editor Mark Saltveit has been crowned World Palindrome Champion at the first world championships in New York. From the press release:

A standup comedian from Portland, Oregon defeated two professors, two computer programmers, a cartoonist and a book clerk to win the first World Palindrome Championship, hosted by Will Shortz, the New York Times' crossword puzzle editor.

600 word nerds filled the ballroom at the Marriott Hotel at the Brooklyn Bridge and watched seven prominent palindromists deliver new reversible verses written on the spot. Audience members voted by deploying signs that said "WOW" on one side (for their favorite) and "HUH?" on the other. Portland comic Mark Saltveit squeaked past Minnesotan John Connett, a professor of Biostatistics, by an audience vote of 169-165.

Anthology Wins Steampunk Award

The Best of Steampunk Awards are given out annualy by the Steampunk Facebook group, the largest steampunk community on Facebook with almost 175,000 members.

Among this year's awards are:

Best Anthology "The Immersion Book of Steampunk" by Immersion Press

Best Short Fiction "Cinema U" by G. D. Falksen, published in The Immersion Book of Steampunk

It's a wonderful recognition of the fabulous stories I was fortunate enough to receive for the anthology.

BSFA Award Nominations

Nominations for the BSFA awards have started making their way to the BSFA and the nominations so far have been posted. As I thought inevitable, the fabulous artwork for The Immersion Book of Steampunk has been nominated, along with one of the stories from the anthology. It will be another couple of months before the shortlist is anounced.

Murky Congratulations

The fabulous Murky Depths magazine has deservedly won the British Fantasy Society award for Best Magazine, on its third anniversary. Of course, the magazine got off to a great start by including a story of mine in issue #1...

Roadmaker Shortlisted for Ictineu Award

The Catalan translation of Roadmaker that appeared in Catarsi #1 has been shortlisted for the Ictineu Awards, in the Best Translated Story category. Also nominated is fellow linguaphile and multiply translated author Frank Roger, and Spanish author Santiago Examino, former editor of Efimeras who translated some of my flash fiction into Spanish.

This is the first time one of my stories has been shortlisted for anything, and I'm very pleased.

Stalker Awards Anounced

The results of Estonia's Stalker awards have been anounced. My story Travel By Numbers, translated for Algernon magazine by Juhan Habicht had been nominated in the 'Best Translated Story' catagory. It was voted joint 16th, out of 49 contenders. I'm very pleased with this as it's my first nomination for anything. :o)

The winner of the catagory was Charles Stross, and many of the others were translations from French or Russian whose names I didn't recognise.

Longlisted for the Stalker Award

My story Travel by Numbers has been longlisted for the Estonian SF Society's Stalker Award in the 'Best Translated Story' category. Voting is until July 11th and the results will be anounced in August.

English translation of the site here.

I'm not sure how much of an accolade this is as there are 50 stories on the list - possibly every story translated into Estonian last year. Nevertheless it's nice to be noticed.

Reading List

The BSFA Award shortlist has been anounced, and unfortunately I've not read any of the 4 short-listed novels. I don't see how I'll have tome to read them before April either.

I've read Albedo One #37 and Interzone #226 in the past couple of weeks, as well as At All Costs, the latest Honor Harrington book from David Weber. I say latest, but it seems to be 4 years old. It's taken me that long to get round to it. I've now started Colin Harvey's Winter Song and my contributor copy of Galactika finaly arrived today. That won't take long as I can't read Hungarian.

Lined up I have:

Cherie Priests two books Boneshaker and Clementine, which will be my first steampunk novels
The Light Of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, one of my favourite authors
Journeys: Stories by Ian R. Macleod, his forthcoming new collection

Voted

I read the last couple of BSFA Award short story nominees at the weekend. They’re all strong stories, though not necessarily the ones I would have chosen. My vote has been cast, with only a week to spare until the presentation at Eastercon.

As I’ve probably mentioned, I can’t make it this year, so I’ll be looking out for reports form those who do get there.

I'm now reading the new Interzone, with the Focus fiction special waiting patiently behind it...

Nominations

It’s that time of year again when I start compiling my list of favourite stories of the year. I have 14 so far – stories that I’ve found entertaining, enjoyable, touching or just fantastic. I’m trying to whittle this down to a shorter list to nominate for the BSFA award.

For the first time ever I’ve actually read some novels that were published this year so I may nominate one of them too. I’m usually reading books that are up to 50 years old.

I’ve had five stories published this year too, four in the Roadmaker series published in Jupiter and Travel by Numbers in Nature, should you fancy nominating any of them.

Not that I’m kidding myself into thinking they have much of a chance. Jupiter is a small press magazine so presumably doesn’t have as great a circulation as some magazines. Nature has a circulation in the hundreds of thousands, but how many of those readers are also BSFA members? It may seem unfair that good stories from some venues will be overlooked (and I’m not talking about my own stories here), but that’s just demographics. Awards that rely on nominations will naturally receive more nominations for publications with higher circulations. The alternative is an award decided by judges, but this is equally unfair as it depends entirely on their personal choice. I’m sure when you see my list of favourite stories at the end of the year you won’t have liked half of them.

I guess it’s best to be philosophical about awards. If at some point in the future I ever receive one, I’m sure I won’t be worried about how it was decided. So I’ll put in my nominations and see if many others agree with my choices.

Sharing the Glory

I'm very proud to be have been part of the Whispers of Wickedness Review Team, who collectively, under the guidance of Peter Tennant, have won the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Non-Fiction.



I can't claim too much credit for this as I only wrote six reviews on the site, but I can still share some of the glory.