Adam Roberts Says SF Awards Are Rubbish

Author of Splinter, Adam Roberts, has written a fascinating article stating that SF Awards are rubbish.

But awards lists and best-ofs are rubbish, for all that. The problem is timescale.

It is a convention, no less foolish for being deeply rooted, that the proper prominence from which to pause, look back and make value judgments, is at the end of the year in question. This is wrongheaded in a number of reasons. One has to do with the brittleness of snap-judgments (why else do you think they’re called snap?). Take those fans and awards-panellists of the 1960s and 1970s who really really thought that the crucial figures of the genre were the often-garlanded Spider Robinson or Mack Reynolds rather than the rarely noticed Philip K Dick. They weren’t corrupt; they just spoke too soon. In the 1980s we went crazy for Julian May and John Varley and Vonda Mcintyre; but the truly significant figures from that decade turned out to be Alan Moore and Octavia Butler and William Gibson. SF academics who championed Jack Womack and Rachel Pollack 90s were right that they are interesting writers, but wrong that they’d prove the most enduring figures of 90s SF. (Does it seem right, in retrospect, that Iain M Banks never won a novel Hugo or a Clarke award?)

Indeed, awards themselves are sometimes motivated by a sense of this very belatedness: Green Mars wins the Hugo that, really, should have gone to Red Mars, a much better novel. Awards, conscious that they overlooked Important Figure’s masterwork a few years back (hindsight being 20:20) sometimes scrabble to make amends by giving the prize to Important Figure’s recent makeweight cash-in. That’s human. I’d guess Ben Bova’s Titan won the 2007 Campbell not because it was the best novel on the shortlist–’best’ comes nowhere near describing it; indeed it hardly deserves even ‘novel’–but because Bova himself is widely known and widely liked as a human and as a heart-in-the-right-place member of the SF community.

But there’s something even more corrosive at work. The particular requirement of awards-that the judges read a whole heap of novels-is, more than anything, the things that makes awards screwy. Properly to claim ‘X is the year’s best SF novel’ one would have to try and read the complete fictional output of one year in one year. Anybody who has tried this-even tried a shrunken, within-reason version of it (not thousands of novels; simply the 80 or 100 that are realistically award contenders)-will tell you it is more than a chore. It is a chore, but it is more. It is a distorting and hallucinatory experience.

Time Machine In Its New Home

Time Machine winner, Kerry Kuhn, sent us this picture of the steampunk contraption in its new home. I can't guarantee the time the photograph was taken, but I'm assured it was some point plus or minus five years from today.

Juliet E. McKenna's 2008 Review / 2009 Preview

Juliet E. McKenna, author of the forthcoming fantasy novel Iron's In the Fire discusses her best of 2008 and what she's looking forward to in 2009 over at Fantasy Book Critic. Juliet also keeps an active livejournal.

Get Your Lovecraft On

A little while back, the folks over at TIGSource held a competition to create video games based on ideas that the late, great H.P. Lovecraft scribbled down in his commonplace book.

While the results ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, some of these games show real imagination and one or two are genuinely frightening. See for yourself by clicking on the video above (apologies for the naked David Hasselhoff about six minutes in!) or, for those of you who want to try them for yourself, a link to a torrent file can be found here.

Justin Gustainis Reviews

There have been some great write ups of Evil Ways and Black Magic Woman out in the blogosphere.

Firstly, Walker of Worlds digs Black Magic Woman, calling it "a very hard book to put down."

And both Graeme and Liz gave a great review of the new book, Evil Ways.

"The characters have grown, new characters have been brought on set and it’s good to see how things are fleshing out in the series. Solid groundwork is being cast for several more novels (I’m hoping and thinking) and it’s going to be interesting to see how the author expands his created world."

Check out Justin's website for more news.

Happy Birthday, Edgar!

As if you didn't already know, today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe.

Not only did the Guardian give Ellen Datlow's anthology, simply titled Poe, a glowing review but they also have a Poe quiz and a blog posting about Poe's lasting influence.

And, if you've already consumed the great man's entire output, then I can thoroughly recommend The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. I'm not usually a big fan of mysteries, particularly those of an historical bent, but this one had me gripped right until the very end.

Andy Remic @ Forbidden Planet

Event news! Andy Remic will be signing copies of Biohell at the Forbidden Planet London Megastore 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JR. The date is Saturday 7, February, 1:00PM - 2:00PM.

Heart of Veridon

I wonder if it's too late for me to go back to school, not spend all my time thinking about Iron Maiden, pay attention in art class and be really talented? Jon Foster's just sent in this artwork for our forthcoming Tim Akers novel and, as usual, he's painted something really evocative and beautiful. I bet he's feeling pretty smug. And he even seems like a nice bloke, which I think is quite unreasonable.

The book's out in October.

Happy New Poe

Ellen Datlow has sent us the Flickr set to the launch the fantastic Poe anthology. And Ellen has blogged about the event too.

And a happy 200th to Edgar for the 19th of January.

The book is already getting some brilliant reviews in. The first at Blog Critics, which says: "The 19 stories commissioned by Ellen Datlow for the collection Poe are works of mystery and imagination that not only do justice to the author they celebrate, but are fine stories in their own right. Datlow has once again shown an uncanny talent for approaching just the right writers for the task at hand, as not one disappoints".

Critical Mass says it's "Sure to be one of the best anthologies of 2009"

And more good things are said at Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth.