2012 Aurealis Award Winners

It was a busy weekend for SFnal awards -- not just on my side of the globe, but Down Under as well, where the Aurealis Awards were announced at a ceremony in Sydney.

It's a long list, but I haven't detected any space limitation for blogs yet, so here they all are:

Best Children’s Fiction (Told Primarily Through Words): Brotherband: The Hunters by John Flanagan (Random House Australia)

Best Children’s Fiction (Told Primarily Through Pictures): Little Elephants by Graeme Base (Viking Penguin)

Best Young Adult Short Story: "The Wisdom Of The Ants" by Thoraiya Dyer (Clarkesworld)

Best Young Adult Novel (Joint Winners):
 Dead, Actually by Kaz Delaney (Allen & Unwin)
 Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)

Best Illustrated Book / Graphic Novel: Blue by Pat Grant (Top Shelf Comix)

Best Collection: That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote by K. J. Bishop (Self-Published)

Best Anthology: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 6 Edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books)

Best Horror Short Story: "Sky" by Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls, Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Horror Novel: Perfections by Kirstyn McDermott (Xoum)

Best Fantasy Short Story: "Bajazzle" by Margo Lanagan (Cracklescape, Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Fantasy Novel: Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)

Best Science Fiction Short Story: "Significant Dust" by Margo Lanagan (Cracklescape, Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Science Fiction Novel: The Rook by Daniel O’Malley (Harper Collins)

Peter Mcnamara Convenors’ Award For Excellence: Kate Eltham

Kris Hembury Encouragement Award: Laura Goodin


Congratulations to all of the winners, particularly to Margo Lanagan, who took a full 25% of the available trophies.

Nebula Award Winners for 2012!

SFWA's annual gala ceremony happened last night in San Jose, officially installing Gene Wolfe as God-King of All Creation the latest Grand Master and revealing for the first time the following winners:

Novel: 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Novella: After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)

Novelette: “Close Encounters”, Andy Duncan (The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories)

Short Story: “Immersion”, Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld 6/12)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book: Fair Coin, E.C. Myers (Pyr)


Congratulations to all of the winners! And, to the not-quite-winners...well, you till get to say "Nebula Nominee" for the rest of your life, which is not nothing. And there's always next year.

I'm sure certain sectors of the Internet are already grousing about one winner or another, but I had no horses in this particular race, so I'm in the unusual (for me) position of being able to be simply happy for the winners.

(via, as usual, the indispensable Locus Online)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/11

If there are any Antick Musings Kremlinologists -- and what a sad and odd idea that is -- they will  have noticed that this post did not appear early this morning, when it was supposed to.

I do have an explanation, though not a good one: I spent all day Sunday (the day I usually write these posts) getting down to my employer's gala Global Meeting down in Miami, and spent pretty much all day Saturday pre-empting that lost Mother's Day and preparing for the trip.

There is a pile of books I should have written about, and there certainly was enough time on Saturday to write something if I'd really wanted to. But they'll still be there when I get back on Friday, and I'll either update this post then or just roll them into next week's post.

So this is just an "I aten't dead" post. I am, instead of being dead in a ditch somewhere, on the 13th floor of a reasonably posh hotel on the water in a subtropical city, in the middle of four very long days of meetings, schmoozing, and other things that I dislike nearly as much as those. I will be back here, eventually.

Generational Trolling in Our Time

Certain sectors of the Internet -- those whose ox is being gored this time, mostly -- are complaining about this here Time magazine cover story, which claims that Young People Today are lazy, unmotivated, and entirely unlike the upright older generations who, gol-durn it!, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and Built This Here United States.

This is indeed a stupid argument, but it's not a new stupid argument. Time in particular trots it out every few years -- see the following two examples from 2005 and 1990, grabbed quickly and haphazardly -- but all of the lazy wing of American journalism (which is most of it) likes this "we're better than you people, even though you're young and healthy and pretty and thin and have your whole lives in front of you" story, because they are old and crabbed and grumpy and have their entire failed lives burning behind them.

I'm part of Generation X, which was massively vilified in the media throughout the late '80s and early '90s -- remember "slackers?"; that was us -- even though we were very much like other teens and twenty-somethings before us. Folks older than me can chime in about how the mass media similarly demonized hippies, "juvenile delinquents" in the '50s, and all the way back to the flappers of the '20s.

The point is that this is what the media does. They identify a stupid trend, don't bother to check to see if it bears any relationship to reality -- or if they've filed the exact same story every five years for the last seven decades -- and run with it, hoping for attention and ad revenue. You don't have to let the idiots troll you. Just tell them to piss off, and go on about your life.

And remember: in twenty years, you and your age cohort will be the ones complaining about the new generation of Lena Dunhams and Douglas Couplands and Abbie Hoffmans. So you'll get your chance in the smug asshole chair, don't worry.

(Also, an actual journalist named Elspeth Reeve -- one of the few who checks facts and has a historical sense and more than one functional brain cell -- has debunked this for Atlantic Wire already.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/4

Welcome back to the weekly post about the stuff I find in my mail -- all of the below books arrived over the past seven days, sent by publishing companies hoping that I will read and love and write about them. That may yet happen, but I haven't read any of these books yet -- but here's what I can tell you about them right now.

John Scalzi's The Human Division is probably the highest profile, most successful serialized novel since Stephen King's The Green Mile more than a decade ago, so there's a good chance that you've already heard about it, if not read it (or parts of it) already. But the thirteen serialized chapters/stories have now been all collected from their original electronic form and published as a hardcover by Tor (and, of course, also as an all-in-one ebook edition as well), hitting stores May 14th. The combined edition contains two extra stories as a bonus to those able to wait. The book itself is a continuation of his main space-opera sequence that began with Old Man's War (and which doesn't seem to have developed a name other than "the Old Man's War universe") I expect to read this one pretty soon, and this time around, I hope not to provoke the author to suggest I should stop reading his work.

Hauntings is a collection of reprint ghost stories, edited by Ellen Datlow and published by Tachyon. The stories range from Pat Cadigan's "Eenie, Meenie, Ipsateenie," from 1983, through Kelly Link's Two Houses," from last year, with stories from Neil Gaiman, Connie Willis, Peter Straub, F. Paul Wilson, Lucius Shepard, Elizabeth Hand, Jeffrey Ford in between -- two dozen ghost tales in all.

Entirely different is Superman: Peace in the Balance, a "Choose-Your-Fate Adventure Book" which is quite similar to a certain trademarked series of "if you decide to do X, turn to Page 6" books from my youth. This one is written by Michael Teitelbaum, has cover at by Rom Zaime and uncredited generic Superman art (and puzzles!) inside, and is aimed at kids ages 8-12. It's published by Tor's Starscape imprint, and features Clark Kent trying to cover a World Peace Conference while three of his deadliest enemies (those guys on the cover) simultaneously attack Earth.

The Beautiful Land looks to be the first novel by Alan Averill -- it doesn't say so specifically, but it won the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and has other new-author indications -- and is coming from Ace on June 4th. It's an alternate-universe SF novel, in which the shadowy Axon Corporation hires Takashiro O'Leary -- who once was his fictional world's equivalent of Bear Grylls -- to explore alternate timelines. Of course, it gets more complicated than that -- the inventor of the time-travel device has his own plans, and Tak's love, a shell-shocked Iraq war vet, will have no place in the clean new timeline Axon wants to build.

Michael Logan's Apocalypse Cow is also an award winner before US publication -- it landed the inaugural Terry Pratchett Prize when it came out in the UK -- and, as the title implies, it is about the zombie cow apocalypse hitting Britain. I expect it's funny -- cows are always funny in fiction, though much less so in real life -- and the Pratchett imprimatur is pretty nice, too. St. Martin's Press is publishing this as a trade paperback on May 21.

From St. Martin's corporate cousin Tor comes Susan Palwick's new novel Mending the Moon, arriving in hardcover on May 14th. Given Palwick's background, and that Tor publication, I expect there's some fantasy in it, but the description is very mundane: a middle-aged woman is murdered on vacation in Mexico, by another American tourist, a young man. When he takes his own life soon after in Seattle, his mother invites the murdered woman's adopted son and other close friends to a memorial service for the murderer. Somewhere in the middle, the online fandom for a comic-book superhero called Comrade Cosmos is also important.

And last for this week is Jon Steele's Angel City, the middle book in the "Angelus Trilogy" after The Watchers. This looks to be a thriller with supernatural elements rather than a "fantasy novel" -- at least as positioned by Blue Rider Press, which will publish it as a hardcover in June -- in which a tough detective and a high-priced whore with a heart of gold continue their battle against the otherworldly Nephilim.

Free Comic Book Day and Other Incoming Books

I've been lazy about writing about, well, just about everything lately. (It's mostly because slow-on-the-uptake Andy realized a year to eighteen months ago that his Underpants-Gnomes style plan to get back into the SF field -- Part One: blog so that everyone can see how brilliant and special you are. Part Two: ??? Part Three: Profit! -- was fatally flawed and that I likely will spend the rest of my life selling stuff to accountants. Not the happiest realization one can make.)

But every day is a new day, and this day was Free Comic Book Day, so I drove my two sons (who are now huge and remarkably mature at 15 and 12) to Joker's Child, the shop with the best FCBD shindig close by. Besides the free stuff, I also bought a few books, since I do like to throw money to people who provide free stuff. And, as long as I'm telling you about those books, I'll also mention two other bundles of comics-related book-shaped goodies that I bought over the past few weeks, all thrown together:

Matt Wagner's Grendel Omnibus Vol. 2: The Legacy reprints the first dozen-plus issues of the major Comico run of Wagner's Grendel in the '80s -- the Pander Brothers-drawn Christine Spar storyline, the short followup with Bernie Mireault art, and the quick single-issue stories that Wagner drew himself -- plus the more recent Diana Schutz-Tim Sale miniseries about Stacy Palumbo (adopted daughter of the original Grendel, Hunter Rose, and mother of Christine Spar). Putting all of the Grendel stories into internal-chronology order makes sense, but I worry that it tends to leach the power out of the best of those stories -- the original short Hunter Rose story, now almost an afterthought in the first omnibus, and the visually exciting Spar story here (which, at least, dominates the volume with its length). However, I'm happy to have a way to get new copies of these stories that I lost in the flood, and doubly so that they're in big, attractive omnibuses. (So I can only quibble so much.)

B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth: Vol. 3: Russia is credited to series creator Mike Mignola (co-script), John Arcudi (the other half of the script for many years on B.P.R.D.), Tyler Crook (art), and Dave Stewart (colors). I'm two Hell on Earth volumes behind on reading this -- and there are, I think two more volumes out or almost out as well. (That's because, I think, my comics-reading life slammed to a halt with Hurricane Irene, and still hasn't come back -- but I still think and hope and buy books like it will.)

Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 3 was the new book from The Hernandez Brothers three years ago, and contains the devastating Jaime story "Browntown." I'm still slowly re-gathering the complete Love & Rockets for a re-read, though it's taking longer than expected. (And I reviewed this back when it was published.)

Nemo: Heart of Ice is the latest "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" story by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, spinning off from the main story to follow Captain Nemo's daughter and her time captaining the giant sub and its piratical crew.

Julio's Day is a brand new graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez, related to his Palomar stories (as I understand it), but not closely.

There finally was a big fat Marshal Law collection -- subtitled The Deluxe Edition -- collecting all of the late '80s - early '90s stories by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill, the nastiest and most vicious of the revisionist superheroes of that first era of revisionism. (We've since seen some writers that I won't name try to write stories with characters like Sleepman as the heroes, but you can't blame Mills and O'Neill for that -- they just pointed out the disease; they can't cure those who want to stay sick.)

Awkward Universe is an obscure book by Andy Garcia (who's probably pretty obscure now himself, unfortunately). I loved his Oblivion City comic in the mid-90s, and this was a spin-off; his books are ones that I want to replace post-flood, unlike a lot of superhero drivel that can stay in the landfill.

Similarly, I got the second collection of Scott Saavedra's wacky series, Dr. Radium And The Gizmos Of Boola Boola! Saavedra seems to have left comics -- I suspect it was actually the other way around, which happens a lot -- but he did some great stuff when comics had space for the nutty and weird.

And speaking of nutty and weird, I also got the sixth trade paperback of Bob Burden's indescribable Flaming Carrot Comics, published by Image in 2006. This one reprints a later series of stories, not the series's brain-twisting original run, but I also need to rebuild my Bob Burden shelf entirely.

The Legend Of GrimJack, Vol. 8, by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, which I got for the same reason. (As an aside, was the ninth volume ever published? I see there was an ISBN, but I don't see any used copies floating around, which usually means a book that never saw the light.)

And last is the big Ambush Bug showcase volume, with stories mostly by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming and Bob Oskner. (I reviewed it for ComicMix when it was originally published.) I still wish there was a color reprint, but, again, I'll take what I can get.