Locus Award Winners

The Locus Awards were recently given out, in a ceremony so exciting that I couldn't settle down enough to write about it for more than a week. (Really. That's my reason for delaying this post, and I'm sticking to it.)

And those winners were:

• Science Fiction Novel: Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)
• Fantasy Novel: Kraken, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey)
• First Novel: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
• YA Book: Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
• Novella: The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
• Novelette: “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains”, Neil Gaiman (Stories)
• Short Story: “The Thing About Cassandra”, Neil Gaiman (Songs of Love and Death)
• Magazine: Asimov’s
• Publisher: Tor
• Anthology: Warriors, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds. (Tor)
• Collection: Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, Fritz Leiber (Night Shade)
• Editor: Ellen Datlow
• Artist: Shaun Tan
• Non-Fiction: Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1: 1907-1948: Learning Curve, William H. Patterson, Jr., (Tor)
• Art Book: Spectrum 17, Cathy & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Underwood)

Once again, I'm surprised and slightly disappointed at the love for Blackout and All Clear, which I'm beginning to believe proves that the modern spec-fic audience values bulk more than anything else.
 
Kraken is a good book, though I personally would have preferred to see The Fuller Memorandum win.

I'd also have rated Shades of Milk and Honey higher than Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which is a perfectly solid middle-of-the-road fantasy novel, but didn't thrill me. Shades is superficially smaller, but does something more difficult elegantly.

I can't complain about Ship Breaker, since I haven't read it. But I Shall Wear Midnight was damn good, so I have to assume that Ship Breaker is even better...or that Locus voters have different ideas of "good" than I do.

I complained about the Chiang novella when I wrote about the Hugo short fiction categories recently; it's not bad, but it's far below his usual standard, has no ending, and is both tedious and repetitive.

Yay for Fritz Leiber, though. Too bad he's been dead for a generation, but skiffy awards do seem to go to the oldest and creakiest writer more often than not.

I am still withholding judgement on the Heinlein bio, and will continue to do so until I read it. I suspect I shall have very strong views on it once I do read it.

Oh, and the Gaiman novella is damned strong -- I don't know most of the rest of the short fiction nominees, so I can make no useful comparison.

Congratulations to all of the winners, for what it's worth after my clearly non-congratulatory comments. And I assume all of the SFnal bookies are frantically re-setting their Hugo odds right now.