More on Fan-Fiction

Hal Duncan had a great post on fan fiction over the weekend, which I've only just gotten to read. I'm particularly fond of the Lego-building-as-writing metaphor.

Oh, and his novel Vellum (which I'm right in the middle of at this moment) is also pretty neat. So go read something by him; it'll do interesting things for the inside of your head.

Wheeler's Law of Hype

Since this morning has seen nominations for one award I've never heard of, and because I don't think I've trotted this particular hobby-horse out on my blog yet, I'm going to inflict on you the one law I've managed to codify.

In this world, there are a lot of literary awards, and there are a lot of blurbs. Some are powerful and meaningful; some are not. It can be hard to judge which are which -- or, rather, it was hard to do so before my law came around. This law applies to any statement or award about books, and could be extended to any field of artistic endeavor -- but I'll leave that for later.

Wheeler's Law of Hype
Each adjective reduces, by half, the importance and significance of a blurb or award description.

We can thus codify the impact of a blurb or award in a simple mathematical equation.

Examples:
An award for Best Novel would have an index of 100. An award for Best Novel by a Norwegian would have an index of 50. One for Best Slipstream Novel by a Norwegian would have an index of 25. The coveted Best Slipstream Novel in Translation by a Norwegian Incorporating Fish Imagery and Published Outside Oslo would have an index slightly higher than 6.

Similarly, a blurb that reads "Sven's Fish-Slapping Dance of Death is the best novel I've read this year!" would have an index of 100. And a blurb that said "I haven't read a novel as real and true about halibut, or as incisive in its portrayal of the lives of half-selkie, hook-handed, hermaphroditic fishermen, or as powerful in its poached-egg and cavalry-saber imagery, since Lars Jorgensen's O! The Fatal Sea! last Tuesday" would have an index that can only be calculated with the aid of powerful scientific instruments.

I thus give this law to mankind, and hope that we all can reap its benefits.

Analog & Asimov's Reader's Poll Winners

As usual, these awards were given at a gala breakfast during Nebula Weekend. And, as usual, you read it first at Locus Online.

SESFA Award Nominations

Another weekend, another round of minor awards (all of which, as usual, I steal from Locus Online). These are the Southeastern Science Fiction Achievement Awards, and the full list is available here.

Rhysling Award Nominees Announced

I saw this via Locus Online, and I'll link to it for the benefit of the three people who actually care about skiffy poetry.

Actually, now that I look at the link, it doesn't seem to be so much a list of nominated works as it is a complete list of all eligible works. Which is even more useful, I guess, for those who love SFnal poesy.

Nebula Award Winners

This time, I vas actually dere (Charlie), which is why I'm a day late posting the winners. (I'm now hitting the point where I actually want a laptop, even though I know logically I'd only really use it for conventions and so buying one would be silly.)

Anyway, your Nebula winners for the 2006 model year are:

NOVEL
Camouflage by Joe Haldeman

NOVELLA
"Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link

NOVELETTE
"The Faery Handbag" by Kelly Link

SHORT STORY
"I Live With You" by Carol Emshwiller

SCRIPT
Serenity by Joss Whedon

ANDRE NORTON AWARD (Not a Nebula)
Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie by Holly Black

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day!

So go out and get a free comic book. Take the kids, bring the family, make a day of it. See how many comic book stores are near your town. And buy something while you're at it; I currently recommend Andi Watson's Little Star (because I just read it, and it's wonderful).

Off to the Nebulas

A car is coming to pick me up in just over an hour to go to the Nebula Awards Weekend in (damnably hot) Tempe, Arizona. So I won't be blogging the rest of today or tomorrow, and Sunday night is pretty unlikely as well.

Someday, if the official SFBC blog ever gets going, I hope to liveblog (or maybe just-after-the-fact blog) things like the Nebulas. But not this year.

Quote of the Week

"Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well."
--Samuel Butler

Reading Into the Past: Week of 4/30

This week, I'm looking at the books I read in 1996

• Bill Bryson, Made in America (4/25)
  This is his book about the American language, specifically words and phrases coined in the US. All of Bryon's stuff is breezy and entertaining, but I do like his travel books best. Still, this was eminently enjoyable, and I'm sure I learned a few things from it.
• Tom Veitch, et. al., Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi (4/26)
  This was a comics collection of some sort, and I have no memory of it.
• Kyle Baker, et. al., The Residents: Freak Show (4/26)
  Ditto; I didn't keep this, which implies that I really didn't like it.
• Clive Barker, et. al., Primal (4/26)
  Horror comics of some sort. Another one I got rid of soon afterward, which implies I didn't like it. (I seem to have been trying to get rid of some comics that day -- it's quite possible I was looking them over for the club, since I was the official comics guy in those days.)
• Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, editors, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Ninth Annual Collection (4/27)
  Oh, like I could remember what was in a ten-year-old Year's Best. Ha! I'm sure it was eminently respectable, even if horror stories regularly annoy me and I kept thinking Windling went out of her way to choose stories (and especially poems) with only the most tenuous connection to fantasy possible.
• Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory (4/28)
  One of the very best of the Miles Vorkosigan books -- and the Hugo voters agreed with me, for once.
• George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge (4/29)
  This is the one with the sled-dog chase across the snow, if I'm remembering right -- and that's one of the Flashy scenes that has stuck in my memory ever since. All of these books are worth reading for Flashy's voice, if nothing else -- and you'll probably pick up some odd bits of history along the way.
• Paul Chadwick, Concrete: Killer Smile (4/29)
  How do you do a thriller in a comic when your main character is a two-ton indestructible alien robot? Well, you threaten someone else, of course. I liked Concrete best when it was less adrenaline-driven, but this was a decent story.
• Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle (4/30)
  Adams's later prose books are mostly just reiterations of ideas from the comic strip (or contractual obligations to make a lot of money), but this first business book from Adams actually had some intriguing ideas, and is well worth reading. If you're a manager, you won't like what it says, but, then, if you're a manager, you're only barely human to begin with.

This week it took until Thursday to get to this; if I get much worse I might just lap myself. (And we all know how painful that can be! [rimshot] Thanks -- I'll be here all week! Try the veal, and don't forget to tip your waitress.)

Today's WFA Reading: 5/3

Another single-book day: this one is an interesting-looking novel in an odd trimsize that came all the way from Australia.

More Publishing-World Bloggers

For the fans of Miss Snark (and I know there have to be some out there, though my blog, so far, hasn't been attracting the wanna-bes), I point you to the perhaps even more entertaining Evil Editor.

I have no idea who he is, and I suspect he works in an area of publishing foreign to me. But he says good stuff.

Lisa A. Barnett, 1958-2006

Locus Online reports that fantasy writer Lisa A. Barnett died this morning of a brain tumor. Barnett wrote three novels with her partner, Melissa Scott, the third of which (Point of Dreams) won a Lambda Literary Award.

Viswanathan-Gate, Part II

Publishers Weekly reported an announcement from Little, Brown that How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life will not be reprinted, and that L,B has killed the second novel of the reportedly-half-million-dollar deal.

The PW report then has a long quote from agent Robert Gottlieb, speculating about L,B demanding their advance back from Viswanathan. Either Gottlieb or PW has forgotten the fact that L,B did not contract for this book with Viswanathan; they contracted with Alloy Entertainment, and they would have to seek their money back from Alloy. (Alloy could then pursue Viswanathan themselves, of course, and they have that option no matter what L,B does.)

I also feel compelled to point out that nothing in the PW report indicates that either they or Gottlieb are privy to the terms of L,B's contract with Alloy, or the terms of Viswanathan's contract with Alloy (and I certainly don't know anything about those contracts). Without knowing what those contracts actually forbid and allow, this is all uninformed speculation.

My local paper (and every other news outlet in the world, it seems) has the story of more "plagiarism" claims, which are now getting very silly. The supposed smoking gun of this round is similar scenes from Opal Mehta and Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries in which the heroine is given a massive makeover, and doesn't recognize herself afterward. The two scenes have substantially different phrasing (making the "using the exact words" argument useless) and the "Ugly Duckling Becomes a Swan (And Isn't Sure If She Likes It)" idea is a genre staple -- I'd bet a large sum of money that the intrepid plagiarism-hunting bloggers could find at least a dozen equally similar scenes that pre-dated the Cabot book.

Another supposed case of plagiarism is using a single sentence slogan, in a similar context, from a Salman Rushdie novel. If we apply this standard of plagiarism, no literary novelist in the world will be safe; they all use allusions and references to previous work, mimicking sentences and phrases from previous books.

I'd like to see the people diligently researching Opal Mehta for plagiarism try their hands at a randomly-chosen literary novel, by someone of impeccable reputation. I suspect they'd find just as many "borrowings," but that literary novelists are just better at making allusions, references and genre conventions integral parts of the fabric of their books.

Today's WFA Reading: 5/2

One big FedEx box, stuffed full of stories from (the late, lamented) SciFiction. There's something homey about getting what looks like a gigantic manuscript after all of the books and magazines so far.