Cora Buhlert's Hugo Nomination Reactions or Why the Fuck is this Controversial?

Odd. I’d have thought that this year’s Hugo shortlist was pretty much uncontroversial. I mean, we have a healthy representation of women and writers of colour, most of the nominations went to works and writers that are popular or at least talked about, there are very few “What the Fuck?” nominees compared with other years (e.g. last year’s nominees included a filk CD and a Hugo acceptance speech from the previous year). Sure, there still are issues, particularly with certain categories, but there always are issues.

Which is why I was surprised to find that this year’s Hugo slate is apparently considered highly controversial in certain corners of the SFF community.

2013 Clarke Award Shortlist

The six shortlisted books for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year 2013 are:

Nod by Adrian Barnes (Bluemoose)
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann)
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Headline)
Intrusion by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)

Total  Female  Male  f/t
   6      0    6     0

Congratulations to the Clarkes for resisting the deadly temptation to produce a more diverse nominee list, especially given the outrageous - by what appear to the current standards of British SF - presence of women, persons of colour and Muslims on the submissions list. In particular I'd like to praise you for snubbing Alif the Unseen, which could have only embolden those people into further creativity in the field of SF and for picking KSR's proud tribute to colonialism and American Exceptionalism IN SPACE! over, say, Blue Remembered Earth, whose author fell into the dark error of actually paying attention to recent trends in Africa.

Total  Female   Male   f/t
 83     17.5    65.5   .21

( Read more... )

Mount Saint Vincent University campaign for the Women’s Wall of Honour project billboard f/m

A new billboard encouraging people to honour the women in their lives may have passersby scratching their heads.

Total  Female  Male  f/m
 3       0      3     0

"Night Shade Books: What went wrong?"

Last August I got an email from Jason Williams, publisher and majority owner of Night Shade Books. He said he’d been paying attention to Staffer’s Book Review and he wanted to pick my brain about the direction Night Shade was heading. My thoughts ranged from:

Wow — someone in publishing cares what I think (to. . .)
Why the hell does anyone in publishing care what I think?

Little did I know that the mere existence of this email was a sign that Night Shade Books was seriously dysfunctional. Williams and I went on to have a lengthy email exchange and several phone calls over the following week. These talks resulted in me doing a very slight amount of consulting for him. I’m not going to reveal too many details from these exchanges, but a few might dribble out here and there as some of them aid in the telling of a good story.

Carmine Infantino (1925 - 2013)

Carmine Infantino, legendary comic book artist and former DC Comics editorial director, passed away today. He was 87.