Briefs and Links

Wednesday 21 November 2001

Awards

§ The first annual Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award was officially handed over to John Stapledon, son of award recipient Olaf Stapledon, on Monday November 5. John Clute, one of the award judges, presented the award to Stapledon [below] at a gathering of the Science Fiction Foundation at the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool, which holds the Olaf Stapledon Archive. The award was announced in September at the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia.

John Stapledon expressed how honored he was to receive the award to commemorate the fiction of his father, and said the family wishes that the award would eventually become part of the Stapledon Archive.

The award website has further details, including Robert Silverberg's remarks from the award announcement in Philadelphia.

— Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award

E-Publishing

§ The Infinite Matrix, the SF webzine edited by Eileen Gunn, has relaunched after receiving funding from a benefactor who prefers to remain anonymous. The webzine was announced in late 2000, then lost funding, though a one-shot issue was eventually posted in August 2001.

The webzine features daily columns from Bruce Sterling and Terry Bisson, a novel excerpt by Kathleen Ann Goonan, and contributions from Richard Kadrey, David Langford, and Simon Ings.

Best of the Year

§ Publishers Weekly has released extensive lists of the best books of 2001, including the following SF titles:

• Kushiel's Dart, Jacqueline Carey (Tor)
• Sir Apropos of Nothing, Peter David (Pocket)
• The Living Blood, Tananarive Due (Pocket)
• The Last Hot Time, John M. Ford (Tor, 2000)
• Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities, Geoffrey A. Landis (Golden Gryphon)

PW's general fiction list includes Cliver Barker's Coldheart Canyon, King & Straub's Black House, and King's Dreamcatcher.

— The Year in Books 2001

§ Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle Book Review presented best of 2001 lists in various categories, including an SF list compiled by Michael Berry:

• The Graveyard Game, Kage Baker (Harcourt)
• Coldheart Canyon, Clive Barker (HarperCollins)
• The Wooden Sea, Jonathan Carroll (Tor)
• The Last Hot Time, John M. Ford (Tor, 2000)
• Black House, Stephen King & Peter Straub (Random House)
• American Gods, Neil Gaiman (Morrow)
• Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link (Small Beer Press)
• Nekropolis, Maureen F. McHugh (Eos)
• Declare, Tim Powers (Morrow)
• Passage, Connie Willis (Bantam)

— Holiday Book Review

Announcements

• "The Profane Comedy" is a presentation of staged readings of three plays by James Morrow, directed by Isaac Butler. Discussion with the author and director will follow the event. 10% of all money from ticket sales will go to benefit "Windows of Hope", a 9-11 disaster relief organization focusing on the restaurant workers, janitors, etc., who were affected by the tragedy.

WHAT: "The Profane Comedy: Plays by James Morrow"
WHEN: Monday, November 26th, @ 8:00PM
WHERE: Theatre 80, 80 St. Mark's Place (@ 1st Ave, Subway: 6 to Astor Place), Manhattan
HOW MUCH: $10
HOW TO RESERVE: Call 212-502-3500 (or e-mail us)

• Robert J. Sawyer will be keynote speaker at the 12th Annual Canadian Conference on Intelligent Systems, to be held in Calgary, May 30-31, 2002. This is Canada's major conference on artificial intelligence and robotics.

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Sunday 11 November 2001

Awards

§ Ursula K. Le Guin's The Telling (Harcourt) and Louise Marley's The Glass Harmonica (Ace) are joint winners of the third annual Endeavour Award, for works published in 2000. The award is given to a distinguished SF or fantasy book by a Pacific Northwest writer. This year's award, which carries a $1000 cash prize, was presented November 9 at OryCon, Oregon's annual SF and fantasy convention. The judges for the 2001 Award were Dave Duncan, Elizabeth Hand, and Michael P. Kube-McDowell.

Nominations for next year's award are available on the award website. Deadline is February 15, 2002.

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Friday 9 November 2001

Obit

§ Comic book artist and illustrator Gray Morrow died November 6, 2001, at the age of 67. Born March 7, 1934, Morrow worked extensively in comics throughout his career (most recently as artist for the syndicated Tarzan strip until its cancellation earlier this year), but was best known in SF for magazine covers from the mid-1960s to the early-1970s for Galaxy, Worlds of If, Amazing, Fantastic, and others; as artist of over 70 volumes of Ace Books' Perry Rhodan novels in the mid-1970s; and as collaborator for The Illustrated Roger Zelazny (1978). He was nominated for the Hugo Award three times, 1966-1968.

A full obituary will appear in the December issue of Locus Magazine.

— COMICON.com [scroll down]
— SFWA News

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Sunday 4 November 2001

Awards

§ The James White Award 2001, announced November 3 in Belfast, went to David D. Levine for his short story "Nucleon". The award includes a cheque for $150 and a trophy. Levine's story, chosen from over 100 entries, will be published in Interzone. Judges for the event were Michael Carroll, Ian McDonald, Kim Newman, Mike Resnick, and Interzone editor David Pringle.

Levine is editor of SF fanzine Bento, a Clarion graduate, and he placed second in this year's Writers of the Future competition. He's sold other stories to anthologies edited by Bruce Holland Rogers and Martin H. Greenberg & Russell Davis.

The James White Award, named after the Irish SF writer who died in 1999, is now accepting entries for the 2002 competition.

— James White Award
— 2001 Winner

Best of the Year

§ Amazon.com is first out with lists of best books—and bestsellers—of 2001. The editor's (Therese Littleton) selections of the Top 10 SF books are:

1. Passage, Connie Willis (Bantam)
2. The Graveyard Game, Kage Baker (Harcourt)
3. Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds (Ace)
4. The Secret of Life, Paul McAuley (Tor)
5. The Chronoliths, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
6. Nekropolis, Maureen F. McHugh (Eos)
7. Kingdom of Cages, Sarah Zettel (Warner Aspect)
8. Cosmonaut Keep, Ken MacLeod (Tor)
9. Metaplanetary, Tony Daniel (Eos)
10. Eyes of the Calculor, Sean McMullen (Tor)

The list of best fantasy books has titles by China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, Isobelle Carmody, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jacqueline Carey, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Elizabeth Haydon, Tad Williams, and Sara Douglass. (The Reynolds and MacLeod SF novels, and the Miéville fantasy novel, were first published in the UK in 2000.)

The top four entries on the SF & Fantasy Bestsellers list are by J.R.R. Tolkien; next is Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass.

The list of best horror titles is led by Stephen King & Peter Straub's Black House, follows by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection.

Rumor Mill

§ Now that the November Ansible quotes China Miéville about the bin Laden-Asimov connection (Foundation translated into Arabic is "Al-Qaeda"), we will pass on a link to a posting on a Russia discussion site from October 14 elaborating on this matter...

This peculiar coincidence would be of little interest if not for abundant parallels between the plot of Asimov's book and the events unfolding now.

— Russia, Terrorism, Asimov

October News Log