Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards (presented 2012), the nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the nominees for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book.

Novel

• God’s War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade)
• The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
• Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
• Embassytown, China Miéville (Del Rey)
• Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime)
• Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

Novella

• ‘‘With Unclean Hands’’, Adam-Troy Castro (Analog 11/11)
• ‘‘The Ice Owl’’, Carolyn Ives Gilman (F&SF 11-12/11)
• ‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’’, Kij Johnson (Asimov’s 10-11/11)
• ‘‘Kiss Me Twice’’, Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s 6/11)
• ‘‘The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary’’, Ken Liu (Panverse Three)
• Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente (WSFA)

Novelette

•  ‘‘Six Months, Three Days’’, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com 6/8/11)
• ‘‘The Old Equations’’, Jake Kerr (Lightspeed 7/11)
• ‘‘What We Found’’, Geoff Ryman (F&SF 9-10/11)
• ‘‘The Migratory Pattern of Dancers’’, Katherine Sparrow (GigaNotoSaurus 7/11)
• ‘‘Sauerkraut Station’’, Ferrett Steinmetz (GigaNotoSaurus 11/11)
• ‘‘Fields of Gold’’, Rachel Swirsky (Eclipse 4)
• ‘‘Ray of Light’’, Brad R. Torgersen (Analog 12/11)

Short Story

• ‘‘Her Husband’s Hands’’, Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed 10/11)
• ‘‘Mama, We Are Zhenya, Your Son’’, Tom Crosshill (Lightspeed 4/11)
• ‘‘Shipbirth’’, Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s 2/11)
• ‘‘Movement’’, Nancy Fulda (Asimov’s 3/11)
• ‘‘The Axiom of Choice’’, David W. Goldman (New Haven Review Winter ’11)
• ‘‘The Paper Menagerie’’, Ken Liu (F&SF 3-4/11)
• ‘‘The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees’’, E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld 4/11)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

• The Adjustment Bureau
• Attack the Block
• Captain America: The First Avenger
• Doctor Who: ‘‘The Doctor’s Wife’’
• Hugo
• Midnight in Paris
• Source Code

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book

• Ultraviolet, R.J. Anderson (Orchard UK; Carolrhoda)
• Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial)
• The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow; Gollancz as Fire and Thorns)
• The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout (Bloomsbury USA)
• Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King (Little, Brown)
• Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking)
• The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
• Daughter of Smoke & Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown)

The winners will be announced at SFWA’s 47^th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend, to be held Thursday through Sunday, May 17 - May 20, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, near Reagan National Airport. Connie Willis will be the honored with the 2011 Damon Knight Grand Master Award for her lifetime contributions and achievements in the field. Walter Jon Williams will preside as toastmaster, with Astronaut Michael Fincke as keynote speaker.

Chicon 7, the 70th World Science Fiction Convention, August 30 – September 3, 2012 in Chicago IL, has announced former NASA Flight Controller Sy Liebergot as a Special Guest. Liebergot joins Astronaut Guest of Honor Story Musgrave as part of Chicon’s tribute to the achievements of manned spaceflight.

Sy Liebergot was the lead EECOM flight Controller in Mission Control for all of the Apollo manned missions and Skylab program missions. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work as part of the Apollo 13 Operations Team. For more information, see the Chicon 7 website.

Author Jane Yolen, together with the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, has created a grant meant to recognize mid-list authors who “struggle to remain true to their personal vision and craft.” Those who wish to be considered must be nominated, and the winners and honorees are chosen by Yolen.

The first grant was given to Mary Whittington, author of Carmina Come Dance, The Patchwork Lady, Troll Games, and Winter’s Child, at SCBWI’s 13th annual conference last month. Honorees were authors Ann Whitford Paul and Barbara Diamond Goldin.

Nominations for the 2013 grant open June 1 2012 and must be received by September 1 2012. Nominees will then be invited to fill out an online application before the deadline of November 1 2012,  and the winner will be announced at the SCBWI winter conference in New York. For more details see the SCBWI website.

ChiZine Publications has signed a sales and distribution deal with HarperCollins Canada, allowing the  publisher to sell and distribute ChiZine titles in Canada and to handle digital distribution for the global market. For more information, see the announcement on ChiZine’s website.

Clive Barker, 59, is recovering after several days spent unconscious in intensive care. He explained on his twitter feed that he suffered:

“a nearly fatal case of Toxic Shock brought on by a visit to my dentist. Apparently this is not uncommon. In my case the dental work unloaded such a spillage of poisonous bacteria into my blood that my whole system crashed, putting me into a coma. I spent several days in Intensive Care, with a machine breathing for me. Later, my doctors said that they had not anticipated a happy ending until I started to fight, repeatedly pulling out the tubes that I was constantly gagging on. After a few days of nightmarish delusions I woke up to my life again, tired, twenty pounds lighter, but happy to be back from a very dark place. And here in the world I intend to stay. I’ve books to write, films to make and paintings to paint. I seem to have come home with my sight clearer somehow, and my sense of purpose intensified.”

Winners of the 2011 Kitschies, awarded to “the year’s most progressive, intelligent, and entertaining works of genre literature published in the U.K.” were  presented February 3, 2012 in a ceremony at the SFX Weekender 3 held at the Prestatyn Sands holiday camp in Wales.

Red Tentacle (Novel)

• A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness & Siobhan Dowd (Walker)

• The Enterprise of Death, Jesse Bullington (Orbit)
• Embassytown, China Miéville (Del Rey; Tor UK)
• The Testament of Jesse Lamb, Jane Rogers (Sandstone)
• Osama, Lavie Tidhar (PS)

Golden Tentacle (Debut Novel)

• God’s War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade)

• Among Thieves, Douglas Hulick (Tor)
• The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday; Harvill Secker)
• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs (Quirk)
• The Samaritan, Fred Venturini (Blank Slate)

Inky Tentacle (Cover Art)

• The Last Werewolf, Glen Duncan, design by Peter Mendelsund (Canongate)

• Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch, illustration by Stephen Walter, design by Patrick Knowles/TAG Fine Arts (Gollancz)
• The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco, illustration by John Spencer, design by Suzanne Dean (Harvill Secker)
• Equations of Life, Simon Morden, design by Lauren Panepinto (Orbit)
• A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness & Siobhan Dowd, illustration by Jim Kay (Walker)

The “Black Tentacle,” an award presented at the discretion of the judges, went to the publisher SelfMadeHero.

The winner of the Red Tentacle received £750, and winners of the Golden Tentacle and Inky Tentacle won £250 each. All finalists received a bottle of rum from award sponsor The Kraken Rum.

Judges were Lauren Beukes, Rebecca Levene, Anne C. Perry, and Jared Shurin. Judges for the art award were Darren Banks, Hayley Campbell, Catherine Hemelryk, Craig Kennedy, and Anne C. Perry. For more: www.thekitschies.com.

Christopher Samuel Youd, 89, better known by his pseudonym John Christopher, died February 3, 2012 in Bath England. As Christopher he wrote the classic SF catastrophe novel The Death of Grass (1956; in the US as No Blade of Grass, 1957), and the YA trilogy Tripods, which began in 1967.

His first publication of genre interest was poem “Dreamer” in Weird Tales (1949) as C.S. Youd, with first SF story “Christmas Tree” appearing as Christopher Youd in 1949. His story “A Few Kindred Spirits” (1965), as John Christopher, was a Nebula finalist.

First novel The Winter Swan (1949), as Christopher Youd, was fantasy, and he produced a number of non-SF works in the following years under various names.

The Twenty-Second Century (1954) collected some of his SF stories, and his first true SF novel was The Year of the Comet (1955; in the US as Planet in Peril, 1959), all as John Christopher. Other adult SF work includes The Long Winter (1962; as The World in Winter), Sweeney’s Island (1964; as Cloud and Silver in the UK), The Possessors (1965), A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965; as The Ragged Edge in the US, 1966), The Little People (1966), Pendulum (1968), and Bad Dream (2003).

He turned to children’s SF and fantasy with The White Mountains (1967), beginning the Tripods series, which also includes The City of Gold and Lead (1967), The Pool of Fire (1968), and prequel When the Tripods Came (1988). He also wrote The Prince in Waiting series, the Fireball series, and numerous standalones for children.

Born April 16, 1922 in Huyton, Lancaster, Lancashire, Youd attended Peter Symonds’ School in Winchester, Hampshire before serving in the Royal Corps of Signals from 1941-46. He became a full-time writer in 1958.

For more, see his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

A complete obituary will appear in the March issue of Locus Magazine.

Susan Marie Groppi, longtime fiction editor at Strange Horizons, is stepping down. Groppi has been with the online magazine for over a decade, serving for a time as both editor-in-chief as well as a fiction editor, and will continue to work with the magazine in an advisory role.

Late last year fiction editor Karen Meisner stepped down as well. Senior fiction editor Jed Hartman remains on staff. 

The magazine is currently looking for two volunteers to fill the vacant positions. For more information, see the announcement on the Strange Horizons website.

SF writer Ardath Mayhar, 81, has reportedly died in Nacogdoches TX. Mayhar wrote poetry in the 1940s and published pseudonymous Westerns and mainstream books before turning to SF and fantasy with “The Cat with the Sapphire Eyes” (1973). Her first SF novel, How the Gods Wove in Kyrannon (1979) was one of more than 60 books and scores of short stories she produced in her long career. In 2008 she received a SFWA Author Emeritus Award.

Ardath Frances Hurst was born February 20, 1930 in Timpson TX, and attended high school in Nagodoches. She married Joe E. Mayhar in 1958. They lived in Oregon for a few years before returning to Texas in the 1970s. Mayhard worked as a dairyman, chicken farmer, and proofreader before becoming a full-time writer in 1982. She ran the East Texas Bookstore in the ’50s and ’60s, and with her husband operated bookshop View from Orbit beginning in 1984 until the late ’90s. She also taught writing.

Her husband predeceased her in 1999. She is survived by two sons and two stepsons.

See the March issue of Locus for a complete obituary.

The Science Fiction Writers of America announced to members yesterday that Dorchester Publishing, after failing to fulfill their contractual obligations to SFWA members, has been removed from the list of qualifying SFWA markets. Dorchester was put on probation on December 10, 2010 for not paying royalties when contractually specified and for distributing books in formats they had not legally secured rights to. Although some effort has been made, because Dorchester did not fulfill SFWA’s requirements during their probation period, their removal from the SFWA qualifying markets list is effective from the start of their probation period, December 10, 2010.

In related news, Dorchester’s sole remaining editorial staff, Chris Keeslar, is no longer employed with the company as of January 31, 2012. Keeslar sent an email to colleagues which directs general questions to Hannah Wolfson (hwolfson@dorchesterpub.com), rights questions to Sam Hazell (shazell@dorchesterpub.com), accounting questions to Loretta Falk (lfalk@dorchesterpub.com), royalties questions to Brian Chinn (bchinn@dorchesterpub.com), and the ordering of any trade paperbacks to Kelley Allen (kallen@dorchesterpub.com).