The Hugo Awards

The Hugo Award winners were announced yesterday at Chicon 7, the 70th WorldCon. You can see all the results here.

As usual I’ve not managed to read any of the prose winners, but for once I have actually read something on the ballot: Digger, by Ursula Vernon, an excellent comic that you should check out. Digger won the Best Graphic Story award.

Also announced during this year’s Worldcon was the winner of the bid for the 2014 Worldcon. It was running uncontested, so there’s no real surprise, but the winner was Loncon3, the London Worldcon. There’s a high chance I might actually decide to go to that one.

Locus Awards

The Locus Award winners have been announced.

You have Miéville and Martin in the Sci Fi and Fantasy Novel categories respectively, Erin Morgenstern takes the First Novel Award, and then there’s a sweep by Cat Valente through the YA Novel, Novella, and Novelette categories; she lost out the Short Story award to Neil Gaiman. I’m a fan of Valente, but haven’t read all that much of her work yet, and unfortunately none the five works she had on this ballot. Plenty of other categories that I’ll not take the time to list; you can see everything at the link above.

Several Things Make A Thing

One:
The 2011 Nebula Awards were presented yesterday. Jo Walton takes home the Best Novel prize for Among Others. Locus Online has the full list.

Two:
Everyone on the internet has seen it by now, but John Scalzi’s post on privilege, Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is, has been making waves all over. A few of the things to see are Scalzi’s own follow-up, and:

• Jim C Hines’ Facts Are Cool
• Nick Mamatas’ post on integrating class into the analogy
• Scalzi’s interview with ColorLines
• Blogger Ian Cordingley’s response to Scalzi’s critics

And, well, a helluva lot of other places online that are talking about it. Really, there’s not much you can do about privilege, directly, but just making people aware that it is there is important.

Three:
Shortly before I went off on holiday I was introduced to Feminist Frequency, an online video series by feminist pop culture media critic Anita Sarkeesian. The videos discuss issues of women and gender in popular culture; much of this is in relation to television shows and film, but her videos on the subject of gender in children’s toy advertising are a must see.

Anita is currently fundraising for a follow-up to her Tropes vs. Women video series of last year, which looked at a small selection of frequently used female stereotypes in pop culture. The new series will tackle Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games, and there has already been a massive influx of support.

Four:
And continuing in the same vein, Jef Smith is currently running a Kickstarter for a feminist speculative fiction anthology, to be edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, the couple behind many previous anthologies including The New Weird, Steampunk Reloaded, and the mammoth effort The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. The people behind this know what they’re about, and I have no doubt this will turn out to be an excellent anthology once it is done.

Five:
On my own end, I remain a voracious consumer without much to give back. I’ve spent the last few weeks, excepting the trip overseas, watching the entire series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show I’ve seen a lot of before but never in full and in correct sequence.

I saw The Avengers while in Toronto, and can’t say much more than most other people do:  It is a very good superhero movie, possibly the best, but not much more than that. It doesn’t try to be more than that. It could easily have been as big a mess as X-Men 3, given the number of characters that had to be juggled; I have to credit Joss Whedon for that.

In books, I read Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness while I was away. It’s an excellent novel, both for its narrative and for the way in addresses issues of gender identity: the Gethenian people in the novel’s setting do not have male and female genders, but instead become sexually active in either role for a few days each month, and are asexual the rest of the time. It provokes questions of just how strongly our civilisation is shaped by the gender binary.

At home, I have been reading The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, a collected edition of Alison Bechdel’s long-running comic. Apart from being engaging on the level of its narrative, humour, and the social/political commentary, it also provides an interesting window into 20 years of lesbian subculture for someone who has no personal experience or connection with it such as myself.

Six:
Finally, last week I went and created a Twitter account. I’ve not really started using it yet, but I have started following a few people. I’m trying out linking up the blog to the twitter feed to see how that works. Not sure where I’ll go with it yet.

Renewed Zeal

I am tearing through books lately. Haven’t made time to read so consistently since University. I did intend to write up more than Splinter last week but couldn’t think of what to say. Since that one, I’ve also read Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, graphic novel Big Questions by Anders Nilsen, the Chronicles of the Black Company trilogy by Glen Cook, Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and over the weekend I bought and read the comic/memoir Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.

I’ve read almost as many new books in the first few months of this year as I did in the whole twelve months before it. Hope I can keep up the pace.

I’m still not in a place where I can say I’m familiar with many of the books that are getting nominated for awards this year, however. The Hugo Awards nominations were announced over the weekend, and I’ve read one book on the Best Novel ballot. I’m more than two years behind on China Miéville (Kraken remains to be read before I broach Embassytown), and the others I’ve not gotten round to even thinking of buying.

It’s kind of a false milestone, though, because I’m not actually seeking these things out. I’m thinking about attending the London 2014 Worldcon, at which point I might actually put some effort in so I can know what I’ll be voting on.

Recently, a lot of the buzz among SFF-related blogs and news sites was about a post by writer Christopher Priest where he criticised the current shortlist for the Clarke Awards.

Too much has been said about it already to bother weighing in myself, but the whole episode prompted Catherynne Valente to think about how very different reactions would have been if a woman had written the same things. In her post Let Me Tell You About the Birds and the Bees: Gender and the Fallout Over Christopher Priest, she makes some excellent points on the big disparity that still exists in the way people react to men and women online.

Yes, I know it’s the net and comments are a festering pile of venom, but you do have to notice that the venom cranks up to eleven when a woman posts. You can tell me well, Requires is so mean! Sady doesn’t say things super nicely! And I will point to all the men who say not nice things, some of whom even call out properties for sexism, and are applauded for their badassery and edginess, for their disinclination to suffer fools, and the total lack of screeching hate speech in their comments.

…

The fact is, to be a woman online is to eventually be threatened with rape and death. On a long enough timeline, the chances of this not occurring drop to zero.

It’s worth reading; this is a real problem that you see everywhere online.

Things

• The World Fantasy Awards were given out at this year’s World Fantasy Convention a little over a week ago, with Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death taking the Best Novel prize – another one I’d been meaning to add to my pile. Full results on the official site here.
• I read one issue of Electric Velocipede (issue 12, Spring 2007) before picking up another novel. I guess I’ll slip these old zines in between my other reading instead of all at once.
  I have two more Velocipedes left. Digging through my cupboard yielded 7 issues of Weird Tales (4 or 5 unread) from 2007 and 2008, one HP Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror (think it came free with a Weird Tales), and the Bull Spec from last year.
• Jeff & Ann VanderMeer have started a new online publication, Weird Fiction Review, with all sorts of great, weird content, that’s well worth checking out.
  Right now there’s a bit of a focus on the VanderMeers’ new anthology, THE WEIRD: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories, which collects over 100 years of weird fiction, including works in translation some of which have never before been published in English.

Hugo Awards

I’ve got nothing interesting to say lately, so here’s another awards post.

Hugo winners for 2011 were announced this weekend at Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon. Results are listed here.

Big surprise, Doctor Who won one again. I enjoy the show, but I’m getting tired of seeing it on the ballot.