Science Fiction Awards Watch

Interzone has published the results of their 2007 Readers’ Poll.

Our Canadian spies tell us that SF author Kenneth Oppel has won the YA/middle category of the prestigious Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Awards for his novel, Darkwing. (And by “prestigious” we mean CA$6,000 prize money.) Some of the other nominees look like they might be SF&F too. The awards are decided by a jury of readers, i.e. actual kids. That’s nice.

Logo, the gay TV channel, is running what they call the NewNowNext Awards. We are not entirely sure what you have to do to qualify for the Totally Most Rad Sickest Blog Ever category, but Brink of Fame: Author we understand. And lo, there is out pal Christopher Barzak, winner of this year’s Crawford Award. You can vote for him (or any of the other candidates) here.

No, this is nothing to do with religion. There is a magazine called the Believer, and it runs two awards. For the first award (the other is a reader poll) they say, “Each year the editors of the Believer generate a short list of the novels they thought were the strongest and, in their opinion, the most undervalued of the year.” And on this year’s short list is Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand. Possibly it was lucky for Hand that her short-listing for a Shirley Jackson Award (reported earlier today) came out around the same time that the Believer was deciding her book was undervalued, but hey, two award nominations in one day, can’t be bad.

(Cheryl, who loves the book, is delighted.)

Locus Online also notes that Zeroville by Steve Erickson is on the list,which suggests it is genre-related. We haven’t read it, but doubtless someone will put us right soon.

Via GalleyCat we learn that the Michael Chabon juggernaut is not unstoppable.

The Final Ballot for the Shirley Jackson Awards has been released. Full details on their official web site. (Thanks Ellen!)

Via Victoria Hoyle and Nic Clarke at Eve’s Alexandria we learn that this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award has been won by Richard Morgan’s Black Man (published as Thirteen in the USA).

The Long List for this year’s Million Writers Award for online short fiction has been announced and is available here. As usual the list includes a lot of genre fiction, including stories from Strange Horizons, Jim Baen’s Universe, Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show and many others.

In addition three awards for magazines were announced. The overall Best Online Magazine went to Blackbird, which is a mainstream magazine, but the Best Publisher of Novella-Length Fiction went to Jim Baen’s Universe and the Best New Online Magazine went to Farrago’s Wainscot, both SF&F publications. Our congratulations to Mike Resnick and Darin Bradley and their teams.

The short list for the story award will be announced later this month, and there will be a public vote for the final winner. Thanks to Rick Bowes for keeping us informed about this one.

Joe Gordon has a report on the NVArt digital art challenge, which this year had a theme of science fiction architecture. The results are spectacular. Here’s the winner:

There’s more on Joe’s blog, and the whole slate of winners can be found here. Some of the winners will be on display at a convention in San Jose in August.

Well the shows are made there, so it is hardly surprising. Joe Gordon on the BAFTA Cymru Awards.

Peter Sullivan writes with news of the FAAN Awards, announced at Corflu this weekend. Apparently the ceremony had a live video feed, which puts the fanzine fans one up on the Hugos for now. We are impressed.

As is becoming traditional here, we have put up a poll to gauge what you think of this year’s Nebula Award winners. Please vote, and if you’d like to justify your opinion please do so in comments below.

Via Jonathan Strahan, we have a list of Nebula Award (and Norton Award) winners as follows:

• Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union - Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, May07)
• Novella: “Fountain of Age” - Nancy Kress (Asimov’s, Jul07)
• Novelette: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” - Ted Chiang (F&SF, Sep07)
• Short Story: “Always” - Karen Joy Fowler (Asimov’s, Apr/May07)
• Script: Pan’s Labyrinth - Guillermo del Toro (Time/Warner, Jan07)
• Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J. K. Rowling (Scholastic Press, Jul07)

Again no official press release.

John Scalzi has the list of nominees for this year’s Sidewise Awards. No official press release yet. We guess Scalzi got the list because he’s a nominee.

Update: They did send out a press release, but it went to Kevin’s personal account not to the SFAW one, so we didn’t see it before John’s post.

The Nebula Award winners will be announced tomorrow night. According to SF Scope there will be a live Internet feed available. Fingers crossed the technology will work. (It has, after all, failed us often enough.) Details here.

Locus has posted the top five finishers in each category for the Locus Awards. These are not “nominees” in the usual sense of finalists that will be voted upon. The winners are already known, and will be announced at the Locus Awards Ceremony in Seattle on June 21st. Locus is just announcing the top five in each category now to give people something to talk about for a couple of months. Feel free to talk away.

The nominees for this year’s Constellation Awards are now online. So is the ballot. You do have to be meet their qualification requirements (which is easy if you are Canadian).

Thanks to Joe Gordon for the tip-off.

John Scalzi reports that The Last Colony has picked up this year’s Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. John also reports that A Companion to Wolves by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette won best Fantasy Novel while Best Epic Fantasy Novel went to The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Congratulations to all involved. Please don’t ask us how they distinguish between an ordinary fantasy novel and an epic one.

The ever-reliable Joe Gordon reports slim pickings for SF&F at this year’s British television awards. The only show to pick up a price was Heroes. More details from Joe.

A few votes are still trickling in on our latest poll, but the results are looking pretty stable so we feel confident in looking at the results. As usual, the numbers voting are very small, but if the results are representative then they are very interesting.

Roughly 40% of respondents say they find authors bringing their works to the attention of potential voters useful. However, just under 25% thinks that authors who do this embarrass themselves, and a similar number thinks that the whole process is demeaning and cheapens the awards. So a 40% OK vote should not be taken as a recommendation to authors to pimp away - there are still lots of people who will be unhappy with people who do.

The most interesting result, however, is that several of those who appear to be against pimping your work, including Jo Walton, have said in comments that what John Scalzi does is OK. That tells us something important. It is easy to think, “oh, Scalzi is always bringing his work to the attention of voters, and everyone loves him, so I can do it too.” But when John does this he does it very carefully, and in such a way as not to offend the sensibilities of the voters. So the real lesson from this poll, we think, is “watch what Scalzi does and learn from him - he’s good at this blogging lark.”