Science Fiction Awards Watch

The Darrells are regional awards for books set in, or by writers living in, the Greater Memphis Area. The winners will be announced at MidSouthCon on Saturday (March 13th). The lists of finalists can be found online here and here. The Hall of Fame inductee for 2010 is Bryan Davis.

Here’s another announcement from Locus. This year’s Pilgrim Award, for lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship, has been given to Eric S. Rabkin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Locus has announced the 2010 inductees for the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. They are: Octavia E. Butler, Roger Zelazny, Douglas Trumbull, and Richard Matheson.

The induction ceremony will be held on June 26 at the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, Washington as part of the Locus Awards Weekend.

The short lists for this year’s Australian horror awards have been announced. Full details are available on the official web site. The nominees in the long fiction category (which includes novellas) are:

• A Book of Endings, Deborah Biancotti (Twelfth Planet Press)
• Red Queen, H. M. Brown (Penguin Australia)
• “Wives”, Paul Haines (X6, Coeur de Lion Publishing)
• The Dead Path, Stephen M. Irwin (Hachette Australia)
• Slights, Kaaron Warren (Angry Robot)

The guest judges — Bill Congreve, James Doig and Martin Livings — will need to make their minds up quickly as the winners are due to be announced on April 5th.

If you are a member of this year’s Swancon you can find the Tin Duck ballot online here.

Octocon has announced that the 2010 Golden Blaster Awards (The National Irish Science Fiction Film Awards) are open for submissions. There are awards for short films and for scripts. Full details here.

Continuing the run-up to the Oscars, the Independent Spirit Awards were given out last night. The lone sf film among the nominees, Cold Souls, was nominated in three categories, but lost all of them (Best First Screenplay and Supporting Female to Precious, and Best Cinematography to A Serious Man).

The Japan Academy Prizes are Japan’s closest equivalent to the Oscars. Like the Oscars, they have a Best Animated Film category, which means one fairly reliable spot for sf to turn up. This year’s winner in that category, announced on Friday, is Summer Wars.

This post is just for UK readers and ex-pats. Everyone else may go, “whaa???”

The Blue Peter Badge for Book of the Year has been awarded to Ali Sparkes for Frozen in Time, a novel about two children who are cryogenically frozen for 50 years and wake up in 2009.

The revised rules for the Nebula Awards are apparently causing some debate amongst SFWA members. The old rules were widely derided for several reasons, most particularly the odd eligibility criteria that few people understood. That’s now gone. However, the old Nebulas were also notorious for “logrolling”, by which members would agree to support each other’s work, and the intensive campaigning that went on around this. Logrolling was made easy because everyone’s votes were visible to other SFWA members.

The new rules changed this. You can no longer see who voted for which works. But you can still see the voting totals as they mount up through the voting period. Consequently people still campaign, much to the irritation of some members.

Jason Sanford thinks the new rules are a great improvement. However, debate in the comments for this SF Signal post suggest that not all is well in SFWA-land. Author Sandra McDonald is quoted as saying that the Nebulas have, “become American Idol-ized.”

The hard working folks at Locus have found out all of the names for the Spectrum Awards that were in that video.

The Association of Media in Digital, based in Japan, announced the winners of its 15th annual awards on Monday. SF content was provided by Avatar and the animated film Summer Wars. Anime News Network has the complete list of winners, or Japanese speakers can see the official press release (PDF).

Via a very happy AussieCon 4, where he is a Guest of Honour, we learn that Shaun Tan has once again been sweeping up the awards. His latest book, Tales from Outer Suburbia, won the AU$15,000 Children’s Book Award at the recent Adelaide Festival. Not content with that, Tan also walked off with the AU$10,000 Premier’s Award for the best book overall. It is the first time that a book written for children has won the top prize. Press release here.

Looking for some free short fiction to consider for the Hugo Awards? Well stories that are already nominated for the Nebulas are a good start. Asimov’s, as usual, has a whole bunch of nominees, and they have made them available online here. Several are also available as podcasts.

The nominees for this year’s Tähtifantasia prize, for fantasy novels translated into Finnish, have been announced. They are:

• Joe Abercrombie: Ase itse (The Blade Itself, Kirjava)
• Jorge Luis Borges: Kuvitteellisten olentojen kirja (El libro de los seres imaginarios, Teos)
• Joe Hill: Bobby Conroy palaa kuolleista ja muita kertomuksia (20th Century Ghosts, Tammi)
• Ursula K. Le Guin: Lavinia (Lavinia, WSOY)
• Haruki Murakami: Kafka rannalla (Kafka on the Beach, Tammi)

That’s quite an impressive field.

The jury for the award comprises critic Jukka Halme, critic Aleksi Kuutio, writer and editor Anne Leinonen and Risingshadow.net representative Osmo Määttä. The award is given by the Helsinki Science Fiction Society and the winner will be announced at Finncon in July. Cheryl Morgan, and last year’s winner, Ellen Kushner, who is a Guest of Honor at the convention, will be on hand to report. Thanks as always to Tero Ykspetäjä for the news.

The Bay Area Science Fiction Association has posted a bunch of Hugo Award recommendations to the Hugo Recommend LiveJournal site. There’s a separate entry for each category, so we won’t link direct, but they are at the top of the stack of posts right now, and should be easy to find my scrolling down if new material has come in by the time you click through.

The deadline for submitting Hugo Award nominating ballots is 23:59 PST on Saturday, March 13, 2010.

Canada’s fan awards have announced their nominee lists for this year. Mike Glyer has the full lists over at File 770. Here are the novel categories:

Best Novel in English

• The Amulet of Amon-Ra, Leslie Carmichael, CBAY Books
• Druids, Barbara Galler-Smith and Josh Langston, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy
• Wake, Robert J. Sawyer, Penguin Canada
• Steel Whispers, Hayden Trenholm, Bundoran Press
• Terra Insegura, Edward Willett, DAW Books

Meilleur Roman en Français

• Le protocole Reston, Mathieu Fortin, Coups de tête
• L’axe de Koudriss, Michèle Laframboise, Médiaspaul
• Suprématie, Laurent McAllister, Bragelonne
• Un tour en Arkadie, Francine Pelletier, Alire
• Filles de lune 3: Le talisman de Maxandre, Élisabeth Tremblay, De Mortagne

We note also a nominee in the category Fan Achievement (Organization): Robbie Bourget, and René Walling, Chairs of “Anticipation”, the 67th WorldCon.

Joe Gordon at Forbidden Planet has a report on the nominee lists for this year’s British Animation Awards. It contains lots of fun video samples, including the ever-wonderful Wallace & Gromit. As their feature film category is European-only, this might be where The Secret of Kells gets to win a gong instead of being beaten by Up and Coraline.

Cathy & Arnie Fenner have announced the winners of this year’s Spectrum Art Awards, and they have chosen to do so in an interesting manner – on video. Over at their web site you can see the jury hold up the winning images and announce the names of the winners.

It is a lovely idea, but we have a few suggestions for next year:

• Get the judges to hold the pictures still for a little longer, we want to see them;
• Caption the video so that we can read the names of the winners rather than have to work out the names from the soundtrack; and
• Put the video on You Tube so that people can embed it – you’ll get so much more coverage that way.

The winners of the Chronos Awards, which are local to the State of Victoria in Australia, were announced at Continuum 6 in Melbourne recently. They are as follows:

• Best Long Fiction: Slice of Life, Paul Haines (The Mayne Press)
• Best Short Fiction: Gamer’s Quest, George Ivanoff (Ford Street Publishing)
• Best Artwork: My Extraordinary Life and Death, Grant Gittus (Ford Street Publishing)
• Best Fan Writer: Felicity Dowker
• Best Fan Artist: Ditmar Jenssen
• Best Fan Publication: Ethel the Aardvark, edited by Murray and Natalie MacLachlan, and Sam Rooney (Melbourne Science Fiction Club)
• Best Achievement: The Halloween Clive Barker Chat, Felicity Dowker (AHWA).