Science Fiction Awards Watch

This year’s Eisner Award winners were announced at the San Diego ComicCon over the weekend. Geek Syndicate has the full results.

The J. Lloyd Eaton Conference has announced its 2010 and 2011 Lifetime Achievement Awards. The 2010 award goes to Samuel Delaney, and the 2011 one to Harlan Ellison.

For more details, the full press release is here.

The Libertarian Futurist Society has announced the winners of this year’s Prometheus Awards.

• Best Novel: The Unincorporated Man, Dani and Eytan Kollin (TOR Books)
• Hall of Fame: “No Truce with Kings,” Poul Anderson

The winners will receive their awards at a ceremony at this year’s Worldcon, Aussiecon 4, at time not yet scheduled.

The press release adds:

The Unincorporated Man is the first novel publication by the Kollin brothers. It is the first novel in a planned trilogy to be published by Tor. The Unincorporated Man presents the idea that education and personal development could be funded by allowing investors to take a share of one’s future income. The novel explores the ways this arrangement would affect those who do not own a majority of the stock in themselves. For instance, often ones investors would have control of a person’s choices of where to live or work. The desire for power as an end unto itself and the negative consequences of the raw lust for power are shown in often great detail. The story takes a strong position that liberty is important and worth fighting for, and the characters spend their time pushing for different conceptions of what freedom is.

Poul Anderson’s novels have been nominated many times, and have won the Prometheus Award (in 1995, for The Stars are also Fire), and the Hall of Fame Award (1995 for The Star Fox and 1985 for Trader to the Stars). He also received a Special award for lifetime achievement in 2001. This was the first nomination for “No Truce With Kings”.

Poul Anderson’s “No Truce with Kings” was first published in 1963. Like many science fiction stories of that era, it was set in a future that had endured a nuclear war. Anderson’s focus is not on the immediate disaster and the struggle to survive, but the later rebuilding; its central conflict is over what sort of civilization should be created. The story’s title comes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Old Issue,” which describes the struggle to bind kings and states with law and the threat of their breaking free. Anderson’s future California is basically a feudal society, founded on local loyalties, but it has a growing movement in favor of a centralized, impersonal state. As David Friedman remarked about this story, Anderson plays fair with his conflicting forces: both of them want the best for humanity, but one side is mistaken about what that is. This story is classic Anderson and, like many of his best stories, reveals his libertarian sympathies.

The runners up in the Best Novel category were: Hidden Empire, Orson Scott Card (TOR Books); Makers, Cory Doctorow (TOR Books); Liberating Atlantis, Harry Turtledove (ROC/Penguin Books); and The United States of Atlantis, Harry Turtledove (ROC/Penguin Books)

Feng Zhang passes on to us the results of the 2009 Sky Awards, presented on July 18, 2010 at a ceremony in Beijing, China.

• Best Fiction Long Form in 2009: Once upon a Time in Shanghai, JIANG Nan (Volumes Publishing Company)
• Best Fiction Short Form in 2009: “Dark Room”, HAN Song (New Realms of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jun 2009)
• Most Popular Translated Fiction in 2009: The Girl Who Leapt through Time, Yasutaka Tsutsui, trans. by DING Dingchong (from The Girl Who Leapt through Time, Shanghai Translation Publishing House)
• Special Contribution Award: Odyssey of China Fantasy – a SF/F magazine

Thanks to René Walling for sending us the nominations for the Prix Rosny award for French science fiction:

Novels

• BEAUVERGER Stéphane: Le Déchronologue (La VOLTE)
• BELLAGAMBA Ugo: Tancrède. Une uchronie (LES MOUTONS ÉLECTRIQUES),
• DUFOUR Catherine: Outrage et rébellion (DENOËL)
• FERRIK Frank, La Loi du désert (Éditions de Riez)
• McALLISTER Laurent: Suprématie (BRAGELONNE)
• MURAIL Lorris: Nuigrave (A.& D., Robert Laffont)

Short Stories

• DEIANA Célia: « Verre brisé » (in Créateurs, inventions et savants fous, HYDROMEL)
• DUNYACH Jean-Claude: « Les Fleurs de Troie » (in Retour sur l’horizon, DENOËL)
• HENRY Léo: « Les Trois livres qu’Absalon Nathan n’écrira jamais » (in Retour sur l’horizon, DENOËL)
• KLOETZER Laurent: « Trois singes » (in Retour sur l’horizon, DENOËL)
• NOIREZ Jérôme: « Terre de fraye » (in Retour sur l’horizon, DENOËL)
• WINCKLER Martin: « Alice in Wonderland » (in Galaxies nouvelle série n° 7/49)

The final vote will take place at the French National Science Fiction Convention in Grenoble on the 26th-29th of August, 2010. Members of the convention will have the right to vote.

The Endeavour Award nominations have been announced:

• City Without End, Kay Kenyon
• Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, Cat Rambo
• Hunting Ground, Patricia Briggs
• Mind Over Ship, David Marusek
• Push of the Sky, Camille Alexa

The judges who will select the winner are Robin Wayne Bailey, Laura Anne Gilman, and Madeleine Robins. The winner will be announced at Orycon 32 in November.

From Con-news.com comes word of the announcement of the Harvey Award nominations for comics and sequential art. The Awards will be presented a this year’s Baltimore Comic-Con on the evening of Saturday, August 28.

As reported by File 770, The winners of the 2010 Mythopoeic Awards were announced at Mythcon 41 in Dallas today. They are as follows:

• Adult Literature: Jo Walton, Lifelode (NESFA Press)
• Children’s Literature: Grace Lin, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (Little, Brown)
• Inklings Studies: Dimitra Fimi, Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
• Myth & Fantasy Studies: Marek Oziewicz, One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle and Orson Scott Card (McFarland, 2008)
• Alexei Kondratiev Student Paper Award: Michael Millburn, “Art According to Romantic Theology: Charles Williams’ Analysis of Dante Reapplied to J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Leaf By Niggle’”

We’ve been checking on tweets about the Shirley Jackson Awards from Readercon. Here are the (unofficial) results, courtesy of someone called @avaland2.

• Novel: Big Machine, Victor LaValle (Speigel & Grau)
• Novella: Midnight Picnic, Nick Antosca (Word Riot Press)
• Novelette: “Morality,” Stephen King (Esquire)
• Short Story: “The Pelican Bar,” Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse 3, Night Shade)
• Collection (tie): Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Robert Shearman (Big Finish Productions) and Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, Kevin Wilson (Harper Perennial)
• Anthology: Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Ellen Datlow (Solaris)

The John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award are normally announced at the Campbell Conference, which is next weekend. However, as Chris McKitterick explains, this year the winners were announced a week early at Readercon. The winners are as follows:

• Campbell: The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)
• Sturgeon: Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow (Tachyon)

We note that both books were published by small presses, and both companies are based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Science Fiction Poetry Association has announced the results of this year’s Rhysling Awards as follows:

Long Form

• 1st: “In the Astronaut Asylum”, Kendall Evans and Samantha Henderson
• 2nd: “Rattlebox III” Mike Allen, Kendall Evans, and David C. Kopaska-Merkel
• 3rd: “The First Story” Lana Hechtman Ayers

Short Form

• 1st: “To Theia”, Ann K. Schwader
• 2nd: “The Changeling Always Wins”, Nicole Kornher-Stace
• 3rd: “Nine Views of the Oracle” Rachel Manija Brown

Grand Master

Jane Yolen

Scott Edelman tweets from Readercon that this year’s Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award has been won by Mark Clifton.

Clifton is best known for the Hugo-winning novel, They’d Rather Be Right, which he co-authored with Frank Riley. A bibliography is available here.

We’ve done it again! Last year Chris Beckett shocked the literary world by winning the prestigious £5,000 Edge Hill Prize for short story collections with The Turing Test. This year’s nominees included two genre contenders, and the winner is Rob Shearman’s Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (Big Finish).

Rob’s book is also up for a Shirley Jackson Award at Readercon this weekend, and is hotly tipped to be a nominee for the World Fantasy Awards (His Tiny Deaths won Best Collection in 2008).

It is pretty common in literary circles to hear people bemoaning the death of short fiction, but judging from the Edge Hill Prize it is alive and well in the science fiction & fantasy community.

The winners of the 2010 Bulwer Lytton contest (for truly awful opening lines) have been announced. This year’s most horrible prose appears to have come from a romance novel, but winners were listed in genre categories as follows.

Fantasy

The wood nymph fairies blissfully pranced in the morning light past the glistening dewdrops on the meadow thistles by the Old Mill, ignorant of the daily slaughter that occurred just behind its lichen-encrusted walls, twin 20-ton mill stones savagely ripping apart the husks of wheat seed, gleefully smearing the starchy entrails across their dower granite faces in unspeakable botanical horror and carnage – but that’s not our story; ours is about fairies!

Rick Cheeseman, Waconia, MN

Science Fiction

t’Bleen and Golxxm squelched their way romantically along the slough beach beneath the three Sommodian moons, their eye-stalks occasionally touching, and tenderly belched sweet nothings like, “I don’t think I’ve ever had such a charming evening,” and, “Say, would you like to gnaw that hunk of suppurating tissue off my dorsal appendage—it really itches.”

Bryan Olive, Tustin, CA

The full list of winners (should you dare to look) can be found here.

The Sunburst Awards, Canada’s juried science fiction awards, have announced their finalists for 2010. They are as follows:

Adult Novel

• Charles de Lint, The Mystery of Grace (Tor)
• A.M. Dellamonica, Indigo Springs (Tor)
• Cory Doctorow, Makers (Tor)
• Karl Schroeder, The Sunless Countries (Tor)
• Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock (Tor)

Young Adult Novel

• Megan Crewe, Give Up the Ghost (Henry Holt)
• Maureen Garvie, Amy By Any Other Name (Key Porter)
• Hiromi Goto, Half World (Penguin)
• Lesley Livingston, Wondrous Strange (HarperTeen)
• Arthur Slade, The Hunchback Assignment (HarperCollins)

The jurors for the 2010 award are: Don Bassingthwaite, Gemma Files, Susie Moloney, Ursula Pflug and Ed Willett. The winners will be announced in the fall.

We note with interest the fact that all five finalists in the adult novel category are from the same (non-Canadian) publisher. Our congratulations to Tor. Can anyone remember a similar publisher clean sweep in a major award?

John Scalzi reports that his novel, The Android’s Dream, has won the Best Translated Work category in the 2010 Kurd Laßwitz Preis. The full results are here (in German). Andreas Eschbach appears to have won the Best Novel category with Ein König Für Deutschland (A King for Germany). Can someone who reads German better than we do provide translations for the other categories, please?

The results of this year’s Locus Awards were announced in Seattle today. We helped Locus provide live coverage at their website. Here are the winners:

• Science Fiction Novel: Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
• Fantasy Novel: The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
• First Novel: The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)
• Young Adult Novel: Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)
• Novella: The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker (Subterranean)
• Novelette: “By Moonlight”, Peter S. Beagle (We Never Talk About My Brother)
• Short Story: “An Invocation of Incuriosity”, Neil Gaiman (Songs of the Dying Earth)
• Magazine: F&SF
• Publisher: Tor
• Anthology: The New Space Opera 2, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos; HarperCollins Australia)
• Collection: The Best of Gene Wolfe, Gene Wolfe (Tor); as The Very Best of Gene Wolfe (PS)
• Editor: Ellen Datlow
• Artist: Michael Whelan
• Non-Fiction/Art Book: Cheek by Jowl, Ursula K. Le Guin (Aqueduct)

The Locus Awards will be announced at a ceremony in Seattle tomorrow. Locus has chosen to use CoverItLive to provide live, text-based web coverage of the ceremony, just as we have done for the Hugos and World Fantasy Awards. Cheryl and Kevin will be on hand to help out. Liz Argall will report live from the ceremony, while Jonathan Strahan joins Cheryl in the studio for color commentary. We are delighted that Locus has opted to engage with a world-wide audience for this.

The awards ceremony is due to begin at around 2:00pm, Seattle time. At least that’s when we’ll go on air. It follows a speech by Connie Willis, which sadly we can’t bring you. Knowing Connie, she won’t suddenly find she doesn’t have enough to say to fill her time slot, so there’s no danger of starting early.

The coverage will be on the Locus web site. We’ll give you the link as soon as we have it.

Update: The Locus page where you can see the coverage is here.

These awards, known as the Goldies, are given out by the Golden Crown Literary Society, which exists to promote writing by lesbians. They have a speculative fiction category, and a separate one for paranormal romance. Given the number of high-profile lesbian SF&F writers, it is a bit surprising to see none of them on the lists. Details of this year’s nominees and winners here.

You just can’t stop Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. Today it was announced that the book has won the prestigious Carnegie Medal. As Alison Flood points out in The Guardian, this makes it the only book to have won both the UK’s most important prize for children’s literature (the Carnegie), and the equivalent prize in the USA (the Newbery). Neil being committed elsewhere, his fiancee, Amanda Palmer, traveled to London to collect the award. If you are in London, she’s playing a free gig in Camden this evening. Check Twitter.

Update: Well we were completely suckered on this one. Neil did indeed attend the ceremony. Presumably he didn’t tweet about it along the way because that might have given the game away prior to the official announcement. He also made a brief appearance on the BBC’s Breakfast program the following morning, and then headed straight back to the airport. That sort of schedule is no fun.