The Seiuns
August 29th, 2007 by Editors
As we mentioned yesterday, with Worldcon being in Japan, the Seiuns get their own award ceremony entirely separate from the Hugos. However, somewhat to our surprise, we could not find the 2007 Seiun nominees anywhere online except on the official Japanese SF Fan Group web site, which is in Japanese.
A certain amount of scrambling around followed. We are not entirely certain of the data yet, but we think that this nominee list is more or less correct. For this we are indebted to Jonathan Clements, and to cataly, who appears to be a Japanese student of English Literature, living in Tokyo. If you see any errors in the listing, or can help out with missing data, please let us know.
Our Japanese friends have once again demonstrated excellent taste. Their translated novel list includes works by Charlie Stross, Phillip Reeve, Geoffrey A Landis, Wil McCarthy and Alastair Reynolds. The translated short fiction comes from Gene Wolfe, China Mieville, Terry Bisson, Greg Egan, Bradley Denton and Jerry Oltion & Adam-Troy Castro. Mr. Clements, who knows far more about anime, manga and things Japanese than we ever will, informs us that the rest of the list is good. We particularly like the look of I Should Be Able to Meet a Kangaroo by Hisashi Asakura from the non-fiction section because, well everyone should.
By now most people probably know that “seiun” is Japanese for “nebula”, which is ironic because the Seiuns are more like the Hugos and the SFWJ’s award is the Nihon SF Taisho. But where there is matter, there can be dark matter, and where there are nebulas… Well, cataly explains about the
Ankoku Seiuns, the “dark nebulas”. These are apparently joke awards given out each year at Japanese National Convention. The categories are: Event, Guest, Costume, The Others, and Lucky Attendee. We hope someone will be able to tell who wins those as well as who wins the real Seiuns.
Hello, sir. How was your stay in Japan?
I came home and started my computer a few days ago, and I was so surprised my blog is linked to somewhere : here.
Btw, directly translating, that title means “When I Met A Kangaroo”.
(Mr. Asakura is a veteran of translation. When he was young, he saw Pocket Books on sale. And the logo was Gertrude the kangaroo.)
We should be able to meet kangaroos in next Aussiecon though.
Cataly, lovely to hear from you!
Cheryl, sadly, did not get to go to Japan, but Kevin in still there (currently in Osaka) and having a wonderful time. For someone like him, who loves trains, Japan is pretty much an idea country to visit.
Thanks for the correction to the translation. Jonathan did them in a hurry and he did warm us that one or two might be wrong. That one has now been corrected.
Thank you once again for posting information about the Seiuns. It has helped us a lot.
As for meeting kangaroos, if Melbourne wins 2010, which seems very likely, then there will indeed be plenty of opportunity. We particularly recommend Healesville Sanctuary.