Posts Tagged: Fandom

Becoming Gandalf

“Petite, her silver hair shining, Le Guin shrugged and grinned when Neil Gaiman placed the medal around her neck,” described The New Yorker of Ursula K. Le Guin when she accepted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters presented by the National Book Awards on November 19, 2014. Le Guin might be petite in stature, perhaps, but her words in acceptance of the achievement were anything but small.

“Hard times are coming,” she said, her voice ringing out over an awed crowd. . “We’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”

Le Guin is a legendary figure in science fiction and fantasy, author of many classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Wizard of Earthsea, and a champion for literature’s place in the every changing landscape of modern society — a “realist of a larger reality” is there ever was one. Her acceptance speech rang through the SFF community and beyond, a tolling bell of optimism. Through her ongoing insistence to use fiction as a lens through which we examine ourselves, Le Guin, and writers like her — poets, visionaries, realists of a larger reality — has continued to challenge speculative fiction to be a catalyst for positive change, a limitless medium that can offer hope to a world that obsesses over hopelessness. Read More »

Wow.

If you’ve seen the results, or watched the Hugo Awards ceremony on Sunday, you’ll know that A Dribble of Ink won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine. I seriously have no words. Thank you to everyone who has supported A Dribble of Ink throughout the years. If you’re interested, you can watch my acceptance speech, which has been described to me as “adorable” by several people.

In addition to the award for Best Fanzine, A Dribble of Ink also published Kameron Hurley’s We Have Always Fought: Challenging the “Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative”, which took home the trophy for Best Related Work. She also won for Best Fan Writer. Kameron posted her acceptance speeches for the awards on her blog, and they are well worth a read.

I’d also like to extend congratulations to all of the other winners, and, most specifically, to the lovely Mary Robinette Kowal, who was a lifesaver in the craziness that followed the award ceremony, my LonCon 3 roommate John Chu, author of “The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere”, and artist Julie Dillon, who illustrated the masthead art for A Dribble of Ink.

And, finally, if you’re not already reading my co-balloters, The Book Smugglers and Pornokitsch, please go check them out. They’re terrific blogs, even more wonderful people, and I expect them to be on the Hugo Ballot for years to come.

Thank you.

loncon3-mini-logo

Unexpectedly, I’ll be attending LonCon3, this year’s WorldCon, hosted in London, England. The convention administrators were foolish kind enough to schedule me on some panels during the convention, and so my schedule for the weekend is posted below. If you’re at LonCon3 (and it seems that half of the SFF fans in the world will be there), I hope you’re able to come by for the panels. They’re all very interesting, and my panel-mates include some humblingly intelligent and amazing people. (And some guy named Justin Landon…)

Outside of these panels, I’ll be around the convention floor (well, wherever they allow you to drink beer, at any rate.) So, if you see me, come say “Hi!”

Note: The listed panelists are preliminary and subject to change. Read More »

Hugo Awards LogoSo, Hugo Award nominations. Every year, it seems to be both an invitation to bellyaching among those who want the award to take itself more seriously, to again become a fair and trustworthy snapshot of the genre’s best year-in-and-year-out, and an everybody-hug-circlejerk-ignore-the-trolls-you-deserve-this-i-voted-for-you twitter fun factory between nominees. Fun times, especially for frustrated Internet pundits like myself. This year’s ballot was particularly blah, though. I won’t go through each category because, well… I don’t have an opinion on a lot of it. But there are a few spots I’d like to explore.

My first thought on the list of nominations for the ‘Best Novel’ was a tepid lack of inspiration. The inclusion of Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon (REVIEW) is the lone bright spot, and also the only novel from my list of nominations to appear on the final ballot. Redshirts (REVIEW) is entertaining, but no more worthy of a Hugo than a fourth-or-fifth episode of Dr. Who appear in the ‘Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)’ category; I’m not surprised to see it there, but I am disappointed that another of Scalzi’s wash, rinse, repeat efforts was rewarded with a nomination. The novels from Bujold and Grant are included, for all intents and purposes, because of the name on their cover, rather than the text inside. I’m sure they’re both fine novels, but neither made waves in fandom or genre discussion this year. Kim Stanley Robinson is another Hugo darling, and 2312 was at least a significant release in Science Fiction, which, alongside David Brin’s Existence (a novel that some will should have been included instead of Robinson’s), reopened a style of hard Science Fiction that has a long legacy in the genre but little recent activity. Read More »

Hugo Awards LogoBy now, you’ve probably seen the results of the 2012 Hugo Awards, which are littered across the ‘net. Instead of sounding like a broken record and posting the unabridged list, I thought I’d toss around a few of my thoughts on the results that most interest me, specifically ‘Best Novel,’ ‘Best Fanzine,’ and ‘Best Fan Writer.’ Overall, I’m quite happy with the results, and found many overlaps between my original nominating ballot and the votes I cast.

For the full list, visit Tor.com.

Best Novel

  • Winner: Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)
  • A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin (Bantam Spectra)
  • Deadline by Mira Grant (Orbit)
  • Embassytown by China Miéville (Macmillan UK / Del Rey)
  • Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey (Orbit)

Very surprised, and delighted, to see Among Others sitting atop this list. I nominated it, and gave it my top vote earlier in the year, but I expected it to get trampled by A Dance with Dragons, or Mieville. Some consider the novel to be too pandering towards the older generation of fandom, who has a huge impact on Hugo voting, and many they’re right, but as someone who was born after Among Others ended, rose-tinted glasses didn’t have any effect on my perception and enjoyment of the novel; The dreamy Welsh setting did, the starkly drawn protagonist and the tender relationships she built around herself did, but nostalgia didn’t. Good choice, voters.
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