First, the Horror Writers Association announced the winners of the 2012 Bram Stoker Awards recently.
There are the usual huge panoply of awards; the biggie -- Superior Achievement in a NOVEL [1] -- went to Joe McKinney's Flesh Eaters
.And there was a special one-time only -- well, presumably they could do another in eighty-eight years or so -- Vampire Novel of the Century award, which went to Richard Matheson's classic I Am Legend
. That book is basically SF rather than horror, which makes me wonder how much self-loathing there is in the HWA that they didn't want to give it to a Rice or King or Layman or Yarbro or Wilson or Powers or Martin or Newman or Streiber or Lumley book.Secondly, the nominees for all of the myriad categories -- I had to deal with them as a judge a few years ago, and I think they have proliferated since then -- of the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were announced.
Thirdly, the Philip K. Dick Award -- for "the distinguished original science fiction paperback published for the first time during 2011 in the U.S.A." (there can be only one distinguished SF paperback; all the rest suck) -- was given to THE SAMUIL PETROVITCH TRILOGY by Simon Morden (Orbit), which is actually three paperbacks: Equations of Life
, Theories of Flight
, and Degrees of Freedom
. I guess that means all of the other paperbacks were especially undistinguished this year.(And I'm reminded that Morden wrote the really nifty Another War
, a novella-as-book which was a World Fantasy nominee my year, so I should really find copies of those books, since they are now so distinguished.) Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees -- and since this was a very conventional weekend, I think there were others awarded that I haven't seen yet. (The BSFAs, possibly?)
[1] I'm not sure if the CAPITALIZATION is meaningful, but you never know with horror writers.
