All the Awards in the World

Or at least it feels like that many. These are the recent award announcements that I've missed pointing out here -- many (most? all?) of you will have heard of some or all of them already, but I hope there's something new or surprising below:

2012 Shirley Jackson Awards

This is a new award -- so new, in fact, that it popped up after I lost my SF job, so it confuses me every year. It's an award for literary horror, more or less -- creepy/uneasy/weird stories written well, in the vein of the award's eponymous writer -- and there's a site for it here. This year's winners are:

• NOVEL: Edge, Koji Suzuki (Vertical, Inc.)
• NOVELLA: “Sky,” Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls, Twelfth Planet Press)
• NOVELETTE: “Reeling for the Empire,” Karen Russell (Tin House, Winter 2012)
• SHORT FICTION: “A Natural History of Autumn,” Jeffrey Ford (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/August 2012)
• SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION: Crackpot Palace, Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow)
• EDITED ANTHOLOGY: Exotic Gothic 4: Postscripts #28/29, edited by Danel Olson (PS Publishing)

Congratulations to all of the winners, and just one question to the organizers -- do you really have to specify an "edited" collection? I'm not aware of any spontaneously published anthologies out there....

(via Tor.com)

2013 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards

This is a long list -- I grumbled about the number of categories when I was a judge, a few years back, and the categories have only proliferated since -- so I'll just give a few of the biggies.

• BEST CONTINUING SERIES: Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image)
• BEST NEW SERIES: Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image)
• BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM -- NEW: Building Stories by Chris Ware (Pantheon)
• BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM -- REPRINT: King City by Brandon Graham (TokyoPop/Image)

(via Comics Reporter, though every other comics site has it somewhere as well)

2013 Prometheus Awards

These are given by the Libertarian Futurist Society each year to, as far as I can tell, the book that they really like that will most confuse the people who look at "Libertarian" in their name and go extremely literal. There are two awards: one for a new work, and one for an old one:

• BEST NOVEL: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow (Tor Books)
• HALL OF FAME: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

 These awards will actually be given at LoneStarCon 3 at the end of August, so, if you see Cory or Neal in the meantime, keep it quiet, OK?

(via Science Fiction Awards Watch)

Science Fiction Awards Watch also updated with several other awards -- I'd call them minor, but I'm trying to be tactful here -- like the Seiun (the Japanese Hugo, though the name means "Nebula"! Ha ha ha!), Scribe, and Sunburst. But my fingers are getting tired, so I'll just link 'em.

Awards -- Stoker & Locus

I'm trying to clean up everything I have saved in Google Reader -- since it goes away tomorrow -- and that includes these recent genre-fiction awards, which you may well have already heard about:

2013 Bram Stoker Awards

These were announced two weeks ago by the Horror Writers Association at the World Horror Convention:

• Superior Achievement in a NOVEL: The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)
• Superior Achievement in a FIRST NOVEL: Life Rage by L.L. Soares (Nightscape Press)
• Superior Achievement in a YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: Flesh & Bone by Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster)
• Superior Achievement in a GRAPHIC NOVEL: Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times by Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton (McFarland and Co., Inc.)
• Superior Achievement in LONG FICTION: The Blue Heron by Gene O’Neill (Dark Regions Press)
• Superior Achievement in SHORT FICTION: "Magdala Amygdala" by Lucy Snyder (Dark Faith: Invocations, Apex Book Company)
• Superior Achievement in a SCREENPLAY: The Cabin in the Woods by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard (Mutant Enemy Productions, Lionsgate)
• Superior Achievement in an ANTHOLOGY: Shadow Show edited by Mort Castle and Sam Weller (HarperCollins)
• Superior Achievement in a FICTION COLLECTION (tie):
  • New Moon on the Water by Mort Castle (Dark Regions Press)
  • Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco Press)
• Superior Achievement in NON-FICTION: Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween by Lisa Morton (Reaktion Books)
• Superior Achievement in a POETRY COLLECTION: Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls by Marge Simon (Elektrik Milk Bath Press)

(via SF Signal)

2013 Locus Awards

These were announced yesterday -- I'm catching up, more or less -- at a gala ceremony in Seattle. (I was supposed to attend a Locus Awards ceremony in Seattle, back in '07, but the job disappeared just before the conference.)

• SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL: Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz)
• FANTASY NOVEL: The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
• YOUNG ADULT BOOK: Railsea, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
•  FIRST NOVEL: Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW; Gollancz ’13)
• NOVELLA: “After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall,” Nancy Kress (Tachyon) 
• NOVELETTE: “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity)
• SHORT STORY: “Immersion,” Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld 6/12)
• ANTHOLOGY: Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
• COLLECTION: Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear (Prime)
• MAGAZINE: Asimov’s
• PUBLISHER: Tor Books
• EDITOR: Ellen Datlow
• ARTIST: Michael Whelan
• NON-FICTION: Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson (Putnam)
• ART BOOK: Spectrum 19: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Underwood)

(I saw this first at Tor.com.)

Congratulations to all of the winners.

Stoker Nominees!

I'm more lackadaisacal about this award than the others -- if that's even possible -- due to my regularly noted (and clearly lamentable) lack of interest in the horror field in the first place. But it is a Major Award, and these are the works contending this year:


SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A NOVEL

• Bottled Abyss by Benjamin Kane Ethridge (Redrum Horror)
• NightWhere by John Everson (Samhain Publishing)
• The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan (Roc)
• The Haunted by Bentley Little (Signet)
•  Inheritance by Joe McKinney (Evil Jester Press)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A FIRST NOVEL

• Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling by Michael Boccacino (William Morrow)
• Wide Open by Deborah Coates (Tor Books)
• The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief by Charles Day (Noble YA Publishers LLC)
• A Requiem for Dead Flies by Peter Dudar (Nightscape Press)
• Bad Glass by Richard Gropp (Ballantine/Del Rey)
•  Life Rage by L.L. Soares (Nightscape Press)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL

• The Diviners by Libba Bray (Little Brown)
• I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga (Little Brown)
• Flesh & Bone by Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster)
• I Kissed A Ghoul by Michael McCarty (Noble Romance Publishing)
• The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic Press)
• A Bad Day for Voodoo by Jeff Strand (Sourcebooks)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A GRAPHIC NOVEL

• The Sixth Gun Volume 3: Bound by Cullen Bunn (Oni Press)
• Rachel Rising Vol. 1: The Shadow of Death by Terry Moore (Abstract Studio)
• The Tale of Brin and Bent and Minno Marylebone by Ravi Thornton (Jonathan Cape)
• Behind These Eyes by Peter J. Wacks and Guy Anthony De Marco (Villainous Press)
• Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times by Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton (McFarland)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN LONG FICTION

• Thirty Miles South of Dry County by Kealan Patrick Burke (Delirium Books)
• I’m Not Sam by Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee(Sinister Grin Press)
• Lost Girl of the Lake by Joe McKinney and Michael McCarty (Bad Moon Books)
• The Blue Heron by Gene O’Neill (Dark Regions Press)
• The Fleshless Man by Norman Prentiss (Delirium Books)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN SHORT FICTION

• “Surrounded by the Mutant Rain Forest” by Bruce Boston (Daily Science Fiction)
• “Bury My Heart at Marvin Gardens” by Joe McKinney (Best of Dark Moon Digest, Dark Moon Books)
• “Righteous” by Weston Ochse (Psychos, Black Dog and Leventhall Publication)
• “Available Light” by John Palisano (Lovecraft eZine, March 2012)
• “Magdala Amygdala” by Lucy Snyder (Dark Faith: Invocations, Apex Book Company)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN SCREENPLAY

• The Woman in Black by Jane Goldman (Cross Creek Pictures)
• The Walking Dead, “Killer Within” by Sang Kyu Kim (AMC TV)
• American Horror Story: Asylum, “Dark Cousin” by Tim Minear (Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision, Ryan Murphy Productions)
• The Hunger Games by Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray (Lionsgate, Color Force)
• The Cabin in the Woods by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard (Mutant Enemy Productions, Lionsgate)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN ANTHOLOGY

• Shadow Show edited by Mort Castle and Sam Weller (HarperCollins)
• Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations edited by Eric J. Guignard (Dark Moon Books)
• Hell Comes to Hollywood edited by Eric Miller (Big Time Books)
• Horror for Good: A Charitable Anthology edited by Mark C. Scioneaux, R.J. Cavender and Robert S. Wilson (Cutting Block Press)
• Slices of Flesh edited by Stan Swanson (Dark Moon Books)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN FICTION COLLECTION

• Woman Who Married a Cloud: Collected Stories by Jonathan Carroll (Subterranean Press) 
• New Moon on the Water by Mort Castle (Dark Regions) 
• Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press) 
• The Janus Tree by Glen Hirshberg (Subterranean Press) 
• Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN NON-FICTION

• Writing Darkness by Michael Collings (CreateSpace)
• The Annotated Sandman, Volume 1 by Les Klinger (Vertigo) 
• Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween by Lisa Morton (Reaktion Books) 
• The Undead and Theology by Kim Paffenroth and John W. Morehead (Pickwick Publications) 
• Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film by Kendall R. Phillips (Southern Illinois University Press)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN POETRY

• Dark Duet by Linda Addison and Stephen M. Wilson (NECON eBooks) 
• Notes from the Shadow City by Bruce Boston and Gary William Crawford (Dark Regions Press) 
• A Verse to Horrors by Michael Collings (Amazon Digital Services) 
• Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls by Marge Simon (Elektrik Milk Bath Press) 
• Lovers & Killers by Mary A. Turzillo (Dark Regions) 

Best wishes to all of the nominees.

The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually by the Horror Writers Association (HWA) since 1987; voting members of HWA now have until March 31 to cast their votes. The awards will be presented during Bram Stoker Weekend (Incorporating World Horror Convention) on June 15th in New Orleans. (Presumably, other festivities will go on the rest of the weekend to justify the title. Though, even if they didn't, you wouldn't lack fun activities in New Orleans.)

(via SF Signal)

The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross

Charles Stross's fiction is never what you might call overly optimistic -- even when Earth-derived minds have spread throughout the solar system (as in Saturn's Children), they're all posthuman robots, since the original meat-based humanity has long since died out. And when he thinks of slapping a million iterations of our continents onto one gigantic plate-shaped world, as in the novella "Missile Gap," he doesn't make it a wide-screen panorama of continent-hopping adventure, but something vastly darker. Even his Amber-derived alternate-worlds caper series quickly devolves into nuclear blackmail and family backstabbing. So it's unnerving to note that his funniest, zippiest, and most consistently amusing series is the "The Laundry Files," a sequence of computer-science spy thrillers set in a deeply Lovecraftian world, explicitly set a few years before the stars will be right, and the Old Gods will return to at the very least kill most of humanity. He's clearly setting us up for a very big fall, and not making any mystery of it, either.

The Apocalypse Codex is the fourth novel in the series -- after The Atrocity Archive, The Jennifer Morgue, and The Fuller Memorandum (see my review), all of which I recommend as highly as possible for anyone who has ever loved James Bond, Lovecraft, Dilbert, or anything roughly contiguous with any of those things.

Since, as we all know from fantasists from Le Guin on down, the true names of things have a special power, all of the people working for the Laundry -- the super-secret agency of the British government tasked with defending its citizens from extradimensional threats -- use false names throughout. And so the series main character is called Bob Howard, his boss is Angleton, and his long-time girlfriend and colleague is Mo O'Brien -- as usual with Stross, there are multi-leveled allusions and wheels within wheels, so Apocalypse Codex could be read as a smart, snarky supernatural adventure novel set in a very dark world even by readers completely unfamiliar with Lovecraft. Though I do suppose that any reader needs to know something of the nature of modern bureaucracies to really enjoy these books.

Apocalypse Codex continues Bob's career momentum; each novel is set a year or two after the prior book, and Bob is rapidly climbing the career ladder at the Laundry -- not primarily because he's such a wonderful agent, but because that coming interdimensional apocalypse (aka CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN) will require as many trained agents in place as humanly possible; one assumes that there are at least a dozen Brits in similar situations, and untold numbers in their own nations' equivalent forces. In this case, it's ten months after the end of Fuller Memorandum, and Bob has almost stopped waking up screaming from the memories. Bob survived that prior mission, and the world did not end -- this counts as an unqualified success, in the world of the Laundry -- and so he's working on his next step up the org chart, which requires various soft-skills workshops dealing with how to manage people.

So he's sent off for a week of workshops and skills-building, out in some random suburb called Sunningdale Park, with a cross-section of up-and-coming British bureaucrats from much more banal organizations. And there he's quietly met by Gerald Lockhart, a high-level officer in his own organization, who tells Bob that he will be immediately seconded to Externalities, a portion of the organization he hadn't previously thought existed. In fact, Externalities should exist at all, as Bob understands the Laundry: it requires everyone who learns the One True Religion to join on pain of death for secrecy purposes. Externalities, on the other hand, is only loosely tied to the rest of the organization, and Lockhart leads Bob to believe that his mission will be to supervise a small team of outside operatives -- Externalities is for operations sensitive enough to require plausible deniability, cut-outs, and similar spycraft traditions.

In this particular case, it's because an American evangelical preacher -- Raymond Schiller of the heavily televised Golden Promise Ministries, purveyor of what seems to be the usual God-wants-you-to-be-rich gospel, though with undertones that worry the Laundry -- is meeting with the UK's Prime Minister, and is clearly seeking closer contact with several Cabinet officials. The Laundry cannot directly investigate the decision-making ranks of Her Majesty's Government, but they can put "external" assets to work looking at individuals who come in contact with those ranks. And so Lockhart introduces Bob to Persephone Hazard, a young woman of varied background and unusual skills, and to her assistant, Johnny McTavish, who was born into an unusual religious tradition (perhaps not unlike Golden Promise) and who escaped into the SAS and other activities.

Obviously, Ray Schiller turns out to be much more than an unctuous American trying to get favors from a foreign government, and so Bob, Persephone, and Johnny make their way, quietly, to Colorado, to do some more intensive surveillance on Golden Promise and to discover precisely what dangerous plans he is crafting. Those plans turn out to be even more dangerous, and more imminent, than anyone had suspected, and the three agents are left on the ground, unprotected, far behind enemy lines. (And "enemy," there, applies almost as much to the deeply frightening American counterpart of the Laundry, the Black Chamber, which relies much less on purely human operatives than the British do.)

Bob and his team must again stop an apocalypse -- keep gates from being opened, Sleepers awoken, and souls from being eaten wholesale. And, along the way, Stross provides a nightmare version of an American church -- one assumes he is not particularly fond of evangelical Christianity, from the evidence here -- and an impressive parade of horrors for Bob and Persephone to confront.

Stross is more and more comfortable with his magical apocalypses as this series goes on; Fuller Memorandum had a major set-piece conclusion, and Apocalypse Codex laps that -- while also being told in a technically more difficult manner. (This time out, Bob is writing his report in both first person and third, covering both the events he personally witnessed and those that Persephone and others engaged in while he was occupied elsewhere.) Apocalypse Codex is darkly funny as well as thrilling, and Persephone Hazard is a great character, continuing Stross's tendency to make his most dangerous agents women.Apocalypse Codex is a great novel in a great series, tightening the screws even tighter as Stross's world shambles ever closer to the abyss -- and these books have the best whistling-past-the-graveyard humor I've ever read.

Other Award News: Stoker Winners, Eisner Nominees, Dick Winner

Because if I wait to make each of these a separate post, it will never get done...

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.