Miscellany

By Cheryl Morgan

Thanks to the excellent IT facilities at the Concourse hotel in Madison the live blogging of the World Fantasy Awards went ahead as planned. Here are the results.

Special Award, Non-Professional: Robert Morgan for Sarob Press.

Special Award, Professional: S.T. Joshi.

Best Artist: John Picacio.

Best Collection: Margo Lanagan for Black Juice.

Best Anthology: Two winners: Acquainted with the Night (Barbara and Christopher Roden) and Dark Matter (Sheree R. Thomas).

Best Short Story: Margo Lanagan, "Singing My Sister Down" from Black Juice.

Best Novella: Michael Shea, "The Growlimb" from F&SF.

Best Novel: Susanna Clarke for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Life Achievement Awards: Carol Emshwiller and Tom Doherty.

There are some very good choices there. Obviously I’m very pleased for Susanna. Winning both the Hugo and the Howie is a major achievement. There was much delight as well for Margo Lanagan, and it was great to see her delighted comments on the blog while the ceremony was going on.

I, of course, am particularly pleased for John Picacio. As and when I have money again, I am going to buy some prints.

Tom Doherty, by the way, was hobbling round the convention on crutches. I hope the leg is better now, Tom.

Commiserations as usual to all of those who did not win.

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International Horror Guild Awards

These were also presented at World Fantasy Con, and may become a regular part of the event. The full results are available here.

Congratulations are due to Ramsey Campbell and PS Publishing for beating out some very strong contenders to win Best Novel with The Overnight. Also to John Harwood and The Ghost Writer for triumphing over Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in Best First Novel.

I’m delighted to see Lucius Shepard win Best Novella with Viator (though commiserations to Leena Krohn and Tainaron).

Much bouncing up and down with excitement over Savoy’s A Serious Life winning Best Non-Fiction. The Savoy folks thanked me for my support in their acceptance speech which is ever so sweet of them but I probably didn’t influence the outcome much. It is a great book. It is apparently also the first award that Savoy has ever received - aside from the type of award that gets you raided by the police and slung in prison.

And finally congratulations to Andy Cox for beating some much better funded US publications to win Best Periodical with The Third Alternative.

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Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire

France has proved its good taste in fiction by awarding its Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for translated short fiction to Jeffrey Ford. The winning story was "Exo-Skeleton Town". Jeff tells me that it is in his collection, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories, from Golden Gryphon.

In the exceptionally strong translated novel field, Christopher Priest emerged the victor with The Separation. That’s another good reason for America to go out and buy the beautiful Old Earth edition of the book. Mary Gentle’s Ash did not win, but Mary’s translator, Patrick Marcel, did win an award for his work on the book.

Full details here.

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Endeavour Award

Next on the awards trail, congratulations to Louise Marley for beating a very strong field, including Lucius Shepard and Patricia McKillip, to win the Endeavour Award with The Child Goddess. The award is for the best novel by a writer from the Pacific Northwest and was presented at Orycon.

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Amazon Top Ten

And finally, Amazon.com has produced a list of the top ten US-published SF&F books of 2005, as chosen by their editorial staff. The winner is The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks (which of course means the Night Shade Books edition). Second was Accelerando by Charles Stross, and third Looking for Jake by China Miéville. Richard Morgan and Neil Gaiman also featured in the top ten, which just goes to show that the predominance of British writers in this year’s Hugos was no fluke. The full list is available here.

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Sci Fiction, RIP

Undoubtedly the saddest news of the month is that SciFi.com has decided to close the Sci Fiction section of their web site, apparently to make room for more hi tech features. The news is particularly galling because Sci Fiction won a Hugo this year for being the Best Web Site. It just goes to show how little importance is placed on the Hugos by the SF industry these days.

The news does, of course, put paid to Ellen Datlow’s day job, though I’m sure that an editor of her skill won’t have any trouble finding new work. Ellen’s farewell message can be found here.

In the meantime various people are launching projects to commemorate the site and ensure that the stories it published are not lost when the site goes offline. The most significant is Dave Schwartz’s ED SF Project, which can be found here.

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New Magazines

There were two fiction magazines in the goody bag at World Fantasy Con. One was the first ever issue of Fantasy Magazine from Prime Books. The other was the second issue of Subterranean from Subterranean Press. There are a couple of interesting things about this. Firstly, both magazines are published by existing successful small presses. That almost certainly means they will both qualify as semiprozines in the Hugos, which might make life interesting for Locus. In addition both of them are letter-sized rather that digest-sized; more like Interzone than Asimov’s, which is an interesting change for the US market.

There are some broad similarities between the two magazines. Both are in the region of 100 pages, though Fantasy Magazine is a little bigger. Both are priced at $6. Both, I think, are intended to be quarterly. In both cases the vast majority of the content is fiction, but with a small amount of non-fiction included. Sadly I haven’t had time to read either of them yet (a quick glance at the reviews above should show why). If there is anyone out there who wants to review magazines for Emerald City, please let me know.