Items: Awards
News and info about various upcoming sf-related awards:
- The Speculative Literature Foundation's Fountain Award is taking nominees. Editors, please send them up to three speculative fiction stories you published in 2005, for consideration for a $1000 award (given to the author of the winning story, of course). This year's jurors are Gwenda Bond, Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, James Patrick Kelly, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. If you have questions, follow the link and read the info page.
- Writertopia is now host to the new revamped John W. Campbell Award Eligible Authors pages. This is not an official page run by the award's administrators (and I don't know if this year's Hugo administrators have weighed in on how they're handling transitional eligibility yet); it's picking up the reins from the invaluable eligibility site that Jim Van Pelt ran for several years. If your first "professional" sf publication (see eligibility page for details) was in 2004 or 2005, then go contact the page administrators and let them know. (And btw, if you ever found the old site useful, you might consider dropping Jim a note (use the "E-Mail" button on the left side of that page) and thanking him for all the work he put into it over the years.)
- The BSFA Awards shortlists are out, and we at SH are pleased to see that Elizabeth Bear's future-New-Orleans story "Two Dreams on Trains" (written and published well before Hurricane Katrina) is on the list. Yay! (We're also, of course, pleased to see various other works on that list; good stuff.)
- The Nebula Award preliminary ballot is out. There'll be a vote among SFWA membership to narrow it down to the final ballot (which the various juries may also add works to). Sadly, the rules committee recently ruled that The Old Negro Space Program is not eligible (for various reasons having to do with timing and the definition of "professional" publication) in the Script category, leaving Serenity currently the only eligible script. But the Script jury may add another one. Anyway, lots of good stuff on the preliminary ballot (though nothing, alas, from SH), many with links to free versions available online. I'm particularly pleased to see Ray Vukcevich's "Glinky" and Dale Bailey's "The End of the World As We Know It" on the ballot, both from F&SF. I haven't yet read, but am looking forward to, John G. McDaid's "Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals" (also from F&SF)--McDaid being the author of "Uncle Buddy's Funhouse," a hypertext work I wrote about back in '97.
- I meant to post a few days ago to mention that anyone who wanted to nominate for the Hugo had to be a WorldCon member (of this year's or last year's) by January 31; unfortunately, I forgot to post, and that deadline is now past. Those who were or became members by that date have until March 10 to nominate.
Whew. I think that's all for now.
