The World Fantasy Award

The Hugos and Nebulas hold a very clear position at the top of the food chain when it comes to SF awards but that doesn't mean that the ones living close to them in their shadow aren't worth looking over. In my mind there's two different awards that are close but because of their narrower perspective can't quite reach the big two: the Locus Awards and the World Fantasy Awards.

The World Fantasy Award is handed out yearly at the World Fantasy Convention. Rather than being voted on by a general body like the Hugos and Nebulas it is a juried prize. A panel of five judges first form a list of three nominees and two more nominees are provided by the members of the World Fantasy Convention. Then this panel of five selects the winning novel. Surprisingly this has led to quite a few ties in the awards; presumably a 2-2-1 vote that becomes intractable.

A juried prize offers something different from the populist Hugos or the SFWA-driven Nebulas: the selection of something outside of the mainstream. With a jury of five you'll still find biases and blind spots but if the jury is doing their task correctly (and that's a big assumption) then they're more likely to locate the minor deserving books than the ones that needs the mass support of fandom or the attention of the members of an organization.

You'll note that when it comes to novels only one book has won both the Hugo and the World Fantasy Award: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. There have been dual nominees between the World Fantasy Award and the two big awards many times but just that one crossover winner. I like to read that as the sign of a unique viewpoint.

The award itself is a bust of H. P. Lovecraft:

(That image is Zoran Zivkovic's 2003 World Fantasy Award with the ear of a second award just edging into frame; for some reason there are few images of the actual award around.)

For the time being I don't plan on pursuing the short fiction winners of the World Fantasy Award. I have nearly forty years worth of Nebula Winners to cover after all. I did want to point out two categories for the awards that stand out: best anthology and best collection. The difference between the two is that the anthology category is for original anthologies and the collection is for reprint, single author anthologies. Categories like this would not be a bad addition to the Hugos or Nebulas.

One thing that drew me to reading the World Fantasy Award winners next rather than the Locus Award winners was the fact that I don't read an awful lot of fantasy. I recognize that there are good fantasy books out there but sorting the wheat from the Tolkien-derivative-chaff is a painful task. Of the winners list on the World Fantasy Awards there's two books I had read before starting down this path and three on my "I'd like to read that sometime" list; so the list is very new to me. I honestly don't have a clue what I'm getting into for the majority of these books.

I'll be breaking down the list of winners in the next few days and reviews of the novels will start on Monday. Let's see what they have for me...

Review - Coraline, "Slow Time", and "Falling Onto Mars"

Bob Eggleton
2003 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist

The image is Eggleton's cover for Nancy Kress's Probability Moon.

Wow, twelve stories away from wrapping up the Hugo winning short fiction and I'm starting to hit the major problems with story availability. "Falling Onto Mars", for example, has never been published anywhere except the issue of Analog that it first appeared in. Fortunately Analog has made it available on their website but if one wants a book collection that has all of the winners that isn't a desirable solution. At least Coraline was published as a Young Adult novel and "Slow Time"

The winners in 2003 struck me as being familiar. All three cover concepts and themes so well worn that ruts have been dug into them. None of them are bad stories by any definition but in all three cases I said to myself, "I've read this before and done better."

Coraline
by Neil Gaiman
2003 Hugo Winner for Best Novella
2003 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

Yeah, I have the movie edition since I bought my copy a few weeks ago.

Let me describe the standard Neil Gaiman plot: a mundane person with a notable character quirk encounters something supernatural. At first it's wondrous and populated by convenient archetypes but sinister undercurrents are there and something goes horribly wrong. Fortunately with the help of a magic talisman provided by a wise woman and their own skill the person manages to get the better of their supernatural opponent and life returns to normal.

Gaiman writes in archetypes; you can practically map Joseph Campbell right onto his stories. Fortunately his skill at crafting prose and character carries a lot of weight.

Coraline might be considered the most standard of Neil Gaiman stories. It hits all the beats dead on with little variation. Coraline is the adventurous young girl in a strange house who finds a door to another world where things initially seem better to her but a monster lurks. It goes through all the same motions that Gaiman always does.

Consequently if you're a fan of Neil Gaiman then you'll probably enjoy Coraline but I won't say that you would be thrilled with it. The book is written for children and the prose and wit just isn't as sharp as it is in other Gaiman books. If you're not a Gaiman fan read American Gods instead.

"Slow Time"
by Michael Swanwick
2003 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette

The first astronaut to visit a new world that was thought to be devoid of life makes the shocking discovery that there's something there. Unfortunately for the astronaut they get into some technical trouble which may kill them. There's a chance that the new life found is intelligent and by bridging the gap between species the astronaut may survive.

If you just said to yourself, "Hey, that's the exact same plot as the 1999 Hugo winner 'The Very Pulse of the Machine'!" then give yourself half a cookie; you only get a whole one if you recognize that this has been a standard SF plot since the 1950's (a fact I mentioned briefly in my previous review). At this point an author really has to offer something special to make me interested in how they handle it; the author of "The Very Pulse of the Machine", for example, included a threatening atmosphere. Unfortunately the author of "The Very Pulse of the Machine" was none other than Michael Swanwick and repeating oneself a few years later but not as skillfully leaves a bitter taste.

The astronauts this time around just aren't that interesting; they barely react to each other let alone the exploration of Titan. The story is very setting heavy with a lot of clumsy dialog and situations created specifically to pile on setting details for the story. Unfortunately the setting is just as uninteresting as the astronauts. The bright spot is the alien encountered has some interesting reactions to the exploration.

This story is decisively average; it's the bog standard, run of the mill stuff I would expect to find in any given anthology or magazine. Give this a pass and read "The Very Pulse of the Machine" instead; it's just a more interesting take on the exact same subject matter.

"Falling Onto Mars"
by Geoffrey A. Landis
2003 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story

After my comments on the last two stories you might thing that "Falling Onto Mars" is nothing more than a weak copy of Landis's other work. If it is then it's a copy of something I'm not familiar with. Landis's story hits familiar concepts but it does so in a distinct manner.

In the future Mars is used as a cheap dumping ground for undesirables. Some of these undesirables band together to survive and others come together to take what they want. The bandits overrun the only science station on Mars and torture, rape, and kill almost all of its staff. It is retaken by those seeking to survive.

This is a very short story; even printed it would only be three or four pages (which might be why it has never been collected). That helps it, I think. "Falling Onto Mars" is told as a family anecdote and because Landis moves quickly through the point it never gets a chance to overstay its welcome. I recommend taking the ten minutes to browse over and read it.

The Passing of Forest J. Ackerman

I could hardly refer to myself as Das Übernerd without noting the passing of one of the first great Übernerds: Forest J. Ackerman.

I have to confess that while I've heard of Ackerman all of the deeds of fandom that he's remembered for like the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, his massive collection of SF memorabilia which he gladly showed to anyone who made the trip to his home, and the huge fandom communities he helped create since they were both before my time and well removed from myself geographically. He was awarded a Hugo in that first ceremony back in 1953 for the "#1 Fan Personality" and that's one award I've never heard anyone challenge.

I've read the anecdotes but I don't feel that I knew him or his works well enough to eulogize him. So I will just wish farewell from one Übernerd to the the King of the Übernerds.

If I Had a Nickel for Every Time a Geologist Said This....

From an ad in the March 1951 issue of Popular Science which are now online thanks to Google. It's a wealth of deliciously ironic visions of the future.

NaNoWriMo '08 - The Postmortem

This past month was my first attempt at a NaNoWriMo novel and it was an interesting experience. I learned many things but it doesn't really matter without careful reflection.

For the uninitiated NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writer's Month, an online movement where participants talk like a pirate... sorry that's Talk Like a Pirate Day. The idea of NaNoWriMo is to start from nothing and write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. Okay, 50,000 words is about halfway between a long novella and a short novel (these days novels tend to clock in closer to 100,000 words) but the concept is there: nothing to a book in thirty day.

I've known about NaNoWriMo for a while but this was the first year I've participated. Time issues or other projects have made it clear that dedicating a month to such a massive undertaking wouldn't be wise. This year I was struck by what I thought would be an easy idea to use to pump words out: Teddy Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland fighting time traveling one term nineteenth century US presidents in a pulp adventure format. I had the idea on October 28 so I decided to jump into NaNoWriMo.

Now that it is over and I have successfully completed my novel I have also decided that I am never doing that again. It is not that I became disillusioned with the idea that "writing is easy"; while that is a common sentiment I am well aware of the fact that it is not. Instead I found that most of the intended goals of NaNoWriMo event were ineffective for me.

One of the purposes of NaNoWriMo is to encourage people to write regularly by setting a deadline. I have this blog to channel my writing instinct into and it serves those needs very well even when I don't have to worry about narrative structure. So I wound up feeling that I was sinking a lot of time into something I was already pursuing.

A big portion of NaNoWriMo is the community attached and I found myself turned off by it. There's no kind way to say this so I'll just be rude: the majority of those involved were barely literate. We'll get to my own failings in a moment (and they are many) but looking at the forums was more disheartening than helpful.

The emphasis on word count and time limits resulted in extremely poor quality output. I chose a light pulp format for the ease in construction (whenever I got stuck I could move the characters to another historical event and have something crazy happen) but I shift tone, style, and structure so often that I produced fifty thousand words of completely unusable garbage. This is why you won't see a sample of my novel here or anywhere else: it's not just first draft quality, it needs a complete rebuild from the ground up to even reach that point. Consequently while I'm proud to have written a novel I also feel that I have wasted my time producing worthless text.

NaNoWriMo is an interesting writing exercise for amateur and would-be writers but I found it to be of limited worth to myself so I won't be doing it again. I did learn things about establishing structure and format and spent a lot of time thinking about pacing. For that reason giving it a try once was worth it but the lessons have been learned and its time to move on.

Review - Howl's Moving Castle

Howl's Moving Castle
2006 Nebula Winner for Best Script
by Hayao Miyazaki, Cindy Davis Hewitt, and Donald H. Hewitt

I first encountered the films of Hayao Miyazaki in an unusual place: the video arcade. His first feature length movie had been dissected to make a laserdisk game called Cliffhanger and compared to other such games like Dragon's Lair and Space Ace the art was obviously superior. It wasn't until I became interested in Japanese animation a few years later that I realized who he was and sought out his movies. He's been called the Japanese Walt Disney but I find that handy shorthand used in newspaper articles a bit insulting: he's much better than Disney when it comes to feature length films.

I have to confess that I have not read Diane Wynne Jones's original novel since I suspect that at this point I am well outside of its target audience. Consequently I cannot comment on how faithful the film is to the book. All I can say is that as a movie it is spectacular.

Sofi is a young girl who is living a quiet life as a haberdasher when she has a brief encounter with the wizard Howl. Howl's rival the Witch of the East confronts her afterward and out of spite curses the girl to be an old woman who cannot tell anyone of the curse. Sofi finds herself in Howl's employ as a cleaning woman and they bond while dealing with things like the helpful fire demon that moves his steampunk castle from place to place and a war where the king is requiring all wizards to turn themselves to monsters in order to fight.

Much like many other Miyazaki films Howl's Moving Castle features a kind of fairy tale magic that carries with it a great deal of charm. Something strange and wonderous is always lurking around the corner. Unfortunately this extends to some aspects of the plot which are glossed over leaving the reason why events are occurring at some points unclear.

The movie is very fast paced. Perhaps a bit too fast paced since I would have appreciated more development of the relationship between Howl and Sofi since I have very little understanding of them at the end. They seem to end up together because they are together.

If there's one thing consistent in Miyazaki films it is the absolutely beautiful art direction. His films always have a water colored look to them that is different from just about any one else out there. Most animated films focus on bright, contrasting color palette but Howl's has a subdued look that appears more gentle. His eye for shot composition is also impressive; any single frame of that movie is a work of art.

It's interesting to note that Howl's Moving Castle is the only animated film that has been awarded a Hugo or Nebula. My interest in anime started from a lack of quality science fiction and fantasy movies or television shows and while some SF fans were willing to cross over there had been a significant number that ignored the development of a new SF medium. It is fitting that the only animated film to have bridged the gap is one of Miyazaki's.

Howl's Moving Castle is not my favorite Miyazaki movie (I couldn't pick a single favorite one if I tried) but it is an exceptional work by one of the last masters of traditional animation left in the world. Not only is it worth seeking out; if you haven't seen it then you need to make it a priority to watch this movie.

Review - "A Boy and His Dog" and "Passengers"

I have completed my NaNoWriMo novel and while I won't inflict it upon any readers I am going to provide a postmortem on the experience in the next day or so; I have a review of Howl's Moving Castle that I wanted to polish off last night for the last Best Script Nebula that may come first tomorrow.

As we come into December I'm going to start reviewing the World Fantasy Award winning novels. I've currently four novels into the list for my reading and have the first ten books already set.

"A Boy and His Dog"
by Harlan Ellison
1969 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

It seems strange to me that I've reviewed the film which won the Hugo for dramatic presentation in 1976 and I'm only now getting to commenting on the original novella. The film is a reasonably accurate adaptation of the novella which is no surprise given Ellison's involvement in the movie.

After a devastating war that has destroyed civilization a young man travels the wasteland with his telepathic intelligent dog. They go to the movies, look for a woman to rape, fight of a gang who wants to take his stuff, and visits an underground community.

The narrative isn't the strong point but the story does convey the setting very well. I found the dog to be an interesting character but the main character got on my nerves. He's a nearly compeltely self-absorbed jerk and doesn't manage to be entertaining in spite of that. The protagonist is a user of people with little to make the reader care about him.

Ellison's prose is as solid as it ever is but I think the lack of a strong narrative thread and interesting characters undermines the story. I think this can be safely bypassed but if you have any interest in Ellison's work then it is one to read.

"Passengers"
by Robert Silverberg
1968 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

In the not too distant future demonic possession has become a fact of life. Occasionaly a person will be possessed by an entity who will drive their body like a puppet and leave them only with vague memories of their actions afterward. A man who woke from a possession where he had a sexual fling finds that he still has memories of the partner. When he encounters her on the street later he tries to start a relationship with her despite the taboo of avoiding those encountered when possessed.

I found myself wishing that Silverberg had expanded this story further. I was interested in what changes people suddenly losing control of their actions would have on society but he only really explores this one aspect of it. It is a very interesting, very well thought out aspect, however.

For a story that was dependent on characters I didn't really get a grasp on who they were and that was a problem but I don't think it was an insurmountable one for the reader. All in all I found it to be a story that was worth reading.