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Category Archives: Industry News

Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011)

You all may think I’m a little crazy to add the death of Steve Jobs to our blog as an industry news. But you have to understand… this is to me a real life science fiction hero. Many of us here read science fiction, but I’ve gotten to live in a science fiction dream. He’s my mother’s age. He started one of my favorite companies the year I was born. Some of my first memories are learning to program on an Apple IIe. My first major crush was on a boy who could outprogram me and had the new Apple IIgs and I might have had a bigger crush on the computer but it’s hard to say. Living in Silicon Valley with other real life science fiction giants, I would continue to get goosebumps driving by Apple headquarters. And I’m not one of the insane uber-Apple geeks. I don’t know a lot about writers or fancy literary stuff, but I know that Steve Jobs is a part of my real life science fiction dream.

Hugo Award winners and the Campbell Award have been announced!

Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention, has announced the 2011 Hugo Award winners and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. We’re so excited to see so many familiar faces including the ICFA 2011 Guest of Honor, Connie Willis, who won Best Novel! If you’d like to see the coverage streaming, it can still be found on the Hugo Awards channel.

  • BEST NOVEL: Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
  • BEST NOVELLA: The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
  • BEST NOVELETTE: “The Emperor of Mars” by Allen M. Steele (Asimov’s, June 2010)
  • BEST SHORT STORY: “For Want of a Nail” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s, September 2010)
  • BEST RELATED WORK: Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It, edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O’Shea (Mad Norwegian)
  • BEST GRAPHIC STORY: Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
  • BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM: Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Warner)
  • BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM: Doctor Who: “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang,” written by Steven Moffat; directed by Toby Haynes (BBC Wales)
  • BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM: Sheila Williams
  • BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM: Lou Anders
  • BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST: Shaun Tan
  • BEST SEMIPROZINE: Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Cheryl Morgan, Sean Wallace; podcast directed by Kate Baker
  • BEST FANZINE: The Drink Tank, edited by Christopher J Garcia and James Bacon
  • BEST FAN WRITER: Claire Brialey
  • BEST FAN ARTIST: Brad W. Foster
  • JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER: Lev Grossman

Congratulations 2011 Chesley Awards Winners

Winners of the 2011 Chesley Awards, given by the Association of Science Fiction & Fantasy Artists (ASFA), were announced at Renovation, the 69th Worldcon, August 18, 2011. Thanks, Locus, for the announcement! 🙂

  • Best Cover Illustration – Paperback Book: Jason Chan, for Geist by Phillipa
    Ballantine (Ace)
  • Best Cover Illustration – Hardback Book: Michael Whelan, for The Way of Kings by
    Brandon Sanderson (Tor)
  • Best Cover Illustration – Magazine: Nick Greenwood, for Orson Scott Card’s
    Intergalactic Medicine Show (6/10)
  • Best Interior Illustration: Donato Giancola, Middle Earth: Visions of a Modern Myth
    by Donato Giancola (Underwood)
  • Best Three-Dimensional Art: Mark Newman, “Eel Walker”; bronze
  • Best Color Work—Unpublished: Julie Dillon, “Planetary Alignment”; digital
  • Best Monochrome Work – Unpublished: Ian Miller, “Triptych”; ink
  • Best Product Illustration: Sam Weber, Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan, promo art for
    Tor ebook (1/10)
  • Best Gaming-Related Illustration: Lucas Graciano, “Amorphous Drake” (Legends of
    Norrath); Sony Online Entertainment
  • Best Art Director: Jon Schindehette, for Wizards of the Coast
  • Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement: Boris Vallejo

Hugo Awards will be announced tonight!

Are you ready for the Hugo Awards announcement? If you can’t wait, watch it streaming live! Good luck to those friends of the conference that are up for awards!

Launch of Zanzalá: Estudos de Ficção Científica

We are delighted to announce the launch of Zanzalá, a Brazilian on-line academic journal dedicated to science-fiction studies. Zanzalá can be accessed at http://www.ufjf.br/lefcav/revista-zanzala/.

Zanzalá: Estudos de Ficção Científica (ISSN 2236-8191) is the first peer-reviewed Brazilian academic journal dedicated to the study and research of science fiction in multiple formats: literature, film, television, theater, music, games, etc. Zanzalá is linked to the research group (CNPq) Laboratory for Studies in Audiovisual Science Fiction (LEFCAV), based at the Institute of Arts and Design, Federal University of Juiz de Fora. This journal is published twice a year. Texts are accepted in 3 categories (essay, short paper and review), in 5 languages (Portuguese, English, Spanish, French and Italian). Submissions may deal with SF from any region of the world. The title of the journal honors a seminal novel in the history of Brazilian science fiction literature: Zanzalá and the Kingdom of Heaven (1949), by Afonso Schmidt.

For further information, please contact us by e-mail: alfredo.suppia@ufjf.edu.br.

We invite all SF researchers to submit essays, short-papers and/or reviews.

Congratulations Mythopoeic Award Winners

The winners of this year’s Mythopoeic Award winners were announced at Mythcon 42 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on July 17, 2011. Award winners are said to best exemplify “the spirit of the Inklings”.

Winners:

  • Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature: Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo (Small Beer Press)
  • Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature: Megan Whalen Turner, The Queen’s Thief Series, consisting of The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, and A Conspiracy of Kings (Greenwillow Books)
  • Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies: Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford, 2008)
  • Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies: Caroline Sumpter, The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

See the Mythopoeic site for more details about the announcement.

The Binding Strength of Irish Studies

Congratulations to Donald Morse and his wife for their new book, The Binding Strength of Irish Studies. It’s a real work of love and we’re delighted about this accomplishment!

The Binding Strength of Irish Studies: Festschrift in Honour of Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse. Eds. Marianna Gula, Mária Kurdi, and István D. Rácz. Debrecen: Debrecen University Press, 2011.

2011 Locus Award Finalists have been announced!

The Locus Science Fiction Foundation has announced the top five finalists in each category of the 2011 Locus Awards. Winners will be announced during the Science Fiction Awards Weekend in Seattle WA, June 24-26, 2011. Good luck everyone!

In Memoriam: Joanna Russ (1937-2011)

We are so sad to hear of Joanna Russ’s passing after a series of strokes. Thank you Locus for this obituary.

Joanna Russ was a prolific fiction and non-fiction writer and is best known for her novel, The Female Man, written in 1975 and which was awarded a retro-Tiptree and inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame and is a staple in many science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and feminist university classes today. She entered the science fiction scene in the 1960’s and challenged the male dominance in this field to become a leading fiction author and critic who was nominated for nine Nebula and three Hugos and won the following awards:

  • Nebula in 1972 for her short story “When it Changed”
  • National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship
  • O.  Henry in 1977 for her short story “An Autobiography of My Mother”
  • Hugo in 1983 for her novella “Souls”
  • Locus award, 1983
  • Science Fiction Chronicle award, 1983
  • Pilgrim in 1988 for her scholarship

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur. -Joanna Russ

2011 Hugo and Campbell Award nominees announced

http://www.locusmag.com/News/2011/04/2011-hugo-and-campbell-awards-nominees/

Nominees for the Hugo Awards and for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer have been announced by Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Reno, Nevada, August 17-21, 2011. The Hugo Awards ceremony will take place August 20, 2011.

And there are a lot of familiar names on this list! Congratulations nominees!!