WWWednesday: January 15, 2014

Lists and awards

For some reason I keep thinking lists are over, but they’re obviously still going strong and who am I to complain. Amazon’s Omnivoracious has a list of SFF books coming up in 2014, compiled by Robin A. Rothman. iO9 also has their 2014 list up, and it’s long, annotated, and arranged by month. I might just cut and paste the whole thing into my calendar. Oh, and Strange Horizons had their reviewers pick their favorite books of 2013 last Monday and I somehow missed it.

There’s also, of course, a lot of various awards-related buzzing going on. Writertopia provides a useful list of writers eligible for the John Campbell Award, with its weird two-year thing. Hugos are also upon us, and Strange Horizons has listed their suggestions and nominations for both the Hugo and Campbell awards. The Philip K. Dick 2013 Nominees have also been announced. If you could all please chant Ancillary Justice quietly at your desks, I think the awards gods might hear us. On the subject of awards, Amal El-Mohtar has also written a much-shared article on why writers should actively promote their work by posting lists of their awards-eligible work. I agree 800%, mostly because I don’t want to do the legwork of looking up original publication dates and award requirements.  Others disagree rather strongly.

Articles and such

Providing your weekly dose of controversy, may I direct you to Paul Kemp’s recent blog post titled “Why I Write Masculine Stories.” This has incited much gnashing of teeth and ranting to the boyfriend, so I’ll just calmly direct you to Chuck Wendig’s response, and Liz Bourke’s smart rant. On a slightly related note, Georgina Voss has a nice article on the use of sexuality to denote otherness and strangeness in science fiction.

Switching to things that make me less teeth-gnashy, here’s a nice list of books that blend crime and speculative fiction, including The City and the City and The Shining Girls. And also, randomly, some shmancy artist just sold a painting that was a more or less a copy of a cover of an old Isamov book. For $5.7 million dollars.

Writing and publishing

First, and very sadly, speculative fiction author and SFWA Author Emeritus Neal Barrett Jr. passed away on January 12^th. A list of his full works may be found here.

In other publishing news, here’s a really fairly depressing thing about how much money publishers make on e-books versus hard copies, and how none of that trickles over to the writers. Also, note that Dagan books is having a buy one get one free sale. Which is good, because you can use your piles of books to take part in Worlds Without Ends new 2014 reading challenge(s).

Pretty things

Well, there had to be bullets somewhere:

• Here are some imagined floor plans and designs for the homes in classic literature.
• If you loved The Little Prince (and you did, because it’s lovely), here are some early pre-publication sketches.
• If you loved The Incredibles (and you did, because it’s awesome), here’s a long, illustrated analysis of its architecture.
• Finally, go drool over these poster-illustrations that are made entirely from the text of your favorite books. This is the kind of thing that makes me soberly reflect on how weird my house would be if I were rich.