Locus Awards; publisher prospects; recent reading.
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It’s a truism that the busier one is, the less time one has to jot notes in one’s journal, or write posts on one’s blog. The past few days have been busy, but the business — busy-ness? — is all over now, so I have time this Sunday afternoon to catch up.
Family from LA arrived on Thursday (with a day’s notice): my partner’s younger son and his wife, expecting their first child in July. Their last trip to the Bay Area to see us and various friends and cousins before the baby comes. Dinners out, lunch with cousins, visits to esoteric coffee shops. They left for home this morning, Sunday, after a trip to Boichik Bagels on 6th St. in Berkeley.
Then the Locus Awards were yesterday, Saturday, at the now usual venue, Preservation Park in downtown Oakland. The event was recorded and posted on YouTube:
The highlight might be, early on in the show, a 5-minute video from Connie Willis, who for years hosted the event, but could not attend this time, and so provided a video recap of past years’ events, from signed bananas to Hawaiian shirts. The event proper unfolds like any other awards show: lots of categories, readings of the “nominees,” announcements of the winners, most of whom are not in attendance. Peter S. Beagle was, and the winner of the Best Science Fiction Novel, one Alexander Boldizar, was. I confess I don’t follow (read) most of the current SF/F writers, but I’m *aware* of most of them; yet the winner in this SF Novel category hadn’t even registered with me.
As it happens, which I will reveal here since it’s academic now and no one reads my blog anyway, I saw the complete list of Locus Awards winners as to be published in the July issue of Locus Magazine when Locus HQ sent me a PDF of the issue on Friday, some 10 days before publication, and a day before the awards ceremony. Given the timing, that issue had the full list of Locus Awards winners. And my reaction was, on seeing the winner in this category, who? What book is this? Well OK, I’ll check it out.
And then, quite coincidentally, entering the hall where the awards were to be presented, and seeing a table run by Tachyon publishers Jacob and Rina Weisman full of books to sell at the back of the room, I saw a copy of this Alexander Boldizar book on display. Only one copy. I bought it. It was already signed, and the author attended, but I did not have time to track him down to personalize it for me, as Rina suggested I might.
Nor did I tell anyone why I’d bought it.
Here is my post about about last year’s event. Gail Carriger and Henry Lien were there, and Bob Blough, Jacob Weisman, and Tim Pratt, who has apparently become Tim Melody Pratt, presenting one of the awards.
But Gary K. Wolfe, long-time Locus reviewer, was there, with his partner Dale Weatherwax Hanes, who seemed to remember meeting me, though not vice versa. We all sat at the same table together, as the buffet began (dumplings and rice from some place in the city, not great), and chatted about his reviews, and the editor and publisher I’m currently working with. I think the result of that conversation is that I will have difficulty finding a publisher for my book for any but a very small prospective audience. McFarland, perhaps, which is where Gary Westfahl publishes. Other respectable folks have published there — David Brin, Howard Hendrix. But McFarland pays nothing to contributors, and publishes only 300 copies for sale mostly to libraries.
Here’s McFarland’s page for the book in which my essay will appear, now scheduled for October: Reimagining Science Fiction, subtitled “Essays on 21st Century Ideas and Authors”
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Meanwhile, this past month I’ve been reading and rereading several classic SF novels, especially a couple dystopian novels that in the last year or two have taken up near-permanent residence on the extended bestseller lists: Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In between those, three others about nuclear apocalypses: Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, and Burdick & Wheeler’s Fail-Safe. I’d read all of these once before except for the Shute. I plan to wrap up with the Atwood this coming week, and then get back to sfadb updates, and blog posts about reading these books and others.
