By the title of this entry, you have probably guessed that MacLeod won the Clarke Award this year, for his book Song of Time. Pretty impressive, since his competition included Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Stephenson, Sheri S. Tepper and Mark Wernham. The Clarke Award was presented last night at the Sci-Fi London 8 Film Festival, and presenting an award for a best book at a film festival is not as unusual as it sounds. This film fest has grown into one of the best SciFi Cons in the UK, and even has its own awards show for best short film made specifically for the event.
This weekend saw the presentation of the 2009 Nebula Awards, and some great writers won. Not hard to do when you consider most of the nominees were great writers, of course. That group included Ursula K. Le Guin, Catherine Asaro, John Kessel, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman for best novel, novella, novelette, and short story, in that order. Wall-E got best script, Ysabeau S. Wilce took home the Andre Norton Award, Harry Harrison won the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, and Joss Whedon got the Ray Bradbury Award (and accepted on video). My favorite first-person account of the event comes from Amy Sterling Casil, herself no stranger to quality writing.
Yes, the Chronic Rift just passed out its 2008 Roundtable Awards, and even if you never heard of the award, it is a fun little podcast to listen to. The winners included authors like Neil Gaiman and Michael A. Burstein, artists like Alex Ross, and folks who could have won from multiple categories (yes, I am talking about Stanley Schmidt there). The Podcast winner was for one of my favorites, Doctor Who: Podshock, and best web page to SF Scope, while the best non-fiction went to William Shatner. The list goes on; I recommend you spend a half hour and change listening to this one.
The Nominees for the 2009 Hugo Awards were announced a few days ago, and they include (as always) an amazing collection of stories. Some of them belong to Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, and John Scalzi, to name but a few. Big Dumb Object has some comments worth noting. Now I need to read everything on the lists; a good way to start is by grabbing the links from Anticipation SF, and as always the SF Signal Hugo page has links to all the free online reading version of the nominees stories…
The 35th annual Saturn Awards will be presented in June, and the nominations are now out. The Dark Knight leads everyone with 11 nominations, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button pulled 9, and Iron Man garnered 8. Some categories this year would be easy to decide, were I an Academy member. Best Horror would be THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR, and the Best International Film would be FORBIDDEN KINGDOM. Other categories… how to decide between THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, IRON MAN, and JUMPER? On different days I would vote for different films. And that’s without getting into the TV side of the competition, with Fringe, Heroes, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, Battlestar Galactica, and True Blood all in the running. There are a lot more, you can see the full nominations list here.
Joss Whedon has just won a Bradbury Award for best screenwriter… what a surprise!