BSFA Awards shortlists announced

The British Science Fiction Association has announced their awards shortlists for work from 2010.

Best Novel shortlist:
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Orbit)
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes  (Angry Robot)
The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz)
Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan (Orbit)

The Windup Girl first appeared in the US in 2009 and in Britain in 2010.  The Restoration Game and Lightborn have yet to be published in the US. Zoo City and The Dervish House were available in both the US and Britain in 2010.

Other categories are Best Short Fiction, Best Non-fiction, and Best Art. These shortlists are available at the BSFA website. The non-fiction category, curiously, has a novel and a podcast. The first time either has appeared in the BSFA non-fiction shortlist I suspect. I haven't read the "non-fiction" novel, Red Plenty, which has not been published in the US. The podcast, I can vouch, is worthwhile: Notes from Coode Street, which has been mentioned several times on this blog. The winners will be announced at Eastercon in April. For additional commentary visit the Torque Control article.

New arrivals in today's mail

Two books that were much anticipated (by me) arrived today: Among Others by Jo Walton and Home Fires by Gene Wolfe, one author I have not read at novel length before and the other I have read many books indeed. They already have been much discussed by critics and editors in the field. Both are listed by Amazon.com as being available on 18 January 2011, today. Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe spent a good part of Episode 30 of the Notes from Coode Street Podcast discussing and praising Among Others. Strahan and Wolfe have also mentioned Home Fires over several episodes as one of the major novels of the year. They've even given it the nickname "Home Fries."

Related links:
Gary K. Wolfe reviews Among Others by Jo Walton
Notes from Coode Street Podcast

Philip K. Dick Award shortlist announced

The short list for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award has been announced. The nominees, published in 2010, are as follows:

Yarn by Jon Armstrong (Night Shade Books)
Chill by Elizabeth Bear (Ballantine Books/Spectra)
The Reapers Are The Angels by Alden Bell (Henry Holt & Co.)
Song of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy (Eos)
The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder (Pyr)
Harmony by Project Itoh, translated by Alexander O. Smith (Haikasoru)
State of Decay by James Knapp (Roc)

Philip K. Dick Award  is presented for “distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States.” In other words, for authors who don’t get enough respect to get their books published in hardcover. Philip K. Dick’s novels, usually published first in paperback, provided the author with a meager living. The winner will be announced at Norwescon in April.

Best TV of 2010

Best series television of 2010 (in alphabetical order):
Breaking Bad (AMC): The best pure drama. Dark stories. Bleak sense of humor. Well written, well acted.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central): At its best, the most essential show on television. It deconstructs the news with insight and humor.
Fringe (Fox): The best science fiction show on television. What started as an X-Files retread has found its own way. One improvement on the original: it has story arcs that actually go somewhere.
The Pacific (HBO miniseries): A bookend to the Band of Brothers miniseries. Harrowing and very human.
Sherlock (BBC via PBS) An update of Sherlock Holmes set in the modern day. Surprisingly successful. Stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a creditable Holmes.
Treme (HBO): The most satisfying new series of the year. Excellent ensemble acting. Filled with the music, sights and sounds of New Orleans.
United States of Tara (Showtime): A surprisingly uplifting portrayal of a family whose mother has dissociative identity disorder. Toni Collette plays the title character and all of her alter egos. A tour de force.
30 Rock (NBC): Funny and rapid fire. Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin are unstable comedic dynamite.

Next best:  
Being Human (BBC America): Appealing actors playing a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost. Stories are uneven in quality.
Boardwalk Empire (HBO): Well-crafted and a visual treat. Stories are a bit predictable.
Friday Night Lights (NBC): Perhaps the best family drama on TV.  It has a weakness for the sentimental.
Justified (FX): An adaptation of Elmore Leonard.  The main character is well-played by Timothy Olyphant.  Sometimes the lawman stories feel routine.
Louie (FX): A wicked sense of humor. If only he was a little less self-satisfied.
Rescue Me (FX): Reveals a lot about male bonding and male humor. Self-indulgent by definition.
Rubicon (AMC): Fascinating look inside the intelligence industrial complex. Filled with paranoia and betrayal. The story went flat toward the end.

Disappointing:  
These are genre-related shows (fantasy, science fiction, horror) that I wanted to like. Alas.
The Walking Dead (AMC): Started strong, then the cracks started showing: bad acting, weak stories, and uneven pacing.
Caprica (Syfy): The story went from too slow the first season to over-condensed this season.  It had several story-threads with potential. By the end I found it hard to care about any of them.
True Blood (HBO): The amped up sex and violence seems to have replaced interesting stories.
Lost (ABC): Went from puzzling and entertaining to silly and embarrassing.

The trend for series to become shorter continued. A season of 10 episodes is becoming common on cable and broadcast TV. Seasons of six or eight episodes are not unusual. The Sherlock series had only three episodes, although that is a BBC import. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Too many long seasons are padded out with endless filler, making shows unwatchable.  In many ways I believe the miniseries, with enough time to tell a novel-length story, along with a beginning, middle, and end, is the ideal form for television.

There was the usual turnover. Rubicon arrived and departed. Lost overstayed its welcome and is gone. Caprica was canceled and the remaining unaired episodes were burned off in a marathon January 4. New shows were Justified, Louie, Sherlock, Treme, and The Walking Dead, with Treme the best of these.

Best SF books 2010 list mania

Website io9 has a list of best 15 speculative fiction books for 2010. Curiously it includes The Windup Girl (2009) published in the prior year. Apparently, it's just too good to ignore no matter what year it came out. It's a sturdy enough list, and sent me to look up a couple titles I hadn't heard of.

More varied and more exhaustive, is the Strange Horizons compilation of 26 reviewers presenting their best of 2010. There are a lot of interesting reading suggestions here.

If year's best lists aren't enough, Tor.com is inviting readers to vote for the best science fiction and fantasy novels of the past decade (their decade has 11 years, go figure). Over at Strange Horizons, Niall Harrison recapitulates the Tor.com best of the decade results and adds his own picks. His list overlaps with only one title in the Tor.com results: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004) by Susanna Clarke. I've only read six on the Harrison list and I already like it better than the Tor.com results.

Edited to add: Gwenda Bond offers a mostly young-adult oriented Top Ten for 2010, more evidence of the strength of this growing segment of the genre.

Truer Grit

True Grit (2010), directors Ethan Coen and Joel Coen: A good solid western with excellent storytelling, crisply told and unsentimental. The acting is fine throughout, especially 13-year-old Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross. The ending is extremely well-measured.

True Grit (1969), director Henry Hathaway: Here the acting is bad, especially Kim Darby and Glen Campbell. John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn is over the top, cuddly and sentimental. Reaction shots go on too long. Musical cues are ham-handed. The ending goes off the rails. The 1969 version is completely superseded by the 2010 version.

Side-by-side these two movies make a stark contrast, a wonderful case study for a film class.

2011 Eaton Conference to honor Ellison and Delany

Authors Harlan Ellison, Nalo Hopkinson, China Miéville, Karen Tei Yamashita, Gregory Benford and Howard V. Hendrix are among the expected participants at the 2011 Eaton Science Fiction Conference, a three-day event intended for authors, scholars and fans, Feb. 11-13, at the Mission Inn and Spa in Riverside, California.

Quoting  from the UC Riverside news release:

“ ‘We’ve attracted almost three times as many scholars than we’ve ever hosted, and there is greater diversity of presenters and topics,’ said Melissa Conway, head of Special Collections & Archives at UCR and co-organizer of the conference. ‘I’m particularly pleased that Harlan Ellison will be coming.’

“ . . . Authors Samuel R. Delany and Harlan Ellison will receive the 2010 and 2011 Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction. . . . Delany and Ellison are two of the most important science fiction writers of the past half-century, said Rob Latham, associate professor of English and co-organizer of the conference.”

Registration is $165 for the entire conference or $75 for a single day. Student admission is $55. The Mission Inn has extended its $120 conference rate to all attendees to Dec. 31. The Eaton Science Fiction Conference is sponsored by the University of California, Riverside.

Related links:
UC Riverside news release
Eaton conference website

Thoughts on the passing of Irvin Kershner

The key to appreciating pop culture or an art form is exposure at an early age. It doesn’t matter the form or genre: books, movies, paintings, theater, ballet, sports, science fiction, fantasy, etc.

David G. Hartwell, in his enjoyable and informative book Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (1985), holds that the golden age of science fiction is 12. My interpretation of Hartwell is that the reader who is exposed to science fiction books at that tender age is able to fall for the genre in the way that only a 12-year-old can: hopelessly and totally in love. At a later age, when the critic that we all grow inside our minds asserts itself, it becomes difficult to achieve that bonding emotion.

I had passed the golden age of 12 when Star Wars (1977) arrived. I could appreciate the visuals. The story was another matter.  I had already read Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, We Who Are About To by Joanna Russ, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Pavane by Keith Roberts, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and several more of the most interesting, most challenging and rewarding science fiction books available. By comparison, the unsophisticated, intentionally retro storytelling of Star Wars resembled a Saturday morning children’s television show with a big production budget.

The production budget for the second movie was bigger. The surprise that The Empire Strikes Back (1980) held was that the story and direction were both considerably better than the first movie. A sequel that was an improvement on the original was a novelty. Certainly none of the four Star Wars feature films made since The Empire Strikes Back can make that claim.

The credit for the surprise that was The Empire Strikes Back goes to director Irvin Kershner (1923-2010) and screenwriter Leigh Brackett (1915-1978).

Related links:
Wikipedia on Irvin Kershner
Wikipedia on Leigh Brackett