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2012 Bram Stoker Award Nominees
The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the nominees for the 2012 Bram Stoker Award.
SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A NOVEL
- Bottled Abyss – Benjamin Kane Ethridge (Redrum Horror)
- NightWhere – John Everson (Samhain Publishing)
- The Drowning Girl – Caitlin R. Kiernan (Roc)
- The Haunted – Bentley Little (Signet)
- Inheritance – Joe McKinney (Evil Jester Press)
SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A FIRST NOVEL
- Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling – Michael Boccacino (William Morrow)
- Wide Open – Deborah Coates (Tor Books)
- The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief – Charles Day (Noble YA Publishers LLC)
- A Requiem for Dead Flies – Peter N. Dudar (Nightscape Press)
- Bad Glass – Richard Gropp (Ballantine/Del Rey)
- Life Rage – L. L. Soares (Nightscape Press)
SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL
- The Diviners – Libba Bray (Little Brown)
- I Hunt Killers – Barry Lyga (Little Brown)
- Flesh & Bone – Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster)
- I Kissed a Ghoul – Michael McCarty (Noble Romance Publishing)
- The Raven Boys – Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic Press)
- A Bad Day for Voodoo – Jeff Strand (Sourcebooks)
See the official press release for a complete list of all nominees in all categories. What do you think of this list? The Drowning Girl has another nomination to go with the 2012 Nebula it got earlier this week.
WoGF Review: Witch World by Andre Norton
Sue Bricknell (SueCCCP) is an ex-pat Brit living in Maine. She has no real memory of learning to read and has always had a great love of fantasy. She blames this on her early introduction to the Tales of Beatrix Potter, which she had memorized by the age of four. From an early obsession with Fantasy she has expanded her interests into the Science Fiction, Mystery, Horror and Crime genres. Joining a local book group made her realize that she really likes talking about books, so she began her blog, Coffee, Cookies and Chili Peppers. She has recently had the good fortune to be hired as an assistant librarian, so now she can think about books even more!
This is one of those series that I have always meant to read but has somehow never reached the top of my TBR pile. With the incentive of various challenges to encourage me, I finally decided to see if it lived up to its Hugo Award nomination. I am pleased to say that, unlike A Wizard of Earthsea, Witch World seems to deserve its place on all those “Top Fantasy Series” lists out there. It does feel a little dated now, but it is fifty years old, so that is hardly surprising.
The Witch World itself is lavishly detailed and totally developed. We experience a series of very different cultures and societies, but they are not presented via a mass of exposition. If anything, I would have liked some more detail and perhaps a little longer to immerse myself in each one before we moved on to the next. This was definitely a book that would have benefitted from a good glossary or appendix explaining some of the terms and concepts as it was a little too light on explanations for my taste.
WoGF Review: The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich
Star Hall (Stella Atrium) is a devoted reader and author of science fiction and fantasy. She writes: “I believe that reading and writing go hand-in hand. Each day I can learn from my characters and provide a big stage for them because I filled the creative coffers with good images from great stories.” Visit her website http://stellaatrium.com for more information.
Louise Erdrich has written a series of novels about a Native American extended family trapped in poverty and fear on the reservation and in Minneapolis (called Apple Town due to the vowel sounds). In The Antelope Wife, revolving narrators bead together the events apparently to bind patterns over generations – fates of twins, lost babies, lustful wives. Since the level of diction of each narrator is identical with lazy grammar, interjected native words, and self-centered vision, the use of he-she-they gets confusing for relations among the cousins.
My reading of The Antelope Wife was different from other reviewers who took the first narrator in chapter one as the center. I found the central character to be Cally who struggles to find meaning in the advice, myths, strange gestures, broken dreams of her parents-stepfather-cousin-grandmas-ancestors. The details Erdrich presents of their disassociated lives are unsparing and often funny. For example, Cally wonders about the choices of a cousin who pre-salts her food since salting before tasting is an indication of general dissatisfaction with life.
2012 Nebula Award Nominees!
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America announces the nominees for the 2012 Nebula Awards. The nominees in the Novel category are:
- Throne of the Crescent Moon – Saladin Ahmed (DAW; Gollancz ’13)
- Ironskin – Tina Connolly (Tor)
- The Killing Moon – N. K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- The Drowning Girl – Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)
- Glamour in Glass – Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
- 2312 – Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
See the official press release for the complete shortlist for all categories. The winners will be announced at the Forty-Eighth Nebula Awards Weekend which will be held May 16-19th, 2013, in San Jose at the San Jose Hilton. Voting will open to SFWA Active members on March 1 and close on March 30.
Congratulations to all the nominees! So what do you think of this lineup? Any early favorites?
WoGF Review: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
Scott Lazerus came to Worlds Without End looking for a good list of books. He found David Pringle’s Best 100 Science Fiction Novels to his liking and is currently working his way through the list. He has posted many fine reviews for WWEnd including several for last year’s GMRC. Be sure to check out Scott’s excellent blog series Forays into Fantasy too!
Stories often succeed by doing one or two things especially well. A novel may stick with us because of a memorable character, a fascinating setting, or due to unique or interesting ideas. Zoo City is especially successful in that none of these elements are neglected, and all are brought together by Lauren Beukes in a satisfying whole within a novel that is relatively short and self-contained. Looking back after finishing it, the craft that must have gone into creating the work becomes more apparent. I’ll focus on four of the novel’s strengths, each of which, by itself, would probably be enough to maintain interest in the book. The fact that they are successfully brought together makes Zoo City a compulsive read…
First, the story is told in the first person by Zinzi December, a character whose intelligence and resourcefulness, as well as her guilt, doubt, and regret, are both revealed and explained compellingly. She becomes a character that we want to learn more about. She has fallen on hard times, scraping a living by using her talent for finding lost things (more on that in the next paragraph), as well as using her “Former Life” talent as a writer to come up with scam emails in order to repay drug-related debts owed to a criminal organization. Along the way, we learn how she went from up-and-coming journalist from an educated middle-class background to scraping by as she can day to day in the Zoo City ghetto of Johannesburg. As we get to know the character, we are drawn into her struggle to come to terms with her past, and to find a route back into the journalistic world, while struggling to “do the right thing” and make up for past and current mistakes.
WoGF Review: Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore
Guest blogger and WWEnd Uber User, Charles Dee Mitchell, has contributed a great many book reviews to WWEnd including his blog series Philip K. Dickathon and The Horror! The Horror! He can also be found on his own blog www.potatoweather.blogspot.com.
I cringe at author events when some one in the audience asks, Where do you get your ideas? But when I read what Rebecca Ore‘s novel, or series of linked stories, was going to be about, I admit I wondered, How does someone think up this stuff?
Vel is a 15,000 year old man who never ages past the prime of his young manhood. He is not immortal, since he could die of an injury or by violence, but except for growing a new set of teeth every century or so, he stays both in excellent shape and immune to disease. He is also a traveler in time and space, a skill he discovered by accident but that has proved handy over the millennia. While other clans are starving during hard times in the Pleistoscene, he can run out for pizza or kill an auroch. In 18th century London, he advises his relatives who run the antique business that supports the family: Buy Hogarth. Invest in woolen mills. Snatch up copies of Gulliver’s Travels, the anonymous author is really Jonathan Swift.
And he is gay. His homosexuality is accepted by his clan. It is neither unusual nor of particular interest. Men like Vel cut down on the competition for women, and Vel and those like him can both hunt with the men and care for children who might otherwise be strangled at birth as that one-too-many child for a still nursing mother.
The Old Weird: Series Introduction
Over my long Christmas break, I decided to read some H. P. Lovecraft. Of course, I’d read a few Lovecraft stories here and there in anthologies, but I’d never read his work in any systematic way. I found a great complete (?) works e-text at Cthulhu Chick and started reading. It contains 63 short stories, novelettes, and novellas. As you can imagine, one can only read so many Lovecraft stories in a row before (1) the plots all start to run together or (2) one begins to question his or her own sanity. Between reading Lovecraft stories, I did what any good English professor does: Research! This led me to a host of Lovecraft precursors and contemporaries who wrote ghost, occult and supernatural stories—the writers of Victorian Gothic, horror and weird. I’m calling this series The Old Weird in order to show the readers that this will not be a blog dedicated to China Miéville and contemporary writers. In my exploration of the Old Weird, I discovered texts by William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Robert W. Chambers, Seabury Quinn, M. R. James, and many others which I will explore as they set forth the parameters for the occult and horror stories that thrill us today.
SF Manga 101: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Glenn Hough (gallyangel) is a nonpracticing futurist, an anime and manga otaku, and is almost obsessive about finishing several of the lists tracked on WWEnd. In this series on SF Manga Glenn will provide an overview of the medium and the place of science fiction within it.
Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here!
Neon Genesis Evangelion, or NGE, has been known to do things to people; it changes them. You have been warned.
When otaku start talking about the NGE anime, it’s normal to talk in clichés and you start to use words or phrases like ground breaking, shattering, stunning, mind-numbing complexity, totally awesome, Rei is so Moe, Or Baka! Shinji (You fool, Shinji!).
When the anime hit in 95 and 96 to say that it changed the face of anime and that it reforged the big giant mecha genre, is not an understatement or hyperbole. That’s what happened. But NGE didn’t just stop. The anime had several movies, which tied up the ending of the series, before moving on to a rebuild series of movies that clarified and distilled the major themes, concentrating and enhancing what was already there.
Now the manga is what we would call a novelization. And they’re still being produced, even after almost a lapse of 20 years. One of the leads from the anime is doing this. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto is sort of slow and there have been pauses in the production. That’s just the way it worked out. But this slowness has allowed the manga to follow it’s own process of distillation and clarification, making for a more concise rendering of the basic story line. I feel the manga stands by itself and is good enough for a top five placement in the SF manga pantheon.
Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge: January Review Poll Winners
The first Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge review poll is now closed. After 70 votes we had a clear first and second place but for the third spot we had a 3-way tie. To break the tie we had Rico (icowrich) re-read the 3 reviews and cast his vote. (He was the only one of us who had not already voted.)
January WoGF Review Poll Winners:
Our three winners will find an Amazon gift card, $25, $15 and $10 respectively, waiting for them in their email. We hope they’ll use them to buy books and regale us with more great reviews!
Congrats to our winners and thanks to everyone who participated in the poll. There are more prizes up for grabs each month so if you didn’t win this time you still have plenty more chances.
WoGF Review: Feast of Souls by C. S. Friedman
For Lynn Williams (lynnsbooks) books are much more than a hobby or a pastime they’re really an obsession. If she’s not reading a book, she’s talking about books on her blog, Lynn’s Book Blog, or deciding which books to buy next. Lynn reads all sorts of books, sometimes straying into YA, but her first love is fantasy. Recently she started to cross into science fiction thanks to the suggestions of some very excellent bloggers.
Feast of Souls is the first in a dark fantasy series of books called The Magister Trilogy and written by Celia S. Friedman. This is my first reading of any novel written by CSF and as such I am submitting it for my Worlds Without End, Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge.
I really enjoyed this story I must admit. I liked the author’s style of writing and whilst the story isn’t particularly hugely out of character with other fantasy stories or totally unique it was compelling and the author, for me, had a captivating style.
The story basically consists of a strong willed woman, determined against all odds to succeed where others have failed. A man, a prince, dying from a terrible wasting disease, who goes on a quest in search of answers and in between both of these we have a strange and dark force that is about to be unleashed upon the world, a mad, blood thirsty king who will go to any length to conquer and his queen – a gentle woman born of a race of people granted innate powers to protect the world in it’s greatest need.
