Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

Locus Online’s 2006 Books by Editor page, which I’ve been compiling as a source of information for Hugo Awards voters in this first year of the “Editor – Long Form” category, has gotten some appreciative feedback, but also apparently has prompted a bit of kerfluffle over some of the entries that have been included for some editors. Specifically, ‘classic reprints’ of older books, such as George Alec Effinger’s “Marid” trilogy, reprinted by Orb the past couple years by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who pointed out to me that he was as proud of those books as products of his editorial work as anything else. I thought his argument was sound; those of us who don’t actually write or edit books might imagine that editors’ jobs are chiefly a matter of shaping raw manuscripts into publishable forms, but the business aspects of their jobs surely include much else. Such as, choosing *which* out-of-print books to resurrect, and getting them through the publishing process and back into print.

That would be analogous to the process of choosing *which* stories to reprint in a best of the year anthology, for instance. That’s as much an editorial task, as shaping a raw manuscript into publishable form.

In contrast, for purposes of this list, I did choose to exclude paperback reprints of the same publisher/editor’s books from the year before, though a couple prominent editors wanted me to include them as evidence of their tastes. This struck me as double-dipping; if the Hugo category, and this annual directory, goes on year after year, each page should compile only those items that represent editorial results in that year.

A final issue, which I don’t yet have any firm policy on, is the matter of books published both in the US and UK. I don’t, as a mere reader, have any definite idea about how the editorial process works in such cases — does a UK publisher merely print what the US publisher’s editor has shaped from the submitted manuscript? Or vice versa, US publishers merely printing the book developed by the UK publisher/editor? I suspect it varies from case to case (perhaps corresponding to the nationality of the author…). For now, I’m posting information as sent to me. Darren Nash of Orbit/Atom was kind enough to annotate his list with indicators of whether their titles were acquired from US publishers vs originating with them, and I’ve tried to preserve his indications on the Book Editors page.

Ultimately, of course, it’s up to Hugo voters to decide what’s worthy of a nomination. The intent of the Book Editors list is to provide information, with as little editorial filtering as possible. It will be interesting to see the results.

I’ve finally finished something I promised a year ago: to work out a way to incrementally update the Awards Index throughout the year, updating the nomination lists and the nominee index pages as needed, without having to build the entire index (all 2884 html pages, at current count) to keep the links between pages current. Having just fixed paginations in the nominee indexes was a third of the task; I worked out the other two-thirds this week. First example: the page for the 2007 Crawford Award finalists. That page is new, and more critically the Nominee Index pages with those seven authors have been individually updated — in fact, these are the first award references for Novik and Lynch — without having to rebuild the entire Nominee Index.

OTOH, various other indexes for publishers and titles and whatnot have *not* been updated — they won’t be until an annual rebuild of the entire site. The individual award pages by year, and the nominee indexes, seem the most critical to keep up to date.

I know, I really should refine the layout of some of these pages — the bulleted templates set up back at the beginning don’t always work. Those wraps on two of the publisher references on the new Crawford page look pretty awful.

In other news, over 400 Locus Poll emails received thus far.

And, quite a bit more data has been compiled on the 2006 Book Editors directory page. Though it’s quite a bit from complete or comprehensive. Still, I should post a formal announcement real soon now, or the exercise will be moot, with the Hugo nomination deadline only 2 weeks away. Next year, I’ll get started earlier.

Finally finished today. I spent an extra day — a day’s work, spread out over available time over the past week or so — re-engineering a number of steps, and manually inspecting index entries to set permanent page breaks, so that Nominee Indexes from now on will have fixed pagination, and permalinks. This means nominees can find their entries in the index, bookmark the permalinks, and be able to use those links indefinitely, even as the entire awards index is updated every year (if not more often). This means that as the entire set of awards data expands, the index page breaks won’t change. Individual pages will grow — but they’re just text; extra download times to access the pages will be trivial. And index pages on a website, unlike pages in a print book, don’t need to be a consistent size, or the same limited size from year to year. Where individual pages were too big in between letter breaks, I set breaks on nominees with substantial numbers of nominations — this puts major names at the beginning of index pages, rather than, as the old system drove, the ends.

I’ve been unable to update the website today, and when the hosting service CI Host finally got back to me (I can’t stand sitting on hold on the phone, so I filed a ‘trouble ticket’ via their website, then went to the movies), they said the problem may be a hard drive failure. Apparently, the server is allowing ‘reads’ but not ‘writes’. Fortunately, this means submissions to the Locus Poll are still being processed, via a cgi script on the site — 126 emails received thus far. When the problem is resolved, updates to Future History events and whatnot will be posted.

Meanwhile, here’s a Blink, from this morning:

» LA Times: Ed Park reviews Philip K. Dick’s Voices from the Street

–Update Monday morning: problem seems to have been resolved. They rebooted my server.

71 Locus poll ballot submissions received thus far, in the first 24 hours of online ballot availability.

The update to the Awards Index is in draft form; the pages have been generated, and I’m checking them for errors and updates to manually-edited comments. Another day or two.

I wish I’d had a chance to post something here last Monday, before the Oscar nominations were announced, so that I could sign in with my opinion that Letters from Iwo Jima is by far the best film of 2006, without sounding like a “yeah me too” response to those nominees. Without exactly planning it, I managed to see three films last weekend: Letters from Iwo Jima, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Dreamgirls. Pan’s Labyrinth is indeed a remarkable film, more a film about Spanish fascism and a young girl’s experience than a fantasy film per se, but then our reactions to films are frequently reactions to what we’ve heard others say… There’s a whole essay here. Dreamgirls is a slick entertaining spectacle, and though my reaction to Jennifer Hudson’s singing quickly became please stop!, I do think this deserved to be a Best Picture nominee above Little Miss Sunshine, which managed somehow to prevail due to marketing and little-engine-that-could campaigning for what is really just a cute and charming but little more than made-for-tv type of film… But every year, it seems, something gets nominated for Best Film that five years later you think, what were they thinking..?

There’s a draft book editors directory page posted, with content from the couple of respondents to my previous post here. You can find the link; it’s not that hard. I’ll send out invitations to a fair range of publishers and editors shortly, and announce and promote the page when I’ve compiled a representative set of data.

Locus Online is pleased to announce that it will compile lists of books categorized by editor, as a service to the SF community in support of the new Hugo Awards category for Long Form Editor — i.e., an editor who selects and edits novels or other books, as opposed to the Short Form Editor of magazines or anthologies, whose candidates have traditionally dominated the Hugo Awards Best Editor category.

The idea of compiling such a list was floated a year or more ago, since the editor category split was first announced, but has taken awhile to arrange. (You may ask me in person for details, if you see me at some convention.)

I will be sending out e-mails to various publishers and editors in the next week or so, but until then, for any book editors reading this, you are hereby invited to send to me (online@locusmag.com) a list of your 2006 book titles annotated with the editor of record — the editor who should be credited for the book, for purposes of this new Hugo Awards category. I will compile the data and annotate the existing 2006 Books Directory listing, and will generate a new page, analogous to the Cover Art Gallery, which will list all 2006 book titles by book editor.

Please note that for the 2006 page (for candidates for the 2007 Hugo Awards), I will compile editors of original books published in 2006 — not paperback reprints of books published earlier, etc. Just as the Hugo Award for Best Artist is intended to honor the artist’s work for the eligibility year, so I think the award for Best Editor (in either range) is intended to honor an editor’s output in that eligibility year. Locus Online will maintain separate lists for each year’s original books, arranged by editor, as long as this Hugo Award category goes on.

Note per comment below (that was fast!) that John Klima has already set up a Science Fiction and Fantasy Editor Wiki that may serve much the same purpose.

Which is why I haven’t posted here for almost two weeks. Locus Magazine’s January is busy with compiling the February issue, full of Recommended Reading lists and overview essays by the various reviewers about their favorite books of the past year. I’m no longer closely involved with that, since I don’t write reviews for the magazine any longer, but I do continue my tradition of tallying up counts of original stories published in the year’s magazines, anthologies, and online venues, and writing a summary of story counts and changing trends from previous years. That exercise took 5 or 6 hours from last weekend through Tuesday evening.

For the website, January is busy with tracking down all the 2006 results of the various SF/F/H awards, for the annual update to the Locus Index to SF Awards — I’m currently about 80% done with that. I hope to finish updating the online site by the end of the month.

More personal responsibilities currently include my reading of candidates for the annual Lambda Literary Awards, in the SF/F/H category, for which I’ve received about two dozen books to read (entailing adjustable interpretations of the verb ‘to read’) by mid-February. Nothing like what the World Fantasy Award judges face each year, I’m sure, but a time-consuming task nonetheless.

And I’m enough of a movie buff, especially with the opportunities available for anyone living in the Los Angeles area, to try to keep up with the high-profile end-of-year releases that are talked about by the cognoscenti as prime candidates for the various film awards… There have been past years when I’ve spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s driving around LA to see two or three movies every day; alas, that’s no longer practical, and as of this writing I’ve yet to see Pan’s Labyrinth or Letters from Iwo Jima or Notes from a Scandal; still, I’ve seen many of the most talked about and acclaimed films, and I appreciated being able to recognize many of the Golden Globe Award winners that were announced this past week.

I have one more remark which I think I will post separately.

This is a new film by the director of Hero (my favorite) and House of Flying Daggers, and it has the two biggest movie stars in China, Gong Li and Chow Yun-Fat, in a 10th century tale of a ruling family beset by infidelity, secrets, plots, mis-understandings, and death worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. It also has, rather unnecessarily and to some excess, the fantasy acrobatic violence characteristic of these films and of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in this film mostly in the last 20 minutes or so, capped by an oddly inappropriately syrupy lounge song over the final credits. Those peculiar misgivings aside, it’s a spectacular film and worth seeing.

On an entirely different matter, I can’t help quoting this line from Dave Itzkoff’s review of Michael Crichton’s Next, referring to Crichton’s visit to the White House to discuss global warming.

Imagine: the modern era’s leading purveyor of alarmist fiction, seated side by side with Michael Crichton.

Whereas usually I average two per week. 2006 is done; 2007 will see a format shift or two.

On another matter, I’m a tad surprised that *more* comments aren’t coming in to the posted review and essay pages. Almost all those that have come in I’ve approved and posted. Not all that many, considering the 10K or so visits to the website that are logged each day.

Just received Claude Lalumière’s best-of-year essay in the email today. I got Jeff VanderMeer’s a week or so ago; I suppose I’ll post both together, probably this weekend. Then, shortly, Cory Doctorow’s January issue essay. And mid-January, the first sample review from Locus Magazine, which will be from Gary Wolfe’s January column, reviews of Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds. And more after that.