Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

Just 8 sets of correct responses received so far, plus another 4 responses with one or more incorrect answers. Plus an email wondering how the quiz fits into a website offering “News, Reviews, Resources, and Perspectives” of SF–which is it? There’s no pleasing everyone.

After passing on a couple previous requests from Bantam Spectra, I’ve agreed this time to set up a giveaway contest for 10 free copies of the latest title they’re promoting and which I’ve posted an exclusive excerpt from… they provide the copies, I set up the contest, and all I have to do is send them the 10 winners’ names and addresses. So I’ve decided to create a little quiz to cull the entrants, and I’ve incorporated some suggestions from the Locus Magazine staff of questions pertinent to Locus Magazine, to give readers of the magazine (and the website) some advantage. Still, I’m not at all sure if the quiz I’ve created is too easy, or too difficult. Most of the answers are easily found by anyone conversant with the web, and the Locus Online site… yet I regularly get e-mails from folks unclear about information I thought was perfectly apparent on the website. So we’ll see. First 10 respondents with all correct answers get a copy of Jeff’s book. Will 10 sets of correct answers appear, in the next week? I’ll let you know.

UPDATE, next morning. As comments point out, there was an obvious error in one of the questions, which has now been corrected. My fault! (though I sent it to the magazine staff for their feedback, and they must have missed it too). Obviously no one will be disqualified for not being able to answer that question correctly.

Five correct sets of answers have already been received, so it looks like it won’t take long at all to get 10… and next quiz will have to be harder.

For the past three weeks I’ve been reading short fiction from 2005 so that I’d have something to nominate for the Hugos, and later the Locus Poll, as well as to respond to an invitation to nominate stories for the Theodore Sturgeon Award (I’m running a bit late on that). As most readers here know, I used to read lots and lots of short fiction every year, and reviewed stories in a monthly column in Locus Magazine. That ended at the end of 2001, and since then, without that monthly obligation, I’ve read far less, though personal circumstances that have constrained my reading time in recent years is also partly to blame.

I’d meant to post comments about stories from 2005 I particularly liked out of this remedial reading, for what it might be worth to other belated readers looking for stories to read and nominate; I’m a bit late on that too, with only a few hours left for anyone to nominate. Well, there’s still the Locus poll, if you haven’t already voted.

So in those three weeks I read 34 short stories, 10 novelettes, and 3 novellas, guided by tables of contents of forthcoming best-of-the-year anthologies that have been posted online, Rich Horton’s lists, and Locus’ own recommended reading list. I’m not done — I’ll read more before filing my own Locus poll vote — but here’s my summary so far.

So, short stories: my two favorites are Michael Swanwick’s “Triceratops Summer” (Amazon Shorts), a charming and clever story about dinosaurs in a small town that craftily provides an answer (“ten weeks or 3 months”) and the implications of that answer before revealing what the question is, and Robert Reed’s “Finished” (Asimov’s Sept.), which explores the social and personal consequences of a variation of immortality (in which the personality is left forever unchanging) with remarkable efficiency (for a short story), complete with an ironic semi-surprise ending.

I also liked two stories by Stephen Baxter, “The Children of Time” (Asimov’s July), about the future of the human race, and “A Signal from Earth” (Postscripts Autumn), about the last member of an alien race, both involving potential explanations of Fermi’s paradox (if aliens exist, where are they?). Joe Haldeman’s “Angel of Light” (from the Australian science magazine Cosmos, fiction edited by Damien Broderick) imagines a future Islam society in which an old magazine and a visiting alien provide moments of wonder, while Gene Wolfe’s “Comber” (Postscripts Spring) imagines a surreal city floating atop waves in which a threat to the city and marital tensions collide. Mary Rosenblum’s “Search Engine” (Analog Sep) extrapolates electronic tagging of merchandise and people into a complex tale of a drug sting gone bad.

My favorite fantasy short stories include two extrapolations of religious myths, both stylish in very different ways, Jeffrey Ford’s “Boatman’s Holiday” (F&SF Oct/Nov), about Charon, and Neil Gaiman’s “Sunbird” (from the Noisy Outlaws etc. etc. anthology), about–but that would be telling. M. Rickert’s “Anyway” (Sci Fiction Aug) is a moving contemporary fantasy that considers a profound moral question about sacrifice. Carol Emshwiller’s “I Live With You” (F&SF Mar) is a playfully subjective story about a lonely woman and an unseen presence. Theodora Goss’ “Pip and the Fairies” (Strange Horizons Oct 3rd) is a sweetly subjective tale about the daughter of a popular children’s writer that considers where fantasies come from. Kelly Link’s “Monster” (Noisy Outlaws etc) is a wryly surrealistic tale of boys at summer camp who discover what really happened to the kids from another bungalow. And Joe Hill’s “Best New Horror” (Postscripts, Spring, and his book) is a remarkably assured tale about a horror anthology editor confronted by new experiences that play off his sense of cliche.

A few others left me less than completely satisfied; sometimes it’s hard not to build expectations of where a story should go that then result in frustration, due to no fault of the author. I wanted a more substantial climax to James Morrow’s “The Second Coming of Charles Darwin” (Amazon Shorts), for example, in what for the most part is a potent confrontation between Charles Darwin and a time-traveling cyborg sent by religious fundamentalists to disrupt his visit to the Galapagos islands. Ken MacLeod’s “A Case of Consilience” (Nova Scotia) considers religious proselytizing aboard a space station devoted to extra-terrestrial contact, with an ending too patly ironic. A few others are just extended jokes–Charles Stross’ “Snowball’s Chance” (Nova Scotia), Jeff VanderMeer’s “The Farmer’s Cat” (Polyphony 5), Neal Asher’s “Mason’s Rats” (Asimov’s Apr/May). Amusing, but not stories I’d nominate for awards.

There are quite a few more novelettes I need to read, and of those I have read it’s been more difficult to find any I can’t quibble with a least a bit. My favorites include Wil McCarthy’s “The Policeman’s Daughter” (Analog June), a recomplicated tale set in the author’s Queendom of Sol future about two people whose careers and relationships are threatened by young, immature copies of themselves — fascinatingly extrapolated, though it’s one of those stories where the complications it explores verge on undercutting its entire premise. Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot” (Infinite Matrix) has a lot of fun undercutting the verities of Asimovian robotics, conflating them with a repressive social state, in a detective tale about a missing teenaged daughter and an ex-wife who defected to Eurasia. Vonda McIntyre’s “Little Faces” posits, somewhat grotesquely, a fascinating far-future space culture of women in which competition for reproductive rights persists, via elaborate social interactions and millennia-long relationships, even without males. Howard Waldrop’s “The King of Where-I-Go” (Sci Fiction) is filled with evocative personal reminiscence of growing up in Alabama, though its change-the-past story is fairly routine. Michael Swanwick’s “Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play” (Asimov’s July) is more fun with Darger and Surplus, this time dealing with satyrs and mad scientists. A couple stories popular with list-makers left me cool. Alastair Reynolds’ “Zima Blue” (Postscripts, Summer) is a fascinating discussion of art and memory, with a revelation that is, ah, anticlimactic, if not outright silly. Somewhat similarly, Daryl Gregory’s “Second Person, Present Tense” has some fascinating infodumps about brain functioning, but the human story of a teenaged girl and her parents could equally well describe a case of total amnesia… couldn’t it? Did I miss something?

I liked all three novellas I’ve read so far. Connie Willis’ “Inside Job” (Asimov’s, Jan) is classic Willis screwball comedy about psychics, debunkers, and a famous psychic presence, that manages to have its premise and debunk it too. Ian McDonald’s “The Little Goddess” (Asimov’s Jun) is a detailed and evocative tale of a girl in 21st century Nepal who journeys from figurative goddess to something more literal, courtesy time, chance, and technology. And Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners” is great metafictional fun about five friends and their favorite TV show; despite its playful allusiveness, it’s the most substantial story I’ve read by an author whose stories, for my taste, often talk about their subjects more than they are about them.

The advent of a new SF reviewer at the New York Times has revived Locus Online’s letters page, which hasn’t been active in over a year and a half. The page has been dormant only partially due to my constricted schedule; mostly because we haven’t received any letters. Perhaps the popularity of blogs for people to air their views is a factor?

Perhaps Gary Westfahl’s latest essay, posted today, will generate some feedback for a letters page, too.

As I’ve threatened to post several times over the past couple years, here’s some statistical commentary on voting patterns in the annual Locus polls, using completed results from the past two years as data samples.

What has always struck me in looking at the ballots as they come in, and as they’re compiled and tallied in the database, is how few voters submit a complete or even mostly complete ballot. Consider that there are 14 or 15 categories — 4 for novels (sf, fantasy, first, YA), 3 for short fiction, 3 or 4 for other books (collection, anthology, nonfiction, and in some years a separate art book category), plus magazine, publisher, editor, and artist. That’s 70 or 75 nominations a voter can make.

In 2004, there were 14 categories for a potential 70 nominations per voter. Of 629 valid ballots, only 29, or 4.6%, filled out every category. At the other extreme, 19 voters submitted ballots without any votes at all. They did fill out the survey, and all but 2 indicated they were subscribers, so perhaps they just wanted the free issue that comes with submitting the survey.

The average number of nominations per voter in 2004 was 29.8, with a standard deviation of 19.5.

In 2005, there were 15 categories, and 913 valid ballots. Of them, 55 voters, 6%, filled out every category, and 20 didn’t vote for anything at all. The average was 30.2 votes, with a standard deviation of 22.

The most noticeable difference from 2004 to 2005 was the number of online voters, including nonsubscribers. That trend seems to be increasing in 2006, with over 600 ballots received in the first month of voting and 6 more weeks to go.

Which categories are most popular with voters? Here are the numbers, where the counts of voters are the number who nominated at least one item in the category.

Unsurprising conclusion: More people vote for novels, with magazine and publisher categories also very popular, while short fiction, artist, and nonfiction book categories are least popular. I would guess without checking that these trends are similar to Hugo voting patterns.

It’s also interesting to quantify the results of the voting in terms of the number of voters. To an extent you can observe this from the published results of the poll in Locus Magazine, which give the total number of ballots received each year and show the number of votes each item received (as well as number of 1st place votes, and total number of points). Consider that the winning novel in 2005, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle pair, attracted 219 votes (97 of them first place votes, for a total of 1503 points). That’s 219 votes out of 913 voters, just 24%. It’s only 29% of those who voted in the category at all, and keep in mind each voter has 5 nominations per category.

Even a perhaps more generally popular book, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, attracted just 426 votes (in the first novel category), i.e. votes from 47% of all voters, 65% of those who voted in the category at all.

Clarke’s results are exceptional; much more typical for novels and short works are numbers in the 20-25% range. In 2004 the most-voted fiction work was the winning SF novel, Dan Simmons’ Ilium, with 198 votes from 629 voters (31%) of whom 538 voted in the category (37%). In contrast, the winning novelette that year, Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”, got just 69 votes from the 374 voters who nominated in the category–18%.

The point is that it’s extremely rare for an award winning book or story to actually by favored by a majority of the voting population. Certainly there are extenuating circumstances; some books take a while to become well-known, while many readers don’t get around to books until they’re in paperback. But as a voting result, I suspect this has always been true, even for ‘classic’ works that are now taken for granted as the most popular works of all time. Even Dune tied for a Hugo in its year!

I had one of these! (via Boing Boing)

It was, as it says, a plastic mechanical computer. You ‘programmed’ it by inserting cylindric pegs along the front tabs–the pegs are visible as black or dark grey in the photo–and then you manually moved in and out the long base plate with the handle visible at lower right. The vertical rods pivoted, powered by rubber bands (!), depending on where the tabs where placed as you moved that base plate, and created the ‘answer’ in three-bit format at left.

I did a grade-school show-and-tell with it, with input from my Book of Knowledge encyclopedia at home. In those days, it was an issue whether ‘digital’ or ‘analog’ computers would prevail.

Is the recreation worth $49? Well–maybe.

The image at the top of this blog is the full moon just after sunset, taken from Medina Road in Woodland Hills CA. It is not the sun through the smoggy Los Angeles haze. It is the full moon at sunset.

500 ballots received so far. The leaders in most categories have not changed since the first sampling. I’ve said for the past two years that I’ve intended to post some comments about voting patterns — how many voters vote in how many categories, etc. — and not gotten around to it; I’ll intend to do so again this year. Soon. It’s not about the results, it’s about the patterns.

Still getting over the flu.

I hadn’t noticed until I was reading my copy of the February issue of Locus thoroughly that for purposes of the Locus poll (390 ballot received and counting) the definition of the fiction categories have been changed, the break between novella and novel now occurring at 59,000 words, rather than the traditional 40,000. This seems entirely reasonable, considering how huge most genre novels are these days, compared to those slender paperback originals of 40 and 50 years ago. The change allows a short book like James Patrick Kelly’s Burn, for example, to count among novellas, rather than novels. (By the same token, if it were up to me, I might edge the novelette/novella break up from 15,000 to 20,000 words, though I’d leave the short story/novelette break at 7500 words, considering how many ss’s are published every year.)

I’ve been flu-bug-bitten the past few days, which is why the relative lack of posting on the site. I have a backlog of emails and book listings to post, maybe this weekend.

PS There was a problem with my archive links in the right column, and so I fixed it, I thought, but now the links are arranged from earliest to latest, rather than latest to earliest. Any Blogger experts know how to fix this?

Look people, if you submit a vote in the Locus Poll and enter the same title in every one of the ‘Best SF Novel’ write-in slots… not to mention the very same title in every one of the ‘Best First Novel’ slots… why, then, we’re not going to count your ballot at all. You broke the rules. The rules clearly state “Do not vote for the same work more than once” (though a first novel can also be voted for in the Best SF novel or Best fantasy novel category, true, but only *once* in each category). The tabulation process is automated, yes, but not that automated. Clear violations go into the bit bin….

Another 20 some ballots since my post earlier today. I don’t expect this rate to continue.

Today I finished setting up archive pages for 2006 posts — news, monitor, features, etc. The drop-down links on the homepage go to the new archive pages, and everything on the new pages flow to the previous year’s 2005 archive pages. I feel so much better now.

I’m fascinated by Andrew Wheeler’s post about reading a book a day — via various other blogs — because I’ve engaged in various schemes to document and metricize my own reading for most of my life, and never thought it was a subject to admit in public. Like one of those fetishes that, in this age of the internet, it turns out is not unique only to you. So, then, perhaps I’ll discuss this further, some time, maybe, in another post…

Discounting a handful of duplicate/repeat voters, no less than 250 votes have been received in this year’s Locus Poll and Survey by this morning. Last year it took a full month to accumulate that many. Obviously the various notices online, those mentioned earlier plus Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing and Neil Gaiman on his blog and no doubt others, bought in a lot web voters. A quick tabulation of those 250 ballots shows only about 40 — 16% — indicating they’re subscribers to Locus Magazine; if I recall correctly in previously years the percentage is around 50% by the end of the voting period, and I expect this year’s results to move in that direction by the time voting ends. (Voters like me have some remedial reading to do before we’re ready to cast our ballots, e.g.)