Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

I’ve spent a long day compiling data about this past year’s awards nominations and winners — about 1100 entries in the database over the past couple days, in addition to about 500 records for the ‘major’ awards already compiled over the past year — and I’m here to appeal for leads on missing data, and to express irritation over unhelpful websites. The leader in that group would have to be the site for the Australian Aurealis Awards, which has a nice advert for the upcoming 2006 ceremony, but nowhere that I can find an actual list of the winners of the 2005 awards. Click on ‘winners‘, and you see a bunch of icons, and no information at all. You can click on ‘finalists’ to see the final nominees for the ’05 awards — but only in one category per page. Click click click, and in crude tables with no cellpadding. I’ve tracked down winners in most categories in a print issue of Locus Magazine, but not for all categories…

The James White Award site is similarly unhelpful. It lists five stories selected as finalists — but only the titles, not the authors. And not the winner. Was the winner announced at Worldcon? If so, I haven’t found it in print, or on the web.

I’ve also had no luck tracking down the nominees and winners of the Lambda Literary Awards, whose website has nothing about recent years. I’m sure I saw a list of finalists a few months ago, but I can’t find it on the web or in e-mail (I thought I forwarded the list to the magazine, but apparently they never printed it, and I can’t find the e-mail).

Still, there are 80 some awards compiled in the Locus Index to SF Awards, and I’ve found ’05 results for most all the others. The few that are still missing are the Ignotus, the Italia, and the Rotsler. (Not to mention several that, it’s increasingly apparent, are defunct.)

My resolution for 2006 is to figure out a way of updating the awards index site incrementally, rather than just once a year. The difficulty is that the full site, with all the inter-connected links between author names and indexes and awards pages, takes many hours (aside from simply compiling the data) to validate and generate and upload; incremental updates would require short-circuiting some of those steps, posting listings of the latest nominations without links to the indexes, perhaps, or without updating all the tables and tallies. I’m working on it.

It’s odd how some SF awards, though established for decades in some cases, have no permanent or reliable web resources, still in this day and age…

I’m sitting at my computer tracking down the past year’s award results for compilation into the update of the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards. I’ve compiled most of the major awards already, over the course of the past year, but there are still several dozen relatively minor awards to compile. It’s disconcerting to do a Google search on an award name and find my own Locus Index to SF Awards turn up as the primary source! This happens when the previously identified site has apparently disappeared… Thus, at the moment, for example, there’s no current Lambda Literary Awards site; no Ditmar Awards site (I’m relying on the copy of the nominations list in Jonathan Stahan’s blog for the latest year’s nominations). Other sites are remarkably casual (or perhaps simply poorly designed) in their presentation of their latest results; one site, for example, doesn’t bother to spell out nominees’ first names in some cases. Fortunately, the Locus Magazine staff has done some of the legwork to verify and fill in details for various awards’ nominations; and so I’ll be paging through the past year’s issues of the magazine to double-check, and in some cases use as primary source, some award nomination listings.

Not much time to talk; my partner will be home in a few minutes, and then I’ll have to stop. This month is looking very busy, what with three best-of-year essays due (including one from Matthew Cheney, already received), the new Locus Poll Ballot and Survey form to set up by the end of the month, trying to finish updating the Locus Index to SF Awards (in progress, penciled in to complete this weekend, when my partner will be out of town), and new orders-from-headquarters about posting a vintage Gaiman/Pratchett interview to promote the upcoming February issue of The Magazine. And there’s a pending Lawrence Person review awaiting some clarification from him before I can post. And Cindy’s due to submit a season 2 Battlestar Galactica update. And I need to update numerous ‘special’ subscription pages with the new rates. And I’m probably forgetting some things. I did manage to complete the final 2005 Monitor page, for end-of-December magazines, this evening. I’d meant to post opinions about recent films, but I haven’t found the time. This website could easily be a full-time job, but it’s not. I wish it could be.

I spent a couple three hours this afternoon going through e-mails from the past (ahem) several months with suggestions or referrals to websites to add to Locus Online’s links pages. I’ve added a few new blogs, some Swedish websites on the Worlds Links pages, a couple small press publishers, etc. Some suggestions I didn’t take; amateur writers who’ve posted their unpublished novels on their personal websites, for example.

The matter of blogs is difficult. Without my having tried very hard or been especially proactive in searching them out, the Links Portal page already has a quite lengthy list of blogs. If I tried, I could easily double it. The list would quickly become unmanageable. The judicious use of bold tags helps a bit, for my own use — those are the ones I check pretty much every day — but aren’t necessarily helpful to others. If not already, soon everyone will have a blog. What then?

To update, the southern California storm has after all lasted through the night, despite which the Rose Parade went on as scheduled. In my area, about 20 miles west of Pasadena, it’s been quite gusty, with tree limbs in the streets; apparently the wind wasn’t that bad along Colorado Blvd, or those floats might have been torn apart.

Happy New Year everyone.

It’s raining in Southern California, the first really big set of storms this year, and settling-into-middle-age curmudgeon that I’m becoming, I’m perversely happy to see the likelihood of rain on the Rose Parade tomorrow morning, bah humbug, as a fitting response to those local folklorists who perceive some divine favor in the lack of rain on the Rose Parades for lo these past 50 years. That said, the second forecast storm seemed to arrive earlier than expected this afternoon, so that I’d be surprised if the storm did in fact persist through tomorrow morning…

I’ve lived almost my entire life in southern California, and never been to a Rose Parade…

More tomorrow.

After several days of holiday obligations, I’m back, more or less; I’ve managed to finish and post the pages for the new issue of Locus Magazine, as well as this week’s bestsellers, just one day late. More tomorrow; lots of e-mail to catch up on, and best-of-year comments.

The comment monitoring is working; I’ve accepted a couple attempted posts, and intercepted several other attempted spam posts.

I found the announcement of a UK readers’ poll in which adults voted for their favorite books for children interesting, since the winner was a series, the ‘Famous Five’, by a popular but now rather disreputable author named Enid Blyton. She beat series by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. I found it interesting partly for the curious fact that Blyton is pretty much unknown in the US, but also because a different series by Blyton, not any of her series that placed in this recent poll, were my own favorite childhood books — namely, the ‘Adventure’ series.

The ‘Adventure’ books, beginning with The Island of Adventure and continuing with 7 more volumes, each title designating a different place — The Castle of Adventure, The Sea of Adventure, etc. — concerned two brother & sister pairs who meet at boarding school and go on holidays together, in Wales or Scotland or at an aunt’s remote coastal abode, and one way or another stumble into ‘adventures’, typically involving secret passages, isolation from parental figures, and encounters with criminals of some sort, gun-runners or smugglers or even mad scientists. The books were written in the late ’40s and early ’50s, and their racial and social stereotypes, not uncommon for the era, have made the books, and Blyton’s books in general, anachronisms of a sort, disregarded by librarians and scholars, despite being fondly remembered by actual readers.

Growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, I discovered 5 of the books — Castle, Valley, Mountain, Circus, and Sea — at the Reseda public library, and checked them out and reread them endlessly. Something about the Britishness of the books gave them an exotic appeal to me; a different landscape, a different language (“wizard!”). My favorites were The Mountain of Adventure, which had a fantasy element, about a mad scientist ensconced inside a Welsh mountain inventing anti-gravity wings, and The Valley of Adventure, in which the 4 kids are inadvertantly flown to and stranded in a remote European valley where they discover a cache of artworks stolen by the Nazis. In later years I found the first book in the series, The Island of Adventure, that turned up in a US paperback reprint (none of the others ever appeared in the US), and eventually I ordered the whole set from Britain — via Fantast Medway — and finally read the two I’d missed, River of Adventure and Ship of Adventure. They were OK, but of course didn’t kindle the same excitement of the other books that I’d read at an earlier age.

I’ve never read any other Blyton, nor been inclined to. But every once in a while, home in bed with the flu, I’ll pull down one of the Adventure books for a revisit…

For the first time ever, I’m sitting in a Starbucks working on my laptop, checking e-mail and updating the website. (I just posted Howard and Lawrence’s King Kong review.) Yes, I am in a faraway mountain location, but unlike the others in my group, I don’t ski (tried it a few times; not worth the fuss and expense), though I still enjoy the mountains and trees and snow once in a while. Yesterday’s surprise snowstorm (the weather forecasts had offered no clue) was suitably winter-wonderland, with fluffy white powder falling all day, the accumulation challenging drivers without chains. Today the snow has stopped and the streets are slushy; not quite as charming. Still a nice change of pace from sotuthern California…

PS, I’ve turned comments back on, this time enabling a ‘moderation’ feature that lets me see them before posting. That way I can delete the comment spam…

PPS, I should have explained that the reason I went to Starbucks is that the condo where we stayed had no high-speed, let alone wifi, internet access. I actually tried connecting to the internet via AOL, but the 2600 bps connection was so agonizingly slow — with 2500 emails to download — that I gave up.

I have a perhaps unjustified suspicion of websites that do not identify their authors or hosts. That’s one reason I’ve never added http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/ to my Links pages; despite its evident scope, its frequent citation as a source for bibliographic data on SF authors (cited almost as often as the ISFDb), and its frequent high placement in Google search results, the only hint of authorship (much less authority) that it offers is ‘webmaster@fantasticfiction.co.uk’. Given that, and the fact that (like, ahem, ISFDb) its content is not always highly reliable, I’ve not permanently linked it.

Similarly Big Dumb Object, an SF blog covering both media and literary topics, by ‘James’. Who be ‘James’?

I suppose this is unfair. Does it matter who is behind these sites? (Maybe, as the joke goes, they’re dogs.)

For that matter, Wikipedia, which has undergone some recent criticism and vindication in recent days’ news stories, is written, as far as is evident, anonymously. So there. In fact, I was impressed enough by the detail on its Kenneth Bulmer page that I linked it with Bulmer’s death notice, posted earlier today. The article isn’t much more than a detailed list, but still.

//

… I’m tentatively planning to be away for an extended weekend, to a distant mountainous place where wifi connections may be few and far between. So there may be no posts, or even email replies, for a few days.