Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

Had a good time in Fort Lauderdale at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), despite an ailment that kept me confined to my room half the time, ruined my appetite, and persists even after my return home. Which is why I’m behind posting reports about the talks and papers delivered there, posting new books pages on the website, and responding to emails. I am, in any event, back home (which is saying something).

I’d also like to mention, re Cheryl Morgan, that I have no intention of leaking anything. Not that there’s anything to leak. Necessarily. (Yet… if someone has received a notification and accepted the nomination, thus guaranteeing their placement on the Hugo ballot, what is the harm in mentioning that…? I can see where alluding to someone else’s nomination, someone who might conceivably refuse the nomination, might cause awkward consequences. But otherwise?)

I left for the airport this morning, in LA, just about an hour before the emails reporting Andre Norton’s death started coming in. I’d made late arrangements for this trip on an airline I’d never previously even heard of — AirTran — and had expected a 3 hour layover in Dallas/Fort Worth. As it turned out, due to stormy weather in Florida that delayed departures of flights heading here, I sat in DFW for nearly 6 hours, and spent the time (in between meals) reading David Mitchell’s fascinating, amazing Cloud Atlas (I’m only just past the half-way point), when I suppose I should have ponied up the few bucks to log into the local airport wireless network to check on my email, and the breaking news; I could have posted the news about Andre Norton from there. Anyway, it’s posted now, and it’s gratifying that so many readers, expecting Locus Online to be the focal point for breaking SF news, sent me e-mail alerts about what they’d not yet seen posted. Thanks, and I’ll try not to be out of touch so long (over 12 hours!) again.

ICFA: Barring travel complications or catastrophes, it seems I will make it to the ICFA in Ft. Lauderdale this year after all, various domestic disturbances and obstacles successfully surmounted or avoided, to permit a scheduled departure first thing tomorrow (Thursday) morning.

Hugos: OK, I admit it: the Hugo ballot deadline being last Friday, with the administrators’ promise to announce the final list by Easter, and with the ‘best website’ category temporarily revived, I’m checking my inbox each day wondering if a ‘do you accept the nomination?’ email will appear. (They don’t announce the final list until all the nominees have accepted; any who decline are replaced by the next-highest ranking nominee.) A lot has changed in 3 years, and the online world has expanded greatly, so I take nothing for granted. But one can hope. I understand why, even for big-name writers, nominations are significant validations; because otherwise, for most of us, there’s so little feedback, other than complaints, that it’s easy to lose perspective about whether one’s efforts are valued, or even noticed.

Locus Curse: Last week James Patrick Kelly’s On the Net column audaciously proposed no less than five website Hugo categories; this week Cheryl Morgan linked this nasty response from 8-time Hugo Award winner (for fanzine and fan writer) Mike Glyer, which ends with the comment

There are also plenty of people who simply feel “We don’t need another Hugo to give to Locus every year….”

I’ve never seen this sentiment so explicitly stated, though I’ve always suspected it. (I don’t follow fannish press, I’m afraid.) I will simply mention that a Hugo to Locus Online is *not* another Hugo to Locus; the website is 99.5% my effort, working in a city 400 miles away from the Locus offices, with only the most incidental support from the overworked staff of Locus Magazine, with any advantage to my website obviously outweighted by the bias against the Locus brand for its continued success over many decades. And I should probably stop there.

I just now posted a new version of the homepage that’s been redesigned with more extensive use of style sheets and a simplified html layout. I started the redesign late last year when I was attempting a blogger/RSS supported version of the page, a task I’ll get back to eventually. For now, today’s redesign streamlines the html and makes it easier to edit and maintain. (There’s no embedded table for the middle section anymore, just header and para tags suitably defined. And, to paraphrase Mommie Dearest, no more font tags!.) It should look virtually identical to the previous version — captured for the moment here — the only intentional difference being some tweaks to the coloring and linking of headlines in the center section. If anything else looks different, or wrong, let me know of course.

I’m sure the page will not look right in older browsers — such as Netscape 4.7, which I still have installed — but the same is true of lots of sites these day. And even current browsers have some css problems The one bug I spent some time solving, or avoiding, is something that turns out to be known as the IE version 6 ‘peek-a-boo’ bug, where text aligned next to an image tends to disappear when scrolling the page, or tabbing to another application and back again. This was happening in the center section at every entry where a thumbnail cover is shown. There are complicated workarounds that css hacks have discovered; I think I solved it by just using different tags than the ones that cause the problem.

The next step is to extend the style consistency to all the current pages, which I’ve been doing piecemeal for a while, but not systematically. There are still pages with links indicated by underlines…

March already! How time flies when you’re having, er, fun.

• 260 Locus Poll ballots received thus far, with several categories indicating clear leaders and others still too close to call. I’ve seen only ballots submitted online, however, not any of the paper ballots mailed into Locus HQ, where the over-worked staff has only just begun to transcribe them into the website form. The results might well be perturbed by the differential in constituencies…

• Speaking of awards, I’ve once again been invited to submit nominations for this year’s Sturgeon Awards, even though, as in the previous two years, I’ve not been reading short fiction (let alone reviewing it) regularly. In fact, I must confess, as of this moment I’ve yet to read a single work of short fiction (unless you count novella-length books like Shepard’s Viator — and even that is on a long side for a novella, I suspect) from 2004. I will now be buckling myself into a chair for the next 10 days to read as much as I can, so as to nominate intelligently for both the Sturgeon Award and for the Hugos. I have the Locus recommended reading lists to guide me, of course, as well as personal best lists from Jonathan Strahan and Rich Horton, available various places online, not to mention Jonathan’s and Karen Haber’s two best-of-the-year anthologies, which I’ve now purchased both in hardcopy and in electronic format, the better to read in whatever circumstance I might find myself. My plan is to focus on short stories, and maybe novelettes, so that I can read as many stories as possible in the time available, leaving longer novelettes and novellas for later… the Locus Poll deadline isn’t until May 1st.

All of that said, if anyone reading this has any strong opinions about stories (especially short stories or novelettes!) that I absolutely must read before making any nomination decisions, by all means let me know.

1) A CD Rom, with a loose yellow paper label beginning “I am converted to you, Children mine!”

2) A cover letter, of sorts, with a five-pointed star graphic in the header aligned with Russian text; and in Roman text, an 11-page letter, decorated by religious icon graphics, beginning “I am, God Supreme, your Father meet your” [sic] and signed on the first sheet “God Supreme”; paperclipped to a turquoise slip with text beginning “Only what I want from my Children it have been understand me.” [sic], and a pink slip with header “Message you Creator messenger” [sic] followed by Russian text and a handwritten telephone number 8(443) 29-54-91, followed by “GOD SUPREME” and further Russian text.

3) Several sheets of English text, beginning with “( At 13years the schoolgirl the third eye >>) has opened<<" [sic], stapled to several double-sized (17x11) sheets of photocopied articles in Russian.

4) 161 double-sided, single-spaced pages of manuscript beginning with a large red-font header “The First Book / The man lives in other world after death” [sic], and ending finally with the para “Means, we have hope for the future. Nikolay, I shall keep in myself thy image, carry him in years. And now leave me. I do not wish to thee troubles at work. And before meeting… Before meeting…”

[sic]

Today’s release of the final Nebula ballot, and publication of SF Site’s editors’ choice list, prompted me to spend a couple hours today finishing up this year’s version of Locus Online’s annual compilation of various best of the year lists. This year I’ve done it as a subset of the regularly-updated directory pages, and included the awards nominations to date, rather than as a separate tally such as last year’s.

Glancing down the 2004 list it’s remarkable how little consensus there is, beyond the small handful of already well-known titles– by Susanna Clarke, David Mitchell, Gene Wolfe, Philip Roth. Minister Faust’s book emerges as a surprisingly frequently cited title.

I watched a bit of the Grammy Awards the other night, more for a glimmer of all the acts I’m unfamiliar with than anything else. What strikes me about the Grammys more than any other award for popular art is how balkanized the form is. There are roughly 100 categories, and I’d guess that most people, even most music industry people, are interested or knowledgable about only a handful of them, knowing nothing about the others aside from the rare ‘break-out’ act. This is why when the entire group votes on the best album category, it so frequently goes to a dead guy–or to someone living for some sentimental reason–becoming in effect a lifetime achievement award rather than reflecting any kind of judgment about the albums themselves. The LA Times music critic Robert Hilburn has become so incensed by this that in his write-up on Monday he said in effect “Academy–please stop this!” Noting that Ray Charles should have won for an album 40 years ago that lost to a Bob Newhart comedy album…

It seems like there are a lot of SF awards, but it occurs to me that if you added up the number of categories in all those awards the total would be somewhere around the number of Grammy categories, around 100. The difference is that in SF there are independent constituencies determining the various specialty awards. The Hugo, perhaps, is where everyone comes together… While the Nebulas, on the other hand, are one kind of constituency.

• This isn’t giving anything away, but for a couple years now Locus has offered its interview subjects links to special subscription pages on the Locus website whereby readers of their websites can either order the Locus issue with that person’s interview postpaid, or subscribe for a year and receive said issue for free. You’ll have noticed this if you’ve visited the websites of those who’ve been interviewed lately, or if you’ve been interviewed yourself. (A few interviewees, by the way, decline the offer of the link, uncomfortable with the matter for one reason or another, but the majority agree.) What brings this to attention now is that just yesterday Neil Gaiman’s Journal posted an announcement of his own offer, subsequent to his interview in the February issue, and the response has far and away exceeded any other such offer — some 30 responses just today, in the first 24 hours. (I create and post the special subscription pages and monitor the traffic from the website.) The point being, Neil evidently has a wide audience that extends far beyond the little globular cluster that is Locus, a spiral arm perhaps — as I type another Neil sub email popped in — and the beam he’s shown in our direction is drawing them our way. Welcome to the party, we hope you’ll stay.

• My email problems are more or less fixed, as I explained in a comment to the previous post, though not entirely. I’m beginning to suspect a weak or flaky wireless router is part of the problem. Still, I will try not to whine too frequently about my computer problems; not thinking myself special for any reason, I must suppose that most people have similar problems from time to time, and find better things to write about in their blogs than those problems. I will try too.

• 150 Locus Poll ballots received to date, and nearly 120 Best-fantasy-story poll submissions. I’ve run a tally on the former and seen some preliminary results. As always, it will be interesting to see how the early tallies compare to the final results. (Last year only a few of the early leaders eventually won.) I said last year I would run some queries on the ballots to reveal various voting patterns — e.g., what percentage vote for novels only, or short fiction at all, etc. — and never got around to it. I’ll do so this year.

Still having trouble with outgoing email from my home PC via the locusmag.com mail server, which has worked just fine until recently. Checking account settings in Outlook, everything checks OK except for ‘send sample email’, which fails. I submitted a trouble ticket to CI Host and they responded that their test showed everything is fine. Grr. If I haven’t answered your email recently, this is why. (At least I have an excuse.) If I haven’t answered your email from 2 or 3 weeks ago, well, it’s just because I’m behind as usual.

I’ve posted best-of-year essays by Claude Lalumiere and Jeff VanderMeer today, finally, after having both of them for one or more weeks, their completion being backed up by work to update the SF Awards index, and then the 2005 best fantasy story poll. January has been a busy month.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen that the best fantasy story poll has elicited much commentary over at Jeff V’s section of the Night Shade Books discussion area. I would only add that, according to the initial definition of the poll, I did omit pre-1900 stories from the final list posted yesterday. That’s why no Edgar Allan Poe, etc. Though in some cases, the decision to include or omit was based on genre-affiliation as much as anything. Mark Twain? L. Frank Baum? Some titles were in fact published after 1900, but I left them off anyway since the titles seemed obscure (i.e. I didn’t recognize them).

If any voter objects to the selectivity of the posted list, all they have to do is use the write-in boxes to vote for whatever stories they feel worthy, whether or not they are included in the posted selections. Anyone who deeply objects to the posted selections is free to email me; I’m happy to consider amending the posted list to include additional items. The voting is open for nearly three more months, after all.

End of year/beginning of year is a busy time; at this moment there are, um, four ‘monitor’ listings due to be posted: fourth week January new books; second half January new magazines; classic reprints seen in January; new paperbacks seen in February. (Given the way paperback reprints are published, the ‘new in paperback’ page can be ready very early in the month.) Ideally these would all be posted by now; practically, it will take another week or so.