Friday, August 22, 2008

Happy Birthday Science Fiction Awards Watch!

One year ago today, Cheryl Morgan and Kevin Standlee launched the Science Fiction Awards Watch website, a site to aggregate, track, report on and discuss the multitude of genre-related awards in our industry. The site (as well as the related SFEditors Wiki) is absolutely invaluable. Contrary to what you may have heard, fandom isn't dying - it's booming online, and this website is an example of the way that fandom can marshal the capabilities of the internet to better inform itself. I'm grateful someone takes the (considerable) time to provide this essential resource. Happy Birthday, Science Fiction Awards Watch! Many happy returns!

6 comments:

ces said...

Ooh! A new website (for me) to track!

Now, back to David Abraham's series . . .

Lou Anders said...

How is that? I apparently recommended it at WorldCon, which is interesting to me as I've not read it.

ces said...

Oh, the series is wonderful! It's not real heavy in the sense that there isn't a bunch of technical stuff (like the concept of multiuniverses) to figure out. But the story is very engaging. The characters feel like real people, with all of the human virtues & vices that we know so well. The pacing is also very good, & there is one particular type of character in the book whose dry humour I love! There is some switching back-&-forth between characters/events, but somehow Abraham keeps them threaded together, so they don't feel real abrupt. I have all 3 of the 4-book series in hardback, and the covers are gorgeous, especially the "red one" - in fact I just received my prints of Brazyl and the "red one" yesterday. As usual, I have read one book a day, so all 3 are now read. Today I got Killerswitch - but didn't realize it was the third in the series, so now I need to order the other 2 from Amazon & read them first.

You've had a busy summer, haven't you? Are they always like this? I assume the Christmas Rush has started in the book business.

It's always interesting to find out you've recommended something you haven't read or seen, especially if you've never even heard of them. :-)

Lou Anders said...

Well, Abraham has been recommended to me... I think what happened was, at WorldCon I was supposed to be on a panel with Charles Stross that Abraham was going to moderate. Neither of them showed, and there were about 100 people in the room, 80% of whom were there for Charlie and 20% for Daniel. They very kindly didn't rush the door when I told them I was all there was. So I talked a lot about how great Charlie was to make up for his absence, and, though I hadn't read him, tried to say nice things about Daniel's series too. I'm guessing that's where the "recommendation" came from.

As to busy summer - you have no idea. From May till now I've been in China, Mexico, Houston, Atlanta, Huntsville, and Denver (half for work, half for personal), and all of this kicked in right as I got the announcement we were growing the line by 1/3. I think the last four months has been the single most sustained period of heavy work I've ever done in my life - dot com industry included, most of it accomplished while I was on "vacation" (I read 11 hours a day my first 10 days in China to fill our next season). It finally ended just a few weeks ago, though I wasn't fully caught up until this week.

I celebrated by reading the almost the entire year's worth of Batman & Detective comics from Jan 2007 to about December 2007 over the last two days - stuff that's been building up and up and that I hadn't had time for before this weekend. (Next time I get a break I'll do 2008). Anyway, very glad you're out there reading! Killswitch is great - if you read Crossover, Breakaway and Killswitch all in a row I'll be very curious how that sits, as I read them across a year.

ces said...

I plan on reading them all in a row! The Crossover is coming from a bookseller on the East Coast & Breakaway from Amazon. Killswitch I actually got from a local Barnes & Noble - and this time I actually picked it up because I remembered it from you writing about it, and not from the cover art (which is wonderful).
And I broke my own rule by reading the blurb on the back cover, and then had my husband explain to me exactly what a "kill switch" was.

Growing your line by 1/3 is very exciting!

Lou Anders said...

Thank you. I'm pretty excited. The short of it is I'm taking on a bunch of new authors and working with several illustrators I've never worked with before, so I'll be really excited to see it all actualize in 2009.