The ever kind and generous Jeff VanderMeer has interviewed me over at SF Site. He makes me look good, which is a not inconsiderable achievement.

Yesterday I baked muffins for the first time. Jessica had gone swimming, and Sophie and I were home together for a while, so we made blueberry muffins. They were a real hit, especially during family movie matinee that afternoon. In the evening Richard Scriven, who’s in town from Melbourne, came over and he,  Robin Pen and I had dinner. It was a great evening, just like old times. This morning has been a bit crazy. First up, I called CHARLES and we caught up above life, Cecilia Holland, his new curmudgeonly column, and such. Then, off to the Autum River Festival, a great annual event held along the Swan River. It was all bouncy castles, hot dogs, face painting, music, bubble blowers, stilt walkers, giant kites and such. A fantastic family event. Then off to a kid’s party at a local play place. I’m currently sitting at a table while kids run and scream around, trying to come up with flap copy for a new Lucius Shepard collection that my pal Bill is publishing. The only problem is that I have no inspiration. I know the collection’s a good one. It covers a healthy selection of Lucius’s stories, covering gthe 25 years or so of his professional career. But, to summarise. Maybe the screaming kids will inspire me.

The nominees for this year’s Hugo Awards have been announced – congrats to one and all. A few people have mentioned the dearth of female nominees in the fiction categories. This seems a reasonable observation, even though I’m always cautious about gender-based breakdowns of such things. It did make me think to take a look at one or two other things, and I was quite surprised to see the case with winners for Best Professional Artist Hugos. Since the first ‘professional artist’ award was presented in 1955, exactly one woman has won the award, and then as part of a team (Dianne Dillon). So, in fifty-one attempts at presenting the Best Professional Artist Hugo, across a fifty-two year period, only one. Very odd (see the list of artists here).

Edited to add:

A quick look down the lists of nominees also shows that only three women – Dillon, Rowena Morrill, and Val Lakey-Lindahn  – have ever been nominated for the Best Professional Artist Hugo. I haven’t done an exhaustive survey, and I’d never advocate some kind of quota approach to these things, but that seems rather extraordinary. If they’ve averaged four nominees in 52 sets of nominations, that’s three women in over 200 nominations.  The only question, I guess, is whether there is an obvious candidate, or candidates, who’ve done science fiction artwork, who have been overlooked.  If so, it would be a rather sad state of affairs.

My pals Jeff and Ann VanderMeer have released the table of contents for their forthcoming anthology, Best American Fantasy. I’m going to be fascinated to see how the world reacts to this one. It’s a pretty obvious, and understandable, attempt to link into the whole ‘Best American” series that Houghton Mifflin publish. Those books are incredibly successful, and it’d be nice to see this one do as well for Jeff and Ann. I’ll also be interested to read the book, when it hits the shelves. The stories that I’ve read – especially the Link and Hand stories – are very good. The other thing that’s interesting about the book is that I’m not aware of any other book taking specifically this angle: trying to identify an “American fantasy” that crosses mainstream and genre boundaries. Very interesting.

Well, we got a really nice handful of entrants. I want to thank everyone who had a go at creating a promotional item for The Last Colony. The winner is Pixelfish for this flash movie . It’s very cool, and a staggering amount of work. If the winner could email me postal details at jstrahan(at)iinet(dot)net(dot)au, I’ll get the ARC in the mail!