After some technical hitches and interruptions, which lead to a classic (no, really, classic) Lost Podcast, Gary and I fire up Skype and talk about old farts, anthologies, Hugos and stuff.
After some technical hitches and interruptions, which lead to a classic (no, really, classic) Lost Podcast, Gary and I fire up Skype and talk about old farts, anthologies, Hugos and stuff.
The issue with a Best Anthology Hugo is that people get very uptight about the possibility of winning (or even being nominated) twice for the same work. If such a category did exist, people fear that it would often be won by the same person who won Best Editor (Short Form) for that year, and that there would always be a significant overlap in nominees for the two categories. Whether such fears are reasonable or not is open to debate, but I think you would find it hard to win such a debate at the WSFS Business Meeting.
On the subject of novels that were worked on obsessively over many years, the one that came to my mind was Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I’m sure that Bloomsbury would love to have a sequel, but it may take Susanna another 10 years to write it.
As to Mr. Truesdale, had he simply said that he preferred old-fashioned pulp stories, few people would have objected. The thing that got people mad was that he appeared to be trying to justify his preferences by complaining that too many present day stories are written by and/or for people who are not politically conservative white men, and were therefore no good.
I don’t know if you are aware Stieg Larsson has a history in Swedish sf fandom. Some readers from our midst thinks they can see a clear influence from sf in his works. Certainly one can see some cyberpunk protagonist traits in his famous heroine.
By the way, there was a bit of a brouhaha in the Swedish press a while back after the “discovery” of a short story (not very good apparently) published in a fanzine in the eighties.