Well, the Ditmar nominations are out. You can see the list here. The awards will be presented at the Australian National SF Convention in Melbourne this June. My congratulations to all of the nominees.  I once was nominated for, but didn’t win, a Ditmar that was presented at someone’s backyard BBQ. It was a nice evening, otherwise, though.

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.