I’ve just heard I’ve been very fortunate, against strong opposition, to win the Aurealis Award for Best Anthology for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six. I asked James Bradley to read this aloud at the event, should this happen:

Thank you so much. If James Bradley is reading these words to you, which I promise I will keep brief as absent winners should, then it means my anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six has won the Aurealis Award. It is a great honour and I wish I was there in the Independent Theatre in Sydney, and not sitting in Perth following this on Twitter, so that you all could see just how thrilled I am.

I would sincerely like to thank the judges Kathleen Stubbs, Matt Chrulew and Sarah Fletcher for their hard work (and commend them on their excellent taste), and I also want to thank awards administrator Tehani Wesley and the AA team for their hard work. It is an honour to be nominated alongside my editorial colleagues Liz Gryb, Talie Helene, and Amanda Pillar and the great team at my dear friend Russell Farr’s Ticonderoga, and I extend my congratulations to them as well.

Editing The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year series has defined the past seven years of my life. It’s a strange, wonderful experience, and I am deeply proud of the books I’ve been able to produce with the Night Shade team. I would especially like to thank Ross Lockhart and Marty Halpern at Night Shade Books for the care and attention they gave to this book, and for their work on the rest of the series. They are my unsung collaborators and deserve your congratulations as much as I do.

Finally, and most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the efforts of my spectacular agent Howard Morhaim, and the tireless support of my family Marianne, Jessica and Sophie who give me time to do this strange editing thing that I love doing so much.

Thank you all very much! Have a great night! I’m going to turn Twitter off now and go have a glass of champagne (or at least get the kids dinner on).

Steven Utley started publishing back in the 1970s.  He wrote smart and strange stories, stories occasionally set in the far future, but mostly set in the deep past.  He was part of the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop, which also included Bruce Sterling, Lisa Tuttle, Lewis Shiner, and Howard Waldrop.  And he was best known for a group of stories known as his “Silurian Tales”, which he started publishing in 1993 and kept writing until his sad death earlier this year.

Somewhere back in the ’90s he connected with local Perth publisher Ticonderoga, who put out Ghost Seas, a collection of his stories.  The book did well and everyone was happy, and fifteen years slipped slowly past (as they are wont to do).  Then last last year they reconnected and Ticondergo published The 400 Million Year Itch, the first of a two volume set of Utley’s collected “Silurian Tales”. The book was well received and now the second volume, Invisible Kingdoms is about to his the shelves.

It’s a cool book and you should consider checking it out. If you’re interested, you can read one of the stories, “Another Continuum Heard From!” at Revolution SF.  Recommended.

There is a pragmatic, if somewhat blind, terror stalking my everyday thoughts as the month of May slowly slides by as though nothing could possibly be amiss.

Every day a new story is published. Hah! Every day dozens of new stories are published. Hidden in books and magazines and websites, in .epub files and .mobi ones, places you’d never think to look. I struggle to find them, to not lose track of them on my Kindle, in my iBooks thingie, on the shelf behind my desk. Wherever they may end up. And every day we move inevitably, inexorably towards the moment when I’m going to have to start choosing stories for my next best of the year volume. I can see the day from here, and I am not ready!

Not only am I not ready, but I have a magazine issue to get ready for the end of September and two original anthologies due in January and March of next year. Things are going to be crazy over Christmas, my friends. Off the top of my head, I’ll be delivering 400,000 wds of manuscript, a collated reading list and writing an essay between Christmas and the end of March. I have no idea how that’s going to work out!

How can you help? Let me know about the best stories you see. Blog, tweet, post on my Facebook or email me direct, but let me know. If you’re working on something, let me know too. I want to know. Really!

Great news to start the day! Locus has announced the finalists for the 2013 Locus Awards. I’m deeply honoured to be short listed for Best Editor and delighted to see that Edge of Infinity and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six are finalists for Best Anthology.  Even more pleasing is that stories from Edge of Infinity, Hugo nominee “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” by Pat Cadigan and “Deeps of the Sky” by Elizabeth Bear, have been short listed for Best Novelette and Best Short Story respectively.   My sincere congratulations to them, and to all of my fellow nominees.

I especially want to thank the great team at Solaris who have made Edge of Infinity such a success, and everyone behind the scenes who worked on The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six at Night Shade. It’s a privilege to work with all of them.

I wish I could be at the Locus Awards Weekend. It sounds like a brilliant time and I envy everyone who will be there more than a little.

For a full list of nominees, see here.

Last week LoneStarCon3, the 71St World Science Fiction Convention announced the nominees for the 2013 Hugo Awards. As with any awards ballot, it featured some works that I thought were absolutely essential, missed some of my favourites, and added some that were pretty much off my radar, all of which is pretty normal and shouldn’t surprise anyone.

What did seem to draw a lot of attention (I discussed it myself with friends on Twitter at the time) was the Best Short Story category, which featured three nominees instead of the typical five. The reason for this was that section 3.8.5 of the WSFS Constitution requires any nominee to receive at least 5% of the nominations if it is to make the final ballot.

I’m not steeped in the history of the Hugo Awards like my good friends Cheryl Morgan and Kevin Standlee, both of whom have been incredibly generous over the years in providing information on the Awards to the Coode St Podcast, so I asked them for some background.

Kevin let me know that according to the Annotated WSFS Constitution, the rule was adopted in 1980, and was intended to protect against flat distributions of votes (75, 53, 43, 12, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, …..) which presumably could lead to very large numbers of works appearing on the final ballot (something that I think would attract at least as much criticism as this year’s situation!).

From what I can gather this rule has only very rarely come into effect. The only instance that has been mentioned to me was in 1994 [ETA: As per a note from Kevin in comments below, section 3.8.5 has come into effect twice in the Short Story category, once in 1994 and once in 2011], and it’s quite possible that is the only time.  So, do I think the rule is unreasonable? Do I think a ballot with just three nominees in the Short Story category signals the end times? Is it a terrible ballot? What does it mean?

Well, all sorts of good information is available on the Hugo Awards site which might help us understand things a bit better. One of my own barometers for the health of an award, especially a popular vote award like the Hugo, is how many people are involved. Has involvement increased or decreased? I took a quick look and this is what it showed:

While that doesn’t go back far in time, it does show that more and more people are taking the time to nominate. This is important because you have to pay to nominate (you need to  be either a voting, supporting or attending member of WorldCon) so I think it shows an increase in the number of people who care about the awards and are willing to act. A good thing, and a sign of good health.

But are those nominators interested in the Short Story category? Well, pretty much. Valid nominating ballots received for the category increased from 270 in 2008 to 662 in 2013, which I think is not quite proportional to the overall increase, but is still pretty darned good. I feel comfortable saying more people care about the Hugos and more people care about the Short Story category than they did as recently as 2008.  All good.

Has it become easier to get nominated during that time? Well, in 2008 you needed 15 nominations to make the final ballot and by 2013 you needed 33 nominations, or about twice times as many. Not too shabby, though I always imagine larger numbers must be involved (I think we all do).

How about the total number of stories nominated?  There are no figures for total number of stories nominated, though we do get some indication of this from looking at the final published voting statistics. Conventions typically release information for works that garner a certain number of nominations. The 2012 WorldCon listed 18 short stories, which cut off at those receiving 16 or more nominations. I assume there were a lot more. In 2008 there were 17 listed, cutting off at those receiving 10 nominations. I am going to guess, and it’s only a guess, a lot more short stories received nominations this year, which strikes me as a good thing.

Given all of that, if you share my biases that more voter involvement and more works nominated are a good thing, then I think we can say the awards themselves are in good health. This doesn’t make any judgement on what is nominated. That really is up to the voters, and I agree with them strongly sometimes, and other times I don’t.  Still, good health is good. I’d like to see increased diversity, and I think that is coming over slowly over time. So, yay voters on that.

What about the 5% rule? Is it unreasonable? Honestly, this is a personal judgement and mine is that the 5% solution is about as good a solution to the problem as any. I don’t think anyone would welcome a ballot with eight or ten works on it, and that means the cut-off has to occur somewhere. Is 5% the right point for the cut-off? I don’t have all the data available, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Yes, we have the lowest number of nominees in the category since 1968, but that’s an artefact of the voting, and the 5% rule seems to have had quite minimal impact since it came into effect in 1980.  So, no I don’t think it’s unreasonable or signals the endtimes.

What about the ballot itself? Is it good? Actually, yes, it’s hella good:

• “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld, June 2012)
• “Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
• “Mono no Aware” by Ken Liu (The Future is Japanese, VIZ Media LLC)

All three of the nominees are in my Best of the Year this year, so obviously I think they are good! There’s traditional hard SF from Ken Liu, but with a different slant. There’s gender chewiness, literally, from Kij Johnson, and more gender focussed hard SF from Aliette de Bodard. There’s two women and one man. There’s a French writer, an American, and an American of Chinese extraction (I believe. Apologies if that’s wrong Ken). There are two stories published online, and one from an anthology.  So, I think the stories that are on the ballot are good, and pretty diverse really. All in all, in my opinion, it is good.

But there are only three stories! Isn’t that bad? Weren’t there other good stories, and shouldn’t they be here? Why did this happen? Well, it’s a little unfortunate. There were a LOT of stories, thousands, published in 2012. Lots of them were good, and I suspect lots of them were of sufficient quality that they would have made worthy nominees. There could have been even more variety and even more diversity, but the ballot as it stands is fine. I hope there will be more nominees next year, and this brings us to why? Why do I think it happened?

It is my personal suspicion that there are more stories being published in more venues at the moment than ever before. This diversity in publishing is a good thing, opening doors to new writers, new viewpoints, and generally invigorating the field and the awards (see the enormous increase in voter involvement above). It does come at a cost, though. I suspect that with this proliferation of fiction means fewer sets of eyeballs on each story, which in turn makes it harder to get the necessary five percent for a story to make the ballot.  I am also convinced by an argument put to me privately by Cheryl Morgan. Beyond a few very well known indidivuals, many short story writers simply aren’t well known. This could mean that it’s easier for popular writers to meet the 5% requirement, while others publish works that are less widely read.   Either way it comes down to the way that readers = nominations. These are just suspicions, though. I’m eager to see the final voting information, as I said, to see if it casts any further light on the situation. I will say, this can’t be too much of a problem, though. Why? Well, even though the field is changing rapidly, we didn’t need the 5% solution in 2008, 2009, 2010, or 2012. I’m guessing we won’t need it in 2014, though we shall see.

So, after all that, I’m pretty happy with the 2013 ballot, and not just because I’m on it. There are works in every category I would loved to have seen added, but that is always the case, just as there are works I might not have chosen, which is also always the case. I’m content, though, that it fairly reflects the view of the largest group of Hugo voters ever and I don’t think we can ask much more than that.

Note:  Thanks to Kevin Standlee for providing some information used in this post. Special thanks to Cheryl Morgan for her input. Cheryl has her own post on the subject, which I commend to your attention.