The Second OUSFG Award

[coalescent]

So, OUSFG has an award. This is its second year. It's voted on by the membership, and given to the best speculative fiction book receiving its first UK mass-market paperback publication in the preceding academic year. This is actually fairly straightforward--it's for books students will be able to find and afford. Last year Coalescent by Stephen Baxter won. The current shortlist is:

Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others (January 2005)
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (September 2005)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (February 2005)
Ian McDonald, River of Gods (April 2005)
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time-Traveler's Wife (January 2005)

Some notes: it's obviously not just for science fiction; it's obviously not just for novels; and goddamn, that's a hell of a list.

I mention this because this evening there is a balloon-debate discussion meeting, starting at 8pm, in the Lady Brodie Room in St Hilda's College, which means I'm going to have to decide how to rank them. And man, that's hard.

(On the subject of St Hilda's deciding to admit men ... I don't know what the reasoning behind the decision was, but I'm somewhat surprised that it happened, and it seems a bit of a shame, really.)

(And just to leave on a controversial note: I've finally got around to watching Deadwood--I'm about halfway through the first season at the moment--and I'm not terribly impressed. I think partly it's how stylised everything is; the dialogue bears as little resemblance to how people actually talk as that in The West Wing or Buffy, but where those shows were consciously presenting its characters as smarter-than-life Deadwood is constantly at pains to tell you how Real it is, how True To Life. The style doesn't mesh with the content, for me, in other words. Of course, that could just be a fancy excuse made up to cover the fact that I find all the characters except Jane excruciatingly boring; the episodes I've enjoyed most so far have been when circumstances have forced them to do something, as in, say, 'Plague'.)

EDIT: the ranking determined by the panel, in reverse order:

5. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
4. Cloud Atlas
3. The Time-Traveler's Wife
2. River of Gods
1. Stories of Your Life and Others

And those placings were almost all hotly contested. It'll be interesting to see whether the official result (announced Saturday) is the same or not.

Comments

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

Right. But what happens in Deadwood is that people come to a new world (hur hur) - the ways in which they were shaped are to varying degrees actually pretty useless to them now. (Bullock's buttoned-up moralism, Alma's East Coast Lady act, Mr Wu's everything.) They have to excercise their agency. (This is where opinion diverges on the second season - the characters' are robbed of their agency a little, and some think this weakens the show.)

I think we're getting back to where we were - you suspect that these characters aren't sufficiently shaped by their world. They don't feel to you like products of it. It's like, to use the genetics metaphor, they've been seeded by some alien race. My point, simply, is that if the characters behave like this, the world has produced them like it. You think you know what that world produces. You don't - Deadwood does.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

They don't feel to you like products of it. It's like, to use the genetics metaphor, they've been seeded by some alien race.

ObBaxter: his talk at the AGM was about the history of his home town. He noted that there was massive urbanisation--like, a seven-fold increase in population--in the five or six years before his birth, that essentially paved over all the history that was there before. He likened it to being the first-generation child of a generation starship crew. :)

You think you know what that world produces. You don't - Deadwood does.

And it doesn't make its argument well enough to convince me.

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

I was reading some local history book the other day, and in 1900 this rode was nowt but fields. Leik, rlly! So I, too, am the first-generation child of a generation starship crew. I can't tell you how happy this makes me feel. :P

And it doesn't make its argument well enough to convince me.

And my problem is that I still don't know what argument could have convinced you.

[veggiesu.livejournal.com]

Dudes, this road (and all the ones hereabouts) was nowt but fields fifteen years ago. Does that make me some kind of pioneer?

I apologise for the lack of the word "cocksucker" in this post

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

pioneer

Not a sufficiently SF term. Niall gives you ZERO BAXTER POINTS.

Cocksucker.

[veggiesu.livejournal.com]

Not a sufficiently SF term.

\o/ *preens*

Swegen!! Cock-sucka!!