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

[iainjclark.livejournal.com]

Yes, the dialogue in Deadwood does two things for me.

One is that it apes the actual style of the period, adjusted for a modern sensibility. It creates a sense of genuine historical period. So if you watch Ken Burns' The West or The Civil War documentaries and listen to the quotes, you can recognise that formalised, convoluted manner of expression. It's slightly theatrical, but it creates a very particular universe for the series, one with real historical flavour but also a certain matter-of-fact eloquence.

Secondly it reflects the relative status of the characters. Civilised folk like Alma speak in a formalised way without obscenity. Swearengen meanwhile apes the same formalised sentence structure, but un-self-consciously peppers it with the most foul obscenities, without any awareness that there's a discrepancy between the two modes of speaking. He's a pompous lowlife who is aspiring to a certain kind of respectability; we're left slightly smiling at the justaposition of genuine eloquence, faux respectability, and innate earthiness. Farnum of course is the Fool to Swearengen's King, only without any hidden wisdom: he sees what Swearengen's speaking style is about, but lacks the education to mimic it. Then lastly you have people like Jane who just speak plainly and obscenely with little formalisation.

It's not only relatively true to the period, it's also interesting and amusing in equal measure. There's a definite pleasure to be had in seeing Al launch into a sentence of Shakespearean ambition while sat in a seedy backroom and peppering his language with brutality and obscenity.

[veggiesu.livejournal.com]

Absolutely agree with all of this; I only wish I'd been able to put it quite so comprehensively and conherently :-)

[iainjclark.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :-)