HogeTown

Homegrown Hugo Nomination Campaign update

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

The Homegrown Hugo Nomination Campaign continues apace.

For those who are still catching up the campaign is designed to get more recognition for great Australian writers and great Australian stories by getting people to think about which local works are worth nominating for a Hugo award.

Most of the discussion is on the Facebook group. Log in and check it out here. There’s also some discussion at the Vision Writers Yahoo group if you’re a member.

Some other useful recommendations and pimpage can be found here:

Tansy Rayner Roberts

Alisa Krasnostein

Peter M Ball

Deborah Biancotti

Rachel Swirsky

Paul Haines 

Go read, enjoy and nominate.

Tags: authors, awards, Homegrown Hugo Nomination Campaign
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The Homegrown Hugo Nomination Campaign

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

American speculative fiction authors and their works get more recognition out of the Hugo Awards than anyone else because most of the time the annual Worldcon is held in the US. And good on them for it.

But with the 2010 Worldcon being held here our community has a great chance to internationally recognise the best work from Australia’s best authors.

Here’s how we can do it together.

Nominations for the Hugo Awards are open until March 13. You can help by nominating your favourite Australian work, writers or artists from 2009.

The works I’m highlighting and recommend nominating are:

Best Novella: Horn by Peter M. Ball

Best Novelette (two recommendations):
“Sister, Sister” by Angela Slatter in Strange Tales III
“Inevitable” by Sean Williams in The New Space Opera 2

Best Fan Writer:  Bill Wright

The John W Campbell Award for best new writer (two recommendations):
Peter M. Ball
Lezli Robyn

I think Jonathan Strahan will receive another nod for Best Editor (short form) and I encourage people to nominate him. I will be.

If you haven’t already read works by these people track them down and see if you think they deserve a nomination.

There are lots of other categories too. Check them out and see if you’ve got other favourite works worth nominating as well. It’s nominations I’m interested in and I won’t be campaigning like this to get particular people particular awards once the nominations are in. But let’s get some of our best authors out there on the international awards stage.

While nominations don’t close until March 13, you need to be a member (supporting or attending) of Aussiecon 4 by January 31 to be eligible to nominate works.

Spread the word.

About Aussiecon 4 and nominating: www.aussiecon4.org.au/
About the Hugo Awards: www.thehugoawards.org/

Tags: Aussiecon 4, authors, awards
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From the ‘You can please some of the people some of the time’ file

Friday, January 8th, 2010

The announcement by Realms of Fantasy it will do a ‘Women in Fantasy” issue has opened up another round of discussion about how the under-representation of female writers in some short fiction markets can be addressed. The announcement that their August 2011 issue will feature fiction, non-fiction and art by female writers has set off a fairly wide-ranging discussion.

There’s not a lot of great data on this out there but I suspect some of the under-representation problem - though far from all - is a flow-through issue. Part of the reason female writers are under-represented in various anthologies and magazines may be that they are under-represented in the number of submissions.

And this is where I’m mostly interested in - and supportive of - the move from Realms. Announcing the issue so far in advance should encourage more female writers to submit. Hopefully that might go beyond just one issue but only time will tell.

Plenty of people are dissing the move and it’s also being conflated with a poor choice of language (which has been apologised for) when the announcement was made. But I think there’s value in it. Unlike a one-off antho, a magazine can address issues like this over time. And if this move helps redress an imbalance and encourage more submissions from a broader range of writers, all the better.

It would be an interesting data-set if Realms tracked their submissions on a gender basis this year and next year and see if the announcement has an impact on submissions. Either way, Shawna McCarthy is a great fiction editor and I’m keen to see what she’ll produce.

Tags: Publishing
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Why does the Productivity Commission hate Sean Williams?

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

There’s a lot more in the Australian Productivity Commission’s report into parallel book imports than just their economic argument about cheaper books.

There’s been some good analysis of what implementing the recommendations could mean for Australian authors, booksellers and publishers. And there’ll be plenty more to come, which I might do a wrap up of next week. I don’t want to revisit those arguments now because, frankly, others have done it in more depth.

My interest today is Appendix F.

Appendix F is titled: “Design of financial support for book producers”. It analyses grants and literary prizes for authors and publishers. They don’t offer much of an explicit opinion on the Public and Education Lending Right schemes, which compensate authors for books borrowed from public and educational libraries. Except they make the point that most authors receiving payments under PLR and ELR get small amounts; only a few get the big bucks, which seems code for saying it’s not much use when it comes to author incomes. Many authors will tell you different.

Stick with me, I’m getting to the Sean Williams hatred real soon.

The Productivity Commission suggests, that instead of inefficient grants to individual authors and various organisations:

Subsidies to book producers ideally should be delivered only for books that yield material cultural and educational externalities that would not otherwise be generated. The externality value of books, and the likelihood that it would be generated without a dedicated subsidy, is likely to vary between classes or genres of books, as well as within them, and so ideally subsidies should vary to reflect these differences.

And which class of books do they say are likely to offer more value?

Among the diversity of the adult trade sector, Australian stories, histories and biographies are examples of books which are more likely to generate cultural externalities than generic fiction or some non-fictional material such as Australian-authored computer manuals.

There’s the hatred. Sean Williams - a great Australian storyteller - writes some of that dreaded generic fiction. No PLR or ELR for him. The Productivity Commission says instead subsidies could be dished out by a panel of assessors who - as they suggest - should probably give the science fiction section a big miss.

But it’s not just Williams. The productivity hates any number of great Aussie speculative fiction authors like Karen Miller and Marianne de Pierres. They probably don’t hate Margo Lanagan quite so much but only because she writes lots of those great youth-oriented page-turning cultural externalities yarns.

Though having a panel to assess subsidy eligibility is probably a bit inefficient. Here’s what they suggest could streamline the process:

An alternative approach to aligning subsidies with potential differences in cultural externalities of books, that may be more suitable for a broad book subsidy scheme, would be to distinguish book content according to generally accepted bibliographic classification systems.

Why bother with a pesky assessment panel - they may let a few genre books through - when you can just wall off the entire science fiction and fantasy section and forget about it? It’s kinda like saying you can go for a jog along any street you want but you’ll only get fit if your route goes through the rich suburbs.

So what type of books are likely to be Productivity Commission pre-approved:

Most obviously, the core ideas that were embodied in books such as The New Testament, The Wealth of Nations, Mein Kampf and The Female Eunuch have had major impacts on how societies operate. Truly ‘iconic’ works are rare, but some books have similar, though smaller, external effects through their influence on people’s views and attitudes.

But watch out for those negative externality generators

For example, some people would see Professor Ian Plimer’s recent book Heaven and Earth — which purports to debunk the scientific consensus on climate change — as generating external costs, to the extent that it weakens community support for measures to reduce greenhouse emissions. Most clearly, books that have the effect of promoting intolerance between groups can diminish certain forms of social capital and generate external costs.

Mein Kampf’s okay but don’t challenge climate change, okay? (And before anyone throws Godwin’s law back at me, just remember - the Productivity Commission started it). 

And here’s the biggest problem for me. The Productivity Commission started off making an economic argument. And there’s probably an important discussion to have around some of these things. It would be good to pay less for books. But why isn’t the Productivity Commission saying we should drop the GST on books, or force Amazon and other online retailer to pay the 10% tax and reduce their government-regulated competitive advantage. Lets discuss them.

Instead we get this nonsense - essentially an argument over what has literary merit. Stories matter to me, not externalities.

But clearly it’s important to them. So just in case they didn’t check - a note for the Productivity Commission: Cheapest I could find Mein Kampf on Amazon was US$1.46 (without shipping). But if that’s a bit much you can probably get it cheaper if everyone puts in and you buy the order in bulk.

Tags: Productivity Commission, Publishing
Posted in Publishing, Uncategorized, politics | 2 Comments »

Austen to Austen, Dust to Dust

Monday, December 1st, 2008

You know you’ve really made it as an author when fans start leaving their ashes in the gardens surrounding your museum.

News sites are reporting that the Jane Austen House Museum is so distressed by people leaving the ashes of loved ones in their garden, they’ve written to fans of the author asking them to stop.

Says the museum’s collections manager Louise West: “While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow. It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. On three or four occasions, our gardener Celia Simpson has found piles of human ash placed in the garden secretly.”

Wonder if anyone was cremated with a copy of Pride and Prejudice?

Tags: death, weird, writing
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Why Obama Won - part 2

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

Today, the second part of my analysis of the Obama win.

Age and race as indicators of change

Americans were in the mood for change. Obama’s age and race provided an immediately obvious difference to crystallize on, even before people started comparing policies. He was a generation removed from Bush, from McCain and from the Clintons.

Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, and 40 years after Ali was stripped of the world heavyweight title for refusing to go to Vietnam an African-American was elected president of the United States. The symbolism was magnificent.

But while African-American turnout was good, it was also strong across most demographics. People wanted to vote. His race or age weren’t responsible for him being elected but they were both a lightning rod for the change that had happened in America and the change he was proposing. They helped people focus.

The Palin Gambit and other McCain errors

The choice of Sarah Palin was illustrative of a number of serious tactical errors the McCain camp made during the campaign. Denied his supposed first choice of independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman, McCain chose the Alaskan governor to appeal to the Republican base and Democratic women put off by the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the primaries. But the two-for-one Palin deal only delivered on half of the bargain and it wasn’t the half they needed. Somewhere along the way the Republicans forgot that the Democratic women who were supporting Clinton so strongly were a generation older than Palin. The fact she was a woman didn’t matter - she was too young to have fought the battles their generation had fought. They didn’t like her politics and weren’t going to do her any favours.

The Palin gambit also meant McCain gave up one of his best tactical advantages over Obama - the experience card. No longer could McCain level the argument that Obama lacked experience because his choice for Vice President was clearly even worse. It was one of the worst own-goals in recent political history.

For large parts of the campaign it seemed like McCain just couldn’t catch a break., McCain’s decision to “suspend” his campaign amid the growing economic crisis wasn’t entirely flawed. But to pay off it needed his party to at least pretend to look to him as a leader and not vote the original stimulus package (whatever you think of it) down and blame Nancy Pelosi for being too nasty.

His decision to go so negative so soon was another flaw. McCain should have spent the last three weeks of the campaign telling American families why he thought Obama’s tax plan would be bad for them. But no, instead he mixed his messages with hyped-up negatives that only appealed to his base.

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A quick World Fantasy Award update

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

I’m happily ensconced in Calgary ahead of the World Fantasy Convention.  It officially begins tomorrow but given that Kate and I already ran into our first fellow attendee in the hotel lift this morning, it’s good enough as on now.

I’ll post the results of the World Fantasy Awards at some stage on Sunday, so feel free to check back here if you’re interested but if you’re keen to get the results as fast as possible, check out SF Awards Watch, which is doing its best to live-blog the awards as they’re presented. They’re also currently taking votes on which work people think will win the award for best novel.

Tags: world fantasy awards
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When art and commerce co-exist

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Art and commerce don’t always have to collide. We’re staying in the Hotel des Arts in San Francisco. It’s decked out with heaps of art and each room is designed by an up-and-coming artist. This is the picture on the wall in front of our bed.

Our hotel bedroom wall

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Welcome to HogeTown

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

Well, I’ve moved over from Livejournal to a dedicated website, which will hopefully see me expand my online presence. I’m aiming to get a few good posts under my belt before heading to the northern hemisphere for the 2008 World Tour next week.

Tags: welcome
Posted in Misc, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »