HogeTown

Homegrown Hugo Nomination Campaign spreads wider

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

The marvellous folks over at ASiF! are getting together to do a 2010 update on the Australian Specfic Snapshot first conducted by Ben Peek in 2007. The good news is one focus of the 2010 update will be on this year’s Hugos and the local authors and works people think are worthy of nomination.

Interviews and recommendations will be appearing on these blogs from tomorrow:
http://random-alex.livejournal.com/
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/

Looking forward to seeing further discussion of what we should be nominating. Don’t forget, nominations close in a month.

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

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Ever noticed how later books in a wildy popular series rapidly balloon in length? You’re not alone. I’m not the first - far from it - and won’t be the last to comment on the increasing length of books in series such as Twilight and Harry Potter.

But I thought it might be worth putting some rigour - ie numbers - around some of the assumptions. So I wheeled out my trusty version of Excel and decided to put its graphing abilities to good use. I wanted to see how rapid the rise (or fall) in page length was over the course of novel series that became suddenly successful.

The four series I chose to graph were:

• Twilight - Stephenie Meyer
• Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
• the Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson
• Lord of the Rings - J. R. R Tolkien

Here’s what the results look like.

I included the last two as controls (and because, you know, they were close to hand). I considered including Asimov’s Foundation books as another (of which there are seven, not including his expanded Empire and Robot series and novels written by other authors). But for the record, Foundation, first published in 1951 in book form totalled 255 pages. The last in the series was Forward the Foundation, which was published 42 years later and came in at 464 pages.

All comparisons are between consistent editions.

For the record:

• the first Twilight book was 434 pages and the last was 736
• the first Harry Potter book was 223 pages and the last was 607 (book five peaked at 766 pages
• the first Mars book was 519 pages and the last was 609.
• the first Lord of the Rings book was 427 pages and the last 416

But here’s where it gets tricky - and probably why the post is titled the Meyer Imperative rather than the Potter Principle. Rowling pulled back on the length of books six and seven. So to adequatelty compare we need to plot all series as if they went to seven books. Enter Excel.

At seven books apiece the last Harry Potter book was 2.7 times the length of the first one. But if the Twilight series had continued in the same pattern, a seventh book in the series would have come in at whopping 1306 pages. And that length would have made in a smidgen over 3 times the lenth of the first book.  A seventh Mars book (Muave Mars, anyone?) would have only clocked in at 828 pages.

So, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

But what’s it all mean, I hear you ask. Who knows? I suspect that publishers who find they’ve got a massive hit on their hands let writers have a freer hand - not necessarily to keep them happy but more likely I suspect to get the product to market faster.

And it isn’t by definition a comment on quality - and certainly I haven’t read the Twilight books - but it will be interesting to see what happens with the next series from Rowling and Meyer, whether they’re a success or not quite so much. And what that means for lengthas the series progress.

Tags: authors, Meyer Imperative
Posted in Publishing, Reading | 2 Comments »