Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy is a great book. Random House not so good on the e-book basics though.

 

The GBS represents a new stage in the evolution of the publishing industry. It offers a glimpse of what bookstores might become in the mature Information Age: A hybrid library/storefront whose job is to preserve and monetize books. It will be difficult to balance the public good of libraries with the free market of the bookstore.

Check it out here.

Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales, by Greer Gilman won the Tiptree this year, along with Ooku: The Inner Chambers by Fumi Yoshinaga.

Cloud & Ashes is published by Small Beer Press run by Gavin Grant and Kelly Link. Great to see such a wonderful press getting a well-deserved gong. Ooku is the first time manga has been chosen for the award.

On top of that Wives by Paul Haines got a mention in the honors list too! Hopefully nod for Wives and the recognition of two stories from Eclipse 3 - edited by Jonathan Strahan – augur well for the Hugo nominations.

Best Novel
Mirror Space, Marianne de Pierres, Orbit

Best Novella
Horn, Peter M. Ball, Twelfth Planet Press
Wives, Paul Haines, Cour de Lion

Best Novelette
Sister, Sister, Strange Tales III, Angela Slatter, Tartarus Press
Inevitable, The New Space Opera 2, Sean Williams, Harper Collins

Best Graphic Story
Scarygirl, Nathan Jurevicius, Allen and Unwin

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
District 9
Moon

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
Caprica Pilot, SyFy

Best Editor, Short Form
Jonathan Strahan
Ellen Datlow
Keith Stevenson

Best Editor, Long Form
Stephanie Smith
Zoe Walton
Bernadette Foley
David G Hartwell

Best Semiprozine
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine

Best Fan Writer
Bill Wright, Interstellar Ramjet Scoop

Best Fanzine
A Writer Goes on a Journey

Best Fan Artist
Andrew McKiernan

John W. Campbell Award
Angela Slatter
Peter M Ball
Lezli Robyn

I know there are some international nominations in there but I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.

If you haven’t already, get out there and nominate!

The story so far, for those who’ve missed it: The Hugo Awards are coming to Australia courtesy of Aussiecon 4. Here’s our chance to help some of our best authors get their best work recognised by getting them nominated for an award.

It’s a pretty simple idea – get out there and nominate your favourite Aussie, writers, works, editors and fans.

But the numbers remain stacked against us.

As of January 1, there were 352 Australians registered and eligible to nominate for the Hugos. A healthy number, yes. But a very small one when compared to the 856 Americans eligible to nominate. And breaking those numbers down further says a bit more about why it’s important we get out there and nominate. Of those 856 Americans, 388 are “supporting” members – ie people who are unlikely to attend the convention but have paid a fee to get regular updates and to be eligible to vote in the Hugos. On top of that, add all the members of last year’s Worldcon, held in Montreal, who are also eligible to nominate and vote in the awards this year.

It’s perfectly understandable that US readers have less exposure than locals to great Australian speculative fiction. But if you think local works and authors deserve recognition; if you think it’s possible to make a difference and if you think it’s important to try then check out the Aussiecon 4 website for nomination details. And if you’re Facebook inclined, log in and join the conversation here.

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.

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.

Williams has handy pie charts on his expenses, income source and income breakdown which give great examples of the business side of being a fulltime writer that you don’t hear enough about. He’s also got a graph showing fluctiuations in writing income over two decades.

Check it out.

After I’m back I’m going to review each of the winners and maybe do a category by category rundow. But until then a reminder of the life achievement winners and shortlisted nominees.

LIFE ACHIEVEMENT
Leo & Diane Dillon
Patricia McKillip

NOVEL
Fangland, John Marks (Penguin)
The Gospel of the Knife, Will Shetterly (Tor)
The Servants, Michael Marshall Smith (Earthling Publications)
Territory, Emma Bull (Tor)
Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada; Roc)

NOVELLA
“Cold Snap”, Kim Newman (The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club)
Illyria, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
“The Master Miller’s Tale”, Ian R. MacLeod (F&SF May 2007)
The Mermaids, Robert Edric (PS Publishing)
“Stars Seen through Stone”, Lucius Shepard (F&SF Jul 2007)

SHORT STORY
“The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics”, Daniel Abraham (Logorrhea)
“The Church on the Island”, Simon Kurt Unsworth (At Ease with the Dead, Ash-Tree Press)
“Damned If You Don’t”, Robert Shearman (Tiny Deaths)
“The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change”, Kij Johnson (The Coyote Road)
“Singing of Mount Abora”, Theodora Goss (Logorrhea)

ANTHOLOGY
The Coyote Road, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Viking)
Five Strokes to Midnight, Gary A. Braunbeck & Hank Schwaeble, eds. (Haunted Pelican Press)
Inferno, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Tor)
Logorrhea, John Klima, ed. (Bantam Spectra)
Wizards, Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois, eds. (Berkley)

COLLECTION
Dagger Key and Other Stories, Lucius Shepard (PS Publishing)
Hart & Boot & Other Stories, Tim Pratt (Night Shade Books)
Plots and Misadventures, Stephen Gallagher (Subterranean Press)
Portable Childhoods, Ellen Klages (Tachyon Publications)
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, Kim Newman (MonkeyBrain Books)
Tiny Deaths, Robert Shearman (Comma Press)

ARTIST
Ruan Jia
Mikko Kinnunen
Stephan Martiniere
Edward Miller
John Picacio 

SPECIAL AWARD, PROFESSIONAL
Allison Baker & Chris Roberson (for MonkeyBrain Books)
Alan Beatts & Jude Feldman (for Borderlands Books)
Peter Crowther (for PS Publishing)
Jeremy Lassen & Jason Williams (for Night Shade Books)
Shawna McCarthy (for Realms of Fantasy)
Gordon Van Gelder (for F&SF)

SPECIAL AWARD, NON-PROFESSIONAL
G. S. Evans & Alice Whittenburg (for Cafe Irreal),
John Klima (for Electric Velocipede)
Rosalie Parker & Raymond Russell (for Tartarus Press)
Midori Snyder & Terri Windling (for Endicott Studios Website)
Stephen Jones (for Travellers in Darkness: The Souvenir Book of the World Horror Convention 2007)