Carl Brandon awards given at Arisia 2011
As announced on this LJ and other places, the Carl Brandon Awards for 2008 and 2009 were awarded. It was a highlight of the convention for me to hear from, and when lucky, meet in person, these talented winners.
As I got to find out more about the winning books and stories:
Half World by Hiromi Goto
Liar by Justine Larbalestier
Distances by Vandana Singh
"Ghost Summer" by Tananarive Due
I became excited about reading them. Below, you can read the jury statements about the winners, which were read at the awards ceremony. I hope they will introduce people who were unable to be there to these fascinating books.
Half World by Hiromi Goto
Melanie Tamaki is an outsider. Unpopular and impoverished,she is the only child of a loving but neglectful mother. She barely copes with surviving school and life. But everything changes on the day she returns home to find her mother is missing, lured back to Half World by a vile creature calling himself Mr. Glueskin. Soon Melanie embarks on an epic and darkly fantastical journey to Half World to save her mother. What she does not yet realize is that the state of the universe is at stake. This novel features an intense, high-speed adventure plot, grotesque creatures, and compellingly bizarre landscapes. But Goto focuses on the sorts of people who are often left out of these kinds of narratives. Melanie is Japanese; she & her mother are poor. Queer people exist as if it’s normal, not crammed in afterschool special style (Melanie notes casually that her mom’s never had a boyfriend, or a girlfriend; Ms. Wei’s dead female partner is mentioned offhandedly). Melanie is awkward & angry, not a lithe manic pixie dream girl of a heroine. She doubts herself, freaks out, but keeps moving forward. She’s not perfect, & knows it; sometimes she’s rude or petty. The storyline of redemption & breaking the cycle didn’t feel trite, it felt exhilarating. Goto makes the perpetual stuck-ness of the denizens of Half World genuinely terrifying. The exceptionally imaginative scenario is engaging and deals in unusual and inventive ways with grief and mourning.
Liar by Justine Larbalestier
Liar was one of the two stand outs for this committee. Larbaleister’s imaginative story gets at deep questions about alienation and estrangement with subtlety and skill. The girl at the heart of this novel is a complex character who is trying to come to terms with her classmates’ and parents’ response to her apparent oddness, with a dark secret that she must guard-literally-with her life, with growing sexual feelings that it is profoundly dangerous for her to express. The psychosocial exploration is done with a marvelously light touch, but a depth that allows for real insight and engagement. The novel is exceptionally well written, often lyrical, but always in a way that enhances rather than distracts from the story.
Ghost Summer by Tananarive Due
Tananarive Due’s “Ghost Summer” is a lyrical exploration of ancestry, hauntings, and history. Davie, the charmingly precocious pre-adolescent narrator begins the story in search of an adventure. Specifically, he wants to go ghost hunting, and solve the mystery of the three dead boys he sees on his grandparents’ property. These ghosts can only be seen by children. The emphasis is on land and overlapping timelines, as Davie and his family are haunted by a ghostly version of the same enemies that originally destroyed the small town of Graceville, primarily the threat of racialized violence. Time is of the essence, as the legacies of Jim Crow and slavery bump shoulders with Davie’s talk of PS3s, YouTube, and flashlights.
Davie’s exploration of local history and ruptured community provide a framework for the more personal themes of families in danger and growing up to learn that adulthood is a series of hard decisions. In the end, it is up to Davie to heal the Timmons family and save his own. Like Octavia Butler’s Kindred, “Ghost Summer” is about the ways in which the past and the present interrupt each other. It is also an incredibly funny and heart-rending ghost story, filled with one liners like “Apparently, librarians get excited when kids come up to them and ask about history,“ and more poignantly, Davie’s extended reflections on what it means to be a family.
Distances by Vandana Singh
Distances is a beautiful construction of an alternate universe and of the characters who inhabit it. Vandana Singh creates a seamless world where the links between art, religion and mathematics are undeniable and vibrant, where the cataloging of planes and vertices are poetry and holy but also may have dangerous consequences. Singh walks a fine line with her protagonist Anasuya, crafting a character that is both honored insider and lonely outsider. One whose skills have brought her praise and family but is still isolated by virtue of being the only of her people in the city. Anasuya is Other but she is also at home. She is also a cutting edge mathematician, engaged in research able to alter the face of interplanetary research and warfare (I just wanted to add this, because Anasuya’s job is central to the story, as well as the corruption of her innocent love of knowledge for knowledge’s sake)
The mystery of the work is paced beautifully, often tempting the reader with the notion that they might have figured it out, only to realize there are more layers to the story than first apparent. And after it ends you are left with a deep sense that the story has not ended, that you have simply been allowed to glimpse this world and those who inhabit it and instead of anger at such exclusion you feel honor at having been allowed to see any of it at all. As Singh writes “So know this: that no poem we can speak is ever a complete poem. No truth we can utter is ever a complete truth. Everything is what it is because of other things as well as its own nature. So there is no thing removed from other things.” With this work Singh shows us the distance between ourselves and home, ourselves and family, the present and past, two peoples and even two planets or galaxies is often not as far as we might think.
As I got to find out more about the winning books and stories:
Half World by Hiromi Goto
Liar by Justine Larbalestier
Distances by Vandana Singh
"Ghost Summer" by Tananarive Due
I became excited about reading them. Below, you can read the jury statements about the winners, which were read at the awards ceremony. I hope they will introduce people who were unable to be there to these fascinating books.
Half World by Hiromi Goto
Melanie Tamaki is an outsider. Unpopular and impoverished,she is the only child of a loving but neglectful mother. She barely copes with surviving school and life. But everything changes on the day she returns home to find her mother is missing, lured back to Half World by a vile creature calling himself Mr. Glueskin. Soon Melanie embarks on an epic and darkly fantastical journey to Half World to save her mother. What she does not yet realize is that the state of the universe is at stake. This novel features an intense, high-speed adventure plot, grotesque creatures, and compellingly bizarre landscapes. But Goto focuses on the sorts of people who are often left out of these kinds of narratives. Melanie is Japanese; she & her mother are poor. Queer people exist as if it’s normal, not crammed in afterschool special style (Melanie notes casually that her mom’s never had a boyfriend, or a girlfriend; Ms. Wei’s dead female partner is mentioned offhandedly). Melanie is awkward & angry, not a lithe manic pixie dream girl of a heroine. She doubts herself, freaks out, but keeps moving forward. She’s not perfect, & knows it; sometimes she’s rude or petty. The storyline of redemption & breaking the cycle didn’t feel trite, it felt exhilarating. Goto makes the perpetual stuck-ness of the denizens of Half World genuinely terrifying. The exceptionally imaginative scenario is engaging and deals in unusual and inventive ways with grief and mourning.
Liar by Justine Larbalestier
Liar was one of the two stand outs for this committee. Larbaleister’s imaginative story gets at deep questions about alienation and estrangement with subtlety and skill. The girl at the heart of this novel is a complex character who is trying to come to terms with her classmates’ and parents’ response to her apparent oddness, with a dark secret that she must guard-literally-with her life, with growing sexual feelings that it is profoundly dangerous for her to express. The psychosocial exploration is done with a marvelously light touch, but a depth that allows for real insight and engagement. The novel is exceptionally well written, often lyrical, but always in a way that enhances rather than distracts from the story.
Ghost Summer by Tananarive Due
Tananarive Due’s “Ghost Summer” is a lyrical exploration of ancestry, hauntings, and history. Davie, the charmingly precocious pre-adolescent narrator begins the story in search of an adventure. Specifically, he wants to go ghost hunting, and solve the mystery of the three dead boys he sees on his grandparents’ property. These ghosts can only be seen by children. The emphasis is on land and overlapping timelines, as Davie and his family are haunted by a ghostly version of the same enemies that originally destroyed the small town of Graceville, primarily the threat of racialized violence. Time is of the essence, as the legacies of Jim Crow and slavery bump shoulders with Davie’s talk of PS3s, YouTube, and flashlights.
Davie’s exploration of local history and ruptured community provide a framework for the more personal themes of families in danger and growing up to learn that adulthood is a series of hard decisions. In the end, it is up to Davie to heal the Timmons family and save his own. Like Octavia Butler’s Kindred, “Ghost Summer” is about the ways in which the past and the present interrupt each other. It is also an incredibly funny and heart-rending ghost story, filled with one liners like “Apparently, librarians get excited when kids come up to them and ask about history,“ and more poignantly, Davie’s extended reflections on what it means to be a family.
Distances by Vandana Singh
Distances is a beautiful construction of an alternate universe and of the characters who inhabit it. Vandana Singh creates a seamless world where the links between art, religion and mathematics are undeniable and vibrant, where the cataloging of planes and vertices are poetry and holy but also may have dangerous consequences. Singh walks a fine line with her protagonist Anasuya, crafting a character that is both honored insider and lonely outsider. One whose skills have brought her praise and family but is still isolated by virtue of being the only of her people in the city. Anasuya is Other but she is also at home. She is also a cutting edge mathematician, engaged in research able to alter the face of interplanetary research and warfare (I just wanted to add this, because Anasuya’s job is central to the story, as well as the corruption of her innocent love of knowledge for knowledge’s sake)
The mystery of the work is paced beautifully, often tempting the reader with the notion that they might have figured it out, only to realize there are more layers to the story than first apparent. And after it ends you are left with a deep sense that the story has not ended, that you have simply been allowed to glimpse this world and those who inhabit it and instead of anger at such exclusion you feel honor at having been allowed to see any of it at all. As Singh writes “So know this: that no poem we can speak is ever a complete poem. No truth we can utter is ever a complete truth. Everything is what it is because of other things as well as its own nature. So there is no thing removed from other things.” With this work Singh shows us the distance between ourselves and home, ourselves and family, the present and past, two peoples and even two planets or galaxies is often not as far as we might think.