SF Awards Watch sarcastically post the formula for dissing SF awards:

• SF awards are useless because they are voted on by too few people
  
• You can only be sure that awards will go to the “best” books if lots of people vote
  
• But awards selected by juries produce better results because the people on juries are experts
  
• Besides, most awards are voted ( Read more... )

Victoria Hoyle has a great post at Eve's Alexandria giving a run down of the Orange Prize longlist.

She also has a much more detailed two part assessment of the William L. Crawford Award shortlist at Strange Horizons ( Read more... )

The 2008 Arthur C Clarke shortlist has been announced. So that gives everyone something to moan about. I've not read Brasyl but I can easily believe that McDonald could be justifiable aggrieved to have missed out, particularly after River Of Gods ludicrously lost to Iron Council a couple of years ago. However, it is a strong, interesting list. I am ( Read more... )

The other day coalescent burst into tears on discovering that not everyone who votes for awards has read the entire shortlist. Por Tuddles :(

Poll Ethical awards

In the interminable Hugo thread here cija comments:When a large group of people chooses books to read and rates those books based on the content and nothing more, they don't end up with a long list of books written only by men. When you judge books on the content, and only the content, that doesn't happen.
Is this true ( Read more... )

Exhibit A:I'm going to do my best to cover all of them, except for the Arthur C. Clarkes, and I'll tell you why. As many probably know, Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day have been ruled ineligible because the UK publishers wouldn't provide the judges with free review copies. So in my eyes, the ACC's have lost their ( Read more... )

Over on Torque Control Rich Horton made some comments on the Nebula shortlist, including one on the jury pick. pnh rather belligerently characterises this as:"Tor is obviously all-powerful and everything it publishes is a mighty award-winning genre bestseller with review coverage from sea to shining sea. Nothing published by Tor could ever be ( Read more... )

So the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist has been announced. Well done to the judges for producing such an interesting and varied list. My odds are ( Read more... )

Inspired by this and this can we all remember that all awards are all wrong and all attempts to fix them make them wronger. This will be particularly useful to bear in mind come this year's Clarke debacle when what was previously the best of all awards is destroyed by wrongheaded judges ( Read more... )

Inspired by swisstone I present the Martin Hill odds for the Arthur C. Clarke Award:

Air by Geoff Ryman 9/5
Learning The World by Ken MacLeod - 3/1
Accelerando by Charles Stross - 6/1
Banner Of Souls by Liz Williams - 12/1
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds - 12/1
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - 25/1

Of course, I would have lost my shirt last year.

( Read more... )