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Nebula Award Winners, Hugo Nominees Announced
CBNobi writes "The 2002 Nebula Award winners have been announced this weekend. The winner for best novel was American Gods by Neil Gaiman (reviewed here at Slashdot), and the winner for best script was LotR:The Fellowship of the Ring. The nominees for the 2003 Hugo Awards have also been announced; Episodes of Enterprise, Firefly, and Buffy are all nominated for best short form dramatic presentation, and LotR and Spirited Away are among the nominees for best long form presentation."
finally lotr's justified... unlike the stupid *ahem* academy people
FP??
my blog
Hmmm,
Firefly - Cancelled (and it was just getting fun)
Enterprise - Might be cancelled soon
Buffy - Wrapping up the series? (don't watch it, but recall the wife mentioning it.)
Should it be seen as a sign of the times that the nominees are all either going or gone? Makes you wonder about the intelligence of the masses. Oh wait, we already know about the intelligence of the masses.
Sup Niggas!!!
I've always been a big science fiction fan, and when I heard the buzz about the English author Ian McLeod I though I would check out his work.
Well, I was appalled when I read Cosmonaut Keep. In case you haven't read this sophomoric Marxists drivel, I will give you a one paragraph summary.
Americans bad. Capitalism bad. Socialism good. Drugs good. High technology cool, but the best technology (computers and aerospace) is American. Don't ask us to reconcile that.
I'm glad to see the Nebula voters have voted for right-thinking, American-proud authors like Gaimain, and avoided socialist anti-American clap-trap like McLeod, it's almost enough to make me forgive them for awarding the commie-drug-perversion filled Gravity's Rainbow the best novel in 1974.
A. Rightmann
Unfortunately, it also says way too much about how short-sighted TV executives are nowadays.
:( ) like reality shows because reality shows have relatively low cost of production per hour. Even with its exotic locales, the best-known reality show (Survivor) is still a bargain compared to shows like the now-cancelled Firefly, the soon-to-end Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, and the potentially-cancelled Enterprise.
TV executives frequently do not like hour-long dramas due to the high cost of production per hour; they still (unfortunately for us TV viewers
The days of a network letting a show find its audience are long over. You'll never see anything like how NBC allowed Hill Street Blues to eventually become a big hit again.
I finished Kiln People last week after a slow two weeks of slugging through it. Flat-out one of the most boring books I've ever read. Interresting ideas, but one boring book.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
You are all a bunch of fucking loser scifi geeks with no life. You consistantly confuse pop culture schlock as art. The rest of the world should get an award for not rounding you up and exterminating you.
I guess the Joss Whedon, Rick Berman & Brannon Braga mutual admiration society didn't leave any room for something watchable.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Fucking slashbots
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One summer's day in the mid-1860's, a young French boy named Joseph Pujol
had a frightening experience at the seashore. Swimming out alone, he held
his breath and dove underwater. Suddenly an icy cold feeling penetrated his
gut. Frightened, he ran ashore, but then received a second shock when he
noticed seawater streaming from his anus. The experience so disturbed the
lad that his mother took him to a doctor to allay his fears. The doctor
complied.
The boy didn't know it at the time, but this unsettling rectal experience
at the beach not only indicated no illness, but it also foretold of a gift
that would later make him the toast of Paris and one of the most popular
and successful performers of his generation.
Joseph Pujol was born in Marseilles on June 1, 1857 to Francois Pujol and
Rose Demaury, a respected stonemason/sculptor and his wife, both of whom
had emigrated from Catalan. Young Joseph went to school until the age of
13, whereupon he apprenticed himself to a baker. Several years later, he
served in the French army.
While in the army, he mentioned his childhood sea-bathing experience to his
buddies. They immediately wanted to know if he could do it again, so on a
day's leave soon afterward he went out to the shore to swim and experiment.
He successfully reenacted the hydraulics of his childhood experience there
and even discovered that by contracting his abdomen muscles, he could
intentionally take up as much water as he liked and eject it in a powerful
stream. Demonstrating this ability back at the barracks later provided the
soldiers with no end of amusement, and soon Pujol started to practice with
air instead of water, giving him the ability to produce a variety of
sounds. This new development provided even more enjoyment for his buddies.
It was then and there, in the army, that Pujol invented a nickname for
himself that would later become a stage name synonymous throughout Europe
with helpless, hysterical laughter: "Le Petomane" (translation: "The
Fartiste").
After his stint in the army, Pujol returned to Marseille and to a bakeshop
his father set him up in, on a street that, today, proudly bears the name
"rue Pujol." At the age of 26 he married Elizabeth Henriette Oliver, the
20-year-old daughter of a local butcher. Pujol enjoyed performing, so in
the evenings he entertained at local music halls by singing, doing comedy
routines, and even playing his trombone backstage between numbers. He
continued amusing his friends privately with his "other" wind instrument,
but only at their suggestion and urging did he decide to turn this parlor
trick into a full-fledged act for public audiences.
Pujol worked up a Le Petomane routine, and with some friends he rented a
space in Marseille to perform it in. They promoted the show heavily
themselves through posters and handouts, but word-of-mouth soon took over
and they packed the house every night. Fin de siecle European audiences,
deeply repressed but newly prosperous and trying to be modern"-- the same
people Freud observed (Freud was one year older than Pujol)-- must have
found a man on stage building an entire act out of mock farting and other
forms of anal play considerably more shockingly funny than we would today.
Pujol's was a good act by any era's standards, but back then his scatology
hit a raw nerve, and hit it hard, at an especially vulnerable time. Like
Alfred Jarry, whose epoch-makingly scatological Ubu Roi actually post-dates
Pujol's Paris debut by several years, Pujol was a French Revolutionary of
the modern theater. Jarry gets the credit today because he was a "serious
playwright" and not a lowbrow cabaret performer, but Pujol clearly laid
some of the groundwork.
Word-of-mouth spread reports of the quality and uniqueness of Pujol's new
show, and soon people from all over Marseille were coming to see it.
After the hometown success, Pujol's friends urged him
ig
That there are two substandard Enterprise episodes on the Hugo nomination list is proof enough that the folks making the nominations are totally insane. I mean, come on "A Night in Sickbay" is widely considered one of the worst Star Trek episodes ever committed to film.
Oh man, this was an awesome book. It actually got passed around in my group of friends... one guy who doesn't read a whole lot really loved it. It's weird, that'd never happened before. It really is a great book.
At 3+ hours, The Fellowship of the Ring gives new meaning to the term "long form presentation." ;-)
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
How do you vote anyway? :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Come on. How could an episode revolving entirely around the erotic dreams of the Captain about his super-hot Vulcan first officer NOT win a Hugo?
Go Charlie!
Apart from writing great science fiction Charlie writes the Linux column in the UK's Computer Shopper magazine.
or do these sci-fi and fantasy awards seem like people in these sectors of entertainment simply jerking each other off, because the long standing awards groups don't give them the recognition they feel they deserve.
Don't get me wrong, i love sci-fi and fantasy. But some of the shows up for awards in the hugos, don't deserve any type of nomination or recognition. As for the nebula awards, I don't get to read much(I am too lazy, and I grew up in america so I don't know how to read), but shouldn't critical and/or monetary success be enough. I mean if people buy your book or a critic whose opinion you value says it is good, do you really need an official award or nomination saying it is a good piece of writing?
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
IMO, the only reason that American Gods has any popularity is because of Slashdot. (I myself read it because of the glowing review it got here.) But I think it has to be the most overrated book I have ever had the displeasure to read. I found it mind-numbingly boring for vast sections of the book and whenever the story did manage to veer into interesting territory, Gaiman skillfully managed to yank it back into mind-numbing territory in quick order.
Glad to see it didn't make the Hugo Award list.
Enterprise gets 2 nominations and Whedon gets 3?
How about dumping the Trek spinoffs and put a couple of episodes of Farscape in. I'll put 'Prayer' up agaist 'Night in SickBay' any day of the week. And 'Carbon Creek' pales up against 'Kansas'.
Also, this shows you how important mindshare is. By many peoples account, Firefly was a show with potential, but it wasn't really good yet. But Whedon's name on it made people believe that it has to be great and deserves an award.
Solaris was easily the most 'sci-fi' movie of the year but Spiderman gets a nod instead?
D
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I think this just goes to demonstrate your point even further, that networks are only thinking short-term these days.
Is there not a single competent businessman among the bunch? A competent businessman would think long-term instead of going after short-term gain.
What are the networks going to have left when the reality tv ratings drop off? Nothing.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I'd have a hard time calling Alias sci-fi. The only sci-fi aspects (rather then fairly realistic and current science) are the Rambaldi storylines, and given what we've seen so far, I'm more inclined to call that fantasy then sci-fi.
;-)
It's a hard call because that storyline is so small and not-well exposited (to keep it mysterious) that you can't get a "feel" for it. I call it fantasy because right now the artifacts are basically working like magic, returning life to long-dead things and so on.
I admit that my current #1 theory to explain Rambaldi is that he is indeed a space alien who couldn't or wouldn't go home, but that's my theory, not official show theory.
Last night I just discovered fansubbed versions of _Last Exile_. Awesome visual style harkening to the WWI era of aircraft mixed with Star Wars pod racing. Just plain *Frikin' A*. Get it from Anime-Kraze as a Bit Torrent download.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
But my dilemma is this, I've read all Sci-Fi/Fantasy from Asimov, Niven, Vance, but have not yet finished all the works of the old masters.
Can any younger (or at least more flexible) Slashdot reader suggest a few authors that they've read and liked? I don't want to get into serials right now, perhaps something that is sort of standalone would be better as an introduction to a new author, I think.
Newsfollow.com
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Been watching that, but I didn't mention it here. Its more steampunk or fantasy than science fiction so far. There are others that are borderline sci-fi, but they tend to be more "X in space". (Stellvia, for example, feels a lot like Azumanga in space.)
Alias isn't sci-fi/fantasy?
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
...so damn stupid you can't understand why would anyone watch it.
ha! hey there -- so my husband and pals read slashdot regularly and one of his buddies messaged me in SILC to tell me about this post. all you people who hasn't read SF since the old greats should read my book (it's a finalist for best related book). it's called better to have loved: the life of judith merril. she was my grandmother, known as the little mother of science fiction. more info
It also has a disturbingly complete necrology of recently deceased members of the SF community. It seems like every other headline is "So & so dies," but that's to be expected with all the graying pulp era artists, writers, and fans.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Pretty clearly a Zelanzy plot with Lindskold doing all of the writing, but it wasn't bad overall. (It helps that I like Chinese mythos stuff, even if this wasn't very Chinese.)
Let me also second Aliaster Renyolds as someone picking up the slack: Revelation Space and Chasm City aren't bad at all.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
One caveat with Stephenson - "Big U" is an interesting attempt to satarize a behemoth of a university, probably his first book. He hadn't developed his amazing chops yet. I worship the man, but I think he'd agree this is not worth the time.
Zodiac was pretty good. Strong narrative, some good characters. You can see the emergence of some geek-friendly themes. It lacks the absolute truckloads of storytelling talent he lavishes on subsequent books, but for many writers this would be their best book ever.
Snow Crash was AMAZING. Has the aforementioned truckloads. Very funny, surprising consistency all the way through. Nothing sacrificed for a laugh, but many of them fit. And a fine backdrop of whimsical neurolinguistic mysticism driving it. Great characters. Absolutely great. Each is hip - or wants to be - in a different way. It's male dominated, but there is a very strong female character that feels real, like the author has actually met a female in person. Even minor characters are fully fleshed out in a few deft strokes.
Diamond Age - AMAZING Very good at pulling heartstrings, fascinating look at nanotach. More of a "realistic" feel than Snow Crash. (Neither good nor bad in itself, but some readers might find S.C. too enjoyable/easy)
Cryptonomicon - awesome. Staggering. (Especially if you have to carry it a long way) This is a more complex narrative, with two sets of characters in two time periods. Amazingly, they fit together and not just at a tangent point. It is rich with historical insight, and it has tons of stuff for those who get a hard-on for computer security.
On a side note - I may have spotted him at Norwescon this weekend. Not really sure. I happened to be raving about him at the time and may have invoked him.
And Nemesis isn't up for one. How strange. (ha.)
Hey, this is interesting. Give the guy a cigar :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
RickHunter is right on Bear. Be Careful.
Moving Mars is great. Eon and Forge of God were great, but feel dated now. Damn cold war ending. Forge of God is still worth reading, its one of my all time favorites. Avoid Anvil of Stars at all costs. Dinosaur Summer was weak too. Blood Music is a cool concept but the story never quite gelled.
Same for Darwin's Radio. Im missing a few that I have read plus there are many more. It doesnt sound like a very positive review, but honestly, I really like reading him stuff.
As has already been mentioned, the two Enterprise episodes up for consideration are perhaps the worst ever. Hell, I'd pick Quark's mother rubbing Grand Nagus Zek's ears (from one of the most-hated DS9 episodes) over Archer and his dog in a "decontamination gel" scene. The writing on the series usually seems to be a rehash of technobabble-heavy TNG episodes, not to mention the fact that all episodes are either written by or come from ideas by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. The running Temporal Cold War plotline is kept so ambiguous that I doubt the producers even know where they're going with it (altho they have sadly missed many opportunities to make some funny Quantum Leap jokes). I have found the acting, even in widely acclaimed episodes such as "Future Tense," to still be somewhat wooden and stilted. A lot of the characters seem to be shoved to the background (see Trip and Mayweather... or are they the same character? Geez, I don't know, it's not like I've seen an episode that really makes it clear). About the only good thing I can find in the show is the all-CGI special effects, and those would be much better employed if they were, say, used to go back and redo one of the Dominion War ship battles from DS9 (which are spectacular already). Hopefully they won't let this one drag on interminably for seven years only to come to a convoluted ending...
Idiot, fucking idiot, you completely missed the fucking point! Dramas take YEARS to get large followings. If they were competent, they'd be supporting shows that had a chance of being really good, instead they go and cancel everything that isn't an instant cash infusion.
When the reality shit bombs, they will have nothing keeping them stable for years.
Silly AC, get a clue before you go flaimbaiting.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
They are technology so advanced that it appeares to be magic, and that's not scifi? Seems like they do a hell of a job selling it.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
I would like to congratulate fellow Twilight Tales member Richard Chwedyk for winning the Nebula for Bronte's Egg and for allowing Twilight Tales to post it on the Web site.
<blatant plug>
If any Sci-Fi or Horror fans visit Chicago, come to Twilight Tales on Monday night for Chicago's longest running (10 years) genre specific reading group.
</blantant plug>
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
She's one of my favorites, and I have considered her a Grand Master ever since I read "The Disposessed," one of the best SF stories about anarchist society that I have ever read.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Looks like Michael Swanwick got a lot of nominations this year. I hope he picks up a Hugo or two, he's a great underrated writer.
Check out Stations of the Tide if you haven't read any of his stuff yet. Great book, very much in the vein of The Void Captian's Tale by Norman Spinrad.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Judging from the review of American Gods, I have to ask... Is there any science in it?
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Starhunter (with Michael Pare) is excellent sci-fi. Why didn't it get any nominations?
I don't have an opinion on Kiln People because I haven't read it and probably never will. But your review sums up my reaction to the last couple of Brin books I've read. Like many "hard" SF writers, Brin has two nasty flaws: he dreams up INTERESTING IDEAs faster than he can make up actual stories to go with them; and he hates to discard an INTERESTING IDEA once he's put any work into it, no matter how absurd and illogical and just plain stupid the INTERESTING IDEA actually is.
He's not alone in having this problem, of course. Even some of my favorites (Neal Stephenson comes to mind) do it. But Brin's always been worse than anybody, and its finally overwhelmed the positive aspects of his work. So I guess I'll never find out how the Uplift Wars turn out. Oh Well!
*shickt* *sssssthwack* *thunk *thunkthunk* *ZOT-rumble-rumble*
According to the article and to Torcon 3's Web site, "Ted Chiang respectfully declined his nomination for the Best Novelette category." Anybody know which novelette, and why?