"SMOF" is ironic. If you take the idea of being one too seriously, you're not one.
As a word, its most useful function is as a verb. I.e., "to smof" -- to geek about the intricacies of Hugos, convention running, and other "inside baseball" of the SF and fantasy world.
"There have been winners who wrote first in another language which was then translated to English - I can think of a few who first wrote the story in French and the English translation won a Hugo."
It would be nice if it were otherwise, but your memory is performing an act of wishful thinking. No work of fiction not originally published in English has ever won a Hugo.
3.3.1: Best Novel. A science fiction or fantasy story of forty thousand (40,000) words or more.
3.3.2: Best Novella. A science fiction or fantasy story of between seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words.
Etc etc.
I'm all for the World Fantasy Awards -- I won one in 1987 and I was a judge this year -- but they're not different from the Hugos in that they're for fantasy and the Hugos are "for SF". They're different in that they're a juried award and the Hugos are a popularly-voted one. You're mixing apples, oranges, prosciutto, and turpentine.
Well, the Clarke/Baxter novel is dedicated to Bob Shaw, who wrote the "slow glass" story "Light of Other Days." So I think it's a good bet that the authors were conscious of the similarity in titles between their novel and Shaw's story. Both works derive their titles from a poem by Robert Herrick.
Re:Why does Tor assume We're Idiots?
on
The Star Fraction
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· Score: 1
Nah, we don't assume readers are idiots. But I do think that if we'd started with The Star Fraction, Ken would have been fixed in many booksellers' minds as yet another British SF author with a negligible potential American audience. We would have shipped about 2500 hardcover copies, and been lucky to sell half that.
We probably could have as easily started with The Stone Canal, which is really the anchor book of the whole tetralogy. The fact is, we started with The Cassini Division because that's the MacLeod book that made me wake up and go Holy Shit, after which I immediately dashed back to take a second look at the first two. Tests performed on a few other readers yielded the same result.
It's very hard to get American booksellers heated up over unestablished British SF authors. Whatever the folly of starting with TCD, we seem to have successfully established MacLeod at a much higher distribution level than such writers usually get over here. And, as I remarked on Usenet, everywhere I go it seems SF readers are arguing about whether we were crazy to start with The Cassini Division, and I find it very difficult to see this as evidence that we did something wrong...:-)
(By the way, I don't know if it's been noted anywhere in these threads, but our edition of The Stone Canal is now out. To be followed by The Sky Road in August, at which point The Cassini Division will also appear in paperback.
I was shocked to see Tor put out The Cassini Division, given the politics of most of its stable of writers.
I think you don't know very much about the politics of most of our "stable of writers"! Ken MacLeod isn't even the first Trot on our list. Or the second.
I'd rather not pigeonhole a lot of particular authors' politics for them. But looking at our schedule for the next two years, I see as many writers who I personally know to tilt left as writers who I personally know to tilt right. For every Poul Anderson, a Suzy McKee Charnas. We're pleased to publish them all.
I'm the manager of the SF line, and I'm an American left-winger with streaks of both libertarianism and old-fashioned Catholic social progressivism. (Parse that!) The editor at Tor who hired me ten years ago, my mentor, is an avowed anarcho-syndicalist. Our boss, publisher Tom Doherty, is a moderate conservative with strong live-and-let-live impulses and a passionate desire for large infrastructure development.
One of the more interesting things about science fiction is the way that, within it, writers of extremely divergent political views have often managed a better level of discourse and argument than their mainstream counterparts. Samuel R. Delany, for instance, has written with great clarity on Robert A. Heinlein, starting with the observation that the conservative Balzac was "one of Marx's favorite writers, and Heinlein is one of mine." SF is where an extremely hard-nosed self-described "Marxian" like John Barnes can wind up writing a story in an anthology of libertarian SF -- a story that brilliantly explodes all the cliches of libertarian SF, but which was included by the libertarian editors anyway. It's a field in which Poul Anderson generously proffers an advance quote praising Pacific Edge, a very left-wing utopian novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. And it's where Ken MacLeod can write novels that ask (as he put it in his Vector interview), "what if the socialist critique of capitalism and the libertarian critique of socialism are both true?"
If you find that it seems like most SF and fantasy writers are either conservatives, libertarians, or moderate liberals, it may be that this is because you're mostly familiar with an older generation of SF and fantasy writers. And it may be that some of those folks' politics aren't quite as simple as you're making them out to be. There's an immense amount of boring normative crap in SF, human frailty being what it is. But the best SF proceeds from John W. Campbell's demand that we "ask the next question." Every so often, you get to see writers do this to their own most cherished beliefs and prejudices, and for me that's when the whole game becomes worthwhile.
Re:Part of a four-volume trilogy ...
on
The Star Fraction
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· Score: 1
Charlie Stross quotes me as saying that The Star Fraction "will be published in the USA, but after the other books."
I don't think I would categorically state plans for publishing a book we don't own the rights to. We own the rights to the other three MacLeod books. I suspect we'll make an offer on The Star Fraction at such time as we discuss his next book with his agent. I'd like to publish it in the US. But right now we don't own it and we don't have a firm plan for it.
All this being said, I really wonder why the Slashdot review lists The Star Fraction as a Tor book, while giving the ISBN of the Orbit (UK) paperback. I guess these little glitches happen when your reviewer is filing from Antarctica...
Slashdot Mirror
"SMOF" is ironic. If you take the idea of being one too seriously, you're not one.
As a word, its most useful function is as a verb. I.e., "to smof" -- to geek about the intricacies of Hugos, convention running, and other "inside baseball" of the SF and fantasy world.
"There have been winners who wrote first in another language which was then translated to English - I can think of a few who first wrote the story in French and the English translation won a Hugo."
Actually, not.
It would be nice if it were otherwise, but your memory is performing an act of wishful thinking. No work of fiction not originally published in English has ever won a Hugo.
Actually, the Hugo Awards are explicitly for both fantasy and SF:
Section 3.3: Categories.
3.3.1: Best Novel. A science fiction or fantasy story of forty thousand (40,000) words or more.
3.3.2: Best Novella. A science fiction or fantasy story of between seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words.
Etc etc.
I'm all for the World Fantasy Awards -- I won one in 1987 and I was a judge this year -- but they're not different from the Hugos in that they're for fantasy and the Hugos are "for SF". They're different in that they're a juried award and the Hugos are a popularly-voted one. You're mixing apples, oranges, prosciutto, and turpentine.
Except that, in fact, the solid majority of those casting nominating ballots were Americans. You do the math.
Well, the Clarke/Baxter novel is dedicated to Bob Shaw, who wrote the "slow glass" story "Light of Other Days." So I think it's a good bet that the authors were conscious of the similarity in titles between their novel and Shaw's story. Both works derive their titles from a poem by Robert Herrick.
We probably could have as easily started with The Stone Canal, which is really the anchor book of the whole tetralogy. The fact is, we started with The Cassini Division because that's the MacLeod book that made me wake up and go Holy Shit, after which I immediately dashed back to take a second look at the first two. Tests performed on a few other readers yielded the same result.
It's very hard to get American booksellers heated up over unestablished British SF authors. Whatever the folly of starting with TCD, we seem to have successfully established MacLeod at a much higher distribution level than such writers usually get over here. And, as I remarked on Usenet, everywhere I go it seems SF readers are arguing about whether we were crazy to start with The Cassini Division, and I find it very difficult to see this as evidence that we did something wrong... :-)
(By the way, I don't know if it's been noted anywhere in these threads, but our edition of The Stone Canal is now out. To be followed by The Sky Road in August, at which point The Cassini Division will also appear in paperback.
I was shocked to see Tor put out The Cassini Division, given the politics of most of its stable of writers.
I think you don't know very much about the politics of most of our "stable of writers"! Ken MacLeod isn't even the first Trot on our list. Or the second.
I'd rather not pigeonhole a lot of particular authors' politics for them. But looking at our schedule for the next two years, I see as many writers who I personally know to tilt left as writers who I personally know to tilt right. For every Poul Anderson, a Suzy McKee Charnas. We're pleased to publish them all.
I'm the manager of the SF line, and I'm an American left-winger with streaks of both libertarianism and old-fashioned Catholic social progressivism. (Parse that!) The editor at Tor who hired me ten years ago, my mentor, is an avowed anarcho-syndicalist. Our boss, publisher Tom Doherty, is a moderate conservative with strong live-and-let-live impulses and a passionate desire for large infrastructure development.
One of the more interesting things about science fiction is the way that, within it, writers of extremely divergent political views have often managed a better level of discourse and argument than their mainstream counterparts. Samuel R. Delany, for instance, has written with great clarity on Robert A. Heinlein, starting with the observation that the conservative Balzac was "one of Marx's favorite writers, and Heinlein is one of mine." SF is where an extremely hard-nosed self-described "Marxian" like John Barnes can wind up writing a story in an anthology of libertarian SF -- a story that brilliantly explodes all the cliches of libertarian SF, but which was included by the libertarian editors anyway. It's a field in which Poul Anderson generously proffers an advance quote praising Pacific Edge, a very left-wing utopian novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. And it's where Ken MacLeod can write novels that ask (as he put it in his Vector interview), "what if the socialist critique of capitalism and the libertarian critique of socialism are both true?"
If you find that it seems like most SF and fantasy writers are either conservatives, libertarians, or moderate liberals, it may be that this is because you're mostly familiar with an older generation of SF and fantasy writers. And it may be that some of those folks' politics aren't quite as simple as you're making them out to be. There's an immense amount of boring normative crap in SF, human frailty being what it is. But the best SF proceeds from John W. Campbell's demand that we "ask the next question." Every so often, you get to see writers do this to their own most cherished beliefs and prejudices, and for me that's when the whole game becomes worthwhile.
I don't think I would categorically state plans for publishing a book we don't own the rights to. We own the rights to the other three MacLeod books. I suspect we'll make an offer on The Star Fraction at such time as we discuss his next book with his agent. I'd like to publish it in the US. But right now we don't own it and we don't have a firm plan for it.
All this being said, I really wonder why the Slashdot review lists The Star Fraction as a Tor book, while giving the ISBN of the Orbit (UK) paperback. I guess these little glitches happen when your reviewer is filing from Antarctica...