Comments on: SF Awards – rubbish.

By: SRSFF

SRSFF — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:52:52 +0000

Dear Sirs, I published the essay. Please, find the link here:
http://www.srsff.ro/articole/sf-awards-rubbish.html
We thank you again.
Best regards,

Sorin Camner

By: Paul Raven

Paul Raven — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:00:16 +0000

I have sent you an email, Mr Camner; thanks for getting in touch.

By: Sorin Camner

Sorin Camner — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:18:21 +0000

Dear Sir,

I am the PR of the newly estabilished Romanian Science-Fiction and Fantasy Society.
I would like to post in our web some translated parts from your essay. Please be so kind and give us approvals for doing so. Thank you very much for your kindly answer.

Best regards,

Sorin Camner

By: Jack Deighton

Jack Deighton — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:43:47 +0000

I didn’t dislike The Sparrow, but didn’t think it was that great a work.

“Gibson’s Neuromancer picked up the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Dick, suggesting that the award process can get it right at least some of the time”

I know lots of folk found Gibson fresh and amazing but I simply couldn’t trust him as a writer because of that first sentence, “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
What, pray, is the colour of television?
The image which I suspect Gibson intended is definitely not what the sentence conjures for me, which is white noise rather than a greyish blandness. And “television” is an industry, not an object.
Consider the absolutely equivalent sentence, “The sky was the colour of battleship, painted for action.” How much sense does that make?
Too much striving for effect and, unfortunately, failing.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:24:32 +0000

Liz says: It seems strange to complain about the Baen’s Universe network of fans skewing an award, since it seems that the problem wasn’t that they mustered all their fans to vote, but that you couldn’t muster as many. You are assuming the panel would have come to a different result.”
I wasn’t assuming anything. Nor was I complaining. In fact because the poll ran a cumulative score updated hourly people were telling me Exit was #1 several times during the final few days of polling. I’m chuffed Exit, Pursued by a Bee came #2 out of 160+. Having said that it says little about the quality of our oeuvre and more about rallying votes – even one more vote. Trying to be objective public voting is a bizarre way to choose ‘best works’, but it is great fun!