Thanks very much to those of you who voted; we had a tie for second place, so to keep things fair and impartial from the editorial side I flipped a coin to decide between them. The Futurismic nominations for the Phoenix Pick Award are:
Best of luck to Sandra and Silvia! I’ll keep us updated as news arrives
Hey! I was going to shut off the comments for Futurismic‘s nominations for the Phoenix Pick Awards today, but there are only three replies. Three.
I mean, come on – I know for a fact that more than three of you regularly read the fiction we publish here. So show a bit of support for the writers, why not? And, yes, for Futurismic as a fiction venue as well: Chris and I may run this site predominantly for the love, but it’d be nice to feel that people cared enough to mention which story they liked best. Thirty seconds of your time, that’s all we’re asking here.
So please, go check the list of eligible stories, and leave a comment with your choices. You’ve got until Thursday evening, UK time, to make a short fiction writer’s day… and to make two editors feel they haven’t been wasting a lot of time and money for nothing.
Readers of Futurismic fiction, your assistance would be appreciated: Phoenix Pick are running a competition for original science fiction stories published online between July 2009 and June 2010, and we need your help to decide which two stories we should send in.
A bit of background, here: the Phoenix Pick Award is a new prize, exclusively for sf published online, and is unique in that the stories for consideration have to be submitted by the editors who originally published them, rather than by the authors themselves. The prize money for the winning story – guaranteed at a minimum of $US650, no less! – will be split between the story’s author and its publishing venue.
Now, each publishing venue can submit two stories from the eligibility period for consideration, and that’s where we need your help.
We obviously think all eleven stories we published between July 2009 and June 2010 are awesome, or we wouldn’t have published them (d’uh!), and picking favourites would be no fun at all. So I figure we call on you lot, the readers, and crowdsource the choices – what could be fairer than that?
So, here are all the eligible stories, so you can refresh your familiarity with them:
To nominate your two choices, please list them in order of preference (i.e. favourite, second favourite) in a comment below this post*. You’ve got until Sunday 10th October to make your choice; on that day, I’ll lock the comments, count ’em all up, and announce the two leading candidates to be put forward for the Award.
[ * I looked into using an embedded poll gizmo, but none of them really worked the way I wanted them to, and at least with comments made here I can check by IP address to be sure no one’s stuffing the ballot! ]
Well, I’m back from Eastercon, and – as is traditional at this time of year – the genre fiction awards cycle is gearing up, with results and nominations and longlists flying in every which direction.
At Eastercon itself, China Mieville took the BSFA Best Novel award while the inimitable Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia took the Short Fiction gong, and we got to hear the Hugo nominations announced to the world; last week saw the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist announced, and the Philip K Dick Award has just been called for Bitter Angels by C L Anderson – the latter being both a book and author of whom I am completely unaware.
If nothing else, the genre scene’s ability (and will) to debate the merits of the the work produced within it (and, in some cases, beyond it) shows little sign of going away… and as far as I’m concerned, that’s the very best thing about all these awards. I’m much less bothered by who wins than I am by the discussions they generate about the winners, the losers and the utterly overlooked.
But I was thinking perhaps I should start some sort of Futurismic annual-awards-type-of-thing, if only because our reader demographic here is skewed rather more away from regular fandom (if there can be said to be any such thing) than many other genre webzines. What do you think? Suggestions for categories and nominees more than welcome – pipe up in the comments. 🙂