Breaking SF news and area writers publishing news
Paul Di Filippo and Sheila Finch Join Campbell Award Jury
LAWRENCE, KS - November, 2009
Paul Di Filippo and Sheila Finch have accepted appointment to the jury for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best SF novel of the year. In 2009, Paul A. Carter retired from the jury after having bravely served for many years, almost since the Award's inception.
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Sheila Finch is the author of seven science fiction novels and numerous short stories that have appeared in Amazing, Asimov’s, Fantasy Book, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and many anthologies. A collection of the “Lingster” stories recently appeared as The Guild of Xenolinguists. Sheila taught creative writing at El Camino College for thirty years and at workshops around California. She also writes non-fiction about teaching creative writing and science fiction, most recently, a series of short essays on the field that appear online at the SFWA website. Her work has won several awards, including the Nebula Award for Best Novella, the San Diego Book Award for Juvenile Fiction, and the Compton-Crook Award for Best First Novel. Paul Di Filippo sold his first story in 1977, and his second in 1985. Since then, he has accumulated over 150 periodical credits, and had twenty-five books published. He has two more due out in 2010. He reviews for a number of venues, including The Barnes & Noble Review. He has lived with his partner Deborah Newton for 34 years in Providence, Rhode Island, currently with a calico cat named Penny Century and a chocolate cocker spaniel named Brownie. |
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The Campbell Award is one of the major annual awards for science fiction. The first Campbell Award was presented at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. Since then the Award has been presented in various parts of the world: at California State University at Fullerton; at St. John's College, Oxford; at the World SF Writers Conference in Dublin; in Stockholm; at the World SF meeting in Dublin again; the University of Kansas; and in a joint event with the Science Fiction Research Association in Kansas City in 2007. The current jury consists of Gregory Benford, Paul Di Filippo, Sheila Finch, James Gunn, Elizabeth Anne Hull, Paul Kincaid, Christopher McKitterick, Pamela Sargent, and T.A. Shippey.
Kij Johnson Wins the World Fantasy Award
SAN JOSE, CA - November 1, 2009
CSSF Associate Director Kij Johnson wins the World Fantasy Award for "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss." If you wish to congratulate her, you can find her contact info here.
China Miéville Reads at KU, September 23
LAWRENCE, KS - September 20, 2009
Miéville's schedule has grown to include a fiction reading on Wednesday, September 23, at 7:30 p.m. in the Kansas Union’s Oread Books (map .pdf here).
China Miéville Speaks at KU, September 24
LAWRENCE, KS - September 14, 2009
A British author of what has been called “the New Weird” will be the KU English Department’s Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecturer September 24 at 7:30 p.m. in the Kansas Union’s Alderson Auditorium (map .pdf here). China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station launched a genre that combined urban fantasy with the rigorous background and treatment customarily associated with science fiction.
The British author of two other novels in the Perdido Street Station universe, The Scar and Iron Council, also published King Rat, Un Dun Lun, and the recent The City & the City. Miéville also is an academic, with a B.A. from Cambridge and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He has been a candidate for the British House of Commons and has published a book on Marxism and international law, as well as co-editing (with Mark Bould) Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Early Classics of Science Fiction). His fiction has been nominated for numerous awards and won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award twice and the Locus Magazine award.
Miéville edited a special issue on Marxism and fantasy for Historical Materialism and a forthcoming special issue on Marxism and science fiction. He will be speaking on "Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory."
The Gunn Lecture, endowed by Dr. Richard W. Gunn, brother of James Gunn, emeritus professor of English and director of the J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, has featured several science-fiction scholars. Although it has also sponsored speakers on Shakespeare and Ralph Ellison, it has brought a distinguished group of science-fiction experts to the campus beginning with scholar Fredric Jameson, William A. Lane Professor at Duke University, and continuing with Bill Brown, Edgar Carson Waller Professor at the University of Chicago. Michael Chabon, a prize-winning science-fiction and mainstream author and editor, presented a Humanities lecture last year.
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2009 Campbell and Sturgeon Award Winners Announced
LAWRENCE, KS - June 30, 2009
Two Canadians and a Briton have won the 2009 John W. Campbell Award for the best science fiction novel of the year and the 2009 Theodore Sturgeon Award for the best short science fiction of the year, James Gunn, Director of the University of Kansas Center for the Study of Science Fiction, announced today.
The Campbell award is shared by Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (Tor Books) and Ian MacLeod’s Song of Time (PS Publishing). Third place goes to James Morrow's The Philosopher's Apprentice (William Morrow).
James Alan Gardner’s “The Ray Gun: A Love Story” won the Sturgeon Award. Second place goes to Kathleen Ann Goonan's "Memory Dog" (Asimov's), and third place goes to Ian McDonald's "The Tear" (Empire).
The authors will accept their awards at the University of Kansas during an Awards dinner on July 10 and will be featured at the annual Campbell Conference on Saturday, July 11, and Sunday morning, July 12.
The Campbell Conference will discuss “What’s Old, What’s New: The New Space Opera, the New Hard SF, the New Weird.” In the afternoon session, the three winners will open a discussion on what’s new in publishing and its affect on writing and reading. Doctorow is a major author on the new digital and internet publishing, and believes that copyright laws should be liberalized to allow free sharing of all digital media.
This is only the third time in the history of the Campbell Award that the balloting of the jurors has resulted in a tie: in 1974 between Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and Robert Merle’s Malevil and in 2002 between Jack Williamson’s Terraforming Earth and Robert Charles Wilson’s The Chronoliths.
Doctorow and Gardner are Canadians. Doctorow currently is living in London. MacLeod is a Britain. Doctorow writes a column about digital publishing for Locus Magazine. Some of his essays have been published by Tachyon Publishing as Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. Ian R. MacLeod studied law and worked as a public servant before publishing his first novel, The Great Wheel (which won the Locus first novel award), in 1997. His novella “The Summer Isles” won the Sidewise Award for alternate history and again as a novel.
Gardner turned to writing after earning bachelor and master’s degrees in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. His story “Children of the Creche” won the Writers of the Future grand prize in 1989. He has published seven novels. He also is an educator and technical writer.