Signing Books Like a Real Writer Would

On Sunday, June 26, at 3:00 p.m., I'll be signing copies of Writers of the Future, Vol. XXVII at the Broadway Book Mall, at 200 S. Broadway in Denver. Appearing with me will be Erik Jean Solem, one of the winning illustrators; J Alan Erwine, local author whose new book is Red Moon Rising; and Laura Givens, Red Moon Rising's cover artist.

The event is hosted by Ron & Nina Else of Who Else! Books, who are the nicest couple you could ever hope to meet. Their little shop has hosted some of the best authors in the world -- Connie Willis was there last weekend, for instance, and Ken Scholes will appear there tonight -- but they are also kind enough to provide a forum for local wannabes like me.

So if you happen to be in Colorado and are interested in the Writers of the Future Contest, or you like to support local aspiring writers, or if you just want a free slice of cake (provided by the extremely generous, supportive folks at the Denver office of Dorsey & Whitney LLP), drop by and check it out!

Aaron's 2011 Hugo Recommendations :: Best Novel

Hugo nominations are due in just a week, so it's past time to list my favorite SF/F of 2010, starting with best novel. These are the five novels I'm planning to nominate:

Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker
Aliette de Bodard, Servant of the Underworld
Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven
Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death
Catherynne M. Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed

I expect the Bacigalupi novel to make the final ballot, and I think the others all have at least a chance at nomination, except perhaps Servant of the Underworld. (If de Bodard is nominated this year, it will be for one of her outstanding pieces of short fiction.)

As usual when selecting novels to nominate for the Hugo, I am dismayed to realize how many books from last year by some of my favorite authors I've yet to read. If I could stop time and read everything I'd like to before the nominating deadline, these are the ones I think would be most likely to elbow their way onto my list:

Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail
Greg Egan, Zendegi
Ian McDonald, The Dervish House
China Miéville, Kraken
Connie Willis, Blackout/All Clear

Whether you agree with any of my choices or not, I hope you find time to nominate by next week.

Aaron's Top Five Neglected Stories

Jeff VanderMeer asks: What are your top five underrated short stories of all time? This naturally had me looking through my list of favorite stories, where I spotted eight that had not received major award nominations or similar accolades. Two were by the same author, so I culled out one of those, then I dropped the two stories that were later expaned into novels to get my list:

Walter M. Miller, Jr. - Crucifixus Etiam (1953) Most of my favorites from the Golden Age are on the usual suspects list, "Flowers for Algernon," "The Star," etc., but "Crucifixus Etiam" has been largely forgotten. In a way, that's appropriate; the story is about brave pioneers whose heroic efforts will surely be forgotten by the later generations who benefit from them.

Orson Scott Card - Holy (1980) Card is known for Ender's Game and sequels, but much of his best work is in his early short fiction. Some of his best short stories were well received at the time, such as "Unaccompanied Sonata" and "Lost Boys," but "Holy," from Robert Silverberg's New Dimensions series of anthologies, was almost entirely ignored. Card must have written it on a dare -- the story is about a man trying to get to a particular rock to smear human feces on it, and by the end Card actually has you caring about whether that happens.

Connie Willis - Chance (1986) For all the awards Connie Willis has won, "Chance" somehow slipped through the cracks, but it's one of her very best, emotionally powerful albeit not as funny as, say, "Even the Queen."

Greg Egan - The Moral Virologist (1990) Originally published in Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, this is a great thought experiment story. What if you tailored a virus to kill people who commit adultery?

Susan Palwick - Sorrel's Heart (2007) This is one of my favorites of this century, from Palwick's collection The Fate of Mice. It didn't get the attention it deserved, although Jonathan Strahan picked it up for his year's best anthology.

The Female Touch

I just looked over the story recommendations I've made for the first couple months of this new feature, and I discovered that of the eight different authors I've picked so far, seven have been women. This was not at all deliberate. I have just been tossing out stories I liked as I came across them, and the authors' gender never crossed my mind.

I believe this is just a statistical oddity, not a reflection of any unconscious bias I have in favor of women authors. Certainly if I were to put together a list of my all-time favorite writers it would be a male-dominated lineup, although Ursula LeGuin and Connie Willis and Octavia Butler would feature prominently.

Still, it demonstrates how many outstanding female authors there are in the field today. As more of these women work their way up the ranks, I suspect the recent underrepresentation of women in major award nominations will become a thing of the past.

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Asimov's Science Fiction December 2007

The Magazine of the Week is the December 2007 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction (cover art by Michael Carroll) with cover story "All Seated on the Ground" by Connie Willis.

At the World Science Fiction Convention here in Denver earlier this month, "All Seated on the Ground" received the Hugo Award for Best Novella of 2007. This was the tenth Hugo Award for fiction of Connie Willis's illustrious career, making her the Michael Phelps of science fiction and fantasy -- the next highest total of Hugos for fiction is seven, by both Poul Anderson and Harlan Ellison. It was fitting that Connie received her tenth award so close to her Greeley home.

"All Seated on the Ground" was Connie's Christmas story for 2007, in which Christmas music proves the key to establishing contact with a stern alien race. Connie Willis Christmas tales are a fixture of Asimov's December issues. Some of her previous Christmas stories were collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories (which I reviewed for Fantastic Reviews - see my review). Next week's Magazine of the Week will contain the Hugo winner in the Best Novelette category.

2008 Hugo Award Winners

BEST NOVEL
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

BEST NOVELLA
"All Seated on the Ground" by Connie Willis

BEST NOVELETTE
"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang

BEST SHORT STORY
"Tideline" by Elizabeth Bear

Here are the fiction categories Hugo winners, the top awards, not a complete list of Hugos awarded. The Hugo Awards were presented last night, August 9th, at Denvention 3 in Denver, Colorado. We were there!

Aaron's Take on the 2008 Hugo Nominees :: NOVELLAS

My two least favorite of the novella nominees are both by writers for whom I have great respect, so I readily concede that I may have missed something. Memorare by Gene Wolfe started with an interesting premise, exploring asteroids carved into elaborate memorials, some of which are booby-trapped, but went off in a direction – the protagonist unexpectedly bumps into his ex-wife in space and they enter a surreal hollow asteroid together – that I found uninteresting and contrived. Recovering Apollo 8 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a little piece of nostalgia, centering on a rich man’s obsession with recovering the corpses of the Apollo 8 astronauts from space. This is alternate history, as in real life Apollo 8 returned safely to Earth. I somehow missed the point of the exercise, and found the whole story rather tedious.

The other three nominated novellas are all very good, although I have to put Lucius Shepard’s Stars Seen Through Stone third out of the three, because the science fictional element seems disconnected from the rest of the tale. It feels as if Shepard wanted to tell a humorous story about a music producer working with a talented but personally unappealing artist, but had to throw in some space aliens so he could sell the story to F&SF.

All Seated on the Ground, in which choir music is the key to communicating with aliens, does not rank with my favorite Connie Willis pieces, as I found the first two-thirds of the story overlong and repetitive. Still, it has Connie Willis’s trademark wit, and things come together so nicely by the end that the tale well rewards the patience required at the beginning.

My favorite of the nominees for best novella is The Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress. Kress is for me an inconsistent writer, producing some stories I enjoy very much and others that leave me cold, but she was on when she wrote The Fountain of Age, in which a wealthy old man searches for his lost love, whose blood was the key to creating a futuristic Hobson’s Choice: stop aging for twenty years, but with certain death waiting at the end of that period. I found this to be very much an award-caliber story, effective on both an emotional and intellectual level.

Aaron's Ballot:
1. Nancy Kress – The Fountain of Age
2. Connie Willis – All Seated on the Ground
3. Lucius Shepard – Stars Seen Through Stone
4. Kristine Kathryn Rusch – Recovering Apollo 8
5. Gene Wolfe – Memorare

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Asimov's Science Fiction January 2005

The Magazine of the Week is the January 2005 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, cover art by Michael Whelan. The magazine is signed by Colorado author Connie Willis, whose cover story "Inside Job" won this year's Hugo Award for Best Novella of 2005. (Also note on the cover the name of Roger Ebert, who contributed an essay to this issue. Mr. Ebert is a lifetime fan who once published his own science fiction fanzine -- there are many more of us out there than you knew.)

“Inside Job” is an excellent example of Connie Willis's renowned wit and irony. The story follows Rob, a professional skeptic dedicated to debunking phony psychics and mystics, who encounters a medium channeling notorious skeptic H.L. Mencken. Each time she does this, Mencken's spirit promptly berates her audience for believing in such nonsense. "Inside Job" first appeared in the Magazine of the Week, and was later published as a stand-alone hardcover book by Subterranean Press.

"Inside Job" was my #2 choice for best novella, behind only Kelly Link's remarkable story "Magic for Beginners," but I was still delighted that it won, because Connie Willis deserves all the accolades we can give her. She is a wonderful writer and an incredibly generous person. (You may recall from an earlier BOTW that she drove from Greeley to Denver just to meet with my son and his fourth- and fifth-grade classmates.) This is her ninth Hugo, the most Hugo Awards for fiction of any author ever. Congratulations to Connie Willis on this well-deserved recognition!

Next week we will see the Hugo winner for Best Novel.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

The Book of the Week is Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. This is a signed and inscribed copy of the trade paperback first printing (cover art by Tim Jacobus), issued simultaneously with the extremely rare hardcover edition.

First published in 1992, Doomsday Book won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award for Best Novel (sharing the Hugo with Vernor Vinge's excellent A Fire Upon the Deep) and has quickly become a classic of the science fiction field. Doomsday Book tells of a young historian who travels in time to England's plague years. It is perhaps the best example of Connie Willis's remarkable ability to write stories that are both very funny and terribly sad.

Connie Willis is a charming person, a delightful public speaker, and absurdly generous with her time. She has twice traveled out from Greeley to meet with our book group - Denver SF & Fantasy Book Club - and last month came out to talk with a group of 4th and 5th graders at my son's school after the students read Doomsday Book. Ms. Willis is always in great demand as a toastmaster at science fiction and fantasy conventions. Last month she hosted the Nebula Awards banquet, presenting the awards voted upon by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. And with that segue, next week's Book of the Week will be in honor of the writer named Author Emeritus at that banquet.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Fire Watch by Connie Willis

The Book of the Week is the hardcover first edition of Fire Watch, signed and inscribed by Greeley, Colorado author Connie Willis (cover art by Tom Kidd). As nice as it was to find a 100-year-old first edition of The Jungle, this was my most exciting acquisition at the book sale mentioned last week. Connie Willis is an amazing author and one of the most decorated writers in the history of science fiction and fantasy -- she has won Hugo Awards in fiction categories eight times and Nebula Awards six times, both more than any other author ever (and she is a contender for a ninth Hugo Award this year for her excellent novella "Inside Job").

Fire Watch is a collection of short fiction, published in 1984. It was Willis's first solo book (she had previously coauthored Water Witch, a collaboration with Cynthia Felice). Two of the stories in Fire Watch had won the first of her many awards to come -- the title story, about a time traveler caught in the London Blitz of World War II, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novelette of 1982 and the poignant "A Letter from the Clearys" won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story of 1982 -- yet Willis was still relatively unknown when the book was published. Because of this, and because collections of short fiction generally do not sell as well as novels, the initial print run for Fire Watch was quite small, which is why copies of the first edition (especially signed copies) are highly prized by collectors.

Connie Willis signed my copy of Fire Watch two weeks ago, when she was so amazingly kind as to come to Denver to meet with my son and a group of his 4th and 5th grade classmates, who had just finished reading her outstanding novel Doomsday Book, next week's Book of the Week.