CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Yea, two more of our own on the winners’ lists of the World Fantasy Awards, announced overnight.

Best novel – Margo Lanagan (Tender Morsels) was in a dead heat with Jeffrey Ford for The Shadow Year.

Best artist – yes, you’ve guessed correctly – the inimitable Shaun Tan.

Congratulations to both.

All winners here.

We have already tweeted these, but just in case you haven’t jumped aboard the twitter train yet, here are the nominations for Best Novel 2009:

The House of the Stag, Kage Baker
The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford
The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory
Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan

And if you check out all the nominations, especially Best Artist and Best Collection, you’ll find Shaun Tan’s name there. Twice.

Well done, Margo and Shaun and all nominees. Winners will be announced at the World Fantasy Convention to be held in San Jose California at the end of October. Should Margo and Shaun be packing their bags?

We know, we know. There’s an unabashed Shaun Tan bias on this blog. But we had to let you know that he has been nominated for a Chesley Award for Tales from Outer Suburbia.Twice.

The Chesleys are given by the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists, and this time Shaun is up for Best Interior Illustration and Artistic Achievement.

Winners will be announced at Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal 6-10 August.

Somehow this award has slipped under our radar in the past, but any organisation that shortlists Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula le Guin and Terry Pratchett in the same year must be listened to.

Have a look at the impressive list of Mythopoeic Awards finalists for 2009 in four categories here.

The Mythopoeic Society, a body devoted to the serious study of ‘fantastic and mythic literature’, will announce the eventual winners in Los Angeles in July.

Ursula K. Le Guin and Ysabeau Wilce were among the winners at the Nebula Awards presentations in Los Angeles at the weekend. These annual awards are presented by SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Best overall novel: Powers, by le Guin. This is the third title in the Annals of the Western Shores series.

And Wilce, for the next in her Flora Segunda series (too long to type so it’s CtrlX and Ctrl V and hang the formatting) : How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room), took the Andre Norton Award for YA Science Fiction and Fantasy.

The shortlists for the Nebulas, the awards presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, have just been announced.

The full list of nominees is here. Of particular interest to readers of YA are the categories of novel (with two YA titles shortlisted), and the Norton Award (named in honour of the great YA fantasy writer, the late Andre Norton). There’s a Knight of the Realm and not to make too fine a parochial point, an Aussie.

Novel

• Little Brother (Cory Doctorow)
• Powers (Ursula le Guin)
• Cauldron (Jack McDevitt)
• Brasyl (Ian McDonald)
• Making Money (Terry Pratchett)
• Superpowers (David A. Schwartz)

Norton Award

• Graceling (Kristin Cashore)
• Lamplighter (D.M. Cornish)
• Savvy (Ingrid Law)
• The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Mary E. Pearson)
• Flora’s Dare … (Ysabeau S. Wilce)

Winners will be announced in Los Angeles over the weekend of April 24-26.

An interesting debate has been occurring on the Read Roger blog, the Horn Book editor’s ‘rants and raves’ as he puts it.

The Horn Book Journal has for a long time listed C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia not in the order they were published but in reading order, thus putting The Magician’s Nephew at the head of the list. Many other sources do the same.

But protests from readers have forced a change – The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) now leads the charge, with The Magician’s Nephew (1955) sitting where it was published, between The Horse and His Boy (1954) and The Last Battle (1956).

The comments that have led to the change in Horn Book’s policy make interesting reading.

With Prince Caspian about to hit cinema sceens, some readers will be finding this series for the first time. But in what order?