Category: Critical Mass News

Winners in each category highlighted in bold yellow

Best Novel

The Dagger’s Path, Glenda Larke (Orbit)
Day Boy, Trent Jamieson (Text Publishing)
Graced, Amanda Pillar (Momentum)
Lament for the Afterlife, Lisa L. Hannett (ChiZine Publications)
Zeroes, Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, and Deborah Biancotti (Simon and Schuster)

Best Novella or Novelette

“The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood”, Deborah Kalin, in Cherry Crow Children (Twelfth Planet Press)
“Fake Geek Girl”, Tansy Rayner Roberts, in Review of Australian Fiction, volume 14, issue 4 (Review of Australian Fiction)
“Hot Rods”, Cat Sparks, in Lightspeed Science Fiction & Fantasy 58 (Lightspeed Science Fiction & Fantasy)
“The Miseducation of Mara Lys”, Deborah Kalin, in Cherry Crow Children (Twelfth Planet Press)
“Of Sorrow and Such”, Angela Slatter, in Of Sorrow and Such (Tor.com)
“The Wages of Honey”, Deborah Kalin, in Cherry Crow Children (Twelfth Planet Press)

Best Short Story

“2B”, Joanne Anderton, in Insert Title Here (FableCroft Publishing)
“The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner”, Alan Baxter, in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan/Feb 2015 (Fantasy & Science Fiction)
“A Hedge of Yellow Roses”, Kathleen Jennings, in Hear Me Roar (Ticonderoga Publications)
“Look how cold my hands are”, Deborah Biancotti, in Cranky Ladies of History (FableCroft Publishing)

Best Collected Work

Bloodlines, Amanda Pillar (Ticonderoga Publications)
Cherry Crow Children, Deborah Kalin, edited by Alisa Krasnostein (Twelfth Planet Press)
Cranky Ladies of History, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Tehani Wessely (FableCroft Publishing)
Letters to Tiptree, Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein (Twelfth Planet Press)
Peripheral Visions: The Collected Ghost Stories by Robert Hood (IFWG Publishing Australia)

Best Artwork

Cover art, Rovina Cai, for “Tom, Thom” (Tor.com)
Cover art, Kathleen Jennings, for Bloodlines (Ticonderoga Publications)
Cover and internal artwork, Kathleen Jennings, for Cranky Ladies of History (FableCroft Publishing)
Cover, Shauna O’Meara, for The Never Never Land (CSFG Publishing)
Illustrations, Shaun Tan, for The Singing Bones (Allen & Unwin)

Best Fan Publication in any Medium

The Angriest, Grant Watson
The Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
Galactic Suburbia, Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, and Tansy Rayner Roberts
SF Commentary, Bruce Gillespie
The Writer and the Critic, Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond

Best Fan Writer

Tsana Dolichva, for body of work, including reviews and interviews in Tsana’s Reads and Reviews
Foz Meadows, for body of work, including reviews in Shattersnipe: Malcontent & Rainbows
Ian Mond, for body of work, including The Hysterical Hamster
Alexandra Pierce, for body of work, including reviews in Randomly Yours, Alex
Katharine Stubbs, for body of work, including Venture Adlaxre
Grant Watson, for body of work, including reviews in The Angriest

Best Fan Artist

Kathleen Jennings, for body of work, including Illustration Friday
Belinda Morris, for body of work, including Belinda Illustrates

Best New Talent

Rivqa Rafael
T. R. Napper
D. K. Mok
Liz Barr

William Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism or Review

Letters to Tiptree, Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein (Twelfth Planet Press)
The Rereading the Empire Trilogy review series, Tansy Rayner Roberts
The Reviewing New Who series, David McDonald, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Tehani Wessely
“Sara Kingdom dies at the end”, Tansy Rayner Roberts in Companion Piece (Mad Norwegian Press)
“SF Women of the 20th Century”, Tansy Rayner Roberts
Squeeing over Supergirl, David McDonald and Tehani Wessely series

Nick is our guest speaker for the May Critical Mass (7pm at Kappys, Wednesday 4th May). He’s going to talk about his first novel, The Curse of Kereves Dere,  and perhaps provide a few hints about electronic publishing.

“The magic of Old Scotland was a very different matter to hers, a thing of fairies and diabolic pacts, chaining its practitioners to ruinous powers she had no intention of dealing with. her magic was book magic, an outgrowth of the natural philosophy that had made her such a prodigy as a doctor, able to cure all ills and almost raise the dead. Hers was the magic of an age of reason: of alchemy and philosophy and the clear light of day, not the smoke and cobwebs of the past’s dark night.” — Even in the Cannon’s Mouth, Adrian Tchaikovsky

Five excellent authors play with the characters from Shakespeare, sometimes crossing plays and centuries in the process. An interesting modern take on the Bard’s tales.

A new novella by Seanan McGuire published by Tor.com

“Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children No Solicitations No Visitors No Quests. Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere… else. But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children.”

Highly recommended by Tansy of Galactic Suburbia

One of the nice things about ebooks is the chance to purchase collections of old stories in useful bundles or “megapacks” for a pittance (typically 99c). As well as classic selections, Wildside have also released a series of classic SF stories  from the early magazines, as well as single author collections. You can find some of this material from Project Gutenberg for free, but the magazine work is harder to get. And these are nicely formatted epubs. 

The Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK

The Professor Challenger Megapack

The Complete Series
by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Arsene Lupin MEGAPACK

11 Classic Crime Books!
by Maurice LeBlanc

Time to have a look at what’s new in terms of SF/Fantasy on television.

Don’t forget, it’s a 7pm start at Kappys!

Those of you who are fans of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series of books might want to pick up the collected Body Work comic story from Titan comics: it’s an original story about PC Grant and Inspector Nightingale of the met’s special Falcon division (dealing with magic events), which takes place between the events in the novels Broken Homes and Foxglove Summer.

Keep an eye out for the serialised chapters of Rivers of London: Night Witch at your local comics shop.

The good news is there is a new, excellent translation of this 1964 novel by the Strugatsky brothers.

Unlike the earlier translation, which Ken MacLeod had difficulty reading, “No reader of this fine new translation will have that reaction. The story grips from start to finish: a smooth and fast gallop full of colour, adventure, action, and intrigue. Set on a feudal planet entering – and a kingdom being violently held back from entering – its equivalent of the Renaissance, it was at first conceived as an exciting adventure story in the manner of The Three Musketeers, albeit with alien (i.e. in this case human) observers caught up in the caper. The beginnings of a reaction in the early 1960s against the post-Stalin Soviet ‘thaw’ in cultural policy made the authors deepen and darken the tale, to present a strong and subtle argument about morality, politics, and history.” — Ken McLeod’s Introduction to the new translation by Olena Bormashenko

see Strange Horizon’s review by Gautam Bhatia

Трудно быть богом (as they might write in Russian) is the title of a new (2013) film directed by Aleksei German (above), based on the novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

…it’s utterly compelling and immersive, with every shot a masterclass in old-school in-camera spectacle. In the end this is the one thing that diminishes the film relative to the book, because what the screen version doesn’t have is the novel’s intellectual and moral power — the uniquely science-fictional sense of standing hands-tied in the middle of an entire world’s history with a godlike awareness of the stakes and a tormented mix of revulsion and pity for the sufferings out of which civilisation is born. German trusts the viewer to bring all that if he merely provides the moral chaos and stomach-churning images, which is probably too ambitious an ask. But it’s been so long since ambition in sf cinema was this big that we’d barely noticed how the pictures got so small.
               — Nick Lowe, writing in  interzone 260

There is a copy in town, and we’re hoping to persuade Cinematheque to screen the film later this year.

Continue reading “Nebula Finalists” →