Track Changes Wins BSFA Award + Hugo Voting Opens

The 2025 Eastercon was held in Belfast last weekend, and at the announcement of the British Science Fiction Association I was stunned and delighted by Track Changes winning the award for best long non-fiction. This was a particularly gratifying win because Track Changes was nominated alongside such impressive work, representing a broad range of long-form criticism of the science fiction and fantasy fields. Far be it from me to suggest more Hugo categories, but I can't help feeling that the BSFA's approach, which separates essays and other non-fiction from book-length work, makes more sense than the grab-bag that is the Best Related Work category.

Even leaving this unexpected honor aside, Eastercon was a very good time. I was on four panels, moderating one—all, I believe, are now available on the con's catch-up platform. I particularly enjoyed the obligatory reviewing panel, which I wasn't even going to request until Niall Harrison asked me to fill in for him. I always worry that these panels end up covering the same topics again and again, and I don't think much is helped by having the same people on them. But under the fine stewardship of moderator Emily January, I think we were able to cover new ground. Other panels included discussion of Twin Peaks and the expanding Dune media universe (the latter ended up being a conversation with Vince Docherty after our moderator had to drop out due to illness, but despite the inherent challenge I think we were able to keep up a good patter and have a fruitful discussion). My last panel, and the one I moderated, was about writing the Regency, where I tried and was only slightly successful at keeping the panelists from running on in endless discussions of the specific peculiarities of this historical period which are often missed by the fiction about it—but it was all quite fascinating so I'm not that sorry.

Other highlights on the con include the Hay Lecture, in which Liz Batty, probably best known in fandom as a Hugo-winning podcaster, put on her day job hat to talk about the role of bioinformatics and genomic analysis in tracking disease, and especially COVID. Briardene Books launched their third title, Paul Kincaid's Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction, with a highly successful event, and I was even recruited to sit at the Briardene table in the dealers' room, where to my absolute delight I sold several books. I also got a chance to explore Northern Ireland as little, including trips to the Giant's Causeway, visits to some of Belfast's public monuments, and a morning spent at the Ulster Museum.

(On a less happy note, I have returned from my trip with a spot of COVID. I've attended three conventions in the last two years, and all three have ended up being COVID superspreader events. In the two where I masked and used nasal spray religiously, I avoided infection. In the one where I slacked on these measures, I didn't. I leave this information here for readers to reach their own conclusions.)

No sooner had I returned from Eastercon when the news went out that the Hugo nominations are open, and that the Hugo voter packet is available. Once again, kudos to the Hugo award and voter packet team for being so on the ball. Voting closes on July 23rd, and if you are eligible to vote—or wish to become so by joining the Seattle Worldcon as a WSFS member, which confers voting rights and access to the voter packet—I hope you will consider giving me your vote in the Best Fan Writer and Best Related Work categories. I have contributions to the voter packet in both categories, and I think they do a good job of representing my work over the previous year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The first thing that must be said about this movie is that it should not work. It's a prequel to one of the most mind-blowing, groundbreaking, and just plain revolutionary action movies of the 21st century—and prequels are a bad idea in most cases, but all the more so when the character they revolve around has already given you their entire backstory in their original introduction, which is also the final, culminating act of their character arc. (To put it another way, if you had asked me, nine years ago, which character I thought offered more fertile ground for prequel storytelling, Imperator Furiosa or Han Solo, I would have picked Han without a moment's hesitation, and I don't even like Han that much.) And it's a follow-up to a movie whose chief virtue lies in its conciseness—in being a single, drawn-out, pulse-pounding, increasingly deranged car chase. Which means you can either try to repeat that accomplishment, which will inevitably feel a bit old hat; or you can ...
Read more

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse

The last month has been a busy one in Hugo and Worldcon fandom. After the shock of the much-belated 2023 nominating stats, and their revelation of serious irregularities in the compilation of the award's ballot, there was a great ferment of conversation and action. Mainstream publications have caught wind of the scandal and publicized it far and wide . Turnover in the few permanent committees that oversee the Hugo trademark and intellectual property has been high . The poor folks at the upcoming Glasgow Worldcon have been scrambling to respond to the evolving situation and to distance themselves from the previous committee—including, most recently, making a laconic announcement that they would refuse any of Chengdu's passalong funds, the budgetary surplus that is traditionally bequeathed from one Worldcon to the next. And stats nerds—of which this community is, unsurprisingly, blessed with a surfeit—have been furiously crunching the nominations numbers and EPH calculations...
Read more

Recent Reading: In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

When Paul Lynch won the Booker last year for Prophet Song , a near-future dystopia in which Ireland falls under the sway of a fascist government, there was the predictable hoopla over whether the book could, or should, be read as science fiction. But it seems to me that the SF community missed a trick several months earlier, when it failed to herald the longlisting of Martin MacInnes's In Ascension for the same award. Not only is In Ascension undeniably science fiction, featuring such core tropes as interstellar space travel, new star drives, and contact with aliens; it also seems very much in conversation with some key genre works which deal with these very topics, most obviously Carl Sagan's Contact and the movie adapted from it. As in that story, the novel is told from the point of view of a young, female scientist who ends up at the center of a global effort to respond to indisputable evidence of the existence of alien intelligence. But whereas Contact used that premise...
Read more