Wednesday, April 30, 2014

I'm a Hugo and Nebula finalist

My co-writer Ellen Klages and I are finalists for the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, both in the Best Novella category, for "Wakulla Springs" (Tor.com, October 2013).

Tor.com illustration by Gary Kelley.

We're delighted, of course, and thank all the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America members who put us on the Nebula ballot and all the World Science Fiction Convention members who put us on the Hugo ballot.

Congratulations, too, to everyone on the ballots. The only other novella up for both a Nebula and a Hugo this year is Catherynne M. Valente's Six-Gun Snow White, published by Subterranean. Other Nebula finalists in our category are Vylar Kaftan, Nancy Kress, Veronica Schanoes and Lawrence M. Schoen. Other Hugo finalists in our category are Charles Stross, Brad Torgersen and Dan Wells.

According to Mark R. Kelly, who keeps track for me and everyone else, "Wakulla Springs" is Ellen's second Hugo nomination and my third, while it's Ellen's fourth Nebula nomination and my eighth. We each have one Nebula win but no Hugos -- yet!

Nebula winners will be announced May 17 at the SFWA banquet in San Jose, Calif. Whatever happens there, I'll still have three months to savor being a Hugo finalist; the Hugo winners will be announced Aug. 17 at Loncon 3, the 72nd Worldcon, in London. Ellen and I both plan to be at both these events. Y'all come, too.

Coll's "King of the Khyber Rifles" (1916)

I can't afford to bid on this 1916 Joseph Clement Coll illustration -- one of a series that accompanied Talbot Mundy's King of the Khyber Rifles on its original serialization in Everybody's Magazine -- but I sure did enjoy clicking the Large view, at the auction site, to study the penmanship up close. Wow!


The auction is for a worthy cause, the Locus Science Fiction Foundation. The illustration is from the collection of the late Locus publisher Charles N. Brown.

Mundy's adventure stories, many set in a mysterious and mystical India during the Raj, have influenced a number of fantasists: Leigh Brackett, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton. S.M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers (2002) is a more recent homage.

Coll was just as influential among fantasy illustrators, for his pen-and-ink wizardry and his iconic visualizations of Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. Al Williamson is one obvious descendant. As collector Jim Vadeboncoeur puts it on his Coll appreciation page:
There were science fiction stories before The Lost World ... just as there were authors before Mundy and Rohmer who wrote horror and adventure stories. What there wasn't, before Coll, was the illustrative style and technique to match the literary ones. Coll invented that style, developed it, popularized it, and disseminated it to the coming generations of artists who saw it and knew that it was right.