2007 Locus Awards

[admin]

The 2007 nominations and ballot for the Locus awards are out. If you subscribe to Locus, you can vote at www.locusmag.com

There is no overlap between the books they recommend and the sfsite reader's choice! Also, I haven't read any of the books they recommend. In most cases, I haven't even heard of the author. Kathleen Ann Goonan, Jay Lake, Daniel Abraham, and Hal Duncan may all be great writers -- but I have never heard of them.

And Locus does not recommend The Children of Hurin, by J. R. R. Tolkien, or anything by Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, Naomi Novik, Orson Scott Card, or Lois McMasters Bujold. There seems to be a disconnect between the Locus/Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine/Gardner Dozois axis and what people actually enjoy reading -- which may be why the circulation of Locus, and of all the sf magazines, keeps going down and down and down.

[k1w1taxi]

There is no overlap between the books they recommend and the sfsite reader's choice! Also, I haven't read any of the books they recommend. In most cases, I haven't even heard of the author. Kathleen Ann Goonan, Jay Lake, Daniel Abraham, and Hal Duncan may all be great writers -- but I have never heard of them.

And Locus does not recommend The Children of Hurin, by J. R. R. Tolkien, or anything by Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, Naomi Novik, Orson Scott Card, or Lois McMasters Bujold. There seems to be a disconnect between the Locus/Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine/Gardner Dozois axis and what people actually enjoy reading -- which may be why the circulation of Locus, and of all the sf magazines, keeps going down and down and down.

Regarding the nominations, I assume that most of the Locus nominees are/have been contributors to the magazines?

Regarding the disconnect and falling sales how much of this is due to the unavailability for whatever reason (including financial) of the more famous authors listed?

[Thanatos]

The nominees are not contributors for Locus for the simple reason that Locus is a newspaper not a fiction magazine.

As for Kathleen Ann Goonan, please! She was nominated for the Hugos and Nebulas, she's the author of one of the best trilogies to deal with nanotechnology, Queen City Jazz, Mississipi Blues and Crescent City Rhapsody (in truth it's a quartet, Light Music being the last one, but I haven't read it) and her last novel, In War Times, deserves to be read.

As for Hal Duncan he's been all the rage with Vellum and Ink.

I simply can't see any disconnection between what people read and the awards. Maybe some people read some authors, others read other but in truth I just can't see why Children of Hurin would deserve more an award than Goonan. And the latest batch of novels from King are a far cry from his heyday.

[admin]

The days are long gone when I knew the names of all the sf writers -- or even all the major sf writers! There was a time when there were about 100 writers in the field, and I tried to read at least something by every one of them, from Aldis to Zelazny. Now, I estimate there are more than 1000 writers of sf and fantasy, and there is no way to read them all. There aren't enough hours in the day. So, writers I see recommended, here an elsewhere, gain karma in my mental construct of the sf field; and at some point a writer makes it to my already crowded "to read" shelf.

What I meant by Locus not listing King, Tolkien, or Rowling was not that those three writers were necessarily better than the writers they list, but rather than those three writers are read by many more people than the writers they list.