The Best Science Fiction Novel of 2013 is...

 

I came across a post about the recently awarded Nebula awards the other day. I was curious how close its short-list of nominees for the best science-fiction/fantasy novel of 2013 matched those of other awards, so I had a look.

Nebula Awards

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Marian Wood)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (Morrow; Headline Review)
Fire with Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
Hild, Nicola Griffith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Red: First Light, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island)
A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar (Small Beer)
The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker (Harper)

Hugo Awards

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit US/Orbit UK)

Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross (Ace / Orbit UK)

Parasite, Mira Grant (Orbit US/Orbit UK)

Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles, Larry Correia (Baen Books)

The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (Tor Books / Orbit UK)

Arthur C. Clarke Award

God’s War by Kameron Hurley (Del Rey)

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit)

The Disestablishment Of Paradise by Phillip Mann (Gollancz)

Nexus by Ramez Naam (Angry Robot)

The Adjacent by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)

The Machine by James Smythe (Blue Door)

They didn’t match at all. Only one novel made it onto more than one list: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, which made it on to all three of the award short-lists.

So why didn’t any other novel make more than one short-list? Probably because of the way they are nominated. 

How are the Novels Nominated?

The Nebulas are nominated and voted on by members the Science Fiction Writers of America. Membership of the SFWA is restricted to published authors, including people who have sold at least three short stories to professional markets. Reviewers and scriptwriters can also become members. The nominated books must have been first published in America in the nomination year.

Anyone who buys a membership to World Con can nominate novels and vote for the Hugos. This year’s World Con is in London. Anyone going to Loncon3 could nominate novels that were published anywhere in the world in 2013.

Novels are submitted by their publishing company for the Arthur C. Clark award. Members of its judging panel and organisation committee can also nominate novels. This year's award was judged by Ian Whates and Duncan Lawie from the British Science Fiction Association, Sarah Brown and Lesley Hall from the Science Fiction Foundation and Georgie Knight from the Sci-Fi-London film festival. The nominated books must have been published in the UK in the nomination year.

Depending on the judges for the Arthur C. Clarke award, it or the Nebula award would have better qualified judges than the Hugo award. But the Hugo is open to nominations of books from all around the world, including non-English written books.

Whose Judgement to Trust?

I wonder how many of the short-listed novels are read by those who vote. I would expect the judges of the Arthur C. Clarke award to read all the short-listed novels. I would imagine that the authors of SFWA would try to read many of the nominated novels before they voted for the Nebula. But for the Hugos, I doubt whether many of the general public who travel to Loncon3 will read more than one or two of the novels, if any. When I went to Aussiecon I did not read any of the nominated novels, so I did not vote for that part of the Hugos.

Due to the different nomination and voting processes, Spock would give more credence to the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards, until he found out no Vulcan literature would be accepted for them. 

Whose judgement do I trust?

I had a look at the past winners of the awards. I have not read many of the winners due to my concentrating on reading Australian authors. And only one of them, George Turner, has won any of the three awards. My favourite international authors do not seem to have won many awards either. 

I have read only three of the Arthur C Clarke Award winners from its 27-year history. I have read eight of the Nebula award winners from its 47-year history, and nine of the Hugo award winners from its longer 61-year history. With the slightly shorter history, it looks like I am more likely to have read a winner of the Nebula award. It must be noted that a few of the award winners that I read did not live up to their hype, but that seems to apply equally over the awards.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie won the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards. I must get a copy. Will it win the Hugo?

The Budget or Mad Max, Here We Come.

 

I have been very distracted over the past couple of weeks by the Australian Government’s budget. I worried about what the Government might cut, and how it might affect the poor. My concerns were realised when the Government produced a horror budget that attacks Australia’s most vulnerable.

Hurting the Unemployed

The budget’s most appalling measure is that people aged 25 to 30 will have to wait six months to claim unemployment benefits, then be kicked off them after six months and have to wait another six months before they can get back onto them. Imagine the stress of having to live on nothing if you had no family to fall back on. A 25 to 30 year old who moved to the city to work and lost that job would probably have to move back home again.

Hurting the Sick

The government wants to introduce a seven dollar co-payment for doctor appointments. Seven dollars can be a lot of money to the poor. This appears to be an attempt to destroy the universality of the Medicare scheme. A scheme that was designed to provide quality free health care to all.  

Hurting People with Disabilities

People who were given a disability support pension after 2008 will be reassessed. Imagine the stress they are going through now. Will the so-called independent government appointed assessors get bonuses for the number of people with disabilities they remove from the disability support pension?

Hurting Education and Health

The government wants to cut university funding by 20% and then let the universities charge whatever fees they like. This will leave universities little choice but to put up fees, massively. It will make university less affordable and leave students with greater debts when they finish. Imagine if you started a course and then were incapable of finishing it. I predict the collapse of Victoria University due to a lack of students.

The government wants to cut $80 billion out of the health and education budgets of the states over the next decade. It appears to be an attempt to get the states to demand that the government increase the GST, which it would obviously be happy to do. The GST is a regressive tax that hits the poor harder than the better off.

Hurting Families 

The reduction of family tax benefits will massively hurt many.

Other Measures

I am not so fussed about the fuel excise increase, which will add only about one cent a litre per year to the price of petrol. And I really think anyone earning over $180,000 who can’t afford the debt levy needs to seriously look at their spending.  

Bloody Hypocrites

 

One strange thing about the budget is that the government has stopped funding the energy discounts for pensioners. This is after them repeatedly screaming before the last election that the carbon tax was hurting the ability of pensioners to pay their energy bills. The pensioners will be much more impacted by the end of the discount then they are by the carbon tax, which they received supplementary payments for.

No Budget Emergency

Why does the Federal Government want to do this? Evidently we have a budget emergency, even though our budget deficit as a percentage of GDP is just about the lowest in the western world.

If there was such a drastic need to cut spending in a hurry than why get rid of the half billion dollars or so the mining tax brings in? Or the $6.7 billion the carbon tax makes. Why use the $7 Medicare co-payments to create a research fund instead of using it to pay off debt? (Obviously to try and wedge the opposition by saying they don’t want to fund research.)  And why are does the government want to spend billions on a gold plated maternity leave scheme when there is already a pretty good Labour scheme?

An Ideological Budget

 

This is not a budget designed to fix the budget deficit, it is an ideological budget designed to hit those people and institutions like the CSIRO and the ABC whose views and lifestyles differ from the rich white men who are currently running the government.

It is a budget designed to please Rupert Murdoch who tweeted after the coalition won the last election that now it was time to cut all the welfare fraud.

It is a budget that will divide Australians into two classes, the very rich, and the rest of us. I hope many in the rest of us underclass wake up before they lose their lifestyles, and vote those rich white men who have no empathy for them out.  

If the measures in this budget go through, I predict a very different Australia in the future. A land of security guards protecting gated communities as crime rates sour. A land were illiteracy flourishes. A land where anyone born poor will stay poor.  A land where people die in the streets from lack of medical care.  A land of hatred and confrontation. Mad Max, here we come.

Next week I hope my mind will be back on to science fiction and writing.

Murdoch Versus the NDIS

It has been an interesting time to be researching an article on the National Disability Insurance Scheme in Australia, with lots of discussion about it in the Australia media and on social media.

My aim is to write an article based on interviews with one or two of the participants in the scheme. So I joined a Facebook discussion group on the NDIS and hoped to find someone who was part of the Barwon regional trial in Victoria to interview. I decided to lurk for a while to see what they were talking about and hopefully identify a few people to approach who were part of the Barwon trial.

Beaten to the Request

Unfortunately, while still lurking, a journalist from The Australian posted an interview request. I worried what sort of interview he would conduct. For those who don’t know, on the night of the last federal election Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The Australian, tweeted something along the lines of “now we can get rid of all these welfare bludgers.” So I worried that his journalist might have an agenda to show the NDIS, which the ill-informed mistakenly think of as welfare scheme, in a bad light. I have had a look in The Australian and there articles seem to be overwhelmingly negative towards the NDIS.

Meanwhile, I decided to wait a day before posting my interview request on the discussion group.  The next day, I logged on to the discussion group and find that the administrator of the group has had a request from the ABC to interview NDIS participants about their fears of the upcoming budget. Bloody hell. I decided not to delay my request for interviewees any longer and posted a request to the group. I stressed in my post that I did not have an agenda, hoping they would take the hint about the journalist from The Australian.

Negative NDIS Article in The Australian

The following day I logged onto the Facebook and the NDIS discussion group is abuzz about an article that has appeared in The Australian: Mother sees merit in NDIS slower rollout. The article was written by a different journalist to the one who had contacted the discussion group.

In the article, a mother suggests that the NDIS be delayed because she had some difficulties with it. As pointed out in the discussion group, if she had had the years of frustration of trying to survive and cope with a fragmented and underfunded non-NDIS disability sector, her attitude to her NDIS hassles might have been very different. I am curious, if she had enthusiastically endorsed the NDIS and not said its rollout should be delayed, would the Australian have reported her comments?

Found an Interviewee

So far, no one has gotten back to my post. I am not surprised, as I have had limited success with similar requests I have made on social media. But while doing more research, I discovered the LEAD program in Geelong which has a number of participants in the NDIS who volunteer to tell people about it. And one of those participants is a fellow Divine writer. I sent him an email and he has agreed to an interview. Yay. I just sent him a number of questions.

But I would still like another point of view for the article, preferably from someone who is just an ordinary client of the NDIS. So I have just reposted my request to the discussion group, this time including my questions.