Fandom

The next two Hugo Awards categories are Best semiprozine and Best fanzine. The differences between these two categories are slight, especially in the day of the internet zine; of the titles nominated iirc only Interzone was originally a paper zine. The main difference is whether or not your zine contributes to your income and either has to be paid for to read or pay its contributors, or both.

Because I don’t follow magazine science fiction and because there has been such an explosion of them in the past couple of years, I find it difficult to judge the candidates here. What I’ve decided upon was to look at a) which writers they publish, b) what sort of stories and non-fiction, c) diversity and d) just general online presence. To be honest, any of these magazines would be a worthy winner.

1. Apex Magazine edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Jason Sizemore, and Michael Damian Thomas
   This is the most diversive of the candidates, looks great and has published some great stories, including Hugo candidate “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky.
2. Lightspeed Magazine edited by John Joseph Adams, Rich Horton, and Stefan Rudnicki
   Lighspeed publishes both science fiction and fantasy, new and reprint, with some very well known authors contributing.
3. Strange Horizons edited by Niall Harrison, Brit Mandelo, An Owomoyela, Julia Rios, Sonya Taaffe, Abigail Nussbaum, Rebecca Cross, Anaea Lay, and Shane Gavin
   Strange Horizons is the one semiprozine I do read regularly, mostly for their reviews as well as their features about diversity in science fiction, like the annual SF count. I’ve always seen it as more a blog than a magazine though; they don’t do issues as such.
4. Beneath Ceaseless Skies edited by Scott H. Andrews
   According to their mission statement, “Beneath Ceaseless Skies will feature exciting stories set in awe-inspiring places that are told with all the skill and impact of modern literary-influenced fantasy.” Not entirely my cup of tea, or at least not as a biweekly magazine, but I like that everything they’ve published seems to be made available with the appropriate Creative Commons license. The magazine itself is basic: you got a cover, two stories, that’s it.
5. Interzone edited by Andy Cox
   
   I’m sorry to say that this is currently the most boring of the candidates, as it used to be a hugely influential magazine back in the nineties and eighties.

Onto the fanzine nominations. I won’t be considering Elitist Book Reviews, for reasons described in my first post, leaving me with a strong field to consider. Because most of the nominees are blogs rather than paper fanzines, I know Pornokitsch, The Book Smuggles and A Dribble of Ink already even when I don’t read them regularly. Journey Planet I didn’t know and turned out to actually be an oldfashioned fanzine and just as good as the other candidates. Again, any of these would make a worthy winner.

1. A Dribble of Ink edited by Aidan Moher
   Worth the nomination just for having published We Have Always Fought, but this is one of the best sf orientated blogs I know anyway.
2. Journey Planet edited by James Bacon, Christopher J. Garcia, Lynda E. Rucker, Pete Young, Colin Harris, and Helen J. Montgomery
   An old skool paper zine only available in PDF online, but the articles published make up for that annoyance. They don’t seem to have published anything since last December though.
3. Pornokitsch edited by Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin
   Pornokitsch looks at geek culture in the broadest sense, is a well written chatty blog.
4. The Book Smugglers edited by Ana Grilo and Thea James
   Review orientated, they do what they do well but it’s not a blog I regularly read or want to read.

Awarded with the Hugos, but not a Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer has been awarded since 1973, in honour of the editor who for better or worse has shaped American science fiction the most. Writers are eligible for two years after their first sale and indeed three of the candidates below are in their second year of eligibility, indicated by an asterix:

• Wesley Chu
• Max Gladstone *
• Ramez Naam *
• Sofia Samatar *
• Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Save for Wesley Chu, whose The Lives of Tao I’d seen in the local sf bookstore, none of these were writers I knew before I got my hands on the Hugo Voters Package (hurhur). I’ve been slowly working my way through the books and stories in it and have now almost finished reading through the Campbell nominees. I’m still reading Ramez Naam’s Nexus but I already know that he, though not a bad writer, is the least of the five candidates.

To determine the best was more difficult. Sofia Samatar, with her excellent fantasy picaresque A Stranger in Olondria quickly went to the top, but Benjanun Sriduangkaew, represented with three excellent short stories Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade, Fade to Gold and The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly, was a strong challenger. Sriduangkaew has a vivid imagination andis at home in both science fiction and fantasy, but in the end I still had to give the nod to Samatar.

In the middle of the pack are Wesley Chu, who wrote a decent but not spectacular first novel and who I ended up putting in fourth, while Max Gladstone wrote a much better steampunk fantasy novel. I wouldn’t mind seeing him win the Campbell either, though I do think Sriduangkaew and Samatar both are a quantum leap ahead of him. If either Chu or Naam win thought that would be a disappointment, as their work is no more than competent adventure science fiction. My final ranking therefore:

1. Sofia Samatar
2. Benjanun Sriduangkaew
3. Max Gladstone
4. Wesley Chu
5. Ramez Naam