GAME OF THRONES beats DOCTOR WHO to a Hugo Award

In a surprise result, Game of Thrones proved victorious at Worldcon at the weekend. It seized the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), an award that traditionally goes to Doctor Who. Doctor Who has won the award in six of the previous seven years (missing out in 2009 only to Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog) and was widely expected to win again this year.

Doctor Who's failure to win can be ascribed to a lower number of episodes overall, the fact that those episodes were largely awful, or to the radical increase in the popularity of Game of Thrones, which has swelled to become one of the biggest shows on television (whilst Who has been in a modest ratings decline in the UK). Whilst the second season of Thrones did not win as much critical approval as the first (or third), it was still well-regarded. The episode that won, Blackwater, is also widely-acknowledged as the finest episode of the series to date.

George R.R. Martin wrote the episode that won the award, making this his sixth Hugo Award overall and the third for A Song of Ice and Fire, following the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1997 for Blood of the Dragon and the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) for Season 1 of Game of Thrones (shared with the writers and producers) last year. George R.R. Martin accepted the award along with Rory McCann, who plays Sandor 'The Hound' Clegane in the TV series.

GAME OF THRONES wins a BAFTA

Game of Thrones has won a BAFTA Award. The show won the Radio Times Audience Award, the only one of the awards to be voted for by the general public. The result was a surprise, with most watchers expecting the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony to walk off with the award, but clearly GoT's motivated fanbase was able to mobilise. However, GoT did miss out on the other award it was nominated for, Best International Programme, which instead went to its HBO sister show Girls (itself surprisingly trouncing the widely-expected winner, Homeland).

Tywin Lannister finds this victory approaching his bare minimum standards of adequacy.

GoT's trophy cabinet is rather full, with the show having already notched up multiple Golden Globes, Emmies and Hugo Awards, amongst others. Congratulations to the team for their success.

GoT Season 2 UK airdate and a Golden Globe Award

HBO has previously confirmed that Game of Thrones will return for its second season in the USA on 1 April 2012. This has now been backed up by Sky Atlantic saying the season will start airing in the UK on Monday, 2 April 2012, less than 24 hours after US transmission.


Meanwhile, Peter Dinklage has won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Tyrion Lannister, adding to his already-impressive Emmy Award for the same role. Dinklage thanked George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and his family in the speech, but also paid tribute to Martin Henderson, a British dwarf who'd been injured in a mean-spirited prank, resulting in the incident becoming a trending topic on Twitter and making headlines all over the world.

Thrones failed to win the coveted Best Drama Award, however, which went instead to Homeland.

Congrats to SF Signal

SF Signal have defeated me to become the SFX SF 'Literary' Blog of the Year. Congratulations to the team over there on a job well done :-)

The Wertzone Awards for SF&F Novels in 2007

...although they're likely to be reduced to 'The Werties' for easy reference. Sigh.

I narrowed this list down to the fourteen SF&F books I really enjoyed reading this year.


Best SF&F Novel Released in 2007

1. Brasyl by Ian McDonald

I havent read McDonald's prior work, such as his much-acclaimed previous novel, River of Gods (set in India in the 2040s), so came to this book with no expectations other than hearing he wasn't easy to get into. I was pretty much blown away by the twisting, dazzling narrative which relentlessly pursues three separate storylines across three timezones in Brazil's history (past, present, future) and then pulls them together for a satisfying pay-off. The gorgeous prose, the brilliantly-realised atmosphere (you can almost hear the samba) and the author's enjoyment and love of the country, tacky telenovelas and all, makes Brasyl into something very special indeed. If Brasyl does not win the Hugo Award in 2008, something has gone very seriously wrong somewhere.


2. Black Man by Richard Morgan

Retitled Thirteen in the United States, Morgan's latest novel starts off as just another high-octane futuristic thriller and develops into an intellectually robust deconstruction of America and its society whilst building his two main characters into deeply flawed but sympathetic three-dimensional human beings. His trademark cyberpunk ultraviolence is still intact, but tempered here by a tremendous maturing in both writing and character-building. To shamelessly steal William 'Stego' Lexner's comments about the book, Black Man is A Stranger in a Strange Land for the 21st Century.


3. The Long Price: Shadow and Betrayal by Daniel Abraham

Abraham arrived on UK shores in 2007 with this omnibus of A Shadow in Summer (previously publshed by Tor in the USA in 2006) and its sequel, A Betrayal in Winter. With its intelligent worldbuilding, original core concepts and terrific central characters, this was the finest work of fantasy I read in 2007 (or at least the finest work of fantasy that wasn't actually a 2008 release) and immediately drew favourable comparisons with the likes of Guy Gavriel Kay, as an epic fantasy that engages the heart as well at the intellect. Roll on the final two books!


4. Un Lun Dun by Chine Mieville

The notion of the master of the New Weird movement writing a kid's novel may seem slighlty incongruous, but in his adult novels set in the world of Bas-Lag Mieville frequently shows a playful capacity for creating monsters and scaring the hell out of the reader, and he carries these ideas across to the YA field with aplomb. The revisionist sideswipes at Harry Potter are very funny (particularly the main character being told she has to go on seven long and dangerous quests before she can win victory, only to decide that she can't be bothered and 'skips to the last quest') and Mieville's well of trademark barmy-but-scary ideas, concepts and characters shows no sign of drying up any time soon.


5. The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

The notion of putting a 15-year-old book on this list may seem a little odd, but given that Sapkowski made his English-language debut this year I deemed it appropriate to feature here. Sapkowski's revisiting of old fairy stories through the character of Geralt, the titular 'Witcher', is constantly amusing and highly enjoyable, featuring such highlights as a barkeeper's glee as his bar is destroyed by an enraged genie (he'd had the foresight to take out insurance against supernatural forces) and Geralt's battle with a surreal man-goat thing armed with metal balls. With more than a hint of Jack Vance to the proceedings, The Last Wish is an inventive and enjoyable fantasy collection.


6. The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

No-one does interstellar, big-budget SF blockbusters like Hamilton, replete with huge space battles, fantastic technology and deeply sympathetic characters (more than any other SF writer, Hamilton seems to suggest that the core of what makes us human will not be changed by advances in technology or our expansion across space). The Dreaming Void is a slight change of pace, focused more on character-building and featuring a long-speculated cross-genre move by Hamilton into epic fantasy in a particularly strong subplot.


7. The Fade by Chris Wooding

Sometimes it's great to read a self-contained fantasy novel which starts, says what it wants, and then gets out without overstaying its welcome. The Fade is such a story, cramming tremendous variety into its modest page count and featuring the most evocative underground environment I've read about in quite some time.


8. Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie

Abercrombie follows up his accomplished debut with a sequel that turns everything you thought you knew on its head whilst escalating the action and the drama to new heights. Impressive.


9. The Inferior by Peadar O'Guilin

It's eat or be eaten in this Darwinian story of survival amidst a vivid jungle environment whilst the central character develops nicely and a terrific variety of monsters is put on display.


10. Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

Lynch delivers a sequel to 2006's accomplished The Lies of Locke Lamora which starts off by retreading old ground and ends on a mildly unforgivable cliche. But in-between we get a very fun story with crackling dialogue and some more inventive cons.


11. Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson

An improvement on 2006's extremely disappointing The Bonehunters but still rather flawed in places. Erikson manages to deliver another interesting and exciting slice of the Malazan epic with great battles and the deaths of several major characters, which are are well-handled.


12. The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds

Reynolds returns to the Revelation Space universe with this compelling SF-noir thriller about a policeman investigating a heinous crime and uncovering a deadly conspiracy which threatens the Glitter Band, the circle of space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone. With some fantastic imagery and, in the Clockmaker, one of the most disturbing SF 'monsters' produced in many years, The Prefect represents Reynolds returning to form.


13. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

As far as epic fantasy debuts go, Rothfuss' is undeniably enjoyable and well-written, although its Harry Potter-for-adults ambitions get a bit wearying after a while, as do some inconsistencies in the plot at the start of the novel. However, the story builds in a satisfying manner and Kvothe is a great protagonist.


14. Cowboy Angels by Paul J. McAuley

2007 was apparently the year that writers finally 'got' how to write quantum SF. Following on from McDonald's Brasyl, Cowboy Angels had a fantastic central concept (the USA extending its cultural imperialism across several parallel universes) that was well and logically-explored. Whilst McAuley is neither a good a prose stylist as McDonald nor as good a thriller writer as Morgan, he nevertheless delivered a servicably entertaining SF action adventure with some thought-provoking ideas in this novel.

Award Season!

A few websites are now holding their annual Best Of polls. SFX Magazine is going to be one of the biggest, with its 3,000-odd forum members and 30,000-odd readers voting on the Best SF of 2006, but Wotmania Other Fantasy is also having theirs as well.

In summary, 2006 was a reasonable year for SF&F. Less big name releases than 2005 (when Jordan, PF Hamilton, Gaiman and Martin all hit us with new books), although we still got new volumes from Bakker, Erikson, Reynolds, Keyes, Elliott, Brooks, Stross, Feist and Pratchett. 2006 will probably be better known for its avalanche of fresh new voices entering the genre: Scott Lynch made the biggest impact of any new author for several years with The Lies of Locke Lamora, although Joe Abercrombie, Naomi Novik and Alan Campbell weren't too far behind; Tom Lloyd and Brian Ruckley were less unanimously well-greeted, but nevertheless picked up some fans as well. Robert Charles Wilson has been around for a while, but languished in relative obscurity until his Hugo Award win for Spin brought him some more attention.

The film scene was less impressive: The Prestige aside, the year struggled to provide much of interest. I missed Superman Returns and Pirates of the Carribbean 2 (but in both cases, apparently I didn't miss much) but Clerks II raised a chuckle.

On television things were stronger. Heroes was the major success of the new season, but Battlestar Galactica reached new heights even as Lost began to show the first signs of a terminal decline. The less said about the embarrassing Torchwood and Hyperdrive, the better. Doctor Who abandoned any pretence it had of being anything other than a cheesy kid's show, despite a heroic effort by The Satan Pit two-parter to remedy that.

On the computer front there was a decided absence of big-name SF&F games. Medieval 2 and Company of Heroes are both strong strategy games, but not in the genre. Neverwinter Nights 2, I have not played yet. Half-Life 2: Episode One was excellent, but short. Thus the best game of 2006 must go to Oblivion, a beautiful game riddled with minor flaws (such as the repetitively tedious Oblivion Gates) but nevertheless a compelling and impressive gaming experience.

My summary of the year:

Best Novel: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Best TV Series: Battlestar Galactica
Best TV Episode: Exodus, Part 2 (BSG Season 3, Episode 4)
Best Movie: The Prestige
Best Computer Game: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion