RIP Deborah J. Miller

It has been sadly been reported that fantasy author Deborah J. Miller has passed away from breast cancer.

Miller wrote a fantasy duology under her own name, consisting of Swarmthief's Dance (2005) and Swarmthief's Treason (2008), as well as writing the Talisker series under pseudonym Miller Lau. This series consisted of Talisker (2001), Dark Thane (2002) and Lore Bringer (2004). In recent years Miller was better-known as one of the key organisers of the David Gemmell Legend Awards, and co-presented the awards for their first few years. She was also a member of the British SFF writers' collective known as the Write Fantastic. She is survived by her husband and daughter.

I had the pleasure of meeting Deborah at two of the awards, and occasionally corresponded by email in the run-up to them. Whilst I did not know her well, she was always friendly, encouraging and generous. She will be very much missed by the British SFF community.

Rothfuss, Martin, Valente and Mieville win awards

Patrick Rothfuss won the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Novel this week for his second book, The Wise Man's Fear. The other winners at the award were Helen Lowe's Heir of the Night for the Morningstar Award for Best Debut, and Raymond Swanland for the Ravenheart Award for Best Cover Art for Blood of Aenarion.

Meanwhile, the Locus Awards were also announced this week. George R.R. Martin won the Best Fantasy Novel award for A Dance with Dragons, whilst China Mieville won the Best SF Novel Award for Embassytown. Catherynne M. Valente won a triple prize of Best YA Book (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making), Best Novella (Silently and Very Fast) and Best Novelette (White Lines on a Green Field). Shaun Tan won Best Artist and Ellen Datlow Best Editor.

Eastercon 2012

This weekend I attended Eastercon 2012, the largest annual British science fiction and fantasy convention. This year it was held at a hotel adjoining Heathrow Airport. For the first time in its history, the convention was sold out in advance, likely due to the presence of George R.R. Martin (although having authors such as Joe Abercrombie, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Chris Wooding, Lisa Tuttle, Pat Cadigan and Cory Doctorow didn't hurt either).

Finally!

Time and budgetary constraints meant I could only attend for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, though I did manage to catch the Game of Thrones TV panel, featuring actors Miltos Yerolemou (Syrio Forel) and John Bradley West (Samwell Tarly). Gethin Anthony (Renly Baratheon) and Natalia Tena (Osha) could also be found around the convention, though they didn't take part in the panels. This was followed by a Wild Cards panel where GRRM talked about the long-running shared world setting with John Jos. Miller, Pat Cadigan, Paul Cornell, David Anthony Durham, Gail Gerstner-Miller and his wife, Parris McBride (who played in the original RPG games that led to the creation of the setting).

The meat of the convention, as normal, happened at the bar and the late night parties. I met Adrian Tchaikovsky (author of the highly enjoyable Shadows of the Apt series) for the first time (he's halfway through writing the tenth and final book in the series) and caught up with a whole raft of other contacts. No massive exclusives, although Joe Abercrombie is heavily into the edits on A Red Country and confirmed that it looks like the UK edition will keep the 'A' in the title whilst the US edition will drop it (as seen on the already-revealed cover art). Gollancz also announced that they are bringing the Wild Cards series to the UK, with the original three books to be published before the end of the 2012 and then the 'new generation' books starting with Inside Straight to follow next year. A plan for the 'middle books' (including the long-missing iBook volumes) hasn't yet been decided upon, aside from the possibility of releasing them as ebook-only editions. Elsewhere, Chris Wooding confirmed he was just about to start working on the fourth Ketty Jay book as well.

The Gemmell Award nominations were announced, to much frowning (there definitely seemed to be a consensus amongst many present - though not the award organisers to my knowledge - that the award could do with being moved to a juried format), and there was much discussion of the Hugo shortlist, not least the renewed GRRM vs Rowling contest caused by Game of Thrones Season 1 going up against the final Harry Potter move in the Long-form Dramatic Presentation category. Previously, The Goblet of Fire bested A Storm of Swords to the 2001 Best Novel Hugo Award, so it'll be interesting to see how it falls out this year. Otherwise the main topic of interest regarding the Hugos was that the novels on the list were books people had actually heard of, with particular positive surprise over the presence of Leviathan Wakes on the list.

My biggest moment at the convention was interviewing GRRM on the Sunday. We talked for about an hour about his career, from short stories through ASoIaF and the TV series, before he fielded questions from the floor. Some interesting stuff there. The interview was recorded and live-streamed, although it seems to have vanished from the Internet now. Once it resurfaces I will link it here.

Overall, it was an interesting - not to mention nerve-wracking - experience. But good fun for catching up with old friends and contacts and making some new ones.

Edit: Interview linkage.

Congrats to Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson emerged victorious at the David Gemmell Legend Awards in London last night. He won the award for The Way of Kings. Many congratulations to Brandon!


Though this is slightly surprising, as it was assumed, due to the much larger Wheel of Time fanbase, that Towers of Midnight would be a better bet. It also means that the Wheel of Time, despite its immense popularity, still remains without a notable fantasy or SF award trophy to its name. It'll be interesting to see if A Memory of Light can end that drought.

Congrats again to Brandon and his publishers.

In other news, Darius Hinks won the Best Newcomer Award for his novel Warrior Priest, whilst the Best Cover Art award inexplicably went to the rather atrocious cover of Power and Majesty by Tansy Rayner Roberts (no, never heard of it either). Pornokitsch have the cover here, if you can bear to look at it.

In addition, the auction to get your name into Scott Lynch's next-but-one novel raised a startling £1,200.

Fancy a cameo in the fourth Scott Lynch novel?

The David Gemmell Awards have a auction every year, and this year they are offering non-attendees of the award ceremony the chance to bid on lots. Among the items on offer is the chance to appear in Scott Lynch's fourth Gentleman Bastard novel, The Thorn of Emberlain (it being too late to arrange the same thing for the forthcoming third novel, The Republic of Thieves). Usually the person who wins these kind of events gets killed off in a nasty manner, but Scott has thrown in a twist: your character will survive! But only by the narrowest of the margin.


For a full list of items, including the complete Dresden Files from Orbit Books (complete in their swanky new covers) and the chance to have your manuscript appraised by publisher and editor Jo Fletcher, check out the link.

Voting for the David Gemmell Awards 2011 begins

Voting for the final winners of the Gemmell Awards is now open (the previous round was to determine the shortlist).


The nominees in each category are:

Legend Award for Best Novel
The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett
War of the Dwarves by Markus Heitz
Towers of Midnight by Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan
The Alchemist in the Shadows by Pierre Pevel
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
The Black Prism by Brent Weeks

A somewhat weaker final list than the previous two years, and once again it's sad to see Paul Kearney not on here (he'd win this hands-down if he was better known). Particularly difficult is that The Desert Spear, The Alchemist in the Shadows and Towers of Midnight were all slightly weaker than the preceding novels in their respective series, whilst The Way of Kings laid excellent groundwork for potential good work in the future but didn't set the world on fire itself. Nevertheless, I voted for Towers of Midnight as Sanderson did a great job in difficult circumstances of delivering the Wheel of Time series to the edge of its long-awaited conclusion.

Morningstar Award for Best Debut
Spellwright by Blake Charlton
The Warrior Priest by Darius Hinks
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
Shadow Prowler by Alexey Pehov
Tymon's Flight by Mary Victoria

This was an easy one. I voted for Spellwright by Blake Charlton as an enjoyable (but as I said in my review, not flawless) opening fantasy novel with a fascinating and original magical system. And, in the interests of disclosure, it's the only one I've read.

Ravenheart Award for Best Cover Art
The Ragged Man
Power and Majesty
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Shadow King
Tymon's Flight

Probably the easiest award to vote for, as you just look at the pics and vote for the one you like best. For me here, this was The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

Voting is open to the end of May and the results will be announced in mid-June.

Voting still open for the Gemmell Award Shortlist

Just a reminder that voting is still underway for the 2011 David Gemmell Awards shortlist. This isn't the final vote, just the first round to whittle the longlist down to five finalists in each category.


My votes were for Corvus by Paul Kearney for the Legend Award for Best Novel, Farlander by Col Buchanan for the Morningstar Award for Best Newcomer and The Black Lung Captain for the Ravenheart Award for Best Cover Art.

Voting for the 2011 David Gemmell Legend Award is now open.

The third annual David Gemmell Legend Award for epic fantasy will be held in the summer of 2011. The winners of the first two awards were Andrzej Sapkowski for Blood of the Elves and Graham McNeill for Empire.

Voting for the third awards are now open. This is for the books that will make it onto the shortlist. The frontrunner for me on this list is easily Paul Kearney's Corvus, though I suspect it will lose out to some of the big-hitters (such as The Way of Kings, Towers of Midnight and Stonewielder). The final shortlist and the last round of voting for the winner will be announced in the Spring.

The David Gemmell Legend Award 2010

I attended the second David Gemmell Awards on Friday night. As last year, the event was held at the Magic Circle in London and there was a good attendance, if slightly down on last year for some reason (possibly related to the England-Algeria World Cup match). As with last year (when Andrzej Sapkowski won for Blood of Elves), the winner was highly unexpected.

This year there were three awards. The big one was the Legend Award for Best Novel, which went to Graham McNeill's Empire, a Warhammer fantasy novel. Graham is one of the franchise's most-respected and popular authors (arguably it's biggest author after Dan Abnett), and was taken aback by his victory. He beat out Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold, Brandon Sanderson for Warbreaker and (with the late Robert Jordan) The Gathering Storm and Pierre Pevel for The Cardinal's Blades.

However, there were consolation prizes. Pierre Pevel took home the Morningstar Award for Best Newcomer for The Cardinal's Blades, whilst Joe and the Gollancz art team accepted the Ravenheart Award for Best Cover Art for Best Served Cold.

There were 15,000 votes in total, up 50% on last year, with most votes coming from the USA and UK. People from over 90 countries voted.

The David Gemmell Awards 2010: voting open

After last year's successful inaugural ceremony, the Gemmell Awards are back for a second year. There has been some expansion of the voting and there are now three categories. Joining the Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel there is also the Ravenheart Award for Best Book Cover/Artist and the Morningstar Award for Best Fantasy Newcomer.

To vote, go to this address and click on 'Legend', 'Ravenheart' or 'Morningstar' to access the voting buttons. Note that as of this time of posting the 'Ravenheart' voting has not started, but the other two have.

My choices for this year were for Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold for the Legend and Pierre Pevel's The Cardinal's Blades for the Morningstar (a very competitive field this year). My selection for the Ravenheart when the voting opens will be Stephan Martiniere for his gorgeous cover to Chris Wooding's Retribution Falls.

David Gemmell Award audio recording available now

The David Gemmell Award organisers have released an audio recording of the ceremony here. It's worth checking out, if just for James Barclay's dramatic re-enactment of Druss' speech from Legend that kicked off proceedings.

Award winner Andrzej Sapkowski also had this to say about receiving the award:

"I am very happy and proud to be a winner in the contest for The David Gemmell Legend Award, the prize precious to me indeed, as I am a great admirer of the writings of the late David A. Gemmell. I would like to express my gratitude to all the readers who voted for my book. I would also like to thank and congratulate all the other fellow writers in the final poll. Finally, it is fantasy - our genre - that was the ultimate winner."

After-thoughts on the Gemmell Awards

Now the tiredness of attending the Gemmell Awards has faded away somewhat, it's interesting to reflect on what the first awards got right and what areas need improvement. The awards have generated some interesting commentary so far about what issues people think should be discussed.


First and foremost, the basic idea for the awards is very sound. The awards which are meant to incorporate all of speculative fiction, both SF and Fantasy, have tended to be very SF-centric, such as the Hugos, whilst there are many purely SF-focused awards (the Arthur C. Clarke, the Philip K. Dick etc). Fantasy is left with the World Fantasy Award and not a lot else. However, given that Fantasy outsells SF by a ratio of three-to-one in the UK, with a similar ratio apparently the case in the USA, it does seem odd that Fantasy hasn't got more awards of its own. So there was definitely a gap in the market for such an event.

However, at the same time there seems a slight fuzziness in the definition of the award. 'For works in the spirit of David Gemmell' is a bit lacking in substance, mainly as people will argue long and hard over what Gemmell's key defining points actually were (aside from 'badassery', as mentioned by one announcer at the awards). There's also the fact, rather under-reported during discussions of the award, that Gemmell himself wrote a variety of stories. As well as traditional heroic fantasy (Legend), he also wrote alternate history (the Macedonian duology), post-apocalyptic science fiction with fantasy underpinnings (the excellent Jon Shannow trilogy) and straight-up historical fiction (the Troy Trilogy), a diversity that was reflected more in the longlist (although that had its own issues, even bringing in some SF works) than in the shortlist. I think simply acknowledging the award is for Fantasy and making sure SF is ineligible is enough. Neither the Arthur C. Clarke nor the Philip K. Dick awards 'demand' that the winners are close to the patrons in style, and it seems silly to limit the Gemmell in that manner.

On the publicity front, the award initially generated a lot of online discussion, but it is interesting that this tailed off after the switch from a juried to an internet vote format, with the suggestion that since any author could now organise bloc-voting to get his book to win, its value was notably diminished. The fact that only 500 of the 10,000 votes came from the UK (allegedly) and that an author still mostly unknown in the UK and USA won will no doubt feed these conspiracy theories, although in this case it seems redundant. Sapkowski has outsold everyone on the list put together and his fanbase (which, thanks to his later historical novels, extends way beyond the traditional SF&F fanbase) is widespread enough to have gained him the win anyway. It will be interesting to see if next year - when Sapkowski doesn't have an eligible entry - the numbers drop off dramatically or not (although given that Robert Jordan could and very likely will be posthumously nominated for The Gathering Storm, probably not).

However, the lack of blog entries and forum discussions may also be down to the narrowness of the field. The SF award nominees are usually very different in character, writing style and can be very different sub-genres (a cyberpunk book can go up against an alternate history and a space opera, for example). Books that are ‘in the spirit of David Gemmell’ (assuming for argument's sake that currently means 'badass heroic fantasy things a bit like Legend,') are going to be, by definition, somewhat similar to one another, and I’ve seen the complaint that there’s not much to argue about between the nominated authors. You can certainly say you think Abercrombie is a better author than Weeks and Sanderson, for example, but in terms of general content and ideas, they are ploughing in the same field. I think broadening the definition more, as discussed earlier, could help generate more discussion of the nominees. However, I also expect discussion to grow simply as the award beds in and people get more used to it being around.

So the award has gotten off to a flying start and it'll be really interesting to see where it goes next. I think ensuring that no SF gets on the longlist at all will be a good start, and an argument could be made for more categories. Very interesting to see how it goes next year.

The Gemmell Awards 2009

Friday saw the inaugural David Gemmell Legend Award for fantasy being presented. The venue was the Magic Circle in London (minor fact: my great-grandfather worked for a time with Maskelyne & Devant, the two magicians who had a major formative role in the organisation) and there was a good turn-out (fantasy authors and particularly editors being vulnerable to the allure of free booze and canapes). Rumours that numbers were looking low until David Devereux promised to come along in a kilt, at which point they soared, cannot be substantiated at this time.

The event got underway with fantasy author (and friend of the late David Gemmell) James Barclay coming out on stage and booming out Druss' speech to the men before the battle at Dros Delnoch in Legend in an impressive and theatrical manner. Deborah J. Miller and Stan Nicholls were the main comperes for the evening and did a sterling job. Stan's wife came out to give an excellent tribute to David Gemmell, and then Mr. Barclay returned for the charity auction. Seeing people having to sit on their hands for fear of spending too much money was quite amusing, with the signed, mint-condition first edition of Legend (which went for £500) being the highlight of the evening. The featured charity, Médecins Sans Frontières, raised quite a lot of money on the night, which was great.

The awards were then announced, with each author getting a miniature replica of Druss' war axe, Snaga, as modelled here by Mr. J. Abercrombie.


Joe was the only author in attendance, the other writers not being present due to the excuse of living on other landmasses (Australia, in Juliet Marillier's case).

The winning book was Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski, originally published in Poland in 1994 but with the English translation only being published last year. This is the first book in his five-volume series of novels featuring the character of Geralt, the Witcher (also the hero of a recent bestselling computer roleplaying game), following on from two earlier short story collections, The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny.

Sapkowski's win may seem a little left-field (the favourites were Abercrombie and Brent Weeks for his Night Angel trilogy), but makes sense. Although new in English translation, his books have been published in Europe for almost twenty years, and in places like Spain, Germany, Russia and of course Poland he is mentioned in the same breath as authors such as George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan. I'd also wager that he is the biggest-selling author on the list by some margin, probably bigger than the others all put together. For a genre often completely dominated by discussions of English-language authors, seeing a European author win the first Gemmell Award was quite refreshing.

Joe took the news magnanimously, possibly because Sapkowski doesn't have a book coming out in English this year to compete with Best Served Cold at next year's awards :-)

Anyway, a good time was had by all and it was a great start to an even I suspect is going to get larger and more influential with each passing year. This year alone there were over ten thousand votes (or about fourteen times as many people who voted for the Hugo Awards last year).

David Gemmell Legend Award finalists announced

The first David Gemmell Legend Award shortlist has been announced. The nominations are:

Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie
Heir to Sevenwaters by Juliet Marillier
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski
The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks

Disappointing not to see Paul Kearney's The Ten Thousand on there, as it was both the best book of 2008 (although there wasn't much between it and Last Argument) and the most 'Gemmell-like' book on the list by miles. Also surprised not to see Peter Brett's The Painted Man, as he'd picked up a lot of praise and momentum along the way. My shortlist vote will definitely be going to Abercrombie, although it's nice to see both Sapkowski and Sanderson also nominated.

The Awards will be held in London on 19 June and I will be attending. There may be pictures.