… among other things, counting the days until we will no longer have to use the word Ought to describe the current decade. Then it’s the teens, I guess.
But that’s all a matter of amateur speculation for now. In the meantime, there’s business for fanciers of professional speculation: the 2009 Aurora Award nominations are open. The Auroras are the Canadian version of the Hugo Award – honouring works of Canadian speculative fiction and various other specfic doings that are chosen by fans. And writers. And friends of writers. And sometimes their mothers.
The online form is here. It is customary on author’s blogs, to pimp their own works published in the past year. I will do that, but later.
First, here are some works that have found favour in the Yard this year – not all of which have made it onto the eligibility database here , but all of which should meet the eligibility requirements.
- “Fitting A New Suit” By Madeline Ashby. Published in Rudy Rucker’s online journal FLURB. Worth a look and then some, as is Mrs. Ashby’s story “βoyfriend,” which appeared on Worldchanging.ca.
- Pirate Sun, the conclusion to Karl Schroeder‘s fantastical Virga Trilogy. If you like zero gravity sky pirates, Newtonian hard science fiction and Gormenghastian intrigue, then I don’t see how you could have avoided at least having started this series. If you’ve finished it – think kindly this Aurora season when you’re perusing the novel category.
- Peter Watts, of the rifters and the space vampires and the sunny outlook (that last one was just to see if you were paying attention) published some fine short stories this year, including “Eyes of God” in the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume Two, and “Hillcrest v. Velikovksy”, which unless someone wants to correct me in the comments, I believe showed up in a little magazine called Nature this year.
- “Beneath The Skin,” by Michael Skeet and Jill Snider Lum is a novella from Tesseracts Twelve. You can read a sample of it here. But of course you already have that anthology, don’t you? Because it contains my story “Wylde’s Kingdom,” which is also eligible. Sample that one, with flashy multi-media wiki easter-eggs, here.