Not a Blog

WARRIORS Wins Locus Poll

June 29, 2011 at 10:30 am
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I’m delighted to announce that WARRIORS, the gigantic cross-genre anthology that I co-edited with my old friend Gardner Dozois, has won the Locus Award as the Best Anthology of 2010.

The award is given by LOCUS magazine, the PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY of science fiction and fantasy, and is decided by an annual poll of of the magazine’s readers. You can check out the full results on Tor.com here: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/announcing-the-2011-locus-award-winners

Gardner and I are very proud of WARRIORS, our tilting-at-windmills attempt to smash down some genre barriers, and we’re thrilled to see it cop this prize over some terrific competition, all of them pure SF and fantasy. My thanks to all our contributors, who helped make the book what it is. Without them, WARRIORS would be… well, a big book of blank pages. And thanks as well to Tom Doherty, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, and all the other folks at Tor.

In other categories, Neil Gaiman took home the prize for Best Short Story for “The Thing About Cassandra,” originally published in another of the anthologies that Gardner and I have edited, SONGS OF LOVE AND DEATH. Congratulations to Neil. A well deserved award for a great story.

In novella, my own contender “The Mystery Knight” was among the finalists, but lost out to Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.” Tough competition, that. Congratulations to the winner… and don’t worry, Dunk & Egg will have other chances in the years to come.

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A Day in Slovenia

June 29, 2011 at 8:06 am
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Some highlights from my recent visit to Slovenia. From Aljaž Potočnik, who followed us around for most of the day.

http://www.dnevnik.si/novice/kultura/1042454378

The news article is in Slovenian, but the video features me speaking English. (What else? That’s all I speak). Bits from my introductory Slovenian press conference and my signing in Koper (the small one, not the monstrous one in Ljubljana) are included… along with highlights of my visit to the amazing Predjama Castle, which appears to double as the Slovenian version of Graumann’s Chinese Theatre as well as being an astonishing fortress-in-a-cave.

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Amazon Screws the Pooch

June 29, 2011 at 7:57 am
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People are posting all sorts of off-topic comments on my Miss USA post, below, so I am going to close that one and address the news about Amazon.de here.

Yes, I know, Amazon Germany screwed up big time and started shipping A DANCE WITH DRAGONS before they were supposed to. I am told that about 180 copies got out before they were made aware of their mistake and shut down shipping.

I am not happy about this. My publishers are furious.

If we find out who is responsible, we will mount his head on a spike.

Some other retailers are making noises about releasing their own stocks early, using the Amazon error as a justification. They are not supposed to do this. If you hear of anyone actually selling or shipping copies in advance of the publication date, please inform me ASAP.

I know that the 180 readers who got advance copies are happy about this, but I assure you, my publishers are not. And thousands of other readers are now getting spoiled, most quite inadvertently and unwillingly, as they stumble over the spoilers cropping up everywhere on the internet. (Some of the spoilers being posted are false, by the way). Most of those “lucky” 180 are keeping mum, to be sure, but there are always a few jerkwads in any group, and those are the ones who cannot keep their mouths shut.

A mess all around.

All I can say is, pfui.

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