Not a Blog

Hugo Recommendations – Best Professional Artist

February 18, 2019 at 1:19 pm
Profile Pic

Nominating for the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist is always especially difficult.   There are so many terrific talents working in science fiction and fantasy just now, it is next to impossible to settle on just four or five as being worthy of a nod.   Nonetheless, that’s the way it works, so…

Once again, I’ve had the honor of working with some astounding artists during the past year.   Let me bring a few of them to your attention.

MICHAEL KOMARCK, who has been the cover artist for most of the Wild Cards books since Tor revived the series, once again excelled this year, with knockout covers for both LOW CHICAGO and TEXAS HOLD ‘EM.   Take a look:

Komarck is a meticulous craftsman who always takes great care to get the characters right.  I can’t imagine anyone capturing Bubbles or Khan any better than he did on these covers.   It is truly past time that Komarck got another Hugo nod.

We had so many Wild Cards titles released last year that Tor brought in other artists to spell Komarck.   One of them was DAVID PALUMBO, who did the art for the reissue of ONE-EYED JACKS, featuring the Oddity.   Palumbo was also the artist for Bantam Spectra’s illustrated edition of NIGHTFLYERS: the cover and the gorgeous interior plates were all his.

Of course, no discussion of Wild Cards artists would be complete without a mention of JOHN PICACIO, who illustrates all of the stand-alone Wild Cards stories that appear on Tor.com.   Here are a couple of the pieces he produced last year, to illustrate Victor Milan’s “EverNight” and Max Gladstone’s “Fitting In.”

 

The biggest book I published during 2018 was not a Wild Cards mosaic, however: it was FIRE & BLOOD, the first volume of my imaginary history of the Targaryen kings of Westeros…. published on November 20 by Bantam in the US and HarperCollins Voyager in the UK in a stunning hardcover edition (still in the top ten on the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller list, some two months after publication, I am pleased to report).  The edition was extensively and lavishly illustrated by DOUG WHEATLEY.

 

Last… but certainly not least… let me draw your attention to JOHN JUDE PALENCAR, whose powerful (and disturbing) paintings for the 2019 SONG OF ICE AND FIRE calendar make it one of the strongest and most unforgettable in what I like to think has been a very distinguished series.  (Though the calendar covers 2019, it was first released at Comicon in July 2018, so the artwork therein is eligible for this year’s awards).   JJP’s take on Westeros and its denizens is like none other, and I have already arranged to buy several of his originals for my own walls.

(If you are one of the many who no longer uses wall calendars, but loves great art, you can get signed copies (signed by me, not the artist, alas) of the JJP calendar from the bookshop at my Jean Cocteau Cinema).

So there you are: Michael Komarck, David Palumbo, John Picacio, Doug Wheatley, John Jude Palencar.   Keep them in mind when making your Hugo nominations.   I know I will.

 

Current Mood: artistic artistic

Hugo Recommendations – Fan Writer

February 8, 2019 at 8:19 am
Profile Pic

Best Fan Writer.   That’s a clear cut category.

My recommendation is ADAM WHITEHEAD, for his work on his blog THE WERTZONE.

He’s come close a couple times, but has yet to make the ballot.   Maybe this is the year.

Take a read, and judge for yourselves:

http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/

I’d also love to suggest KATY RASK, who writes the marvelous Wild Cards Reread posts for Tor.com.   However, my understanding is that Tor.com pays her for those columns, which makes her ineligible.   Which is a pity, since she does a great job.   Take a look at one of her posts for a taste:

SFF Archaeology: Excavating the Superhero World of the Wild Card Series

Good stuff, I think, and there’s lot’s more where that came from.   Read the whole series, and you’ll be as impressed as I am.

Current Mood: geeky geeky

Hugo Eligibility – Fire & Blood

February 2, 2019 at 8:09 pm
Profile Pic

I had a big new Westeros book published last year (official publication date November 20, 2018) — FIRE & BLOOD, covering the history of the Targaryen kings from Aegon’s Conquest to the regency of Aegon III.   It’s been doing rather well, thank you.   Debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and is still in the top ten two months later.  And just last week, we got a great review in KIRKUS, a notoriously tough journal.

The question of its Hugo eligibility is… well, trickier than usual.

FIRE & BLOOD is eligible, certainly.  But what category does it belong in?

There’s Best Novel, the “Big One”  A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, A FEAST FOR CROWS, and A STORM OF SWORDS were all nominated for the Best Novel Hugo in years past (they all lost, to be sure, but never mind).   In all of the promotional interviews I did leading up to the book’s release, however, I took pains to stress that FIRE & BLOOD was not a novel  but rather a work of imaginary history (I used to say “fake history,” but some of my readers objected).    I did not want anyone buying the book under the misapprehension that it was the latest volume in A SONG OF ICE & FIRE.   After saying over and over again “this is not a novel,” it would be rather disingenuous of me to accept a Hugo (should it win, which I must admit is rather unlikely) or even a nomination in the Best Novel category.

Alas, there is no Hugo category for “Best Imaginary History.”

It has been pointed out to me that the publication of FIRE & BLOOD makes me eligible for nomination in the new (relatively) Best Series category.   Well, yes, I suppose.  It depends on one’s definition of what constitutes a series.   Worldcon’s definition is considerably broader than my own, for what it’s worth.   Many SF writers have set their stories against a common background or “future history,” a term originated by Heinlein and popularized by Campbell.  My own Thousand Worlds stories fit that template, but I don’t consider them a series.   They share a background, but that’s all; except for the Tuf stories, there are no recurring characters, and the tales are set hundreds of years and hundreds of light years apart.   (The Haviland Tuf stories, a subset of my Thousand Worlds, ARE a series, as I define the term).  At the other extreme, you have what I’ll call “mega-novels,” stories spread across many books because of length.   Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS was not a series, as I see it, but one long novel published in three volumes.

Those are my definitions, however.   Not worldcon’s.   The Hugo rules are much looser, and would seem to include future histories, mega-novels, and true series all in the same Best Series category.

For what it’s worth, I do not consider A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE to be a series.   It’s one story.   A huge complicated story, admittedly, one that will take seven volumes to tell (once I finish the last two).  And in any case, FIRE & BLOOD is not strictly speaking a part of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE.   It’s imaginary history set hundreds of years before any of the characters in SONG were born.   Yes, I suppose if you bundle FIRE & BLOOD, the five ASOI&F novels, and the three Dunk & Eggs novellas (collected as A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS) together, you have a series of sorts.   I wouldn’t even know what to call it.   The Westeros series?  The Seven Kingdoms series?  Not GAME OF THRONES or ICE & FIRE, certainly.   So…

I don’t know.

So… if not Best Novel, and not Best Series, where would FIRE & BLOOD fit on the Hugo ballot?  If anywhere?

My suggestion: Best Related Work.

That seems to be the best description of what the book actually is.   It’s an imaginary history, related to five published ICE & FIRE novels, but not a novel and not a part of that story.   A WORLD OF ICE & FIRE, the concordance we published several years ago, was its closest precursor.   That volume got some nominations in Best Related Work, though it did not come close to making the final five.  But there’s a precedent of sorts, so…

If you read and enjoyed FIRE & BLOOD and would like to nominate it for a Hugo, I would urge you to consider Related Work rather than Novel or Series.   (If you haven’t read it yet, hey, you can still get autographed copies from the bookshop at the Jean Cocteau Cinema).

And while I am the subject of the Best Related Work Hugo, let me make a recommendation that has nothing whatsoever to do with my own work (though my name is mentioned once, fwiw): ASTOUNDING, by Alec Nevala-Lee, an amazing and engrossing history of John W. Campbell Jr and his authors, Isaac Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, and Robert A. Heinlein.   Insightful, entertaining, and compulsively readable, it brings Campbell and his era back to life.   I thought I knew a lot about Astounding, Campbell, and his authors, but Nevala-Lee goes way way deeper than any previous history I’ve read, and his book is full of stuff I never knew.  Of course, I’d love to have my own book nominated (I value the Hugo more than any other award), but I suspect that ASTOUNDING will win the rocket in the end.   It certainly deserves to.

 

Current Mood: confused confused

Hugo Recommendations – Editor

January 18, 2019 at 9:16 am
Profile Pic

As I was saying… nominations are now open for the 2019 Hugo Awards, to be presented this August in Dublin.   You need to be a member of either the Dublin worldcon, or last year’s gathering in San Jose, to nominate.

There are two rockets given for editing.   As with drama, the editorial awards are split into Long Form and Short Form.  In simple terms, the Long Form award is for those who edit books (novels, mostly), and the Short Form for magazine and anthology editors.   (Before they split the award, the magazine editors won everything, and the book editors got nothing).

Lots and lots of good editors out there.

In Long Form, I recommend you strongly consider two of my own editors:  ANNE LESLEY GROELL of Bantam Spectra/ Random Penguin in the US, and JANE JOHNSON of Harper Collins Voyager in the UK.   Anne and Jane have both been doing amazing work for decades, and have been criminally unrecognized.   Anne has only been nominated for a Hugo once, and Jane has never been a finalist at all… though she has been one of the major players in the British SF scene for as long as I can remember, and has built Voyager into one of the top UK genre publishers.   Last year, both of them did some incredible work… especially for me.   They were the editors on FIRE & BLOOD, my book of imaginary Westerosi history.   Let’s look beyond the usual suspects this year, and nominate these two amazing women.

In Short Form… well, we have the usual suspects here as well, in a category usually dominated by the editors of the major magazines, both print and electronic.   Anthology editors are eligible as well, however, so let me blush modestly and suggest that perhaps you might consider… well… me.

I have been editing the Wild Cards series since 1987, thirty one years and counting, and we’ve published some amazing stories over the years.  I’ve edited my share of reprint anthologies and theme anthologies (many with Gardner Dozois), demanding gigs both, but neither one is as tenth as hard as editing a shared world anthology and pulling it all together.   I did come in seventh on the long list once for my editorial work on Wild Cards (back when five works made the ballot), a decade or so back, but that’s the closest I’ve ever come.  (No matter, it’s a labor of love, I sure don’t do it for the money). Wild Cards had an especially strong year in 2018, I believe.  Though I’ve lost lots of Hugos as a writer, I’ve never lost one as a editor.   Maybe this is the year.

 

 

Current Mood: hopeful hopeful

Hugo Eligibility – Drama

January 15, 2019 at 4:43 pm
Profile Pic

Nominations are now open for the 2019 Hugo Awards, to be awarded this August in Dublin at the Irish Worldcon.

The Hugos (as most of you know) are the oldest and most prestigious award in science fiction and fantasy.   They’ve been giving them since 1953, and the list of winners… and nominees… is a Who’s Who of our genre.   Dublin 2019 will also be presenting the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, which dates to 1973, and the brand new Lodestar Award for YA fiction.

It is a huge honor to win a Hugo… and almost as great an honor to lose one.  I should know.   I’ve won a few, lost a lot more, and in 1976 Gardner Dozois and I started the Hugo Losers Party.   (It still feels like a punch in the gut to type Gargy’s name, knowing he is gone).   To nominate, you need to be a member of either Dublin 2019 or last year’s worldcon, Not ConJose II.

Paper ballots are available for those who want them, but these days most voting is electronic.   Worldcon members will be sent a link to the nominating ballot by email.   Nominations close on Friday March 15.

For more details about the awards, go to https://dublin2019.com/hugo-awards-wsfs/the-hugo-awards/

My most recent Hugo wins — and losses — have been in the Dramatic Presentation categories, where GAME OF THRONES has been been a strong contender.   However, there were no episodes of GOT telecast in 2018, so the show is not eligible this year (the seventh season was shown in 2017, and the eighth and final season debuts this April).   As it happens, however, I have another series for your consideration:  NIGHTFLYERS, SyFy’s sf/horror series based on my 1980 novella (a Hugo finalist, and Hugo loser, in its day), all ten episodes of which were shown between December 2 and December 12.

There are two Drama categories in the Hugos, Long Form and Short Form, as determined by running time.   Feature films usually dominate Long Form, and television shows Short Form.   You can nominate a TV show in Long Form, but in that case you are nominating the entire season (GAME OF THRONES won its first Hugo in Long Form, as it happens).   In Short Form, you need to nominate a specific episode.   So if you’re a fan of NIGHTFLYERS, you can nominate the entire first season in Long Form, or one or more of the following episodes in Short Form:

01    “All We Left Behind”
02   “Torches and Pitchforks”
03   “The Abyss Stares Back”
04   “White Rabbit”
05   “Greywing”
06   “The Sacred Gift”
07    “Transmission”
08   “Rebirth”
09   “Icarus”
10    “All That We Have Found”

I expect the competition to be very tough in Dramatic Presentation, Short Form this year.  This is a golden age for science fiction on television.   Not all that long ago, we were lucky to have one or two genre shows worthy of nomination, but today, in this age of max tv, there are science fiction and fantasy shows everywhere you look — on the broadcast networks, on cable, on the streaming services.   Recent winners THE GOOD PLACE and THE EXPANSE both had new episodes in 2018.   Fans of superheroics had the Marvel shows on Netflix and the DC shows on the CW to choose from.   Zombie lovers had THE WALKING DEAD and Z NATION.  Lev Grossman’s THE MAGICIANS had a fun third season.  If starships and aliens were your thing, there was a new STAR TREK show and Seth McFarlane’s THE ORVILLE.   And of course there is always DOCTOR WHO, a perennial powerhouse, this year with a brand new Doctor, the thirteenth.   I’d be very surprised if there were not at least two episodes of DOCTOR WHO on the final ballot (recent rules changes make it impossible for there to be more than two).    I’ve undoubtedly forgotten some other shows as well, and there may well be British and Irish shows of which I am entirely unaware… there’s just so much out there, that even someone deeply involved in television on a professional basis, like myself, cannot keep up.

I would like to recommend one series that has never been nominated, but IMNSHO deserves to be:  OUTLANDER, based on Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling novels.   I have a feeling that Hugo nominators tend to overlook the series because they think of it as a historical or a romance rather than science fiction.  It IS both those things, of course, but it is also a time travel show… and more importantly, it’s superb.   Amazing production values, well written (and quite faithful to Diana’s books), well directed, and well acted.  The cast is doing fantastic work, especially the leads.   If you haven’t watched OUTLANDER, you should check it out… and nominate your favorite episode, if you like it as much as Parris and I do.

Whatever you watch, whatever you like, NOMINATE.   It IS a singular honor just to be nominated, and far fewer people nominate than vote on the final ballot, so this is your chance to let your voice be heard.

I will talk about some of the other categories in subsequent posts, over the next few weeks.

 

Current Mood: busy busy

Hugo Nominations Announced

March 31, 2018 at 6:54 pm
Profile Pic

The San Jose Worldcon has announced this year’s list of nominations for the Hugo Awards and the John W. Campbell Award.

LOCUS has the full list of finalists at:

http://locusmag.com/2018/03/2018-hugo-and-campbell-awards-finalists/

The Hugo is the oldest and most prestigious award in SF and fantasy. If you want your voice to be heard, there’s still plenty of time to join the San Jose Worldcon and cast your vote. There’s Attending memberships, if you actually plan to attend, and Supporting memberships, if you can’t, but either way you get a Hugo ballot.

Congratulations to all the nominees. Some of you will carry home a silver rocket come August. More of you will be Hugo Losers, but that’s almost as good. (I’ve lost lots of them myself).

Sad to say, Wild Cards did not get any love this year (sob)… but I was very pleased to see that our Wild Cards editor, Diana Pho, is one of the finalists for Best Professional Editor. You go, Diana. Win it for Jetboy!

Current Mood: contemplative contemplative

Wild Cards Artwork

March 2, 2018 at 11:21 am
Profile Pic

The Wild Cards series has been blessed with some really amazing artwork since we’ve been published by Tor. Let me introduce you to some of our artists.

MICHAEL KOMARCK Has been our main cover artist since INSIDE STRAIGHT, and he’s still hitting it out of the ballpark. Here’s his cover for LOW CHICAGO, due out in hardcover in June.

The amazing JOHN PICACIO has been doing all the “cover” art for the Wild Cards stories on Tor.com. Here’s his two latest, for Vic Milan’s “EverNight” and Melinda Snodgrass’s “When the Devil Drives.”

David Palumbo has been building quite a buzz for his recent cover work. If you haven’t seen his cover art for Nnedi Okorafor’s BINTI, look it up, it’s stunning. We’re thrilled to have snagged him for Wild Cards. Here’s his cover for the forthcoming reissue of ONE-EYED JACKS.

Bastien Lecouffe Deharme is another artist new to Wild Cards, but he did a knockout cover for our most recent mosaic, MISSISSIPPI ROLL. See below. We want to get him back for more covers!

Remember those four names when you are making out your Hugo nominations for Best Professional Artist: Michael Komarck, John Picacio, David Palumbo, Bastien Lecouffe Deharme. You can find lots more examples of their art on their respective websites.

Current Mood: excited excited

Hugo Nominations Open

February 7, 2018 at 2:53 pm
Profile Pic

Nominations for the 2018 Hugo Awards have now opened, I am informed. If you are a member of last year’s worldcon in Helsinki, this year’s worldcon in San Jose, or next year’s worldcon in Dublin, you are eligible to nominate. You should be receiving an email with a link to the ballot. (I have not actually received mine yet, but I’m told that others have, so I expect mine Real Soon Now).

I have a few things eligible for nomination myself this year… more for editing than writing, however.

GAME OF THRONES is eligible in the Dramatic Presentation category, of course. The whole of Season 7 can be nominated in Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, and any or all of the individual episodes can be nominated in Short Form. GOT has won in both categories in the past. Last year in Helsinki, three episodes actually had enough votes to make the ballot, but the new rule limits any series to no more than two places on the ballot, so we had to withdraw one. But you can nominate as many episodes as you like.

Wild Cards had a big year last year. We celebrated the 30th Anniversary of the series, and our twenty-fourth mosaic novel, MISSISSIPPI ROLL, was published in the fall. A couple of the older books were reissued, and we had two original Wild Cards story on Tor.com — “When the Devil Drives” by Melinda M. Snodgrass, and “The Atonement Tango” by Stephen Leigh. The two Tor.com stories are both novelettes and are eligible in that category. MISSISSIPPI ROLL is a more complex case. Like most Wild Cards books, it is a mosaic novel, with individual stories by half a dozen writers woven together to make a whole that is, we hope, more than the sum of its parts. One could argue that our mosaics are anthologies, I suppose… but they feel more like collaborative novels to me. If the former view prevails, the individual components of MISSISSIPPI ROLL are eligible in the short fiction categories, Steve Leigh’s “In the Shadow of Tall Stacks” in novella, the other stories as novelettes. If the latter, the volume as a whole could be nominated in novel.

In either case, I’m eligible for nomination in the editing categories. Short Form, most likely, for the stories in Tor.com as well as the book. (If you consider MISSISSIPPI ROLL a novel, then it counts for me as a Long Form editor, but I don’t think one book is enough to make me eligible in that category). My Wild Cards work was the only editing I did in 2017. The big cross-genre anthologies I co-edited with Gardner Dozois all came out in previous years.

Wild Cards as a whole is definitely eligible for nomination as Best Series. That’s a new category that first appeared on the ballot last year, as an experiment, but now it has been made permanent.

The only writing I had published in 2017 was “The Sons of the Dragon,” which was published in THE BOOK OF SWORDS, Gardner Dozois’s massive anthology of original sword & sorcery stories. Like “The Rogue Prince” and “The Princess and the Queen” before it, “Sons” is more of my (fake) history of the Targaryen kings of Westeros. By length, it is a novella… but it’s not a traditional narrative. By design, it reads like history, not fiction; but since the history is entirely imaginative, it’s still fiction, even if dressed up as (fake) non-fiction.

It has been pointed out to me that the publication of “The Sons of the Dragon” makes the entirety of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE eligible to be nominated as Best Series. I suppose that’s so. All I can say to that is : please don’t. If you like fake history and enjoyed “The Sons of the Dragon,” by all means nominate the story as a novella… but it’s really not part of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, and sneaking in the entire series by means of a technicality seems wrong to me.

If I may broaden the discussion a bit, while I think it is good that the Hugo Awards now have a category to recognize series books, I would quibble somewhat with how a “series” is defined. The rules were written very broadly, to include not only true series, like last year’s winner, the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold, but also any grouping of stories set against a common background, what we used to call “future histories,” as well as what I’d term “mega-novels,” those massive epics too long to be contained in a single volume. Three-quarters of the SF I wrote back in the 70s was set against a common background, but I never considered that I was writing a series when I visited the Thousand Worlds; it was a future history, made up of stories set hundreds of years apart, on planets separated by thousands of light years (though within the future history there was a series, the Haviland Tuf stories). On the other extreme, I don’t consider A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE a series either; it’s one single story, being published in (we hope) seven volumes. FWIW, Tolkien wasn’t writing a series when he wrote LORD OF THE RINGS either. He wrote a big novel and his publisher divided it into three parts, none of which stands on its own.

Anyway, that’s my own perspective on the matter. Obviously, the good folks who drafted the Best Series rules disagree. Ultimately I think the fans will decide the matter by what they choose to nominate. Worldcon committees have traditionally been reluctant to overrule the fans, even in cases where a nominated work would seem to be ineligible for one reason or other.

FWIW, Wild Cards is a series, plainly, so if you want to consider any of my work for Best Series, that’s the one I’d ask you to look at. Thirty-one years and twenty=four books is something to be proud of, and I am.

Regardless of whether or not you nominate any of my own work, I do urge all the worldcon members reading this to be sure to nominate. There are a lot of awards being given in SF, fantasy, and horror these days, but the Hugo was the first, and it’s still the one that means the most. It is, of course, important to vote on the final ballot too… but you can’t vote for works that have not been nominated, and it is crucial to have widespread participation in the nominating stage.

((Comments and debate allowed, but ONLY on these subjects. Stay on topic)).

Current Mood: thoughtful thoughtful

A Sadness

September 10, 2017 at 3:51 pm
Profile Pic

Jerry Pournelle has passed away. He was 84.

It would seem that he attended Dragoncon in Atlanta, caught some kind of bug, and died in his sleep on September 8, after complaining of feeling unwell in his last blog post, on the 7th.

Pournelle has been a major figure in the field for as long as I have been a part of it. I first met him in 1973 at the worldcon in Toronto, where both of us were finalists for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer (along with Lisa Tuttle, Ruth Berman, George Alec Effinger, and Robert Thurston). That was the very first year the award was given. To the surprise of no one, Pournelle won, though Geo. Alec Effinger finished so close behind the con gave him a special second place plaque, the only time THAT ever happened. (How close, you may ask? Ten votes, two votes, a single vote? No one knows. In those days, worldcons did not release vote totals).

The Hugos were given at a banquet in those days. I could not afford a ticket, so I came in after the meal for the awards. It was rather an unusual ceremony. The Hugo rockets had not arrived, so the winners received only empty bases… except for Jerry, since the Campbell sponsors (Conde Nast, in those days) HAD managed to come up with a plaque. There’s Jerry holding it, above.

The other weirdness about that night was that toastmaster Lester del Rey, for reasons only known to himself, chose to present the awards backwards. In other words, he started with Best Novel (the ‘Big One,’ then as now), working his way though short fiction and to the fan awards, and ended with the brand-new never-given-before Campbell. Thing is, people started leaving after each award was given, and by the end, there was hardly anyone left in the hall except me, Jerry Pournelle and his party, and the other nominees and their friends (I think Lisa Tuttle and Ruth Berman were there, but Thurston and Effinger were not, someone else accepted the plaque for Piglet).

I came out of the night all right. It was an honor, a huge honor, just to be nominated. And in the aftermath I came up with the idea of a Campbell Awards anthology. A couple editors told me it was an idea worth pursuing, but of course I needed to get all the nominees to sign on… and the key one was Jerry, the winner. So I bought him a drink and pitched him the notion, and he said yes (though, being the consummate pro, he made that contingent on me being able to pay competitive professional rates). Eventually that conversation led to my NEW VOICES anthology, and launched my career as an editor and anthologist… and I’m still going strong there, forty-four years later.

The Hugo voters knew what they were doing when they gave Pournelle that first Campbell; he went on to have an amazing career, both on his own and in collaboration with other writers, particularly Larry Niven. With INFERNO, LUCIFER’S HAMMER, FOOTFALL, and (especially) MOTE IN GOD’S EYE, the two of them helped transform the field in the 70s. They were among the very first SF writers ever to hit the big bestseller lists, and among the first to get six-figure advances at the time when most writers were still getting four figure advances… something that Jerry was never shy about mentioning. Though he was nominated for a number of Hugo Awards in the years that followed, he never won one… but if that bothered him, he did not show it. “Money will get you through times of no Hugos better than Hugos will get you through times of no money,” he said famously.

Pournelle was fond of talking about all the help Robert A. Heinlein (whom he always called “Mr. Heinlein,” at least in my hearing) gave him when he was starting out, and he was a passionate advocate of RAH’s “pay it forward” philosophy, and did much to help the generations of writers who came after him. He served a term in the thankless job of SFWA President, and remained an active part of SFWA ever after, as part of the advisory board of Past Presidents and (even more crucially) on GriefCom, the Grievance Committee. Jerry could be loud and acrimonious, yes, and when you were on the opposite side of a fight from him that was not pleasant… ahh, but when you were on the SAME side, there was no one better to have in your foxhole. I had need of SFWA’s Griefcom only once in my career, in the early 80s, and when we met at worldcon with the publisher I had Jerry with me representing Griefcom. He went through the publisher’s people like a buzzsaw, and got me everything I wanted, resolving my grievance satisfactorily (and confidentially, so no, no more details).

His politics were not my politics. He was a rock-ribbed conservative/ libertarian, and I’m your classic bleeding-heart liberal… but we were both fans, and professional writers, and ardent members of SFWA, and we loved SF and fantasy and fandom, and that was enough. You don’t need to agree with someone on everything to be able to respect them. And while MOTE IN GOD’S EYE may not have won the Hugo in its year, it remains one of the great classics of space opera, destined to be read and re-read for as long as people read science fiction (it IS an honor just to be nominated).

The last time I saw Jerry was at Keith Kato’s chili party at MidAmericon II. He loved Keith’s chili as much as I do, another point in his favor.

R.I.P. Jerry. You were one ornery so-and-so, but you were our ornery so-and-so. Hoist a pint for me at that Secret Pro Party in the sky, and say hello to Mr. Heinlein.

Current Mood: sad sad

Tick, Tick, Tick

July 12, 2017 at 12:38 pm
Profile Pic

The clock is running.

Only three days left for worldcon members to cast those Hugo ballots.

And yes, of course I will be at Helsinki. See, it’s right there on my website, with a link.

(My website has an Appearances page that lists ALL the public events I have committed to, not only for this year, but for the next several years as well. Do check it regularly to see if I am going to be anywhere near you. There’s nothing that honks me off more than getting the inevitable email that says ‘How comes you never come to Trantor?” two weeks after I’ve just returned from Trantor).

I will be at worldcon all week. They are scheduling me for several signings, but those will be the ONLY times and places I will sign books. I’ll also be doing a couple of panels, but please don’t rush the stage afterward to get an autograph. I will not be signing after panels, or before panels, or when walking the halls, or on the trams, or while eating dinner (or lunch, or breakfast), or at the urinal, or at parties, or at the Hugo Awards… ONLY at my scheduled signings.

Thank you all for respecting that.

And hey, looks like GAME OF THRONES will be well represented in Helsinki. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are coming in from Belfast, and Sibel Kekilli is flying up from Hamburg.

Let’s party like it’s 1976.

Current Mood: working working