Nominations are open for the Ursula K. LeGuin prize.
The Tolkien Society Awards were announced on April 1, and apparently that isn’t a joke. These awards include visual arts.
Oh, no, I missed a scandal. I have failed you. Apparently, during the tallying of the SFWA Nebula Award nominees, an editor from Baen Books cast doubt on the counts, providing a screenshot of a list with a Baen book near the top. Strangely, the screenshot wasn’t from the nominating list at all, but a completely different SFWA list.
Tor.com isn’t the only site that does “Five…” or “Eight…” and a round-up of books with a certain theme. CrimeReads does it too. Here’s a list of best books with AI.
Vanity Fair has a nice article about a new Marvel series, Secret Invasion, which features Nick Fury and the Skrull, who are tired of waiting for the “home of their own” they were promised. Many familiar faces in this one!
I got introduced to this story this weekend. Saki is well-known; you may have read this is school. It’s actually… social commentary? Grim humor? A cautionary tale? Enjoy!
Is cyberpunk dead? No, says this article; it’s alive and doing great in South Asia.
Robot dogs can now open doors and let themselves in, just like your dog can with the bathroom door.
Nerds of a Feather reviews Peculiar Woods, which sounds like a charming graphic novel for young people.
I’ve commented in a couple of reviews lately that I’m growing tired of teen or twenty-something protagonists, and I’d like to see some different flavors of grownup. This middle-grade school librarian brings a different position to the argument. She wants to see more middle grade books with a specific age range. What do you think of her reasons?
Scary! Teens are sneaking away to… watch chess tournaments.
Ars Technica reviews the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons film, Honor Among Thieves, and likes it.
The middle grade school librarian’s article is less interesting than the article she links to about a supposed decline in YA book sales. How many books have protagonists of a certain (definite) age is not data that would be easy to come by, and how those books are marketed is another quandary. Because what we’re talking about is marketing categories, which should be less meaningful to the kids doing the reading than they are to publishers and maybe to school librarians. I doubt kids are checking the exact age of the main character before deciding whether to buy or borrow a book. And the reasons that the second article gives for possible sales decline include some pretty likely sounding ones: fewer inexpensive mass market paperbacks, uninspired look-alike covers, too many series books and excessively lengthy standalones; to which I would add less disposable income with the economy heading into a downturn, too many sound-alike story blurbs, and a media-saturated environment that promotes too many time-wasting alternatives to reading. I’ve heard some people say that the way they are teaching reading nowadays makes it seem very unenjoyable to students, but I have no idea if there’s any truth to that. They did manage to totally bollix up the teaching of mathematics back when I was in secondary school, so it’s not impossible.
I’ll take a look at the article she linked to. I love librarians, but I also wondered how much she is doing to direct kids to exciting books. “In the old days,” before we had a bunch of marketing categories, the librarians at our local libraries would direct me to all kinds of books. Of course, they knew us and knew my parents let me read what i wanted. I wasn’t limited to 15 year old protagonists when I was 13. Admittedly, that was a long time ago.
Probably even longer here, but I remember a great librarian pointing me to Ray Bradbury when I was 11, and the wealth of very inexpensive paperbacks led me to J. G. Ballard, A. E. van Vogt and Samuel R. Delany at 12, and to Thomas Pynchon, Frank Herbert and Philip K. Dick at 13-14. I consider those ages at the upper end of what they call “middle grade” now from a marketing standpoint, but I don’t think the library recognized any such category back then. And nobody was asking your age at the news stand or drug store unless you had a book with a really lurid cover (and not always even then). It was a much more formally moralistic era, but paradoxically less paranoid about what the young were exposed to (within reason).
Those sound like a lot of the same authors, actually. I also read Harlan Ellison when I was a young teen. That was… not a good match,.
Ellison and Norman Spinrad would probably top the list of SF authors not appropriate for early teens (in those days). I think the reason there was no “tween” or “middle grade” category back then is that whatever the equivalent young adult category was called (maybe “high school readers”), it didn’t include any books with sex. It wasn’t till the very end of the 1960s that books including sexual themes started being marketed as young adult. So before that there wasn’t much of an issue with 6th or 7th graders reading high school age-group books. But it also wasn’t that hard to get a hold of adult reading-level books. I think some of the shift in attitudes is the result of what was called “mainstream” Protestant churches fading out and being overtaken by the evangelical sects, which have a much greater horror of their children being exposed to anything counter to the belief system. The mainstream churches were stuffy conservatives or moderates, not “stone you to death” conservatives, so the level of sensitivity about what children read was not at the fever pitch that we’re experiencing now.