Fantastic Queensland has released this year’s shortlist for the Aurealis Awards.
Congratulations to all finalists. Ones to watch are Cat Sparks and Garth Nix, with three nominated stories each, and Kate Forsyth who seems to have virtually choked the life out of her competitors for the children’s long fiction.
Fantastic Queensland has vastly improved the awards website layout; it looks superb and is much easier to navigate. Mind you, you still have to be careful saying its acronym out loud in public spaces.
Terry Dowling’s collection Basic Black tied for Best Collection with Glen Hirshberg’s American Morons at the International Horror Guild Awards. Other winners were Conrad Williams, Norman Partridge, Paul Finch*, Stephen Gallagher, William Sheehan and Bill Shafer, Subterranean magazine, Lewis Trondheim, S.T. Joshi, Aeron Alfrey, and John Picacio, while Ramsey Campbell was honoured as a Living Legend.
This year’s International Horror Guild Awards were wrapped into the World Fantasy Award convention, a synergy that works very well indeed. Details and nominees courtesy of the International Horror Guild.
*Who, given his primary genre, really ought to be Paul Flinch.
Talking Squid favourite Shaun Tan, creator of The Red Tree, The Lost Thing, and artist behind The Rabbits, took away the Best Artist trophy at the World Fantasy Awards banquet in Saratoga Springs, New York. As the award is for the 2006 calendar year, this would appear to be the judges’ response to Tan’s outstanding graphic novel, The Arrival.
Betty Ballantine and Diana Wynne-Jones* were recognised for Lifetime Achievement; other winners were Gene Wolfe, Jeffrey Ford, M. Rickert (twice), Ellen Datlow & Terry Windling, Ellen Asher, and Gary K. Wolfe. Details at LOCUS Online.
*Not to be confused with Diane Wynna-Jones.
I’m pleased to announce that the Australian popular science magazine COSMOS includes my story “Empathy” in the current issue.
COSMOS has already published fellow squid Robert Hood, and you can read Rob’s story “Cross-currents” online via the COSMOS fiction archive along with stories by Charles Stross, Gregory Benford, Paul di Filippo, Joe Haldeman and others. “Empathy” should be online in the next few weeks as the magazine rolls over to the next issue, but I strongly encourage readers to buy the magazine. Apart from having a hard copy on high-quality paper, COSMOS is an excellent magazine all round. I think it fills a very interesting niche that I can’t quite describe yet, somewhere between New Scientist and National Geographic in tone, but unlike either one, and it is one of the very few journals in Australia (or indeed the world nowadays) that gives a lot of space to strong feature articles. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Attention, Mortals!
It has come to Kanaloa’s awareness that you cannot transcend time and space. I pity you all. To ease the pain of your pathetic, physics-embedded existence, here is a list of acolytes and the times at which they will be in semi-predictable locations. Beware, though, the limitations of feeble humans. Bound by time, space, and physical laws, they can be relied upon only to be unreliable. Check back here or the Conjure squid festival program for the inevitable changes.
The Squid God has spoken!
New Scientist reports that the animal cloning team at Texas A&M University has succeeded in making five cloned copies of a champion sire. The horse, a stallion with the unlikely name of Smart Little Lena, has won $750,000 on the cowboy/rodeo circuit, and his foals have won a combined total of $36 million. That’s some horse. Now that the animal is coming to the end of its life, the Equine Embryo Laboratory has stepped in and made five copies.
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Welcome to Talking Squid. This is a group blog of a poorly defined nature. For my own part, I intend to roll over my old Frankenstein Journal readers to here and very slightly change my tone of voice. What the other contributors want is up to them.
