Hugo Winners Announced!

Not many surprises in this list.  Though, it’s worth noting, that a tie in the best novel category hasn’t happened since 1993 when Connie Willis’  Doomsday Book and Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep shared the award.  We are also pleased to see “Doctor Who” once again win in the short form dramatic presentation category.  And, yup, that’s this year’s trophy design pictured above:

• Best Novel: TIE: The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK); The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)
• Best Novella: “Palimpsest”, Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace, Orbit)
• Best Novelette: “The Island”, Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2; Eos)
• Best Short Story: “Bridesicle”, Will McIntosh (Asimov’s 1/09)
• Best Related Book: This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance (Subterranean)
• Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm Written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; Art by Phil Foglio; Colours by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Moon Screenplay by Nathan Parker; Story by Duncan Jones; Directed by Duncan Jones (Liberty Films)
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars” Written by Russell T Davies & Phil Ford; Directed by Graeme Harper (BBC Wales)
• Best Editor Short Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden
• Best Editor Long Form: Ellen Datlow
• Best Professional Artist: Shaun Tan
• Best Semiprozine: Clarkesworld edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, & Cheryl Morgan
• Best Fan Writer: Frederik Pohl
• Best Fanzine: StarShipSofa edited by Tony C. Smith
• Best Fan Artist: Brad W. Foster

And the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (presented by Dell Magazines): Seanan McGuire

The “Long Goodbye” of the Print Book

In a piece highlighting the massive success of Tony Blair’s memoirs, the Guardian once again bemoans the potential death of bookshops and the printed book.  But, finally,  near the end of the article they get to the crux of it:

… paradoxically, the age of digitisation is both a golden age of ink (virtual and electronic as much as ink-and-paper) and a boom time for narrative, in many media, on countless “platforms”, from blogs, audiobooks and trashy paperbacks to television soaps, Facebook crazes, and – yes – hardback memoirs. Not since the late 16th century has there been such a bonanza in new prose. The scale of the global audience and its extraordinary new means of self-expression get forgotten amid the legitimate anxieties over the consequence of “free content”.

Bookshops are changing. The worst are becoming novelty item and greetings card boutiques, but the good ones are selling more books than ever, and the publishers, cursing the climate and moaning as usual about the state of the harvest, show few signs of cutting back on their output. Blair’s success suggests that the book-buying public may talk digital but actually buy analogue. This could be Gutenberg’s long goodbye.

And this is the real point.  The Internet revolution has brought in a new vibrancy to both reading and writing.  And this revitalization has inevitably brought more and more people to books be they electronic or otherwise.

And ultimately the question isn’t the success of books in a specific form but of books themselves.  The growth of reading.  And the ebook success story is further proof that despite all the other activities open to us,  modern humans still make time for reading.   And that doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon.  Thus, this “long goodbye” the Guardian speaks of may rapidly transform into a long series of new hellos.