Am I the only one to have noticed this? Locus Online has chosen to exclude one of the awards announced last week by the Carl Brandon Society from its coverage of the news. I say "chosen" because the exclusion was obviously not inadvertent, since the site confirmed the erasure in its headline. Although reading that news item might make you wonder, I firmly believe that Vandana Singh will indeed receive the CBS's 2008 Parallax Award for her novella, Distances, when the awards are officially made at Arisa.
To me, the slight feels a slap in the face. Am I being ridiculously sensitive? Perhaps I am. But such disrespect also seems to bode ill for the Carl Brandon awards, since they're still very young.
Looks like Locus also didn't note Tananarive Due's win for 2008. I'm betting they figured that since the two awards omitted should have been awarded last year, they were old news.
ReplyDeleteIt's unfortunate, but I think the responsibility is partially that of the CBS, which didn't get it's awards out in a timely manner. Still, it's not like the electrons were costing Locus a lot, so they could have acknowledged the other wins too.
Your conjecture, King Rat, might be correct. Or it might be that bestowing the award on two pieces of short fiction was not considered worthy of being mentioned on the site. The reason for the erasure doesn't interest me, since it's my belief that Locus Online would not have omitted including the 2008 awards in their coverage had even one of them gone to a short story or novella by one of the small group of white males in our field who consistently receive good coverage of their accomplishments.
ReplyDeleteIt certainly looks to me like they were simply covering the 2009 awards. If they're on the ball, they will also announce the 2008 awards in another article. I'll drop them a note suggesting it.
ReplyDeleteI really really don't think that they did anything different than they would have if men had won the awards. I don't think they think that way (but I agree that their choices reinforce that impression).
My guess is that they didn't realize the 2008 awards were current, rather than old, news. I'd be most inclined to suspect them of not paying very much attention to the Carl Brandon Society and its awards than anything else.
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