The World Fantasy Award

Nnedi Okorafor and Karen Joy Fowler are among the winners of this year's World Fantasy Awards. Yay!! Congratulations Nnedi and Karen! And congratulations, also, to Alisa Krasnostein, the publisher of Twelfth Planet Press in Australia, for her Special Award Presentation.

Here's the full slate of winners:

Novel: Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death
Novella: Elizabeth Hand, "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" (Stories: All-New Tales)
Short Story: Joyce Carol Oates, "Fossil-Figures" (Stories: All-New Tales)
Anthology: "My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me" (Penguin), edited by Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Gimenez Smith
Collection: "What I Didn't See and Other Stories" by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)
Artist: Kinuko Y. Craft
Special Award-Professional: Marc Gascoigne, for Angry Robot
Special Award-Non-professional: Alisa Krasnostein, for Twelfth Planet Press

Jeff VanderMeer reports here, for Omnivoracious.

Stuff of Interest

--Wendy N. Wagner interviews Nisi Shawl for Fantasy Magazine.

--Nnedi Okorafor offers her personal definition of feminism.

--Brit Mandelo reviews Joanna Russ's We Who Are About to..., of which she says:

Books rarely ask so much of the reader, true, but perhaps they should. We Who Are About to… is brutal, unforgiving, and also supremely, astoundingly beautiful, not simply because of Russ’s phenomenal, unmatched prose but because of the journey it takes the reader through. In fact, I might go further than Delany—I might be willing to call this book perfect, not just pristine, in the sense that it does exactly what it was intended to do, on every level it was intended to do it on, at the same time.

--Karyn Huenemann reviews Ursula K. Le Guin's Cheek by Jowl for the International Research Society for Children's Literature.

--Jo Walton reviews C.J. Cherry's Cyteen, about which she notes

I’ve probably read Cyteen forty times, but it always grabs me and won’t let go, and I always see more in it.

--After reading Patricia Anthony's The Happy Policeman, Gord Sellar wonders

why she is one of those authors I feel like we don’t remember in SF, and I think this fact in itself indicates something problematic in SF circles. Authors who have impressed me less (or at least less consistently — Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad, among others) are far better-remembered, and I think there are perhaps a few reasons for this.

This is the sort of question for which one explanation will not suffice as the definitive answer. Back when Anthony was still writing and publishing, she was on my sight-unseen must-buy list. In his list of possible explanations, Sellar misses at least one that occurred to me when I read that Anthony had decided to leave the genre and found myself wondering the same thing.

Here, by the way, is Anthony herself, speaking to to Sara Martin, on her career difficulties:

Your work is habitually labeled as science fiction or speculative fiction. How does labeling affect you as a writer?

To be frank, it destroyed my career. For the first few years I'd not seen myself as a science fiction writer, but instead as something of a thriller writer whose books just happened to include aliens. Well, my fault - what can a bookstore do with an alien except sell it as science fiction? But I'm afraid that I disappointed many s.f. readers who came to my books seeking a "worlds of wonder" adventure, a high concept cerebral story, an escape from the day-to-day troubles in their lives. Hah! My books are not concept-driven, but character- and story-driven. They deal with very real, very mundane tragedies, more the fodder of mainstream readers. But because the books contained aliens, a very small number of mainstream readers would read them. Neither were they accepted by the s.f. audience. By the way, I caution new writers to try not to make the mistake I made. I don't know the solution to this dilemma, since how else can bookstores make sense of their inventory? And yet slotting a writer kills a lot of creativity. Many of the books available out there tend to look and sound the same.

Doing the Right Thing

I attended an intriguing panel on Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary F&SF at Readercon this past weekend. Caitlin R. Kiernan, K.A. Laity, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Catherynne M. Valente had a lively discussion about taboos, artists and their responsibility to their audiences, and consensual artistic exchange.
The panelists spoke eloquently against “shoulds,” against telling artists what they should or should not do in their art. From the panel’s perspective, the artist is not obliged to offer role models, accepted norms, or ideas, characters, situations, actions, dialogue that the audience is comfortable with.
A few people in the audience insisted (in question form) that artists had some sort of responsibility toward the “audience” that would read/experience their work. Artists should not violate or damage that audience. Caitlin R. Kiernan claimed to have no audience in mind when creating her stories. She writes to get paid and to express the truth that comes to her. Other panelists noted that the audience doesn’t have to read a book that offends them. The audience is not forced to take in an artist’s work. Works of art can be labeled, tagged, or come with warnings to aid readers in finding what they want or avoiding what they aren’t up for.

I think people talking about the artists’ responsibility to the audience were trying to figure out how to undo the damage and violence of patriarchal and colonialist narratives. How do we transform the harsh past/present of negative representation, discrimination, and exploitation based on figments of our collective imagination such as gender and race? Popular mainstream culture has not done justice by all of us. On-going anxiety over how to deal with this results in calls for artists to Do The Right Thing and save us all!

Along those lines—
As I revised my paper critiquing District 9, Nnedi Okorafor, Nigerian author of Who Fears Death, was being chastised and badgered, live and on online, to cease and desist her speculative engagement with African narratives. See Nnedi's Blog.
The logic of this and similar attacks goes like this. Given all the savage imagery, disinformation, and stereotypical refuse clogging up our minds and spirits, Nnedi and other African (or Indigenous, Asian, African American, et. al.) writers should stick to mimetic realism to set the record straight and “uplift the race.” They should also hold off critiquing woman-hating practices, such as female genital cutting/mutilation in Africa, least they contribute to the savage imagery that oppresses colored people.

Women writers are policed for doing dirty laundry in public—an interestingly domestic metaphor for exposing women hating traditions. Colored people are not yet ready for SF&F meta-literature. Look at say District 9! What good does SF&F do us? To the frequent challenge, “What good is science fiction to Black people?” which implicitly demanded a justification for abandoning realism and the honorable labor of racial uplift, Octavia Butler replied: What good is any form of literature to Black people?
Despite apparent similarity, critiquing the stereotypical representations of Nigerians in D-9 is not the same as demanding narrative maid service in the form of mimetic realism. Nigerian writers need not spend their time, their creativity simply reacting to colonial narratives, setting the record straight, cleaning up the mess that has been done to their image. No artists need to be doing maid service. Nnedi certainly doesn't need to be in a constant reactive state to deal with the representational juggernauts trying to wipe her. However, offering complex aesthetic experiences that transform the narrative landscape as Nnedi does, is invaluable.
To Do The Right Thing--we need more stories, not more “shoulds.”

Today at Strange Horizons

Strange Horizons has just posted an interview of Nnedi Okorafor, one of WisCon's GoHs this year, as well as my review of Holly Black's new collection, The Poison Eaters. Check them out!

Nnedi Okorafor wins the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa

In case you missed this, Nnedi Okorafor's novel, Zahra the Windseeker, has been awarded the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. She has posted a photo of the trophy as well as an account of flying to Lagos for the awards ceremony and photos of Wole Soyinka, who made the award personally, herself, and her family at the ceremony. Here's a quick taste of her post:

The event was pretty elaborate. There was a full-length play (written by Promise Ogochukwu), beautifully dressed singers (who serenaded Wole Soyinka. This was pretty funny as I saw that Soyinka is very much a Nigerian man), poems were recited, awards were presented for younger writers, a little girl did a reading (what a ball of talent she was), there was dinner (mmmm, jallof rice and flan…since I don’t eat meat I stayed away from the chicken and beef and goat meat).

Of course, the approaching elections in the United States colored the air. “I want to say in a few days that history will be made,” Soyinka said as he spoke to the audience. Obama is well-loved in Nigeria.

Do check it out!