Out of the Woodwork 154. August 2009
Fantastic Literature - setting the standards for out of print on-line bookselling.

Welcome to our newsletter, it contains up to the minute news and gossip as well as awards details and items requiring help from the collective consciousness. If you wish to contribute please do so! We welcome your thoughts, your news items and any gossip! We do love a bit of gossip here at Fantastic HQ.

In this newsletter:

2009 Locus Awards - success for Neil Stephenson
Charles N Brown - editor of Locus and Phylis Gotlieb dies in July
The End of Emily West by Wendy Webster-Turner - sure fire hit!
The Shirley Jackson Awards - announced July 12th 2009
Terry Pratchett BBC interview on assisted suicide - fascinating and thoughtful
Campbell & Sturgeon Award Winners 2009 - a tie for the very first time
Crime Writers' Association Dagger Awards.
The Libertarian Futurist Society - Prometheus Awards - Cory Doctorow wins
Finalists for the 11th Endeavour Award - another nomination for Neal Stephenson
Sunburst Award finalists - for literature of the fantastic
Collective Consciousness - success from the last newsletter
- and a new one for you as well - one of ever popular features!
Department of Smug Self Satisfaction - the usual trbutes - always appreciated
Archive

Locus publisher, editor, and co-founder Charles N. Brown, 72, died peacefully in his sleep July 12, 2009 on his way home from Readercon. Locus

Phyllis Gotlieb, the novelist and poet said to be the first Canadian science fiction writer, has died. She was 83. She has been called the mother of contemporary Canadian science fiction, and the Sunburst Award, for adult and young adult sci-fi, was named after her first novel. CBC News, Canada

2009 Locus Award Winners
Winners of the 2009 Locus Awards were announced at a ceremony and banquet June 27, 2009 in Seattle WA during the Science Fiction Awards Weekend.

Science Fiction Novel: Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow

Fantasy Novel: Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt)

First Novel: Singularity's Ring, Paul Melko (Tor)
Young-Adult Book: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, Bloomsbury)
Novella: "Pretty Monsters", Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters)
Novelette: "Pump Six", Paolo Bacigalupi (Pump Six and Other Stories)
Short Story: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
Anthology: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin's)
Collection: Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)
Non-Fiction/Art Book: P. Craig Russell, Coraline: The Graphic Novel, Neil Gaiman, adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell (HarperCollins)
Editor: Ellen Datlow
Artist: Michael Whelan
Magazine: F&SF
Publisher: Tor

Wendy Turner-Webster, the TV presenter, is a friend of ours and we are happy to promote her latest title "The End of Emily West" and to inform you that 50% of the proceeds go to the charity "Refuge" - it has excellent reviews on Amazon. To order click the image below .Emily West's idyllic childhood is shattered when her young brother, Bobby, dies from meningitis. Her wish to escape to a more exciting, adventurous life seems to be granted when, at the age of eighteen, she meets Darren O'Dowel. Fifteen years her senior and with a job at the local radio station he appears to offer a sophisticated and glamorous existence... the reality is anything but. Darren is controlling, domineering, abusive and violent and leads her into a dark and degrading world of drink, drugs and sexual exploitation. Only when she eventually extracts herself from this destructive relationship can her life start afresh. But Darren O'Dowel does not forgive or forget. He blames her for his downturn in fortune and he wants revenge. He believes that Emily West has ruined his life... now he will try to ruin hers.

The 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards winners were announced on Sunday, July 12th 2009, at Readercon 20, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts. Congratulations to all winners.

Last year's winners can be found here.

NOVEL
Winner:
THE SHADOW YEAR, Jeffrey Ford (William Morrow)
Finalists:
Alive in Necropolis, Doug Dorst (Riverhead Hardcover)
The Man on the Ceiling, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem (Wizards of the Coast Discoveries)
Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)
The Resurrectionist, Jack O’Connell (Algonquin Books)
Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Knopf Books for Young Readers)

NOVELLA
Winner:
DISQUIET, Julia Leigh (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton)
Finalists:
"Dormitory," Yoko Ogawa (The Diving Pool, Picador)
Living With the Dead, Darrell Schweitzer (PS Publishing)
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, Stephen Graham Jones (Chiasmus Press)
"N,", Stephen King (Just After Sunset, Scribner)

NOVELETTE
Winner:
"PRIDE AND PROMETHEUS," John Kessel (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
Finalists:
"Hunger Moon," Deborah Noyes (The Ghosts of Kerfol, Candlewick Press)
"The Lagerstatte," Laird Barron (The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ballantine Books/Del Rey)
"Penguins of the Apocalypse," William Browning Spencer (Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, Subterranean Press)
The Situation, Jeff VanderMeer (PS Publishing)

SHORT STORY
Winner:
"THE PILE," Michael Bishop (Subterranean Online, Winter 2008)
Finalists:
"68° 07’ 15"N, 31° 36’ 44"W," Conrad Williams (Fast Ships, Black Sails, Night Shade Books)
"The Dinner Party," Joshua Ferris (The New Yorker, August 11, 2008)
"Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account," M. Rickert (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2008)
"The Inner City," Karen Heuler (Cemetery Dance #58, 2008)
"Intertropical Convergence Zone," Nadia Bulkin (ChiZine, Issue 37, 2008)

COLLECTION
Winner:
THE DIVING POOL, Yoko Ogawa (Picador)
Finalists:
A Better Angel, Chris Adrian (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser (Knopf)
The Girl on the Fridge, Etgar Keret (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Just After Sunset, Stephen King (Scribner)
Wild Nights!, Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)

ANTHOLOGY
Winner:
THE NEW UNCANNY, Edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page (Comma Press)
Finalists:
Bound for Evil, edited by Tom English (Dead Letter Press)
Exotic Gothic 2: New Tales of Taboo, edited by Danel Olson (Ash-Tree Press)
Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Night Shade Books)
Shades of Darkness, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press)

Terry Pratchett is lending his support to a bill going through the House of Lords to legalise assisted suicide in England. The Wiltshire-based science fiction writer has Alzheimer's Disease.

He told BBC News: "I think it is possible that someone in possession of their faculties who has an incurable disease could actually request death rather than face an unpleasant endgame. "It seems to me to contravene no real law." See BBC interview

Campbell and Sturgeon Award Winners
Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (Tor) and Ian R. MacLeod's Song of Time (PS Publishing) tied to win the 2008 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. This is only the third tie in the award's history.

"The Ray Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner (Asimov's 2/08) won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

The awards were announced early, but will be presented at a banquet July 10, 2009, held during the Campbell Conference in Lawrence KS, from July 9-12

The Libertarian Futurist Society has released winners of this year's Prometheus Awards in advance of the planned awards ceremony at Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, August 6-10, 2009, in Montréal, Quebec, Canada.

Winners and finalists are as follows:

NOVEL`

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow (Tor)

Matter, Iain Banks (Orbit)
The January Dancer, Michael Flynn (Tor)
Saturn's Children, Charles Stross (Tor)
Opening Atlantis, Harry Turtledove (Roc)
Half a Crown, Jo Walton (Tor)

Twelve novels were nominated.

HALL OF FAME

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

Falling Free, Lois McMaster Bujold
Courtship Rite, Donald M. Kingsbury
"As Easy as A.B.C.", Rudyard Kipling
The Once and Future King, T.H. White
The Golden Age, John C. Wright

The Hall of Fame category includes works sometimes nominated year after year until they win; The Lord of the Rings has been nominated several times in the past.

The Crime Writers’ Association is delighted to announce the winners of the Dagger in the Library, International, Short Story and Debut Daggers.

Colin Cotterill has won the Dagger in the Library; writer Fred Vargas and translator Sîan Reynolds have triumphed in the International Dagger for the third time in four years; Sean Chercover has won the Short Story Dagger and Catherine O’Keefe the Debut Dagger.

The CWA Dagger Awards celebrate the very best in crime and thriller writing, and are the longest established literary awards in the UK. These premier awards in crime fiction are recognised internationally as a mark of excellence. CWA

The winner will be announced November 27 at OryCon, Oregon's annual science fiction convention and will receive a $1,000.00 honorarium.

Judges for this year's award are Joe Haldeman, John Helfers, and Sarah Zettel.
FINALISTS

Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Morrow)

Ill Met in the Arena, Dave Duncan (Tor)

Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Stories, Ken Scholes (Tor)

Space Magic, David Levine (Wheatland)

A World Too Near, Kay Kenyon (Pyr)

Finalists for the 2009 Sunburst Award, given to the best novel-length Canadian literature of the fantastic, have been announced.

Adult Novel:

Night Child, Jes Battis (Ace)

The Gargoyle, Andrew Davidson (Random House Canada)

The Alchemist's Code, Dave Duncan (Ace)

Things Go Flying, Shari Lapeña (Brindle & Glass)

Half a Crown, Jo Walton (Tor)

Young-Adult Novel:

The Summoning, Kelley Armstrong (Doubleday Canada)

Dingo, Charles de Lint (Viking)

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow (Tor)

Wild Talent, Eileen Kernaghan (Thistledown Press)

Night Runner, Max Turner (HarperTrophy)

One for the collective consciousness, yet another result! and another query - see below

a) Hi there. This is a bit of a long desperate shot in the dark.

Way back in 1984 I read a fantasy book about a man who was unemployed in our world. He went for a job interview and to cut a long story short he became a 'Conan' like hero in a fanasy world.

Unfortunately I do not remember the title or author but I am sure the word Golden appeared in the title. I have been searching for this book for nearly 15 years and I am about to give up.

Nigel Hallett

Well the answers flooded in, as you might expect we all had roughly the same idea!

Rodney Sims. "Hi there, I'm sure you'll be inundated with answers, but this sounds very much as though it's Robert Heinlein's Glory Road (Glory/Golden?) - if it isn't, he could certainly give it a try anyway".

James Goddard. "Sounds like Heinlein's Glory Road to me!"

John Bucklew. "The description by Nigel H. sounds vaguely like Robert Heinlein's "Glory Road." Best regards, John

David. "Unfortunately the 'can you help' button appears to have no function, but I'm pretty sure that the book he's looking for is 'Glory Road' by Robert Heinlein. I'm sure scads of people have already told him!! Keep up the good work"

Sid Seton . Nigel H's question makes me think of Heinleins Glory Road.

A Vietnam veteran idling away his time on the Isle du Levant, Oscar+s eye is caught by the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, sleekly muscled and with regal bearing. When she offers him a job with great adventure and great risk he blindly accepts, little realizing just what an incredible trek he has let himself in for: a journey through some of the twenty universes where Star is Empress, on a quest to retrieve the stolen Great Egg. The grandest pure adventure from the genre+s master storyteller, Glory Road is a masterpiece of escapist entertainment with a typically Heinleinian sting in its tail
( Text from Shelfari)

David Tierney. "Hi The first collective consious book described sounds a lot like Glory Road by Robert Heinlein. Do you keep a list of the queries and possible books anywhere as quite a few have intrigued me" - now that's a good idea we will scour our archive and put them on a collective consciousness page!

Norris Hart. Nigel H., I think the book you are looking for is Robert A. "Heinlen's Glory Road".

Mark Lockyer. Hi Simon. Nigel H's book quest (it just has to be a quest, doesn't it?) sounds like Robert A Heinlein's 'Glory Road'. Loved it when I was younger. Never did get into fencing though, so I never made it as a hero!

Alan Hoskins. Nigel's book sounds like it might be Glory Road by Robert Heinlein.

Denis Lein disagreed though:- At a wild guess, perhaps THE GOLDEN APE by "Adam Chase," but let me take a look at it when I get home tonight before anyone gets a hope up...and then Dennis added: GLORY ROAD belatedly occured to me last night, and I agree that is almost certainly the work sought. For what it's worth, I did check out THE GOLDEN APE and that is not a match.

Nigel responded thus:

Thanks for runing my query in your news letter. There has been a great response and thankyou to all.

The consensus is that the book I am looking for is Glory Road by Robert Heinlein so I shall venture forth to all local book shops and surf the net.

Once again, a big THANK YOU to all who responded.

Nigel H.

b) Hi i am searching for a book ,i think its called a history of thing to come and i think its by someone mcauley not quite sure,one of the main characters is a young boy who is a healer, and is looking for lake eerie, with the help of a very old map,its set in the future , in the before people i think, the copy i used to have was a lemon front colour with a picture of ruined buildings, could you possibly help me find it please, many thanks, kind regards, Erika.

John Boston e-mailed "Robie Macauley, A Secret History of the Time to Come, no doubt."

Rich. I remember this one, I have a copy somewhere. There is one on Ebay for £4.95. (and Fantastic Literature have a copy for £1.45)

Norris Hart. Erika, The book you are thinking of is Robie MacCauley's "A Secret History of Time To Come".

Hi with regard to your question,i have a copy of this book and yes it has a yellow cover with a drawing of New York on the cover rundown an deserted in a future time.The book is published by Corgi (1983) by Robie Macauley author,ISBN 0-552-12169-X price was £1.95.It is a very good book and i hope this info is of use to you,maybe a look on E Bay might be worth it .Best of luck Stewart Green

Angelia wrote: Could it possibly be by Paul J. McAuley? It sounds a bit like him. Here is his wikipedia article that lists all his books. Nothing called "A History..." though.

How about this one?

The artist (photographer maybe) is somewhat of an outcast, his art isn't very good. He meets a girl and after a night together finds out that she has a genetic disorder that makes her bruise very easily but the marks are gone the next day. Together they come up with a plan to write poems and draw pictures on her body and then photograph/paint them. He uses the handle of a paintbrush or something similar to do this. He writes poetry and stories on her skin. His art takes off and he is in high demand. It is a very interesting love/hate relationship. I think it was set in Seattle or Portland. I remember the book talking about them sleeping on a pallet on the floor and their apartment being a studio style one. Also in one scene he stands on a ladder and takes pictures of her lying on the floor.

I remember that the girl has very pale, translucent looking skin. He finds out she has this bruising issue when they spend the night together and he wakes to find her sleeping beside him looking like someone beat her. He is horrified because he thinks that he may have done it but then she wakes and explains. I’m fairly certain that the couple engages in “rougher” behavior in the bedroom. Resulting in days where they can not take new photos until her bruises are healed. The artist/main character suffers from "lost time"; he blacks out and forgets where he has been and what he has done.

This book was probably published in the late 80's or early 90's, could be older than that but I doubt newer. I THINK that I picked this book up because someone told me that if I liked Anthony Shriek by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, I would like this one. Anthony Shriek was published in 1992 that may or may not be of any significance. It has been suggested that this may be a short story rather than a book, but I don’t believe that is the case.

Dennis Lien responded: Sounds like it should have been one of the Dell Abyss paperback line of that period (as was ANTHONY SHRIEK), but if so I don't know which one.

It doesn't appear to be Kathy Koja's SKIN (from that line) no matter how temptingly that title would have fitted... For what it's worth,

Dennis Lien

and Angeiia replied: Thank you so much! I've looked into that line before, but maybe I need to dig deeper. I've checked out "Skin" in the past and really wanted it to be there, but sadly it's not. I appriciate your input and I'll let you know if I find it in the Abyss line.

Angelia

OK what about this one!

Something of a long shot but I am searching for a book I read many years ago (possibly late 60's) about an organism that absorbed humans it came into contact with and grew as a result. I recall it started with a lady trying to clear her sink plug hole and getting absorbed and it grew from there until it took over most of the London tube network. I also seem to recall it didn't absorb the water in our bodies but left it as residue.

Any ideas what this may be?

Colin Cooper

Dept of Smug Self Satisfaction (cont)

a) Dear Simon and Laraine,
I got my book some time ago (The other log of Phileas Fogg), meant to say thanks, it arrived quickly and was well packaged and in great condition. I also have been meaning to say that I really appreciated the better layout of the book lists, they are soooo much easier to read now! I used to have to take breaks, my eyes would get strained trying to pick out the titles on the densely packed page. I still take a break, simply because you have so much to offer, but it isn't a trial, now, to get through the list! I am sure it takes longer to produce, though, so I wanted to commend you on the effort being put into it, that is noticed and appreciated! Gratefully, Nancy Stewart

b) Dear Fantastic literature,
The book arrived today. I am very happy with it. Great packaging.
Love,Light and Power.
Best wishes,F.Limam.

c) Dear Laraine, Thank you for the excellent service. The item is in great condition and I have left feedback to that effect. I would like to be added to your mailing list please.
Many thanks
Regards,
Michelle

d) Hi Laraine,
The above item arrived in sunny Llandudno today, and I am well pleased. Many thanks for your kind and prompt attention.
Best regards,
Burt.

e) Hi Laraine,
Thanks for items, very pleasing. Will send out cheque in payment.
Best,
Frank

We also buy books and travel around the country to purchase, we will pay a finders fee to anyone who puts us in touch with a collection we later purchase.

OotW121. OotW122. OotW 123, OotW 124, OotW 125, OotW 126, OotW 127, OotW 128, OotW 129, OotW 130, OotW 131, OotW 132, OotW 133, OotW134, OotW135, OotW136, OotW 137, OotW138, OotW 139, OotW 140, OotW141, OotW 142, OotW 143, OotW144, OotW145, OotW146. OotW147, OotW148, OotW149, OotW 150, OotW151, OotW 152