Linky has been doing the devil’s work (idle hands)

At Tor.com, Amal El-Mohtar is talking about How To Read Poetry:

Part of me is perpetually astonished that I need to explain to people why they should read poetry. The mainstream perception of poetry in the anglophone West is fundamentally alien to me. Over and over I encounter the notion that poetry is impenetrable, reserved for the ivory tower, that one can’t understand or say anything about it without a literature degree, that it is boring, opaque, and ultimately irrelevant. It seems like every few months someone in a major newspaper blithely wonders whether poetry is dead, or why no one writes Great Poetry anymore. People see poetry as ossified, a relic locked away in textbooks, rattled every now and then to shake out the tired conclusions of droning lecturers who have absorbed their views from the previous set of droning lecturers and so on and on through history.

Cora Buhlert on Hugo Nomination:

Odd. I’d have thought that this year’s Hugo shortlist was pretty much uncontroversial. I mean, we have a healthy representation of women and writers of colour, most of the nominations went to works and writers that are popular or at least talked about, there are very few “What the Fuck?” nominees compared with other years (e.g. last year’s nominees included a filk CD and a Hugo acceptance speech from the previous year). Sure, there still are issues, particularly with certain categories, but there always are issues.

Which is why I was surprised to find that this year’s Hugo slate is apparently considered highly controversial in certain corners of the SFF community.

Everything Is Nice on Clarke Award Data:

Unfortunately, we can’t compare submissions historically but we can compare with the shortlists. So, in the first 10 years of the award 30% of nominees were female, 50% of winners were female and there were three years when there were as many women as men on the shortlist. Whereas in the last 10 years 22% of nominees were female, 20% of winners were female and men made up the majority of the shortlist every years.

So the record of the Arthur C Clarke Award is getting worse. I think this has to reflect the worsening situation for women in British science fiction publishing over this period. The fact that this year’s shortlist is made up entirely of men is a symptom of this and we need to address the root cause.

There’s a lot of talk about Night Shade Books’…thing.

Kameron Hurley, Deal/No Deal.

Tobias Buckell, Night Shade Sale Summary.

Staffer’s Book Review, Night Shade Books: What Went Wrong?

Michael A Stackpole, The Night Shade Books/Skyhorse Publishing Deal.

Phil Foglio, Publish & Perish.

JABerwocky Literary Agent, The Night Shade Writers of America.

Shaun Duke of the Skiffy & Fanty Podcast invited me to join himself, Paul Weimar, and Stina Leicht to kvetch about the Hugos and the Clarkes. So that’s available over there. Apparently I can be counted on to go on, and on, and on at length.

(And also to do some research first.)