Thanks, everyone, for the best wishes (the haiku remedies particularly helped). I'm back on-deck now and pondering which news to blog first: Swancon, the launches of Magic Dirt and The Changeling, finishing The Grand Conjunction, the Ditmar Awards, my Dickless status, the wonderful rain in Adelaide...?

I guess I'll start with the first one and work my way through. Swancon was a blast. Thanks to everyone involved for putting on another wonderful show. There have been reports posted on-line and I don't see the need in repeating what's been said many times over, but the guests were wonderful, the masquerade was a hoot, and the weekend in general went by in a happy, drunken blur. "Tick...tick...tick...tick...BOOM!"

A very big thank you to everyone who attended the launches, and even engaged in audience participation when pressed to. Magic Dirt is out and proud, and available from Ticonderoga in two splendid editions. Buy it now, if only for the cover! The Changeling is just as beautiful, imho, and a very different read. The feedback has been wonderful. I hope every kid in Australia reads and is freaked out by it.

Saturn Returns might have missed out on the Philip K Dick Award (despite Jay Lake's most excellent spruiking of it on the night), but it was still a splendid spread to be part of. Receiving the Ditmar Award at Swancon was icing on the cake, really, and I'm enormously grateful to everyone who voted for it. Kudos to everyone else nominated, and congratulations to the other winners on the night. This is such a talented and good-natured community. There will never be enough awards to go around.

My damaged status had everything to do with sleepless nights and exposure to the real world, and bore no relation at all to the cold and wet Adelaide to which I returned home. Perfect weather, really, to dive into the final edits of The Grand Conjunction, the last book in the Astropolis series. It's been a long and winding road, writing this book; I'm both relieved and sad it's done. So often I don't know what books are about until I've finished them, and in this case it appears I've spawned another romance: one in which the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda plays a role, but a romance all the same. I'm a sucker for it, I guess.

My next projects are The Scarecrow (the last of this round of kids' books) and completely reorganising my study (you know, because there's never a good time so it might as well be now). Lined up after that are a thriller, another YA novel, PhD stuff, and appearances here and there. I'll report on the latter as they grow nearer.

For now, I'm off to have some soup.

Thanks for being such a wonderful bunch of people. I am sending you all happy vibes.

I'm looking forward to seeing lots of friends (and making new ones) at the Aurealis Awards Ceremony in Brisbane on Saturday.* Who's coming and who's not? Looks like the giant electric head will be absent this year, thank goodness. :-)

While we're gazing into the crystal ball, what about Swancon? I just booked my hotel room and ticket. Hurrah!

* Follow the link. That's exactly what I'll be wearing on the night. And isn't the chick's raygun shaped like a wine bottle?

Here's a quick conversation between Jessica Wade, Ginjer Buchanan and me that covers all sorts of fun topics: the Philip K Dick nomination, where Astropolis is going, the weather in Darwin, chundering, and our favourite PKD novels. Enjoy!

I'm very pleased (and flattered) to learn that Saturn Returns has been nominated for the Philip K Dick Award, for "distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States." It appears alongside a truly stellar list of names, including Elizabeth Bear, M. John Harrison and Karen Traviss. The result will be announced in March.

This news has prompted a wave of Dick jokes, the likes of which I haven't seen since High School. Bring 'em on! :-)

( Full details here. )

It's been a tough year for the SFWA. On top of everything, it's now short of recommendations for the Nebula Awards--which may have gone a little bit wobbly on their wheels in recent years but are still among the field's most respected awards.

If you're a member, you would've received the call to vote via email this morning. If you're a member like me, you probably haven't read nearly enough to consider yourself able to vote, and that makes you feel vaguely guilty. Well, I'm considering shucking off that guilt and voting anyway. If enough of us do the same, all our misinformed opinions will mash together to form some kind of uber-gestalt, and the correct result will pop out of its black box like magic.

Below is a list of the works I've enjoyed this year (not counting the works already on the existing list (here)). I'm not 100% sure any more how the rules of the Nebulas work, but I'm going to vote anyway. You can vote for them as well (here), if you're short on inspiration, or you can suggest titles I might not have thought of. Note that I'm not trying to kick-start a bloc-vote. I'm just trying to get things moving. Only one member in five is recommending works for the ballot at the moment. The field has long been too big for any one person to keep in touch with, so we need put our faith in our collective unconscious and vote regardless. This is democracy in action.

Ragamuffin by Tobias S Buckell (novel)
Plague Year by Jeff Carlson (novel)
Darkspace by Marianne de Pierres (novel)
"WikiWorld" by Paul di Filippo (novelette)
Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon (novel)
Mainspring by Jay Lake (novel)
Magic's Child by Justine Larbalestier (Andre Norton)
The Darkness Within by Jason Nahrung (novel)
Lady Friday by Garth Nix (Andre Norton)
Set the Seas on Fire by Chris Roberson (novel)
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (novel)
"Kiosk" by Bruce Sterling (novella)
Extras by Scott Westerfeld (Andre Norton)
"Julian: A Christmas Story" by Robert Charles Wilson (novella)
Battlestar Galatica: "Razor" (script)
Doctor Who: "Blink" (script)

I really wish I'd had time to read or watch more. There are bound to have been excellent and worthy works out there that I just haven't seen. Still, better a list than none at all. (And while I'm in the mood to plug, I would be remiss not to mention that my own Saturn Returns and Cenotaxis are eligible too, for the novel and novella categories respectively. Just a reminder, which you should feel free to ignore at will. :-)

As of this moment, there are insufficient recommendations to make a full ballot. So get cracking! Spread the word if you're not a member yourself. The deadline is the end of this year. That doesn't give us long to keep this fine tradition alive. What, after all, are we going to argue and bitch about if the Nebulas die?

Huge congrats to all the nominees of this year's Aurealis Awards, among which I'm pleased as punch to be numbered. Saturn Returns is in the running for Best SF Novel, making it my sixth consecutive appearance in that category and giving me my twentieth nomination all-up. I'm excited but not holding my breath. The short-list is very strong, and I haven't had a win in this category since 2001 (which is a bit of a worry :-).

Anyway, it's wonderful to be part such a fine line-up. What an amazing pool of talent we have here in Australia! I'm sure there were many, many other fine stories that didn't make it over the line, and my commiserations go to those who might be feeling disappointed.

Ultimately it's about celebrating the community we're all part of, and in that spirit I'm really looking forward to the bash in Brisbane next year--which will be co-hosted by Kim Wilkins and some big loser from Adelaide... :-)

Our handsome new Prime Minister has just created two awards for literature, one for fiction and one for non-fiction. They will be the third most lucrative in the world (after the International IMPAC Dublin Literary award (£100,000) and the Man Booker (£50,000)), coming in tax-free at AU$100,000 each.

Sounds good? Maybe, maybe not.

Here's an oped I wrote for ABC Online. All comments welcome, but I encourage you to post your opinions on the ABC where they'll be more visible.

(With thanks to Gary Kemble for guiding this little rant into existence, to Cristen Tilley for the title, to Jeremy Fisher of the ASA, Barbara Wiesner of the SA Writers' Centre, and Sue Hill and Fiona Lange of The Big Book Club for double-checking my facts, and to Garth Nix, Chris Lawson, Stephen Dedman and Deb Biancotti for letting me steal their best ideas.)

I'm remiss for not posting much about writerly stuff lately, so here are some reviews of Saturn Returns that have been accumulating over recent weeks:

Colin Steele neatly summed it up for the Canberra Times--"Saturn Returns probes the nature of what it is to be human against the wider backdrop of the rise and fall of civilizations"--while Brooke Walker of Good Reading thought it "A breathtaking piece of space opera!"

Dirk Flinthart liked it in the pages of ASIM: "Saturn Returns is a fine book. It’s better than fine...a very entertaining read. Williams’ prose is sharp as ever, with vivid characters, imaginative techno-splashy stuff, and a satisfying dash of dry, sly humour tucked up around the edges."

Keith Stevenson very kindly raved in Aurealis: "In Saturn Returns, I felt a new assuredness, a strength of voice that was compellingly entertaining and thought-provoking. Saturn Returns is Sean’s best yet—go out and buy it."

My favourite review of all, though, was in Locus. Russell Letson describes it as a "Jacobean revenge melodrama" featuring "a mysterious, memory-damaged, morally-ambiguous but militarily potent hero; even-more-mysterious masked opponents; a gang of companions evincing varying degrees of loyalty, sympathy, and resentment; wildly various, extra-large-scale, magical-technology-filled environments; murky pasts, secret histories, hidden agendas, sudden reversals, murky and shifting alliances; plus the usual amusements of chases, captures, escapes, kidnappings, rescues, befriendings, betrayals, and blowing stuff up."

As if that wasn't enough, he goes on to add "malcontents, tainted protagonists, secret and shifting alliances, and convoluted plotlines in pursuit of revelation or revolution or simple payback--mixed motives; love-hate relationships; unholy alliances, affections, and obsessions; amnesiac heroes, masked enemies, and wheels within wheels. And again the setting, in which every kind of scale is exaggerated and the sheer weight of millennia of history (and characters' lifetimes) and millions of cubic lightyears of space, dwarfs even the extravagant foreground action."

Exactly the kind of book I like!

And lastly, while on the topic of reviews, David Conyers in Albedo One had this to say: "Geodesica Ascent and Geodesica Decent have some great ideas, clever characters, and present a convincingly imagined world. These two novels are amongst the best Australian science fiction written in the last few years." For which I am very grateful.

We have two long-running awards for specfic in this country. Plenty of people have tallied up the winners down the years, but what about all those people who've been nominated and haven't got the gong? Who are our biggest losers?

I've taken the data from the entire history of the Aurealis Awards, plus the Ditmars covering roughly the same period. I've included only professional fiction data for discrete works, ie not included collections or Athelings etc. The results are below the cut.

Does it mean anything? Probably not, but it does confirm my gut feeling that those who win a lot tend to lose a lot too. A bit like rejections, maybe, although the awards process is for the most part outside the author's control.

Awards have no meaning, really, but they do supply a lot of data, and sometimes it's just fun to fiddle.

( Who are Australia's biggest losers? )

UPDATE: Thanks to deborahb for this quote:

"We are all failures--at least, the best of us are."
-- Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937), British writer

The 2006 Aurealis Awards have been announced and the news is good for some, not so good for others, but excellent for everyone involved. Hurrah!

As always, there were some raised eyebrows. Judging the Horror category kept life interesting the last few months (as the tied result might testify). No friendships were harmed in obtaining that result, I swear, and I won't tell which side of the divide I fell.

In the science fiction section, I was very pleased to walk away with the Best Short Story gong--a surprise to me, given such a strong line-up--which was collected on my behalf by the most excellent Stephanie Smith of HarperCollins.

Sadly, despite having agreed to co-host with Kim Wilkins, I was forced to pull out at the last minute (attending solely as an animated head on the big screen), so I missed out on all the excitement and merriment afterwards. If the party was anything like last year's, there'll be some sore heads today. I look forward to the photos...

( P.S. )