Congratulations to Mandolin (aka Rachel Swirksy) for being nominated for a Hugo Award! This isn’t Mandolin’s first Hugo nomination, of course, but it’s always nice to have another. (Or so I imagine.) :-p
The nominated story, “Fields of Gold,” was also nominated for a Nebula Award earlier this year.
Yay Mandolin!
Mandolin’s story “Fields of Gold,” which is sadly not available online but was published in this year’s Eclipse anthology, has been nominated for a Nebula award, in the “Novelette” category.
You can read “Fields of Gold” online here. (It’s a pdf file.)
As I’m sure you’ll recall, last year Mandolin won a Nebula for her novella “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window,” making her one of the youngest ever Nebula winners.
Yay Mandolin!
A Washington Post article about the Nebula Awards opens by quoting the joke Rachel (aka Mandolin) told in her acceptance speech:
Before Rachel Swirsky won the Nebula award for best novella Saturday, she went to an authors’ reception and learned some tips from veterans of the science fiction awards circuit.
“Apparently the Hugo makes a great paper-towel holder,” Swirsky says. “And if you put a sock over the World Fantasy Award,” it looks like a profile of Jacques Cousteau. But what to do with a Nebula — a heavy glass block — no one knew. And so Swirsky, a first-time author whose novella, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window,” recounts the weary adventures of a resurrected magician, made a vow in her acceptance speech at the Washington Hilton:
“I will figure out” what to do with a Nebula. [...]
Someone asks Connie Willis — who has won seven previous Nebulas in various categories — whether she has any advice for Swirsky’s quest to find an alternative use for the award.
“If you got enough of them, you could use them like Legos,” says Willis doubtfully, weighing her solid, rectangular trophy in her hands. “But you would really need an awful lot.”
Incidentally, “first-time author” Mandolin has had approximately fifty stories and poems published so far, if I recall correctly.
Rachel Swirsky!!
That’s right,
Rachel (known in these parts as Mandolin) just won the Nebula Award for her novella “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window.”
Let me mention that the competition in Mandolin’s category this year was AWESOME. Paolo Bacigalupi, J. Kathleen Cheney, Ted Chiang, Geoffrey A. Landis, and Paul Park were the other nominees. That’s an amazing group to be in, and a hard, hard competition to win.
I cannot possibly describe how thrilling it was sitting with Rachel when the award was announced. (As John Scalzi was reading the nominees, Rachel leaned across to me and mouthed “I know I didn’t win.”) I really wish I had a camera and the means to upload a photo, because lemme tell you, Rachel’s Nebula is gorgeous. (Every individual Nebula Award is unique, not identical to any other). I’m sure we’ll get photos up eventually!
This is a big, big deal. Congratulations, Mandolin!
(Oh, and since people will wonder if I don’t mention it, I didn’t win in my category — Terry Pratchett did. Hard to complain about losing to Terry Pratchett!)
Congrats to current “Alas” blogger Mandolin and former “Alas” blogger Nojojojo for their Hugo Award nominations!
Rachel Swirsky, known on this website as “Mandolin,” is nominated in the “best novella” category for ‘‘The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window’’.
And N.K. Jemisin, who once upon a time cross-posted on Alas as “Nojojojo,” was nominated for “best novel” for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
Both Mandolin and Nojojojo have also been nominated for Nebula Awards this year. And in fact, this is the second year in a row that both of them have been nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula. Which is pretty fucking incredible, when you think about it.
Congratulations to them both!
From Publisher’s Weekly‘s review of Eclipse 4, an anthology book:
The latest volume in Strahan’s unthemed anthology series has almost no weak links. The highlight is Rachel Swirsky’s “Fields of Gold,” a diabetic ghost’s witty and melancholy tale of his life and death. Other standouts are Andy Duncan’s folksy, Twainesque “Slow as a Bullet,” Kij Johnson’s metafictional “Story Kit,” and Caítlin R. Kiernan’s uncommonly beautiful Lovecraftian “Tidal Forces.” Even familiar tropes are handled elegantly by top talents like Michael Swanwick (whose “The Man in Grey” explores the idea that human reality is controlled by others), Jeffrey Ford (playing with doppelgängers in “The Double of My Double Is Not My Double”), and Eileen Gunn (nicely twisting time travel and paradox themes in “Thought Experiment”), as well as relative newcomers like Peter M. Ball (whose “Dying Young” is a surprisingly fresh postapocalyptic western). Less successful contributions from Gwyneth Jones and Emma Bull are still entertaining but outshone by their companions. Strahan continues to raise the bar for original genre anthology series.
That’s some big names in that book — but nonetheless Mandolin’s story was picked out as the best by Publisher’s Weekly. Pretty awesome!
Speaking of stuff like that, I mentioned earlier today that Rachel is listed for three separate items on the annual Locus poll. It’s worth mentioning, that’s not a minor achievement in and of itself.
(Via.)
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has announced nominees for the 2010 Nebula Awards, and “Alas” did even better this year than last year!
N.K. Jemisin, who used to cross-post on Alas as “Nojojojo,” hasn’t been much around these parts lately, presumably because her writing career has taken off! Her novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is nominated for this year’s “best novel” Nebula Award, and having read and loved the book I can say the nomination is very well deserved. Congratulations, N.K.!
Rachel Swirsky, known on this website as “Mandolin,” was also honored! Her novella ‘‘The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window’’ is nominated for this year’s “best novella” Nebula Award. “The Lady Who Plucked…” is an incredible story, one of Mandolin’s best, and I would have been shocked if it weren’t nominated.
I should mention that both Mandolin and Nojojojo were also nominated for Nebulas last year, because they are that awesome.
Barry Deutsch, that is to say, me, posts on “Alas” as “Ampersand.” And I was very surprised, but also very honored, that my graphic novel Hereville has been nominated for this year’s “Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.” (When the nice lady from the Nebula committee called me, she said this is “essentially the Nebula Award for young adult books”).
I can’t say how thrilled I am, and how much I’m looking forward to losing to Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker when the awards are given out in May. :-p
Thank you to everyone who voted for me (or for Mandolin or Nojojojo). And congratulations to Mandolin, to Nojojojo, and to all the other Nebula nominees!
From an interesting post at tansyrr.com:
For some reason this got me thinking of a couple of this year’s stand out stories which are most definitely fantasy, but which benefit from a reader viewing them through a science fictional lens.
“My story should have ended on the day I died. Instead, it began there.”
The first of these is Rachel Swirsky’s “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window,” a marvelous novella published in Subterranean Online. While this is undoubtedly a fantasy story, with elements that would not seem out of place in an antique copy of Weird Tales, it is very much a treatise on immortality, or the effects upon humanity of living beyond one’s natural time period, through a conceit that works very similarly to time travel.
Much like classic science fiction novel The Forever War, the protagonist skips across aeons as she is resurrected again and again to advise a series of leaders, and sees the world change into something utterly unrecognisable. She is particularly confronted by changes in perceptions towards gender and sexuality which alienate her from the societies that need her help.
While it is entirely framed as a fantasy story, with the teaching and sharing of magic an essential plot point, not to mention a ghost constantly at the beck and call of her former employer’s descendants, the structure of the story is strongly science fictional. It feels like a science fiction story at its core.
“The Lady…” (which is my personal favorite of Mandolin’s stories, so far) definitely feels, to me, like it includes elements of both sf and fantasy.
