I found a list of this year’s winners over at Frederick Pohl‘s blog The Way The Future Blogs. This is because he won the award for Best Fan Writer.

Surprisingly the list isn’t up at the official Hugo site though there is a video of the award ceremony.

Edited to add (9/9/10):- The list is there (see comment.) The link I followed only took you to the video.

Other awards of interest to me were:-
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars.”
Hmm… I didn’t think that episode was particularly good.

Best Novella
“Palimpsest” by Charles Stross (Wireless, Ace, Orbit.)
Charlie is a one time and now somewhat detached member of the East Coast Writers Group. We bask in his reflected glory.

Best Novel (tie)
“The Windup Girl” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)
“The City & The City” by China Mieville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
I’ve read the Miéville.

Pan, 2007. 522p.

This is Miéville’s first book for younger readers. It is also copiously (and well) illustrated by the author. In it Zanna and Deeba, two of a group of normal young teenagers in London, are beset by strange occurrences. They are attacked by smoke tendrils, freaked out by an ambulatory umbrella and Zanna is addressed as Shwazzy several times during different chance encounters in one of which she is given a card naming her as such.

Soon they are both transported to a strange place where the sun is too large – and doughnut shaped – weird and colourful characters abound and telecommunications work through the medium of what can only be described as carrier wasps. Zanna is revealed as the choisi – chosen – the girl who will save the abcity of Un Lun Dun (unLondon) from the menace of the Smog. She is presumed to know the details of the Armets and their secret weapon the Klinneract which saved real London and drove the Smog to Un Lun Dun. (This parallel existence also contains other abcities such as Parisn’t, Lost Angeles, Sans Francisco and Hong Gone.)

The book which contains the Shwazzy prophecy – and which speaks morosely a la Eeyore or Marvin – turns out to be wrong, though, and Zanna is unable to help. She is incapacitated by the Smog whose attack is only driven off by using specially slit and treated unbrellas made by Mister Brokkenbroll to ward off the smog’s projectiles. With this apparent victory Deeba and the still far from well Zanna return to London. But Deeba cannot forget her experiences, realises that not all may be well in Un Lun Dun and so makes her return. On her quest to find a weapon to defeat the Smog she is accompanied by the aforementioned Book of Prophecy, Bling, a silver furred locust, Diss, a brown bear cub, a four-armed, four-legged, many-eyed man called Cauldron, a half-ghost, half-normal boy called Hemi, and Curdle, an animated milk carton Deeba adopts as a pet.

There are some nice coinages – mostly portmanteau words like smombies, Propheseers and smoglodytes. Mister Brokkenbroll – the Unbrellissimo – is a particularly redolent case. There are also glazed, wooden framed, eight legged things called Black Windows. These are just a few examples of Miéville’s playful linguistic invention.

There is more than a hint of Alice in Un Lun Dun though generally Through The Looking Glass rather than Adventures In Wonderland. This is underlined on page 296 when the Speaker of Talklands echoes Humpy Dumpty by saying, “WORDS MEAN WHATEVER I WANT.” We also have a pair of Tweedledum/Tweedledee-ish mitre-wearing clerics, in white and deep red robes respectively, who only move in zig-zags. There are parallels too with THE CITY & YTIC EHT Miéville’s recent adult novel, which I reviewed here.

Un Lun Dun is an enjoyable romp. For its target audience I would have thought it might be more than a touch too long, though its young readers may welcome a long immersion in Miéville’s skewed world.

MacMillan, 2009, 312p.

Another detective story! I thought I’d read this after The Night Sessions in case it got on the ballot for the BSFA award. (It has.) I had bought it on the strength of Miéville’s previous outings, Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council but didn’t know its content.

After an event known as Cleavage which happened a considerable time in the past, the city of Besźel, which is somewhere in Eastern Europe, is crosshatched with Ul Qoma. Cleavage has resulted in both cities coexisting independently of each other but in the same location, in some cases sharing the same buildings. Their inhabitants must unsee any manifestations of the other which they may notice, otherwise breach may occur. Areas within only one of the cities are known as total to its inhabitants and alter to the other’s.

This central conceit can, I suppose, be taken as a metaphor for divided cities or societies everywhere, or even a split personality, but here instances of intruding into the other city, ie breaching, whether by accident or design, will incur the attentions of Breach, a mysterious organisation which deals with such transgressions.

Aside: I wonder if Miéville ever toyed with the idea of calling his novel Split as in the Croatian city. Perhaps that would have localised things to too large a degree to the former Yugoslavia, though, or he may have considered it too obvious a pun.

In all other respects the novel’s world is ours (complete with MySpace pages.) The two are normal cities, they have hinterlands and they (or their countries) have diplomatic relations with the rest of the world; and with each other. There are rumours of a third city, Orcinny, interweaved with Besźel and Ul Qoma, but no-one is supposed to talk about that.

As to the plot, the body of a murdered American woman turns up in Besźel and the investigator, Tyador Borlú, swiftly comes to the conclusion the murder actually took place in Ul Qoma. However it transpires that the body was transported across the divide legally; in the only way that is possible. Breach is not invoked and Borlú has to go to Ul Qoma to aid the investigation there; where the murder victim had been part of an archælogical dig. The working through of the story thereafter is pretty standard conspiracy thriller stuff and not really speculative fiction at all, though the unusual background has a minor plot function.

Regarding the speculative nature of the book, to both cities’ inhabitants the observances of demarcation – the seemingly necessary unseeing, the unhearing – are only really a convention; they are not physically prevented from straying into the other reality, which in that sense is not, therefore, another reality, and while the consequences of breaching are implied to be dire, Miéville does not explore this aspect fully.

The unseen twinned city conceit is a good one but once again Miéville doesn’t really do anything with it. In the end it is no more than the backdrop to the thriller story which, with only minor tweaks, could equally well have been set in a truly divided city.

I was swithering about the classification I would assign to this book in my categories. I was leaning towards fantasy since crosshatching, the intrusion of another reality into the normal world, belongs in that tradition but I have decided on SF even if the only thing that makes THE CITY & YTIC EHT Science Fictional is the mention of Cleavage. There is/was a mechanism for the break, it was an event with a cause even if Miéville doesn’t go into detail as to how it happened.

These are not, though, major difficulties with the narrative. Miéville is in full command of his story and the prose flows freely. THE CITY & YTIC EHT is much easier to read than, for example, Iron Council which dragged rather. Give it a whirl if you have a penchant for detective thrillers or the mildly strange environment.

Ursula Le Guin is one of the best, if not the best, Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of the past fifty years. She is now 80.

You can still (until 24/3/09) catch on the BBC iPlayer an interview with her by China Miéville, broadcast on Tue 17/3/09.

Thanks to Zornhau for bringing this to my attention.

My review of Le Guin’s novel Gifts is at Infinity Plus.