Being a part of
the genre community means that you will face one award after another. It’s an
inevitable event in any book nerd with ties to SFF. I’m not much of an award
person, because I’m constantly dwelling in the past. The books I read have all
been talked about to death and I don’t have the reading capacity to catch up
with all the new ones to hit the shelves and pop up on a shortlist. My ability
to hold a proper conversation on any award’s shortlist and comment on the
likely winner is therefore impaired. I’m indifferent towards awards, because I
rely on a number of recommendations from people, whose opinions I trust.
For this latter
reason, paradoxically, I can’t not comment on Anne Perry’s and Jared Shurin’s
award The Kitschies, which I’ve been following for two years, counting 2012. I
have been a reader of Pornokitsch long enough to know that our tastes in
literature overlap and I can trust their decisions. When someone, whose opinion
I hold of importance, speaks, I pay attention, which is why I will follow how
this year’s Kitschies develop and even comment on the Inky Tentacle category
for Best Cover Art.
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| Did I mention that the awards are handmade tentacles? I pronounce Professor Steampunk Octopus as the award's unofficial mascot! Art by Meg Lyman |
The Kitschies’
mission is to “honour the year's most progressive, intelligent and entertaining
works of genre literature”, which means that the judges will search for
envelope pushers and innovators of our time. It’s an interesting angle and
perhaps even makes the selection easier as you have specific criteria to work
with other than the ‘best’, which is the case with quite a few other awards.
Even though I’ve
made minimal observations about the industry, there is no denying that it’s a
bit incestuous. Though nothing wrong in on itself, this crosspollination of
activities makes it hard to organize awards without some sort of controversy attached
in one way or another. It’s of great importance to eliminate any close
relations in connection to awards, whose winners are decided through a judging
panel.
So, if you are
an award buff, take your time to check The Kitschies. Here is their shortlist
for you to see:
Red Tentacle:
The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington (Orbit)
Embassytown by China Miéville (Tor)
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd (Walker Books)
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (Sandstone)
Osama: A Novel by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)
Golden Tentacle:
Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick (Tor)
God's War by Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (Quirk)
The Samaritan by Fred Venturini (Blank Slate Press)
Inky Tentacle:
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch; illustration by Stephen Walter, design by Patrick Knowles (TAG Fine Arts) (Gollancz)
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan; design by Peter Mendelsund (Canongate)
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco; design by Suzanne Dean, illustration by John Spencer (Harvill Secker)
Equations of Life by Simon Morden; design by Lauren Panepinto (Orbit)
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd; illustration by Jim Kay (Walker Books)
