The award went, instead, to Connie Willis for her book The Winds Of Marble Arch And Other Stories. Doctorow's Overclocked: Stories Of The Future Present came in third, despite having the most votes and the most first-place votes. The last-minute rule-changing didn't stop Locus from bragging that its awards got more votes than the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy nominations combined. (To be clear, Willis and Doctorow are both fantastic writers, and they both deserved to win. But changing the rules after everyone's voted? Not super great.)

In other, happier awards news, the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas announced the winners of its annual awards. The John W. Campbell Award for best novel (not to be confused with the Campbell Award for best new writer) went to In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan. For the first time ever, the Theodore Sturgeon Award for best short story was divided between two works: "Finisterra" by David Moles and "Tidelines" by Elizabeth Bear. [Workbench and Infozine]

Crappiest new way the police or your mom can follow your every move without ever leaving the sofa: The groovy satellite navigation system in your car that tells you how to get to any address you type into it is also ratting you out. Most satnav systems keep records of every address you type into it, and the route you took to get there. If you sync it with your bluetooth phone, it also has records of phone calls and messages you've received. That's why police officers in the U.K. have started sucking data off the satnav systems of suspects to find out where they've been. Now the authorities can tail you without ever leaving their stations — and probably without getting a court's permission to follow you either. Plus, according to New Scientist, the hacks required to get this data off the satnav systems are widely known and can be used by anyone smart enough to look them up on various wikis or discussion boards. So your mom or your boyfriend could be snarfing up your location data too, checking to see whose house you're going to after work and where you go for lunch. That is seriously crap.

At least two things happened in the world of science and science fiction last week. One was cool, the other was crap.

Crappiest cop scenario in a giant, 24-hour food riot: Koreans are seriously pissed off that their government has lifted the ban on importing U.S. beef. Who knows what goes into U.S. beef, anyway? Ranchers feed them everything from penicillin and bubblegum, to kibble made of other cows. Plus, U.S. screening for mad cow disease is just not up to the Korean standards. Koreans freaked out by the idea of buying U.S. beef started rioting Thursday night after the ban was lifted, and just never stopped. Riot cops sent to deal with the nighttime riots you can see in the top picture (below) had to work around the clock, which led to them sleeping in shifts (bottom picture). When science fiction authors write about police state dystopias and food riots, they never seem to take into account what the cops do when they're having to enforce state controls 24-hours a day. Now we know. They sleep on the street, in full gear, with cement as a mattress. Photos via Getty.

Beef Around the Clock [via Foreign Policy Passport Blog]

This has been a hot topic on the email list of the Secret Masters of Fandom (SMOFs), a group of long-time convention attendees and organizers. Several influential SMOFs are opposed to making WorldCon memberships too cheap, worrying it'll allow publishers to buy tons of votes. In fact, there's a proposal among some SMOFs to restrict who can vote for the Hugos.

But as blogger Steve Davidson points out, putting complicated and draconian restrictions on Hugo voting is just one approach to preventing vote fraud. The other, more sensible approach, is to ake it as easy to vote as possible, so you have tens of thousands of actual voters and it's not possible to buy enough votes to outweigh them all.

Writes Davidson:

Hugos are respected and utilized by publishers and such for marketing purposes: Hugo winning books have new editions rushed into print, proudly displaying the win on their covers.

So you can’t say they are a meaningless award, despite the small amount of participation. But I believe that they would be MORE meaningful if, instead of winning on four or five hundred votes, a novel, story, artist, magazine or movie won with four or five THOUSAND votes.

I hadn't actually realized that most Hugo Awards are decided on the basis of a few hundred votes. I thought WorldCon was a bigger event (I haven't been yet) and more people bought supporting memberships. It's a bit scary to think that the awards process is that insular — let alone that it might get even more insular soon, if some of the Secret Masters have their way. [Crotchety Old Fan via SF Awards Watch]

Crappiest way to encourage people to use their imaginations and experiment with evolutionary possibilities in a game devoted to both: Last week saw the release of EA/Maxis' Creature Creator — a component of the upcoming evolution game Spore — and the entire internet greeted it with a cry of happiness. Creature Creator lets you build any organism you like, quickly fleshing out an animated being as cute or hideous as you can imagine. An algorithm animates the little beast, giving it realistic motions for its body shape. You can share your creations with other users, too.

Of course, one of the first things that people did was create the most obscene-looking creatures they could. It turns out the Creature Creator is very versatile when it comes to adding body parts that look like penises, vaginas, and anuses. Thus, within a day after Creature Creator's launch, Sporn was born. Instead of laughing the whole trend off and coming up with ways to prevent people from uploading their dirty bits to kid-friendly areas in the Spore community, EA reacted with censorious poopheadedness. They banned users from the Creator Creator community who uploaded naughty creatures, and requested that YouTube yank any Sporn videos. What the hell, people? Is this any way to encourage people to think about evolution, which is after all very much about genitals and where you put them? I can understand wanting to wall off this grown-up stuff once kids start playing the game, but squashing it entirely? Crap! Luckily, io9 has managed to procure some of the best Sporn available and we've edited it into a smashing NSFW music video for you.

Infographic above via UK Telegraph.

[Oscarsvia Wired]

Crappiest effort to pay homage to a once-great franchise, while also failing to pay homage to 1950s science fiction and misapplying CGI ant swarms:

Sure, I said Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a fun afternoon diversion, but that doesn't mean it wasn't total crap. I love Indy, and I loved the "alien skull" premise of this film, and yet the more I thought about it, the less I liked it. The ending felt like bad TV. And no, it's not cool or neato that Indy was able to survive a nuclear bomb blast by hiding inside a refrigerator. I can believe that he might escape a giant zooming rock by the skin of his teeth, but a nuclear bomb? That stretches the bounds of credibility so far that I'm not having fun anymore. I'm just feeling condescended to. Plus, as many io9 commenters already noted, the CGI ants were crap. Swarm of ants = good. Swarm of ants so fake they look like a batch of angry M&Ms (and not the good kind you can drink with the Carl Brandon Society) = crap.

Plus, why did putting the crystal skull inside a burlap sack prevent it from being magnetic? Oh I know: probably the same forces that made gold and gunpowder ferromagnetic in the movie. The force of crap.

Here's how Morgan described Black Man in an interview:

Black Man is set in the aftermath of a century of ill-advised and poorly regulated genetic experimentation, where an otherwise fairly successful global (and extra-global) community is struggling to come to terms with the legacy of the human damage done over the previous hundred years. I suppose you could draw a parallel with the way in which we now struggle with the human consequences of previous centuries of colonialism.

Carl Marsalis, the black man of the title is one of a series of engineered humans, in his case engineered for combat, who have been modified not so much in any physical aspect as in the way they think and feel. It's a specialism based on designed aptitude, and the book aims to show, among other things, that the aptitudes required or desired by our society are often very frightening things.

In tone, Black Man is quite similar to my Kovacs novels, in that it's a fairly high velocity crime-and-conspiracy thriller with a noirish lack of obvious good or bad guys - but the book addresses issues that the Kovacs series could only ever really meet obliquely because of the sleeving technology. Simply put, in the Kovacs universe physicality and death are problems that can be sidestepped. In the world of Black Man, as in our own, they aren't. You have to meet them head on.

NOVELLA: "Fountain of Age", Nancy Kress (Asimov's Jul 2007)
Kress' latest collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls, is about to hit the bookstores. I'm excited to read it, and will be reviewing it here!

NOVELETTE: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", Ted Chiang (F&SF Sep 2007; Subterranean Press)

SHORT STORY: "Always", Karen Joy Fowler (Asimov's Apr/May 2007)
Fowler's latest novel, Wit's End, just came out this month.

SCRIPT: Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro
This tale of a girl, a fairy kingdom, and a nation full of fascists was one of the best fantasy movies I've ever seen. Del Toro is directing Hellboy 2, and two forthcoming movies based on The Hobbit. His monsters are more sympathetic and nuanced than most human characters.

ANDRE NORTON AWARD: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (Scholastic)
Apparently Rowling has ever won a Nebula before. About time.

My favorite multiverse Marxist, Michael Moorcock, was presented the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. I hope that means he gets to wear a cloak or something. Or maybe shiny shoes? Nothing says "grand master" like shiny shoes.

(Thanks for the reminder, Saadiq!)

Nebula Winners [Locus Online]

The young adult novel in question is Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce and the graphic novel series is Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra and others. Also on the "Honor List" is Charles Stross' Glasshouse, which I liked a lot. Here's what I said about Glasshouse in recommending it for inclusion:

It's set in a John Varley-esque world where you can have any body you want and you can back up your brain. But the main character agrees to take part in an experiment where he'll live in a reconstruction of America in the 1990s. Because so much data from that era of history was encoded on magnetic tape and digital media, it's been lost and historians know little about the period from 1950-2040. So the 1990s reconstruction is fatally flawed, especially as it relates to gender roles. It's sort of a pastiche of the 1950s, where women are expected to be subservient and sexually available. The main character gets stuck in a female body and quickly discovers how non-consensual gender roles can be. On top of that, participants receive points (towards a promised bonus) for gender conformity, including sexual behavior.

JAMES TIPTREE JR. AWARD WINNER ANNOUNCED

A gender-exploring science fiction award is presented to Sarah Hall for The Carhullan Army (Daughters of the North)

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2007 Tiptree Award is The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (published in the United States as Daughters of the North). The British edition was published in 2007 by Faber & Faber; the American edition in 2008 by HarperCollins.

The Tiptree Award will be celebrated on May 25, 2008 at WisCon (www.wiscon.info) in Madison, Wisconsin. The winner of the Tiptree Award receives $1000 in prize money, an original artwork created specifically for the winning novel or story, and (as always) chocolate.

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winners and compiles an Honor List of other works that they find interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note. The 2007 jurors were Charlie Anders, Gwenda Bond (chair), Meghan McCarron, Geoff Ryman, and Sheree Renee Thomas.

The Carhullan Army elicited strong praise from the jurors. Gwenda Bond said, "Hall does so many things well in this book - writing female aggression in a believable way, dealing with real bodies in a way that makes sense, and getting right to the heart of the contradictions that violence brings out in people, but particularly in women in ways we still don't see explored that often. I found the writing entrancing and exactly what it needed to be for the story; lean, but well-turned." Geoff Ryman said, "It faces up to our current grim future (something too few SF novels have done) and seems to go harder and darker into war, violence, and revolution." Meghan McCarron said, "I found the book to be subtle and ambiguous in terms of its portrayal of the Army, and its utopia....The book became, ultimately, an examination of what it means to attain physical, violent power as defined by a male-dominated world. And it asserted that it could be claimed by anyone, regardless of physical sex, provided they were willing to pay the price."

The book, which is Hall's third novel, also won the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) from Britain or the Commonwealth written by an author of 35 or under.

The Tiptree Award Honor List is a strong part of the award's identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. The 2007 Honor List is:

* "Dangerous Space" by Kelley Eskridge, in the author's collection Dangerous Space (Aqueduct Press, 2007)
* Water Logic by Laurie Marks (Small Beer Press, 2007)
* Empress of Mijak and The Riven Kingdom by Karen Miller (HarperCollins, Australia, 2007)
* The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Hyperion, 2007)
* Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press, 2007)
* Glasshouse by Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
* The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Collins 2007)
* Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Pia Guerra (available in 60 issues or 10 volumes from DC/Vertigo Comics, 2002-2008)
* Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

The James Tiptree Jr. Award is presented annually to a work or works that explore and expand gender roles in science fiction and fantasy. The award seeks out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. The Tiptree Award is intended to reward those women and men who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

The James Tiptree Jr. Award was created in 1991 to honor Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. By her choice of a masculine pen name, Sheldon helped break down the imaginary barrier between "women's writing" and "men's writing." Her insightful short stories were notable for their thoughtful examination of the roles of men and women in our society.

Since its inception, the Tiptree Award has been an award with an attitude. As a political statement, as a means of involving people at the grassroots level, as an excuse to eat cookies, and as an attempt to strike the proper ironic note, the award has been financed through bake sales held at science fiction conventions across the United States, as well as in England and Australia. Fundraising efforts have included auctions conducted by stand-up comic and award-winning writer Ellen Klages, the sale of t-shirts and aprons created by collage artist and silk screener Freddie Baer, and the publication of four anthologies of award winners and honor-listed stories. Three of the anthologies are in print and available from Tachyon Publications (www.tachyonpublications.com). The award has also published two cookbooks featuring recipes and anecdotes by science fiction writers and fans, available through www.tiptree.org.

In addition to presenting the Tiptree Award annually, the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council occasionally presents the Fairy Godmother Award, a special award in honor of Angela Carter. Described as a "mini, mini, mini, mini MacArthur award," the Fairy Godmother Award strikes without warning, providing a financial boost to a deserving writer in need of assistance to continue creating material that matches the goals of the Tiptree Award.

Reading for the 2008 Tiptree Award will soon begin, with jurors K. Tempest Bradford, Gavin Grant (chair), Leslie Howle, Roz Kaveney, and Catherynne M. Valente. As always, the Tiptree Award invites all to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org.

Struzan came to George Lucas' attention when he helped an artist friend who was uncomfortable with portrait work by painting the human figures on a Star Wars poster. Struzan stepped in and painted Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia on the "Star Wars Circus" poster, and that started his long career of painting movie posters for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

You've probably seen his work dozens of times without realizing it. From Hellboy to Harry Potter to Back to the Future to The Thing, Struzan's been there. While we see the need for posters advertising the Academy Awards as about as necessary as a screen door on a deep-space cargo ship, it's cool that they're using an artist who loves and appreciates science fiction so much.

Academy unveils Oscar poster [Variety]

Lessing's five-novel masterwork, The Children of Violence, starts out as a super-realistic semi-autobiography and ends with the main character gaining psychic powers on the eve of World War III. Many of her other books from the sixties and seventies blend realism and confessional writing with speculative elements. Her venture into actual space opera, the Shikasta series, is the only science fiction story to become a Philip Glass opera.

It's not speculative fiction, but 1985's The Good Terrorist is a must-read for anyone wanting to write believable characters in an extreme situation. It's also required reading for anybody who wants to understand how a "normal" person could become a terrorist. Image by Getty Images.