educating alice

I have always known about the Hugo Awards, but not how they were selected.  Interesting!

Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention, has announced the ballot for the 2008 Hugo Awards. Nominations were made by the members of last year’s World Science Fiction Convention, held in Yokohama, and this year’s, to be held in Denver. Members of the 2008 convention will have until July 1, 2008, to vote on this ballot. Winners will be announced and trophies awarded at Denvention’s Hugo Awards Ceremony on Saturday, August 9.

The voting will be conducted by mail and online. The online ballot will be available at the Denvention 3 web site in the near future. You do not have to attend the convention to vote. A Supporting Membership ($50) is sufficient to secure you voting rights. Memberships can be purchased here.

(The members also created the shortlist by way of nominations.)

And then there are the categories, like none I’ve seen before. Children’s material shows up on several short lists:

Best Related Book

• The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Glyer; appendix by David Bratman (Kent State University Press)
• Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium by Barry Malzberg (Baen)
• Emshwiller: Infinity x Two by Luis Ortiz, intro. by Carol Emshwiller, fwd. by Alex Eisenstien (Nonstop)
• Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff Prucher (Oxford University Press)
• The Arrival by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

• Enchanted Written by Bill Kelly Directed by Kevin Lima (Walt Disney Pictures)
• The Golden Compass Written by Chris Weitz Based on the novel by Philip Pullman Directed by Chris Weitz (New Line Cinema)
• Heroes, Season 1 Created by Tim Kring (NBC Universal Television and Tailwind Productions Written by Tim Kring, Jeff Loeb, Bryan Fuller, Michael Green, Natalie Chaidez, Jesse Alexander, Adam Armus, Aron Eli Coleite, Joe Pokaski, Christopher Zatta, Chuck Kim. Directed by David Semel, Allan Arkush, Greg Beeman, Ernest R. Dickerson, Paul Shapiro, Donna Deitch, Paul A. Edwards, John Badham, Terrence O’Hara, Jeannot Szwarc, Roxann Dawson, Kevin Bray, Adam Kane
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Written by Michael Goldenberg Based on the novel by J.K. Rowling Directed by David Yates (Warner Bros. Pictures)
• Stardust Written by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman Directed by Matthew Vaughn (Paramount Pictures)

Best Professional Artist

• Bob Eggleton
• Phil Foglio
• John Harris
• Stephan Martiniere
• John Picacio
• Shaun Tan

In an exclusive extract from his new book, Once Upon a Time in the North, Philip Pullman takes readers back to the very beginning of His Dark Materials.

Winds of chance | Extracts | guardian.co.uk Books

Seems as if my wishful dreaming for film adaptations of The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass is not totally hopeless. Here are some heartening excerpts from ‘Compass’ spins foreign frenzy” in yesterday’s Variety.

After its strong start in Japan last week, “The Golden Compass” is on course to make box office history as the first film to gross $300 million in foreign while failing to reach $100 million in North America.

As producer Deborah Forte points out, with a global gross heading for $375 million-$400 million and an Oscar to its name, “Golden Compass” counts as a success by most yardsticks — just not necessarily for New Line.

With a downsized New Line set to become Warner label, the intriguing question is now whether Warner toppers will see past the domestic flop and greenlight the second and third installments of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy — “The Subtle Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass” — based on those boffo foreign grosses.

Indeed, Warner, the studio behind “Harry Potter,” may turn out to be a better home for the Pullman franchise than New Line ever was.

Clearly, “Golden Compass” was not as unmarketable as the U.S. figures would suggest. “If the movie really wasn’t up to snuff, it wouldn’t have done $300 million,” Forte says.

Excuses that fantasy pics often do better in foreign, or that the film’s perceived anti-God message was a more powerful negative in the U.S., have a certain truth, but can’t fully explain the unprecedented gulf.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the foreign indies such as Entertainment in the U.K., Metropolitan in France, Tripictures in Spain, 01 in Italy and Gaga in Japan, not to mention Warner in Germany, simply did a better job of understanding and positioning “Golden Compass” as a family film, and heading off the potential problems in advance, than New Line’s domestic team did.

Forte notes, “We probably underperformed in the U.S., and we performed according to expectations outside the U.S. Why? It’s so hard to tell. People say fantasy does much better overseas, and that the book was much better known, but I’m not sure either is true. The book was really only known in the U.K. and Australia. Most of the foreign distributors built awareness from scratch.”

It’s hard to imagine the folks at Warner Intl. rubbing their hands at the prospect of more of the same from a downsized New Line. But they might welcome “The Subtle Knife,” the second book in Pullman’s trilogy, for which Hossein Amini has already written a script, and the final installment “The Amber Spyglass.”

New Line’s foreign distribs would certainly snap up the sequels, if offered. If Warner gives the greenlight, the overseas indies won’t get a look-in, but should Warner put the rest of the trilogy into turnaround, there’s a ready-made independent market for the pics.

One way or another, Forte won’t give up the fight. “I will make ‘The Subtle Knife’ and ‘The Amber Spyglass,’” she vows. “I believe there are enough people who see what a viable and successful franchise we have.”

Philip Pullman in conversation with Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation, an edited extract from Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth? (Constable & Robinson), edited by Andrew Simms and Joe Smith, published on Thursday in England.

Philip Pullman speaks up for the narrator and argues that ‘literature’ is what a film director must leave out when translating a ’story’ into a movie.‘

Story’ versus ‘literature’ | Book club | Guardian Unlimited Books

Actually, it is a fascinating glimpse into academic politics, this one being a battle royal between two philosophers.

Intellectually, they hold very different views on one of the hottest, and most intractable of philosophical problems, consciousness. Honderich calls himself a radical externalist on consciousness, meaning, he writes in his book, that “my perceptual consciousness now consists in the existence of a world”.

I’m the daughter of an academic and all too familiar with academic feuds, disputes, and other very nasty stuff. The Guardian article suggests that something personal not intellectual is at the heart of this particular fight which makes me quite uncomfortable. No doubt it will make all involved even angrier than they already are. But it was the consciousness stuff that caught my eye — Pullman’s Dust. Interesting, that.

Even those avatars racing around the internet apparently need the services of something called an “identity manager” to keep them up to date and on track. They don’t - just as daemons don’t - have a useful, productive existence independent of the person who created them. Until that moment comes, they remain yet another smart accessory that is more trouble than it is actually worth.

Huh? Kathryn Hughes is seriously stretching things by presenting avatars as something similar to Philip Pullman’s daemons. Avatars are things you make yourself (as in Second Life). But daemons? They are a part of you, your soul, not avatars or servants. You don’t select them or make them. They are a part of you — visible and active in Lyra’s world, but not ours. Utilitarian seems a pretty prosaic word to use about them. While not as peculiar a juxtaposition as Philip Pullman and V.C. Andrews, it is nonetheless pretty lame.

I’ve a post below on the Guardian Book Club’s focus this month on His Dark Materials. (Updated to include two columns by John Mulland). But I just came across the quiz they set for the audience at the interview the other night and thought it was entertaining enough to get a post of its own:

His quiz materials

(Darn — I got two wrong!)

Philip Pullman talks with John Mullan of the Guardian Book Club about writing, reading, narrators, Milton, daemons, Mrs. Coulter, angels’ taste in food, among many other things (and gives a very intriguing little hint about on extra bit in his forthcoming book Once Upon a Time in the North).

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books: Guardian book club podcast: Philip Pullman

See also:

John Mullan on “Borrowing from Paradise Lost” and “Other Worlds.”

Whatever stories are made of, words aren’t fundamental to it. Something else is. And what I think is fundamental to the narrative process is events — stories are made of events….Whether we read it in a children’s book or hear it being told to us in a class, it doesn’t matter. It’s the story itself, the events themselves that have that power to affect us.

From a truly wonderful interview by James Mustich with Philip Pullman (and one he especially recommends).