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

The BBC radio program, The World, did a feature on The Arrival today. There’s an interview with Shaun as well as a few comments from me and even something from one of the class podcasts. They very nicely provided links on their website to this blog and my class blog. So welcome to anyone who came here from there. Take a look around and go here for a bunch of posts on my teaching of The Arrival.

Shaun Tan and Arthur A. Levine Visit My Class

Today my class will give our beautiful Arrival Collection box to Shaun Tan in person. I only hope we can express to him how wonderful the experience of reading his book has been for us.

The children have created all sorts of fantastic documents, artifacts, maps, drawings, and more for the box — all based on this amazing book. Here are a few of them, but do go here to see them all. They are wonderful!

One of the many birds in the book.

The man’s pet.

The game.

The ship’s manifest

A Map of the Old Country

Last Wednesday we went to Ellis Island. At the kids’ request I brought along a copy of The Arrival and they brought their little booklets. Rushed as we were (the buses were late and we had to get back for our Halloween party, of course!), they were fascinated and many busily took notes throughout the exhibits. They loved seeing the actual Registry Hall, the large photographs that were used as research by Tan, the dormitory, the intriguing exhibits about the tests that new immigrants had to go through — just the whole space was remarkable to them. Even the seagulls flying around them on the ferry ride made them think of Shaun Tan’s birds flying over the steamship as his protagonist came into his new land.

The next day one child wrote that his favorite room was the “golden” one where there were walls of ships’ manifests, identification forms, and other materials directly related to The Arrival. Others loved the rooms describing those horrible tests that the new immigrants had to take (and were beautifully presented in Tan’s book). The connections between the immigrant experience, what they saw at the Museum, and Tan’s book were remarkable. For a bit more and a few photos head over to my class blog to read this post.