Gene Wolfe named SFWA Grand Master

Gene Wolfe, it was announced today, will be recognized with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement. The award will be presented next year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America at their annual Nebula Awards banquet.

I’m pleased for Wolfe, of course, although I did wonder why it had taken SFWA this long to recognize one of the giants of science fiction and fantasy.

There are three principal lifetime achievement awards in the field: the SFWA Grand Master Award, the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the World Science Fiction Convention Guest of Honor. Until today only 10 people have been the recipient of all three. Gene Wolfe becomes the eleventh person.  He was the Worldcon Guest of Honor at Aussiecon Two in 1985, and he won the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1996.

The triple winners are an interesting group of people. Some that might be expected, such as Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, and Jack Vance. There are only two women on all three lists (Le Guin and Andre Norton), which is sign of where we’ve been but hopefully not a sign of where we are headed on gender issues.

There are some major authors who were overlooked by all three acknowledgements of lifetime achievement: Philip K. Dick, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree (Alice Bradley Sheldon) for instance.

Related link:
Gene Wolfe chosen as SFWA Grand Master

From Mindblowing to Mindfulness

When the table of contents of a forthcoming anthology, The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF edited by Mike Ashley, was posted online people commented that none of the authors were women or people of color. Yes, that’s a problem. I’d like to offer a possible new direction.

Years ago, I did some hiring at a certain university in California, and whenever we had a job opening I would receive a letter from the university's diversity officer asking me to be mindful of the gender and racial diversity of our employees. The letter was a welcome reminder for me and it caused me to take stock of how well the people under my supervision reflected the diversity of the pool of applicants and the general population.

Selecting stories for an anthology isn’t exactly the same as hiring employees, but I hope we can agree that consideration of diversity applies to both. What if, whenever an editor announces that an anthology is open for submissions, the SFWA diversity officer sent the editor an email reminder to be mindful of the gender and racial diversity of the authors? What’s that you say? SFWA (new redesigned website) doesn’t have a diversity officer? Perhaps that would be the place to start.

Links:

Sf Signal: the Mindblowing table of contents followed by many interesting and/or ill-considered comments.

Angry Black Woman: an intelligent and funny, if overly caustic, dissection of one of the comments on the SF Signal thread.

Tor.com: a thoughtful post on the topic and many more comments