The Cybils: You can even find us in the dictionary under “Cool.”
I got such a kick out of seeing an announcement for the Cybs come up the other day in my Google Reader from Tor.com. Thank-you, Tor, as always, you rock!
If you weren’t already aware of it, the Cybs have gone up-tech! As they do every year between sessions, the behind-the-scenes team has worked on the website, the logo, the databases. The cool little form you fill out for nomination will come back to you if your nomination has already been nominated. If you’re on a judging panel, the nominated titles which have cleared vetting for year and genre are even now populating the database list — you can start looking them up by title, author or ISBN! Who cares that the cut-off date is the fifteenth! Last night I placed twenty-five holds with the library… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This year I see a definite trend already in Damsel in Distress novels, a bit of steampunk, a couple of horror, and lots and lots of angel fiction.
(I think those are classified under horror as well, but I shall not judge before I read. Much.)
We already have a hundred-and-twenty-five nominations in YA SFF. Those people who said that picture books were drying up in the children’s publishing world? Haven’t seen the list of nominations yet for the Cybs in Fiction Picture Books. It’s a good thing those books are short!
I’m afraid to even count YA Fiction.
Have you nominated?
(You do realize I’m going to keep bothering you about this?)
Mwahahaha. Those angels. 😉
But really–damsel in distress? At least a few of those damsels better be ready to save their own butts.
I did some voting! I was a little dismayed that a book I had voted for pb non-fiction had already shown up in pb fiction, but I'm confident that'll all be sorted out by the judges.
Off-topic from the Cybils, but relevant to science-fiction: I just reread the novella The Green Book, by Jill Paton Walsh. Even though this human-colonization-on-another-planet story was published during the Cold War and before smartphones, it still remains relevant and thought-provoking.