Index slightly amended from the ISFDB listing:
- Publication: WFC: World Fantasy Convention 2007
- [World Fantasy Convention Souvenir Books • v. 33]
- Editors: Lorna Carlson, Chris Logan Edwards
- Date: 2007-11-01
- Pages: 114
- Format: trade paperback
- Type: NONFICTION
- Cover: World Fantasy Convention 2007 by "Moebius"/Jean Henri Gaston Giraud
The Awards and Shortlists (courtesy SFADB): Where and When: World Fantasy Convention, Saratoga Springs, NY : November 4, 2007
Eligibility Year: 2006
Judges: Gavin J. Grant, Ed Greenwood, Jeremy Lassen, Jeff Mariotte, Carsten Polzin
Judges: Gavin J. Grant, Ed Greenwood, Jeremy Lassen, Jeff Mariotte, Carsten Polzin
Life Achievement
- Winner: Betty Ballantine
- Winner: Diana Wynne Jones
Novel
- Winner: Soldier of Sidon, Gene Wolfe (Tor)
- The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch (Gollancz; Bantam Spectra)
- Lisey's Story, Stephen King (Scribner; Hodder & Stoughton)
- The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
- The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner (Bantam Spectra; Small Beer Press)
Novella
- Winner: “Botch Town”, Jeffrey Ford (The Empire of Ice Cream)
- Dark Harvest, Norman Partridge (Cemetery Dance)
- “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire”, Ysabeau S. Wilce (F&SF Jul 2006)
- “The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train”, Kim Newman (The Man from the Diogenes Club MonkeyBrain)
- “Map of Dreams”, M. Rickert (Map of Dreams Golden Gryphon)
Short Fiction
- Winner: “Journey Into the Kingdom”, M. Rickert (F&SF May 2006)
- “Another Word for Map is Faith”, Christopher Rowe (F&SF Aug 2006)
- “Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, Geoff Ryman (F&SF Oct/Nov 2006)
- “A Siege of Cranes”, Benjamin Rosenbaum (Twenty Epics All-Star Stories)
- “The Way He Does It”, Jeffrey Ford (Electric Velocipede #10, Spr 2006)
Anthology
- Winner: Salon Fantastique, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Thunder's Mouth Press)
- Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard., Scott A. Cupp & Joe R. Lansdale, eds. (MonkeyBrain and the Fandom Association of Central Texas)
- Firebirds Rising, Sharyn November, ed. (Firebird)
- Retro Pulp Tales, Joe R. Lansdale, ed. (Subterranean Press)
- Twenty Epics, David Moles & Susan Marie Groppi, eds. (All-Star Stories)
Collection
- Winner: Map of Dreams, M. Rickert (Golden Gryphon Press)
- American Morons, Glen Hirshberg (Earthling Publications)
- The Empire of Ice Cream, Jeffrey Ford (Golden Gryphon)
- The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
- Red Spikes, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin Australia; Knopf)
Special Award, Professional
- Winner: Ellen Asher, for work at SFBC
- Deanna Hoak, for copyediting
- Greg Ketter, for DreamHaven
- Mark Finn, for Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard
- Leonard S. Marcus, for The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy
Special Award, Non-professional
- Winner: Gary K. Wolfe, for reviews and criticism in Locus and elsewhere
- Leslie Howle, for her work at Clarion West
- Leo Grin, for The Cimmerian
- Susan Marie Groppi, for Strange Horizons
- John Klima, for Electric Velocipede
- below, a 1990 World Fantasy Award trophy, for Jack Vance, in the Gahan Wilson-designed H. P. Lovecraft statue format in use from 1975 till 2015:
The purpose of a convention souvenir book is more a matter of a token of appreciation, usually, rather than a lasting monument. Even one, such as this one, with some full-color panels of Moebius's comics work, on heavy, slick paper (as opposed to the rather good if stiff non-clay-coated pages of the rest of the large-format booklet)...something to read while, if waiting alone for a panel or ceremony or speech or reading to start, one sits in audience chairs or otherwise has a downtime moment. Also, to give those who don't know why this person or that one might be speaking or performing, some information...even if the good Ramsey Campbell essay, from his long-running "Ramsey Campbell, Probably" column, barely mentions the Rodens' Ash-Tree Press, at the very end of a survey of 20th Century, including then-recent, attempts to praise the ghost-story tradition, while prematurely burying it...Ash-Tree and the Rodens being singled out as a shining example of those not doing so (though illustrated, as noted above by ISFDB, with a number of Ash-Tree edition covers, in black and white photos). The Campbell column is the best piece of prose in the book, but this doesn't make the heartfelt, if at times insufficiently copy-edited, other short essays and interviews unworthy nor inutile, but someone certainly should've corrected Carol Emshwiller's memory-slip, in a valuable late interview with her, that had her most supportive early editor Robert A. W. Lowndes taking her stories for Thrilling Wonder Stories, a science-fiction magazine with a pulp-legacy title that was also featuring rather sophisticated fiction in the early 1950s...as then edited by Samuel Merwin, then Samuel Mines, while Lowndes was editing rather lower-budget magazines for Louis Silberkleit's Columbia Publications, such as Science Fiction Stories and Double-Action Detective and several western titles. The interviewer overconfidently refers to them as pulps, when the vast majority of her early sales were to digest-sized magazines, which proliferated in the '50s as the pulp format was being phased out.
A not-unique example of an issue with a Carol Emshwiller story within, and with a cover by Edmund Emshwiller (for the Scortia story) with the married couple as the models.
The other essays in the booklet tend to be more or less good brief introductions to the works of the convention guests highlighted, including Neil Gaiman's slightly updated appreciation of Diana Wynne Jones (originally written for her 1995 appearance at the Boston annual convention Boskone), and certainly Darrell Schweitzer's, about his long-term work colleague and friend George Scithers, is easily among the most fully-informed about its subject, though several others (such as Stephen Hickman on "Moebius"/Giraud and Locus co-founder Charles Brown on the hugely innovative and accomplished Betty Ballantine) provide some data-points that were new to me (I've never been the biggest fan of Heavy Metal magazine, the US version of Moebius's most prominent market, Metal Hurlant, but he has been among the most influential artists of theirs, if not the single most influential comics artist of his generation). George R. R. Martin on Lisa Tuttle was more in the nostalgic, jokey mode of much fannish writing; Paul J. McAuley just a bit more formal, not too much, in his piece on Kim Newman; the anonymous profile on Joseph Bruchac more briskly professional, though touching rather well on the variegated nature of his career.
As a further reminder of how ephemeral this was meant to be, the glue holding the cover onto the spine completely gave way as I finished reading it this morning, though I think it can be reapplied carefully. I didn't attend this convention (I managed to drop in on one earlier WFC), but was kindly given this volume. along with others, some years back by Kate Laity, who was lightening her load.
