Archives: 2009 September

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Nebula Awards Weekend

The Forty-Seventh Nebula Awards Weekend will be held Thursday through Sunday, May 17 to May 20, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, near Reagan National Airport.

We honor Connie Willis as our Grand Master!

To register, click on “Registration” in the menu to the immediate left. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Register” button.

Tours, workshops and panels are available for registered attendees (the number of people who can be accommodated on the tours and workshops is limited.) Active and Associate SFWA members may nominate works, until February 15th, for the awards to be presented at the May 19th Nebula Awards Weekend Banquet. Hour long interviews and readings will be recorded by Jim Freund for his Hour of the Wolf radio show broadcast on WBAI (99.5FM) in New York City.

Jon Williams is our Toastmaster (he will also conduct a half-day Writers Workshop on Friday morning.) Mike Fincke is our Keynote Speaker.

The Mass Autographing Session on Friday, May 18th will be followed by a reception to honor the nominees and other honorees.

You don’t have to be a nominee, a member of SFWA, or even a writer to participate in the weekend. Registration for the 2012 Nebula Awards Weekend is open now. The cost for the Nebula Awards Banquet is $75.00 per person. The cost to register is $50.00 for a SFWA Member and $60.00 for a non-SFWA Member until February 29, 2012. Rates for registration will be higher as the date of the event draws closer.

Results from the 2010 Nebula Awards (presented 2011).

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Archive for September, 2009

How syntax can help you!

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

by Juliette Wade

This one’s funny, because it sounds like grammar, or maybe computer programming…

Syntax is the study of how sentences are put together. Part of this is word order. This is the one everyone fears because it often involves diagramming sentences. Actually, one of my most intense and wonderful classes was Syntax 1 at UC Santa Cruz. We put together a set of rules for how to create the sentences of English, based entirely on example sentences given to us by our teacher, Professor Sandy Chung (who totally rocks, by the way). Each time we thought we had it, she’d throw us another sentence that didn’t fit, and the rule set evolved.

So how is this useful for science fiction and fantasy writers?

First, consider Yoda. He doesn’t use typical English syntax. We know this. Yet we can still understand him. I always figured he was a native speaker of some other language and that affected how he could speak the common tongue – but my husband says he never thought of that, and he thought Yoda was just quirky.

Be that as it may, one of the things you can do by altering syntax is give a feeling of dialect, or of a foreign accent. The key here is to keep it all consistent. If it’s inconsistent it will feel quirky, and could be construed as an error.

So how do you keep it consistent? Track your subject/verb/object order, and track your phrase types.

In English we use SVO (subject-verb-object) word order: I hit him: I=S, hit=V, him=O.
In Japanese they use SOV (subject-object-verb) word order. boku ga kare o utta : boku=I (for boys)=S, kare=he=O, utta=hit=V

I don’t personally know any VSO languages (write in a comment if you do!) but I do know that Earth languages don’t actually have all the possible orderings of these elements. For alien languages, who knows? They might not even conceptualize subject and object and verb the way we do – in which case it might be tough to write out their language in the story!

Some languages have freer word order than English. Take for example Latin or Japanese. This is a place where phrase syntax (in the Japanese case) or morphology (in the Latin case) can allow you greater freedom.

In Japanese, the subject and object are marked by particles, special words that come directly after the nouns they apply to and tell you their role in the sentence. With your words marked like that, you can scramble the phrases up a bit and still get meaning out of it.

In Latin, morphology provides case suffixes. Case suffixes essentially play the same role as the Japanese particles, and by labeling the word’s role directly, allow more freedom for altering word order.

Play around with it. Yoda shows us that we can understand a lot of different ways of putting a sentence together, provided that we know enough to track each noun’s role in the action at hand. You might also want to run it by your friends to make sure it’s comprehensible!

At this point you may notice that I’ve been talking about altering English syntax within a story to imply the structure of another language. This is true. The same principles apply if you want to write sentences in a created language – but I’m guessing this is going to happen less often in the story than the use of English for implication. I have written a song in one of my created languages, but I don’t imagine it will do more than sit in an appendix, since putting the entire thing in the story as Tolkien did isn’t quite my style.

Now, go forth and have fun with syntax!

–

How syntax can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Table of contents for How Linguistics can help you

How linguistics can help you!
How articulatory phonetics can help you!
How syntax can help you!
How semantics can help you! Part 1
How sociolinguistics can help you!

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Tags: Juliette Wade, syntax, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | 8 Comments »

“Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela” by Saladin Ahmed

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

“Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela” by Saladin Ahmed
Clockwork Phoenix 2, July, 2009, Mike Allen, ed.

Tags: Ahmed, Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela, Saladin Ahmed
Posted in Nebula Suggested Reading, Short Stories | Comments Off

“Stone Flowers” by Mike Allen

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

“Stone Flowers” by Mike Allen
September 2009, Cabinet des Fées

Tags: Allen, Mike Allen, Stone Flowers
Posted in Nebula Suggested Reading, Short Stories | Comments Off

“Before My Last Breath” by Robert Reed

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

“Before My Last Breath” by Robert Reed
Asimov’s Oct./Nov. 2009

Tags: Before My Last Breath, Reed, Robert Reed
Posted in Nebula Suggested Reading, Short Stories | Comments Off

Interview: Ysabeau S. Wilce

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. Whether it’s your short stories or novels, I find that you have a unique style and voice that no one else in the field is doing. How did you develop your particular writing style?

Reading, reading and reading. I have a theory that you can’t be a good writer if you aren’t a great reader. And you must read lots of different things too, with no regard for one particular genre, or for high or low literature. Obviously, I have more of an affinity towards the rococo and melodramatic, but I think it’s important not to be too limited in my reading choices, so I will read almost anything. Immersion in reading helped me develop an ear for rhythm, and made my style second nature. Now I just sit down and start typing, and out it all comes!

All your fiction so far seems to be set in the world of Califa. How did you come up with this cosmology? How do you keep track of all your characters and locations and interactions?

Califa evolved over a long long time. In the beginning elements of Califa could be found in a role playing game that my friends and I were obsessed with in high school. Back then, Califa was not called Califa, and it was more medieval. Later, when I got interested in American history, Califa began to turn into more of a California cognate. I decided, as a point of ideology, to have all my fantasy based in American mythology and geography. In my opinion, pastoral Tolkien-type fantasy is already well-picked over and I wanted to do something new. As far as keeping track of people and places, I do not do so formally. It’s all in my head. Thankfully my editor is very good at picking up continuity errors!

Have you ever considered writing fiction that’s not set in your Califa setting?

I’ve considered it, but rejected the consideration for the moment. Right now I’m still having fun with Califa and its environs, and my readers seem happy to be exploring that world along with me. But at some point I’ll have to stretch into something new.

(Read the entire interview at NebulaAwards.com)

Tags: interview, Nebula, Ysabeau S. Wilce
Posted in SFWA Blog | 1 Comment »