I have been nominated for a John W. Campbell Award

Last Sunday I was informed by email that I have been nominated for the 2015 John W. Campbell award for best new science-fiction writer. I was also asked not to reveal this in public until 4 April.

This is a shame.. I had a really elaborate April Fool’s joke planned where I was going to announce my nomination in the style of a U.S. presidential campaign launch. Lots of talk about a 50-state strategy and my hopes of appealing to swing voters disaffected with both the SJW and Evil League of Evil extremists, invented polling results, and nine yards of political bafflegab.

The plan was to write it so over-the-top that everyone would go “Oh, ha ha, great AFJ but you can’t fool us”…and then, three days later, the other shoe drops. Alas, I checked in with the organizers and they squelched the idea.

It is, of course, a considerable honor to be nominated, and one I am somewhat doubtful I actually deserve. But after considering the ramifications, I have decided not to decline the nomination, but rather to leave the decision on the merits up to the voters.

I make this choice because, even if I myself doubt that my single story is more than competent midlist work, and I want no part of the messy tribal politics in which I seem to have become partly swept up, there is something I don’t mind representing and giving people the opportunity to vote for.

That something is the proud tradition of classic SF, the Golden Age good stuff and its descendants today. It may be that I am among the least and humblest of those descendants, but I think both the virtues and the faults of Sucker Punch demonstrate vividly where I come from and how much that tradition has informed who I am as a writer and a human being.

If you choose to vote for Sucker Punch as a work which, individually flawed as it may be, upholds that tradition and carries it forward, that will make me happy and proud.