Views from Medina Road

It's odd how some SF awards, though established for decades in some cases, have no permanent or reliable web resources, still in this day and age...

I'm sitting at my computer tracking down the past year's award results for compilation into the update of the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards. I've compiled most of the major awards already, over the course of the past year, but there are still several dozen relatively minor awards to compile. It's disconcerting to do a Google search on an award name and find my own Locus Index to SF Awards turn up as the primary source! This happens when the previously identified site has apparently disappeared... Thus, at the moment, for example, there's no current Lambda Literary Awards site; no Ditmar Awards site (I'm relying on the copy of the nominations list in Jonathan Stahan's blog for the latest year's nominations). Other sites are remarkably casual (or perhaps simply poorly designed) in their presentation of their latest results; one site, for example, doesn't bother to spell out nominees' first names in some cases. Fortunately, the Locus Magazine staff has done some of the legwork to verify and fill in details for various awards' nominations; and so I'll be paging through the past year's issues of the magazine to double-check, and in some cases use as primary source, some award nomination listings.