Here are this year’s nominees and winners. I’ve arranged the list with the winners at the top of each category, starred and bolded:

BEST NOVEL IN ENGLISH :

*WAKE, Robert J. Sawyer, Penguin Canada

THE AMULET OF AMON-RA, by Leslie Carmichael, CBAY Books

DRUIDS, by Barbara Galler-Smith and Josh Langston, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy

STEEL WHISPERS, Hayden Trenholm, Bundoran Press

TERRA INSEGURA, Edward Willett, DAW Books

MEILLEUR ROMAN EN FRANÇAIS ( Best Novel In French ):

*Suprématie. Laurent McAllister, (Bragelonne)

Le protocole Reston. Mathieu Fortin, (Coups de tête)

La Quête de Chaaas (L’axe de Koudriss). Michèle Laframboise, Médiaspaul

Un tour en Arkadie. Francine Pelletier, Alire

Filles de lune 3. Le talisman de Maxandre. Élisabeth Tremblay, (De Mortagne)

BEST SHORT-FORM WORK IN ENGLISH:

*”PAWNS DREAMING OF ROSES”, Eileen Bell, Women of the Apocalypse. Absolute Xpress

“HERE THERE BE MONSTERS” Brad Carson, Ages of Wonder, (DAW) (story)

“LITTLE DEATHS” Ivan Dorin, Tesseracts Thirteen

“RADIO NOWHERE” Douglas Smith, Campus Chills

“THE WORLD MORE FULL OF WEEPING” Robert J. Wiersema, ChiZine Publications

MEILLEURE NOUVELLE EN FRANÇAIS ( Best Short-Form In French )

*« Ors blancs » Alain Bergeron, (Solaris 171)

« De l’amour dans l’air » Claude Bolduc, (Solaris 172)

« La vie des douze Jésus » Luc Dagenais, (Solaris 172)

« Billet de faveur » Michèle Laframboise, (Galaxies 41)

« Grains de silice » Mario Tessier, (Solaris 170)

« La mort aux dés » Élisabeth Vonarburg, (Solaris 171)

BEST WORK IN ENGLISH (OTHER) :

*WOMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (the Apocalyptic Four) Editor, Absolute Xpress

AGES OF WONDER Julie E. Czerneda, & Rob St. Martin, Editors, DAW Books

NEO-OPSIS MAGAZINE, Karl Johanson, Editor

ON SPEC MAGAZINE, Diane Walton, Managing Editor, The Copper Pig Writers’ Society

DISTANT EARLY WARNINGS: CANADA’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION Robert J. Sawyer, Editor, Robert J. Sawyer books

MEILLEUR OUVRAGE EN FRANÇAIS (AUTRE) / (Best Work In French (Other):

*Revue. Joel Champetier, éditeur, Solaris

Critiques. Jérôme-Olivier Allard, (Solaris 169-172)

Le jardin du general, Manga. Michele Laframboise, ,Fichtre, Montréal

Rien à voir avec la fantasy. Thibaud Sallé, (Solaris 169)

Chronique «Les Carnets du Futurible». Mario Tessier, (Solaris 169-171)

ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT :

*Dan O’Driscoll, Cover of Steel Whispers, Bundoran Press

Kari-Ann Anderson, for cover of “Nina Kimberly the Merciless”,Dragon Moon Press

Jim Beveridge, “Xenobiology 101: Field Trip” Neo-opsis #16

Lar de Souza, “Looking for Group” online Comic

Tarol Hunt, “Goblins”. Webcomic

FAN ACCOMPLISHMENT (Fanzine):

*Richard Graeme Cameron,.WCFSAZine

Jeff Boman, The Original Universe

Dale Speirs, Opuntia

Guillaume Voisine, éd. Brins d’Éternité

Felicity Walker, BCSFAzine

FAN ACCOMPLISHMENT (Organization) :

*David Hayman, organization Filk Hall of Fame

Renée Benett, for “In Spaces Between” at Con-Version 25

Robbie Bourget, and René Walling, Chairs of “Anticipation”, the 67 th WorldCon

Roy Miles, work on USS Hudson Bay Executive

Kirstin Morrell, Programming for Con-Version 25

FAN ACCOMPLISHMENT (Other) :

*Ray Badgerow, Astronomy Lecture at USS Hudson Bay

Ivan Dorin, “Gods Anonymous” (Con-Version 25 radio play)

Judith Hayman and Peggi Warner-Lalonde organization, Filk track @Anticipation

Tom Jeffers and Sue Posteraro, Filk Concert, Anticipation

Lloyd Penney, Fanwriting

The other finalists are Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer, Steel Whispers by Hayden Trenholm, Druids by Barbara Galler-Smith and Josh Langston, and The Amulet of Amon-Ra by Leslie Carmichael. I know every one of these authors. It should be a great evening at KeyCon in Winnipeg in May when the winners are announced.

Voting will begin soon, once the complete shortlist has been announced. Keep on eye on the Aurora Award website.

The Aurora Awards, for the best Canadian works of science fiction and fantasy, are nominated and voted on by fans. Any Canadian citizen or permanent resident can nominate up to three works or individuals in a range of categories in both English and French. The five works with the most nominations go on the final ballot and are voted on by members of CanVention, the annual national SF convention. It costs nothing to nominate but there is a fee for voting on the final ballot. The mail-in and on-line nomination forms are here.

My novel Marseguro (DAW Books) won the Aurora Award for best long-form work in English last year, and its sequel, Terra Insegura, is eligible this year. You can read the first two chapters of Terra Insegura (or listen to me read them) online here.

If you consider my work worthy of a nomination this year, and you’re a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, I hope you’ll take the time to do so. But I hope you’ll also take the time to nominate others. There’s a partial list of other eligible work at the Canadian SF database.

Remember, nominating is free! And it only takes a couple of minutes.

I agree with him, of course. It really is a terrific cover. Shaun writes:

The artwork for Terra Insegura is stunning, as are all of Martiniere’s paintings. A big plus is the cover actually matches what is in the book. What more can I say? Just look at it!

However, I must take issue with some of Shaun’s other comments in his list of awards for 2009, particularly the notion that you should refuse to buy books from someone whose opinions you disagree with, a position Shaun espouses with regard to John C. Wright and Orson Scott Card.

Buy or don’t buy books because you like or don’t like them, not because you do or don’t like something the author said. (Same thing holds for movies and music. Lots of great actors, musicians and artists are awful, awful people…but their work is still tremendous and still capable of offering value to the viewer or listener.)

In my own case, I don’t agree with anyone about everything–and the more strongly someone expresses an opinion the more likely I am to want to argue with it. Many, many writers whose work I enjoy hold political opinions I find ludicrous, annoying, and potentially harmful to society if held by enough people, but so what? Their work, as committed to the page, stands or falls on its own merits,  as far as I’m concerned.

I suspect Shaun wouldn’t agree with many of my opinions (I’m a liberally progressive  libertarian conservative, or possibly a conservatively progressive liberal libertarian, if you must know), but he likes my books. That’s because I mostly keep political opinions to myself, or only share them with very close friends, and as a result he’s probably unaware of all the things we disagree on.

Why don’t I talk about politics more? Because the waters of political discourse are poisonous, soul-sucking whirlpools today. Express a strong opinion on either side of any contoversial topic, and invite a deluge of nasty emails, personal attacks, and name-calling. And to what end? You’ll change no one’s mind, and (if you’re a writer) you’re likely to alienate potential readers.

I’d like readers of all political persuasions to read my books. They can disagree with them, hate them, love them, whatever–but I want that decision to be made based on what’s in the books, not what I might have posted elsewhere on, say, abortion, gun control, gay rights, or the abysmal record of this or that politician.

I’m glad there are plenty of writers who don’t share my reticence and are willing to jump into political discussion with both feet. I enjoy reading many of them. But I don’t plan to be one of them any time soon…and I don’t plan to boycott anyone for their expression of opinion, no matter how much I might personally disagree with it, either.

Any Canadian citizen, whether or not they live in Canada, or any permanent resident of Canada may nominate for the Prix Aurora Awards. The categories have been re-named slightly and are now Best Novel In English, Best Novel In French, Best Short-Form Work In English,  Best Short-Form Work In French, Best Work In English (Other), Best Work In French (Other), Artistic Achievement, Fan Achievement (Fanzine), Fan Achievement (Organizational), and Fan Achievement (Other).

My novel Terra Insegura, sequel to Marseguro, is eligible this year in the Best Novel in English category, and I’d be honored if you think it worthy of nomination, but whether you do or not, if you read Canadian science fiction and fantasy, I hope you’ll consider nominating your favorite works from the past year.

You can do so online or via printed-and-mailed PDF form, here.

6. Terra Insegura by Edward Willett
One of the few science fiction novels I reviewed and loved this year, Willett’s sequel to Marseguro is exactly what science fiction needs: action, awesome ideas, and good characterization. No more good vs. bad plots. There’s so much grey in Willett’s book that it makes you really think about everything, from what occurred in the previous novel to what happens by the end. It’s absolutely a must for science fiction fans.

Shaun’s review of Terra Insegura is here; his review of Marseguro is here.

And I think I must begin with the Public Health Prize, which went to Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, who on August 14, 2007, received U.S. patent #7255627 for a “Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks.”

What that patent title doesn’t tell you is that the “garment device” in question is a brassiere that can be turned into two face masks, one for the wearer of the brassiere (presumably) and the other for a needy bystander of the brassiere wearer’s choice.

The official website features a photo of Dr. Bodnar demonstrating her invention with the help of Nobel laureates Wolfgang Ketterle, Orhan Pamuk and Paul Krugman, all of whom look quite fetching in their individual half-brassiere masks.

But, as usual, there were so many wonderful awards presented it’s hard to fit them into the limited space of this column—not if I want to make wisecracks about them.

Speaking of wise cracks (ba-DUM-dum), the Medicine prize went to Dr. Donald L. Unger of Thousand Oaks, California, for his investigation of whether or not knuckle cracking leads to arthritis of the fingers. Unger, an allergist, investigated in the most straightforward way possible: for more than 60 years, starting in his teens, he diligently cracked the knuckles of his left hand—but never his right—every single day.

His results were published in 1998: he found no arthritis in either hand. Which, you have to admit, is swell. (Get it? Arthritis? Swell? Swelling? Oh, never mind.)

Mooooving on (that’s going to be really funny in a second), we come to the Veterinary Medicine prize, which went to Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University in the U.K. for discovering that cows who have names give more milk than nameless cows. (The time or two I’ve had to herd cows I called them many names myself, but I doubt the names I used boosted milk production.)

People who drink too much beer are said to be “smashed.” A quintet of researchers from the University of Bern investigated the smashing qualities of beer in a different way, winning the Peace prize for determining, by experiment (in a drop tower, not a bar) whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or an empty one. Their conclusion? It is better not to be smashed over the head at all, because full or empty, a bottle of beer can break your skull. But full bottles break at a lower energy than empty ones, so in your next bar brawl, be sure to ask your assailant to use a full one.

Space is short, so let’s totter ahead to the Physics prize, given to U.S. researchers who analytically determined why pregnant women don’t tip over, and the Chemistry prize, which went to Mexican researchers who created diamonds from tequila (and no, they didn’t just notice the crystals on the edge of their sixth margarita and suddenly decide they were diamonds).

Ireland’s police service received the Literature prize for writing and presenting more than 50 traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country, Prawo Jazdy—Polish for Driving License.

The Economics prize was given to the “directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks” for demonstrating “that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa—and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy,” and Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, received the Mathematics prize “for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers” by printing bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent to 100 trillion dollars.

And last, but certainly not least, a trio of Japanese researchers received the Biology prize for “demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.”

Science is grueling work, you know. By the time they finished their research, I’ll bet they were all pooped out.

I’d give you the complete list of winners as I usually do, except as one of the nominees, I didn’t take notes or photos tonight. I’ll post them when I have a chance. But in my acceptance speech I made a point of thanking Robert J. Sawyer, who was a nominee in the same category tonight, because it was in his Banff Centre class in writing science fiction that Marseguro began, and I also did my best to acknowledge all the other nominees in my category, Douglas Smith, Ursula Pflug and Hayden Trenholm, urging people to read them all, because, I said, “Canadian science fiction deserves it.” Of course, in the process I forgot to thank my wife and daughter, and I fumbled introducing Sheila and Betsy from DAW, but it’s amazing how hard it is to think when you win an award.

Speaking of my daughter, I think she was more anxious than I was as my category (which, by the way, was announced by none other than well-known cigar-smoking puppet Ed the Sock) approached, and she apparently, though I didn’t see it, reacted with even more glee.

Afterward, of course, once I had Tweeted and Facebooked and phoned Mom, I headed over to the Delta Hotel for the SF Canada/Robert J. Sawyer Books party. I was also briefly in the SFWA Suite, where Analog and Asimov‘s were hosting a party, until it was closed down by the hotel. Oops. (Apparently a few people hung on in near-silence and seclusion.) It’s amazing what carrying a pointy, shiny award around an SF convention does to encourage people to talk to you. Two parties was my limit, though. (Pointy, you ask? The Aurora Award is famous for its sharp points, which are a) useful for forcing your way through crowds, b) an exellent means of self-defense should you be mugged on your way to your hotel, and c) known to shred clothing if you pack it injudiciously in your luggage. Fortunately, since we drove, I should be able to take it back in one piece).

Oh, I did do a few other things today. I went to a rather depressing panel on “After the Shuttle,” which spent much of its time pointing out that NASA’s plans for replacing the shuttle are inadequate, and therefore NASA astronauts won’t be going anywhere other than low-Earth-orbit riding Russian Soyuzes any time soon, manned the SFWA table for an hour and then signed books (not very many, but some) at the SFWA table for another hour, and went to the DAW Books upcoming books presentation.

It’ll be hard to have a better day than today at the this year’s WorldCon. But I’ll give it the old college try tomorrow!

And my deepest thanks to everyone who voted for Marseguro! You’ve made my year.

However, I can take some comfort in the fact that one of the jurors, John Dupois, mentioned Marseguro on his blog. In response to a comment noting, “Not much hard sci-fi, is there?,” then asking, “Is this a bias of the jury? Or are Canadian authors just not interested?”, Dupois replied, ”a bit of both I guess. We did see a few more straightforward sf novels but they didn’t strike us the same way that the others did. Two that I enjoyed from last year were that were harder sf: Marseguro by Edward Willett and Omega Sol by Scott Mackay.”

So, although I made neither the shortlist nore the honorable mention list, at least one of the jurors liked my book enough to mention it on his blog.

I’ll take what I can get.

(And have I mentioned the deadline for voting for Marseguro–or anything else, for that matter–for the Aurora Awards, which you can do online here,  is July 15? I have? Well, fancy that.)

*Oh, have I mentioned recently that Marseguro is an Aurora Award finalist? The voting deadline is July 15! Don’t delay, vote today!