The Android’s Dream Nominated for the Seiun Award
Posted on April 2, 2013 Posted by John Scalzi 25 Comments
So, this is turning out to be a pretty good week for me in terms of award nominations, since in addition to Hugo and Kurd Lasswitz nods for Redshirts, the Japanese translation of The Android’s Dream has been nominated for the Seiun Award, the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo, in the category of Best Foreign Novel. The entire category:
* The Android’s Dream – John Scalzi
* The Quantum Thief – Hannu Rajaniemi
* Vortex – Robert Charles Wilson
* Black Out – Connie Willis
* The Leviathan Trilogy – Scott Westerfeld
Once again, I am in an excellent field of competitors and I will be delighted to lose to any of them (I won the Seiun a couple of years back, so I’m good). In the short fiction foreign category, Allen Steele, Rachel Swirsky, Adam Troy Castro, Ian McDonald and Paolo Bacigalupi (twice!) are the nominees, so good luck to them.
As I did yesterday with the Kurd Lasswitz award, let me take a moment here to thank my translator, in this case Masayuki Uchida (内田昌之). I believe good translators deserve as much recognition as authors can give them. Thank you also to the Japanese fans who nominated me. I am grateful, and pleased.
With all this love for the book, where’s the sequel?
Could the manga adaptation be next?
Joel Finkle:
I started writing it and it was bad, so I stopped. Better no sequel than one that is not good. I may try again at some other point.
Good heavens, I skimmed from the bottom up and thought John had started writing a manga adaptation. Hum. Definitely wake me up if there’s ever an anime in the offing :P
Translators are fucking amazing. Serious make-or-break capacity.
The cover art is pretty awesome on this too! I definitely took a second look.
If there is a category for it then I hope that the person/people who did the coverwork get kudos for it too!
Congrats.
Congratulations. Again!
Well, unlike the Hugo nominations and the German awards, at least I’ve read something on the list besides your book – in fact, I’ve read part of all but the Wilson, though I couldn’t get into The Quantum Thief. My tastes must align more with the Japanese…
Amen to the importance of good translators. My French isn’t really up to appreciating the original, but I’ve read different translations of Cyrano de Bergerac, and it makes a WORLD of difference to translate something well. Hooray for Uchida-san!
John,
Better no sequel than one that is not good.
And you want to work in Hollywood? ;)
Congrats on the award. And since I forgot to congratulate you on the Kurd Lasswitz nomination (and kinda peed in the punch bowl while I was at it), let me congratulate you now for that as well.
That is a gorgeous cover – do you know who the artist is? Thank you for recognizing the translator – it’s often a thankless job. Especially since a good translation should not be obvious. Congratulations to both of you on the nomination.
Nice to be a world-famous author, isn’t it? Congrats on achieving that status!
Sort of interesting that Connie Willis was nominated for the first half of a two-book series, but Scott Westerfeld was nominated for the whole series. I guess it depends on what gets translated when and how (and how well).
I’ve actually read three of the nominations, which is a high-water mark for me. Yeah, John, you are in pretty good company.
Congratulations for the nomination – all of them – and I hope you win.
Congrats, John! Best of luck to you.
At this point are you needing to apply grease to the side of your head to enter a room?
That is awesome. Congrats!
Congrats John, love yer werk – but if you don’t lose to Hannu Rajaniemi this time, I will blame your respective translators. Loudly, perhaps unpleasantly. With no personal disrespect to you intended, thanks for caring.
Since the only Japanese I know was learned from the Shogun miniseries when I was a kid, I’ll just say, “Congratulations!” in English.
おめでとう！
Keep up at this pace and your head my not be able to fit into your office any more ;) Also, second what beej said, an attitude like that is no way to get work in Hollywood!
I also put in my “amen” to your comment about translators. I marvel particularly at the translators who can communicate humor effectively, so clearly kudos to Mr Uchida, yes? I recall Stanislaw Lem’s regular translator was able to transfer his off-beat humor so effectively from Polish to English that he had me laughing out loud in nearly every book. I thought that Lem would not nearly have been so respected in the English speaking sf world if not for his talented translator. Sure enough, I came across a book with a different translator, and although not bad and still funny, it was curiously flat, almost seeming like a different author. So, yes, translators deserve respect.
Congratulations, John. I hope you win!
I need one of y’all SF expert types to tell me what is so great about “Black Out.” I got it because “To Say Nothing of the Dog” was one of the best things I’ve ever read.
I had to slog through “Black Out,” and was SO MAD when it turned out to be Part 1. I mean, the same thing happened over and over and over again (and maybe that was the point?) and then I got no payoff. Slogged even harder through “All Clear” (which I got because I was grimly determined to get to the end of the story) and thought, this should have been one book.
Anyway … those two books have killed my desire to read anything else by Connie Willis and that’s a shame. What am I missing?
chacha1, “The Doomsday Book”, for one. That also has time travel. It’s heartbreakingly poignant.
Congratulations John, and well deserved! I loved T.A.D, and am glad to see (from the nomination) the humor in the book translated into Japanese. This is another of those books I recommend to friends – it is fun, yet there is depth as well. Kudos to your translator for the translation, as well!
I just noticed something. My Japanese isn’t up to snuff, but why is the kanji for “sheep” at the end of the title on the book cover? Is it a nod to PK Dick?