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News Log: Briefs and Links

§ Octavia Butler will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN Center USA West at the organization's annual awards in Los Angeles tonight, October 25.

(Note: the awards link here does not include the Lifetime Achievement Award, but does list winners and nominees in other categories. The only genre connections are in the Screenplay category, where nominees included the writers of Being John Malkovich and Toy Story 2; the winner is David O. Russell for Three Kings.)

• PW Daily reports results of a marketing survey by NPD BookTrends on book buying habits of 12,000 American households, with particular attention to Harry Potter:

• 47% of all book purchases were planned before going to the bookstore
• 77% of Harry Potter purchases were planned
• Half of those were bought as gifts
• One third of HP books were bought for people 35 or older
• Of 1.6 billion books sold in the US last year, half were for adults/teens, and half were for children 14 and under

§ Correspondent Michael Walsh alerts us to this 1999 Listserv post describing a six-degrees-of-separation link from Gordon Van Gelder to H.L. Mencken. (Search for 'Mercury'.)

§ Winners of the German ''Phantastik Award'' 2000, determined by e-mail vote of 574 readers, were announced Saturday, October 21. The website lists winners and runners-up in these and other categories.

Best German Novel 1999

Krieg der Engel, Wolfgang und Heike Hohlbein (Ueberreuter)

Best Foreign Novel 1999

Hearts in Atlantis, Stephen King (Heyne)

Author of the Year 1999

Joanne K. Rowling

Best Translation 1999

Uwe Anton, for Geschoepfe der Nacht by Dean Koontz

Best Feature 1999

Die Matrix

Best TV Series 1999

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Flop of the Year 1999

Star Wars: Episode 1

§ Winners of the second annual Geffen Awards were announced October 19th at Icon 2000, the annual Israeli SF&F Convention. The award is named after the late Amos Geffen, co-founder of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy, and a trailblazer in SF publishing in Israel.

Best SF

Dune: House Atreides, Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson (Am-Oved)

Best Fantasy

Stardust, Neil Gaiman (Opus Press)

• During her Friday appearance on The Today Show author J.K. Rowling mentioned that volume 5 of the Harry Potter series will ''probably'' be called Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. And it probably will not be published until 2002.

§ Stephen King will continued posting installments of ''The Plant''; the fourth will be posted midnight E.S.T. on October 23rd at--

§ This obituary of Keith Roberts, by Christopher Reed, is reprinted from The Guardian:

§ The Spanish SF and newszine BEM has closed at issue number 75. It had been running for ten years. States the press release:

The editors Ricard de la Casa, Pedro Jorge Romero, Joan Manel Ortiz and José Luis González consider that a printed bimonthly newszine is obsolete in the era of the Internet, when news spreads within days.

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