LINKS PORTAL

*

E-MAIL
LOCUS

News Log: Briefs and Links

• Ray Bradbury will receive a medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, at the National Book Awards ceremony to be held November 15, 2000.

• Bryan Smith, the motorist whose van struck and injured writer Stephen King, was found dead last Friday.

• Ed Kramer arrested
Ed Kramer, anthologist, current vice-president of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), and founder of the popular annual convention Dragon*Con, has been arrested in Georgia on charges of child molestation. Kramer is being held in a Georgia correctional facility, while police have raided his house for evidence to corroborate the initial accusation, which stems from an anonymous phone call.

On Sept. 15 HWA President S.P. Somtow distributed an e-mail letter to fellow members urging calm and presumption of innocence, especially considering the potential for the horror or gothic communities to be put on trial, ''misunderstood and blamed for various societal ills''. A principal piece of evidence is apparently a low-budget, straight-to-Internet horror video (directed by Kramer, co-written with Brad Linaweaver, and with music by Somtow) called ''Terror at Tate Manor'', "in which a kid, in underwear, flees in terror from a nude woman for fear of being seduced" (Somtow); the film can be viewed online.

• Stephen King's Plant
Stephen King is having second thoughts about the fate of his online e-book serial The Plant. Payments for downloads of the second installment are down, principally because so many paying customers are downloading the installment in two or three different formats while paying only once. King's message on his website is "As simply as I can put it, you must pay for what you take every time you take it or this won't work".

• Chicon Notes

• Toronto won the site selection vote to host the Worldcon in 2003, with 1375 total votes. The only other contender was Cancun, with 247 votes.
• Membership reached a peak of 5736 warm bodies on Sunday, Sept. 3.
• Complete voting results were not immediately available after the Hugo Awards ceremony, unlike past years; only the list of nomination voting totals was distributed. (This list showed how many nominations were received by the 15 highest vote-getters in each category; for example, novels that just failed to make the ballot were Robert J. Sawyer's Flashfoward, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow, Pat Murphy's There and Back Again, etc. The complete list is available here.) Voting results were not available because of delays with revisions to the Hugo-counting program and with data entry of the 1,071 ballots. First place results were determined via hand count of the ballots by three people in time for the convention; subsequently ballots have been fully counted according to official rules, with complete voting results available here.
• Chicon passed a resolution to extend the eligiblity of works published outside the US for one year, allowing non-US worked published in 1999 to be eligible for next year's Hugo Awards at the Millennium Philcon. This is a one-time resolution that will not necessarily be incorporated into the permanent Hugo rules.