{"id":5598,"date":"2015-02-16T11:57:16","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T19:57:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5598"},"modified":"2015-02-16T12:21:27","modified_gmt":"2015-02-16T20:21:27","slug":"finalist-as-in-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5598","title":{"rendered":"“Finalist.” As in “Last”."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cbcbookieawards2015-986-v2\"<\/a>So remember when I <\/a>mentioned<\/a> that cryptic little <\/a>page<\/a> over on CBC with Echopraxia<\/em> on it? The one whose origin and purpose was a total mystery? Well, not so much any more. Turns out Echopraxia<\/em> is a finalist for this years “<\/a>Bookies<\/a>“, under the “SciFi\/Fantasy” category. (No, I’m not blind; I swear that logo wasn’t on the page first time I dropped by.)<\/p>\n

You may remember the Bookies. Back in 2012 Caitlin’s The Pattern Scars<\/em> <\/a>was nominated in the same category<\/a>\u00a0 (though it was called “Speculative Fiction” at that time, since Margaret Atwood was on the list), and\u2014 after some <\/a>odd lulls and surges in voting<\/a> that revealed an interesting vote-rigging exploit\u2014 it <\/a>ended up winning<\/a> with more votes than all the other finalists combined (an especially nifty trick when you remember that those other finalists included both Atwood and Rob Sawyer).<\/p>\n

\"First<\/a>

First Place.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Last<\/a>

Last Place.<\/p><\/div>\n

My own chances are somewhat dimmer, and not just because Echopraxia<\/em> is up against William Gibson’s first balls-to-the-wall unrepentantly-SF novel this century. Both of us are getting our asses\u00a0handed to us by someone called Emily St. John Mandel, who I’ll admit I’d never heard of until I followed the link and learned that <\/a>Station Eleven<\/a><\/em> is a NY Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the star of at least a dozen Best-of-Year lists. According to the Amazon synopsis the novel tells of a hopeful apocalypse, in which the tattered remnants of a decimated Humanity are decent and humane and (if I’m reading this right) continue to put on performances of Shakespeare in the Park while the bodies stack up. It almost sounds as if \u00a0 Cormac McCarthy’s The Road<\/em> was written by the guys who do those Chicken Soup for the Soul books, which is a trick I could never manage in a million years. I wish I could; as of this writing, Station Eleven<\/em> has nearly six times as many votes as Echopraxia<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This would be an even more remarkable disparity if Echopraxia<\/em> wasn’t running dead last, and thus getting trounced by pretty much everyone. So, yeah; not much hope of taking home the Pixelated Golden Beaver this time around. But if you wanted to try and boost me out of last place, at least, you could always go over to the <\/a>Bookies site<\/a> and cast a vote or three (as before, multiple votes are allowed for some reason). (Now that I think of it, maybe that’s the way it works for all<\/em> our federal institutions). Beating Queen of Stars<\/em> is probably still within the realm of possibility.<\/p>\n

If not, no biggie. I still don’t know how Echopraxia<\/em> ended up on the finalists list in the first place…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So remember when I mentioned that cryptic little page over on CBC with Echopraxia on it? The one whose origin and purpose was a total mystery? Well, not so much any more. Turns out Echopraxia is a finalist for this years “Bookies“, under the “SciFi\/Fantasy” category. (No, I’m not blind; I swear that logo wasn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5598"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5635,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5598\/revisions\/5635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}