Lou Anders Leaves Pyr

(Via Rob Bedford)

I learned today that Lou Anders is leaving Prometheus Books.  Anders is both the editorial director and art director of Pyr, and imprint of Prometheus. Anders is leaving to focus on his writing career. I wish Lou and Pyr nothing but the best, with good fortune to follow on both sides.

In my mind, Lou Anders IS Pyr.  I understand that there is and was a team in place making everything happen, but Lou was the face of Pyr, a public advocate for the fiction he was publishing, and he was the editorial director. It was his vision and guidance that drove the sort of fiction published at Pyr.  The reason I am familiar with and fans of James Barclay, Justina Robson, Kay Kenyon, and Joe Abercrombie is because I was introduced to them by Lou Anders. There are another dozen or so writers I haven't read yet, but they are on my radar simply because Lou published them.  They have to be good.  Not only did he publish good books, as art director, his books looked good, too.  They looked sharp.  They looked like something you'd want to pick up. 

Books selected by Lou would, from the first year, be nominated for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Hugo, World Fantasy Award, Compton Crook Award, The John W Campbell Memorial Award, Sideways Award, Philip K Dick Award, and the Locus Award. Among others.  The art that he selected would be nominated for and win the Chesley Award. Short fiction he edited would invariably be nominated for awards, and Lou himself would be nominated for the World Fantasy Award and win the Hugo and Chesley Awards.  It isn't an exaggeration to say that if Lou Anders published a book, I could assume right off the bat that it was going to be worth checking out.  Lou Anders built the Pyr brand and knowing that a book was published by Pyr, I'd give it a second or third look. 

I almost wrote that it is sad to see Lou leave Pyr, but that would only be the selfish thought of someone whose reading life has benefited from and been enriched by the work that Lou has done with Pyr.  Lou Anders is leaving to focus on his own writing.  His first novel, Frostborn, has been published and has been well received and if leaving Pyr gives him the opportunity to fully embrace and chase his dream and his personal goals, then that's the right decision and the right call. 

I have never met Lou Anders, though I hope one day our paths cross and I can buy him a beer and sit down and talk books with him for a few minutes, but he has my sincere best wishes in this next stage of his career. 

On his blog today, Lou has some poignant words about Kermit the Frog.

Somewhere along the way, it became less about his own dreams and more about facilitating others' dreams, about accruing and enabling a group of like-minded individuals to reach their own potential.

As an editor over the last ten years at Pyr, Lou Anders has done exactly that.  While the nuts and bolts of editorial work is largely invisible to the reader, to a very real point, the job of an editor is to facilitate the dreams of others and to enable them to reach their potential.  And like Kermit, he has been remarkably successful at bringing those voices forward and making them known.  He has been the public face of a company's brand.  Now he is stepping forward himself, making his own dream a reality, pushing his own vision and stretching to tell his own stories.

Richard Powers and the Hugo

I’ve had a couple of very interesting conversations since I posted my preliminary Hugo ballot. Both centered on my inclusion of Richard Powers as a probable nominee for Best Professional Artist.

I placed Richard Powers on my preliminary ballot on the strength of the cover art of Eclipse Three. I’ve listened to several interviews with Night Shade Books publisher Jeremy Lassen where he talks about how he got this particular cover for the book. Any mistakes here are mine, but as I understand it, Lassen contacted the estate of Powers and asked if there was any unpublished artwork available to use for a cover. It just so happened that there was this one particular piece of artwork which had been commissioned several decades ago and for whatever reason, was never used or published. At this time nobody knows what the original commission was. Lassen, no fool, snapped up the art and used it for the cover of Eclipse Three. It’s spectacular.

One of my first thoughts when I decided to purchase a supporting membership to this year’s Worldcon was that I had to recognize the Powers cover. I absolutely love it.

There’s only one thing. Richard Powers died in 1996.

I received two e-mails asking me to reconsider my potential nomination of Richard Powers for the Best Professional Artist Hugo.

Now, the conversations I had were private correspondence, but Lou Anders was gracious enough to permit me to publicly use some of his words here.

The conversations were not simple “Dude, don’t give it to Powers”, but were rather well reasoned explanations stating that while the Powers cover is excellent, the intent of the Best Professional Artist Hugo is to recognize the art of artists working today and who are actively producing new work. The Powers cover would be akin to finding a long lost novel from a deceased master.

I do not believe I was following the awards at the time, but was there ever a campaign or a conversation around nominating The Children of Hurin for a Hugo? That would be a similar case to the Powers cover. Or, let’s say that sometime after Harlan Ellison is no longer with us, Last Dangerous Visions is finally published and everyone recognizes that compared to Last Dangerous Visions, the discovery of fire and the inventions of the wheel and sliced bread really weren’t all that impressive. Harlan gets nominated for whichever of the two Best Editor Hugos he is eligible for. We’ll ignore various impossibilities of this happening and just accept it for a moment. Though Last Dangerous Visions may indeed be excellent, such a nomination would not represent the state of the genre today.

Lou Anders responds to this,

I think you hit the nail on the head yourself when you said LDV wouldn't represent the state of the genre today and I think that's what an annual award needs to do. Again, Powers was just inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame - which is utterly appropriate and LONG OVERDUE. He's a giant. But he's not TODAY's giant.

This is the heart of the issue and the conversations I’ve been having. There is a distinction in the name of the category, “Best Professional Artist”, that suggests the award is not honoring a single work, but rather the body of work over the previous year.

Can a single piece of art, no matter how good, honestly outweigh the collected output of a working artist? If, as Lou Anders says, “artists have fought so hard recently for the Best Artist Hugo to be a reflection of current work”, do we do a dishonor to working artists and to the spirit of the award if we nominate and vote for work produced decades ago?

This is where I waffle.

The Powers cover was first published in 2009. This is not a case of Lassen recycling a cover that was previously on the market. So, from the perspective of a fan who wishes to honor a single piece of art which can be considered one of the best works published in 2009, the work of Richard Powers for the Eclipse cover certainly qualifies and merits a nomination. This is also a particular cover which reflects a 70’s aesthetic while still presenting as modern and something today’s artists would do well to aspire to.

On the other hand, the arguments of Lou Anders and the other correspondent are sound and they hold water. While Powers does fit the letter of qualifying for a nomination, there is a serious question of whether Powers fits the spirit and intent of what such a nomination should stand for. Also, the cover of Eclipse Three is only one piece of artwork and the category is intended to honor the body of work published in a given year. Once again, does one piece of art outweigh the collected output of a working artist who produced multiple pieces of high quality art?

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I am honestly torn between honoring an excellent piece of art that may have been produced thirty years ago and using my nomination in the spirit in which the Best Professional Artist is intended.

It’s something to think about.

I very much appreciate the courtesy of the e-mails and the conversations which resulted. They caused me to think through the nomination more fully and they challenged me to become more informed about a somewhat vague category and about the artists working within.

Lou Anders on SFF Nostalgia

Over at Pyr-O-Mania, editor Lou Anders has a great post about what SFF we recommend to others and why recommending the "classics" of the past may do the genre a disservice.

Lou writes:

I was in Barnes & Noble some months back and bumped into a friend of mine with his daughter. He told me she had been assigned Fahrenheit 451 at school, to which I replied, "You poor girl. You are going to hate it. It's about an old man whining that his wife watches too many soap operas, and nothing happens it it until the cities arbitrarily blow up at the end on cue. Please don't think that's the sort of thing I do for a living. Come with me." Then I walked her over to a display of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies books and said, "Here, this is much more representative of contemporary SF. Try this."

Now, lest the "classic-loving reader" get into a tizzy, read the rest of Lou's article. There's a context.

And for my take: I agree.

Quick Takes: Kealan Patrick Burke, Lou Anders

The Hides, by Kealan Patrick Burke: After reading Currency of Souls I wanted to read more of Burke’s novel (or novella) length fiction. My library had The Hides, so it worked out well. I understand that The Hides is actually the second novel featuring some of these characters, but no knowledge of the prior event(s) is necessary for The Hides. Not to be hideously cliche about it, but Timmy Quinn can see dead people. They can see him, too. After another bad experience at home, Timmy’s father moves him and Timmy to Ireland to live with Timmy’s grandmother for a time. It is supposed to be better. Things only get worse.

As much as I liked Currency of Souls there was this erratic vibe to the novel, and Burke may have let things spin a little out of control at the end (and what the hell was up with that Indian sequence anyway), but The Hides is much more constrained. There is a quiet horror to the novel and Burke keeps the story on track and focused and The Hides is a better novel for it. I wish I could read his novella The Turtle Boy which first introduced Timmy Quinn, but until then The Hides is a quietly excellent story of horror, the dead, and how personal history will always come back to haunt.



Fast Forward 1, by Lou Anders (editor): Once I started reading Fast Forward 1 I knew I had something good. Lou Anders collects 21 stories in this original, unthemed anthology of science fiction tales of the future, some future, perhaps our future. There are some absolute gems in this anthology. By this point everyone knows about “Wikiworld”, but Pamela Sargent’s “A Smaller Government” was an impressive look at the US government and I was surprised by “Jesus Christ, Reanimator”. Ken MacLeod’s story was nothing like what I expected and was quite understated...and if Jesus would come back the way he does in the story, I suspect it would end the way MacLeod envisions. Mary Turzillo’s “Pride”, complete with a saber tooth tiger is another quite gem. Looking back, “Solomon’s Choice”, the Justina Robson, Kage Baker, and Elizabeth Bear stories...this is the future of science fiction and the future is strong. Shoot, “p dolce” , a story about virtually sending people back in time to find out what Bach’s mysterious notation means, is another one worth mentioning. The only stories which did not work for me were Paolo Bacigalupi’s and Ian McDonald...I don’t understand the big deal with either author based on their short fiction. I could have done without Robyn Hitchcock’s poetry, but otherwise I would recommend Fast Forward 1 as THE anthology to read this year and I am very much looking forward to the inevitable (I hope) Fast Forward 2.