Collected and Reported by Allen Steele
Not Exactly Breaking News: Seiun Award Nomination … for 2021!
Well, this is old news for Captain Future fans in Japan, but it may be for American fans that my first Captain Future reboot, Avengers of the Moon, was a 2021 nominee for the Seiun Award, Best Translated Novel. It didn’t win, but the very fact this novel landed on the final ballot for Japan’s most prestigious SF literary award is something that still astonishes me; as the saying goes, “It’s an honor just to be nominated.”
This is the third time something of mine has been short-listed for what has often been called “the Japanese Hugo” …but I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that my first nominated work, and also the winner in its category that year, was my 1995 novella “The Death of Captain Future” for Best Translated Work, Short Fiction. Captain Future may have become obscure for a number of years in the country where he was created, but he has never been forgotten in Japan, thanks to paperback translations going back to the 60’s but mainly as well for the Captain Future anime series of the late 70’s that is still a cult favorite in that country. So the Japanese translation of Avengers of the Moon was greeted with largely favorable response by fans and reviewers when it published there.