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• Lois Bujold's speech

The 2008 UPC Science Fiction Award, which was presented on November 26, was won by La cosecha del centauro, by Eduardo Gallego Arjona and Guillem Sánchez Gómez. It is an adventure story of fierce battles in which the main characters search for the meaning behind their existence and their annihilation. In this eighteenth edition of the Award, the special mention went to Les fleurs de Vlau, by the Belgian author Alain Le Bussy. This novel is about a science journalist who becomes embroiled in a plot to take control of pélope, an extremely potent medicinal plant. The winning works will be published by Ediciones B in its Nova collection.

La cosecha del centauro is to receive the 6,000 euros in prize money that the UPC’s Board of Trustees awards each year. It is about a race of aliens (planters) who choose a planet in the Scutum-Crux Arm to sow their seed of life. Every 802 years, the aliens return to harvest their crop and destroy everything around them. The threatened settlers in the Orion Arm embark on an adventure with humans to uncover the meaning of life and who they are.

Les fleurs de Vlau, the winner of the jury’s special mention, takes place on the planet Hellas. Its inhabitants, who have lived there for two hundred years, discover a plant called pélope that has miraculous properties: vlau-A cures cancer, vlau-B slows down the aging process, and vlau-C controls mental illnesses (schizophrenia and autism). The science journalist Olivier Boxwoody travels to Hellas to cover the story and becomes involved in the fight to control the flower’s production, which is in the hands of the franchise Vlad Corp…

The UPC Science Fiction Award gives a special mention to novels that are submitted by members of the university community. This time around, the mention, endowed with 1,500 euros, was for Los ángeles de la inmovilidad, by Gerardo Benicio Da Fonseca (Brazil). The main character in the narrative is an egocentric, unstable security guard, Mike Prat, who is contacted by the DSE (Department of Special Situations) to go on an expedition with a group of scientists who are to look into the unusual events in Ganges Chasma, on the surface of Mars. Mike Prat finds out that the mystery is linked to a physics experiment that went wrong.

In its minutes, the Award’s jury gave mentions to the following works in order of preference: Los nexos del tiempo, by Rodrigo Moreno Flores (Madrid), S por Salomon, S por Sussman, by José Miguel Sánchez Gómez (Cuba), and El dragón de Schrödinger, by Vladimir Hernández Pacín (Barcelona).

Of the works submitted, 31% were sent in from Catalonia, 35% from Spain and 34% from the rest of the world (ten narratives from the USA, five from Argentina, four from Mexico, three from Cuba, three from Chile, two from Belgium, two from Ecuador, and one each from Bolivia, Canada, Hungary, Northern Ireland and Peru).

In this edition of the Award, the speech that is traditionally given at the awards ceremony was “Science Fiction, Fantasy and Me”, by the American writer Lois Bujold.

Most of Lois Bujold’s stories take place in the future and revolve around the Vorkosigan family on the planet Barrayar. The author has won some of the most prestigious awards in the genre for this series of books, amongst which are the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1949, her first published novel was Shards of Honor in 1983. She went on to publish other novels that have now become classics of the genre, such as Komarr (1998), The Curse of Chalion (2001) Paladin of Souls, (2003) and The Hallowed Hunt (2005).