Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

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Nebula Awards Showcase

2012

Ed. by James Patrick Kelly

& John Kessel

No copyright 
 201
2
by MadMaxAU eBooks

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IN MEM
ORIA
M

Christopher Anvil

Kage Baker

Everett F. Bleiler

Martin Gardner

James P Hogan

F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

Jeanne Robinson

George Scithers

William Tenn, pen name of Phillip Klass

EC Tubb

Sharon Webb

and our agent Ralph Vicinanza

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CONTENTS

Introduction: In Which Your Editors Consider the Nebula Awards of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel

Po
n
ies

Kij Johnson

The Sultan of the Clouds

Geoff Landis

Map of Seventeen

Chris Barzak

And I Awoke an
d
Found Me Here on the Cold Hill
’
s Side

James Tiptree, Jr.

In the Astronaut Asylum

Kendall Evans and Samantha Henderson

Pishaach

Shweta Narayan

excerpt from
Blackout/
All Clear

Connie Willis

Bumbershoot

Howard Hendrix

Arvies

Adam Troy-Castro

How Interesting: A Tiny Man

Harlan Ellison

The Jaguar House, in Shadow

Aliette de Bodard

The Green Book

Amal El-Mohtar

That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made

Eric James Stone

excerpt from
I Shall Wear Midnight

Terry Pratchett

To Theia

Ann K. Schwader

The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window

Rachel Swirsky

2011 Nebula Awards Nominees and Honorees

Past Nebula Winners

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Introduction

IN WHICH YOUR EDITORS CONSIDER THE NEBULA AWARDS OF YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW

James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel

Jim: When you compare the very first Nebula ballot to our 2011 ballot, you see a lot of differences. One is that the 1966 ballot was much, much longer— there was no preliminary winnowing back then. For example, Nebula voters had to choose a winner from thirty-one nominees in the short story category alone! This year there are just twenty-six nominees in the four fiction categories combined. Another difference was that there were just four awards given, Novel, Novella, Novelette, and Short Story. No Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation or Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. The Bradbury was started in 1992, but then went dormant until it was rebooted in 1999. The Norton was first given in 2006. Another difference was that there was just one woman nominated in any category: Jane Beauclerk, a pseudonym for M. J. Engh. Yikes! Note that the 2011 ballot has more women than men. And all five winners in 1966 were science fiction stories, as were the vast majority of the nominees. For the record, the winner for best novel was Frank Herbert’s
Dune
, the tied winners for novella were “The Saliva Tree” by Brian W. Aldiss and “He Who Shapes” by Roger Zelazny, the novelette category was won by Zelazny’s “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” and the short story award went to Harlan Ellison’s ‘“Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” In the four plus decades since, we have seen a proliferation of subgenres in our little corner of literature, but clearly we have nominated more fantasy than science fiction this year.

Of course, in 1966 there wasn’t nearly as much fantasy as science fiction being published. So you would expect the Nebulas to track a publishing trend that reflects changes in popular tastes. And the two of us have certainly written plenty of fantasy, even though we’re primarily known as science fiction writers. So has the rise of fantasy been at the expense of science fiction?

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John: “At the expense of. . .” is a loaded phrase; after all, this is now the Science Fiction
and Fantasy
Writers of America. But even then I think the answer is not simple. The geography of our genre(s) has changed drastically over the last forty-five years, and the consequences are evident everywhere. Consider, as a minor example but a reflection of the larger movement, the term “speculative fiction.” In both 1966 and 2011 the term was in widespread use, but its meaning has changed drastically. In 1966 it was already in its second incarnation. Originally the term was coined by Robert Heinlein (in 1947) to describe a subset of science fiction extrapolating from known science and technology; what he meant by it is what we today essentially mean by science fiction. By 1966 the term was being hijacked by New Wave writers and editors—notably by Judith Merril— to indicate SF that de-emphasized the science and focused on sociological extrapolation and stylistic experimentation. Today “spec fic” has lost almost all rigor and is used as an umbrella term to describe any fiction, SF or fantasy or horror or slipstream, that is not mimetic fiction. So Vernor Vinge and N. K. Jemisin and Kelly Link and Paolo Bacagalupi and Holly Black and China Miéville are all “speculative fiction” writers in one big happy family.

Or is the family such a happy one? As many commentators have noted, there is no longer an easily identifiable center that can be used to, say, identify all the stories nominated for the Nebula Award in any year. Hard science stories compete with liminal fantasies, which compete with horror fictions, which compete with sociological extrapolations, which compete with nostalgic exercises in pulp adventure. Many SF writers bemoan the very fact you note, that fantasy is overwhelming science fiction in sales and popularity, and that the things that are called science fiction today would not have passed muster as SF in John W. Campbell’s
Astounding.
But perhaps it’s only the dinosaurs who have even heard of John W. Campbell. Is the field losing all coherence, or are these changes just the natural effects of time passing and the world changing? Is any of this something that Nebula voters and readers should worry about? Does the reader who picks up this volume have any reason to know what she is going to get when she reads its contents?