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Nebula Award Winners
jbennetto writes: "The Nebulas are out! The winning novel is A Quantum Rose, a SF/Romance backwater-standalone in a series of six books about an interstellar conflict between human empires. The author, Catherine Asaro, is a physicist. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won best script, and Jack Williamson, Kelly Link, and Severna Park won the short fiction catagories."
I was looking at a Nebula last night, unfortunatly the Quantum Roses were too small to see (and whenever I tried looking for them, this punk Heisenberg told me I wouldn't be able to find them....)
I didn't even bother looking for the Hidden Dragon.
Karma, karma, everywhere, so let's all have a drink!
A quick check on Amazon reveals that this book is the sixth in a series. Does this book stand on its own or does it require reading the earlier books?
That award actually went to Bill Gates during his apologetic testimony in the anti-trust case.
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
Since when is crouching tiger, hidden dragon science fiction?
Whoa, the cover of the Quantum Rose looks like some cheesy romance novel.
http://www.sff.net/people/asaro/quantumrose.htp
Note for romance lovers: Get some taste. Oops, no, I meant it looks like the bad romance novels, as opposed to the, er, good ones.
...that in light of the current climate for authors, musicians, etc. trying to protect their copyrights online to unnecessary extremes, it's very nice to see that two of the five Nebula winners (Novella, "The Ultimate Earth", and Short Story, "The Cure for Everything") are freely available online, along with many of the non-winning nominees as well.
It's nice to know that professional literature can still be free, even if professional music often can't.
Never before has technology (the lingua franca of sci-fi) played such a role as it currently does, IMO. Meanwhile, the Sci-Fi Channel (could Jules Verne even have imagined such a thing in his wildest fantasies?) is among the fastest-growing cable channels on television, according to ratings.
I'm thinking, maybe this stuff isn't just for antisocial nerds any more. Perhaps science fiction finally matters.
It won't be long now before the Nebula awards are as popular, as talked about, as the Emmies or the Clios!
Any thoughts?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
How how how did this story win? I have a copy of it on my shelf and have read it three times. I think it's an average story but every time I read it, the plot flaws become more glaring. In fact, I once took a science-fiction writing course instructed by Joe Haldeman and we spent about 20 minutes just discussing inadequacies in this story's plot development. So what I want to know, sincerely, is if any of you Slashdotter's have read this short, then what were your impressions and what makes it an award winner? The reason I ask is that after spending time analyzing the techinical flaws of the story, it came as a shock to see it praised so highly. If this piece isn't highly successful on a technical level, what parts compensate and what makes it so enjoyable?
You might be interested in this link...
more telling is this from one of the featured amazon reviews:
"The Skolian novels can be read in any order and the Quantum Rose particularly can be read out of sequence with the planet-hopping novels."
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
That said, I enjoy science fiction, and I'm reasonably happy with my social life.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
I was under the impression it wasn't really fantasy, but a telling of a chinese folk tale.
I suppose I could do a Paul Bunyan & Babe the Blue Ox with some nifty ninja moves as they descent upon Evil Harry Dread in his Shed of Doom and get at least a nomination...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sometimes, when someone is recommending a book to me, I'll ask, "Does it have trees, grass and (egad) flowers on the cover?"
Call it a stupid prejudice but if ever there was cover art that would turn me away, Quantum Rose has it.
When I'm looking at it, I'm thinking Nora Roberts crossed Gone With the Wind and the Lord of the Rings?
My eyes!!! My eyes!!!
Jesus saves....And takes 1/2 damage.
Let me guess. You were so tired of hearing so many people saying that Jar-Jar was the most annoying character ever that you decided to prove them wrong?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Jack Williamson, one of the winners, is 94 years old today. Warmest congratulations!
Interesting that in Amazon's user ratings this novel winning the Nebula gets 4 of 5 stars while five of this same author's other books get 4.5 of 5. Does that mean one of those will be next year's winner? Or simply that, as usual, the critics and the public have different opinions?
I was rather hoping that George R. R. Martin's _A Storm of Swords_ would win. However, I haven't read _A Quantum Rose_, so I can't compare it yet.
Anybody here read both of these books? If so, could you tell me what aspects of _A Quantum Rose_ really distinguished themselves and how it would compare to Martin's character-driven "realism"?
Thanks.
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Steve Irwin is *never* annoying you ilbegotten titlet.
Incidentally, I got a nice chuckle out of jbennetto making a snide comment about the "Romance" nature of the Best Novel winner, while ignoring the fact that Crouching Tiger is clearly a love story.
No, it's because Steve Irwin kicks ass and would make a neat Jedi! Steve Irwin and Jar-Jar, when compared for annoyingness: Jar-Jar, by a long shot. Jar-Jar is more annoying than that rash on your ass that you just can't get to go away!
Try reading some nice "mainstream" books once in a while. I don't mean bestseller/landfill category, but a genuinely good book. The thing you probably will notice that the characters have, well, character.
When you compare this to the usual cut&paste stats in a genre book.. Ouch. Sometimes even genre/mainstream titles by the same writer show that. Try "The Crow road" by Iain M. Banks, you'd hardly believe it was written by the same person as those Culture books. I suppose you have to write a story around your people if you don't have utopia/dystopia/whatever to distract the reader.
There are some very nice SF titles I have read. Usually, but not always, the story could be rewritten in contemporary setting without too much difficulty. Okay, so the 7 samurais was a samurai movie which was inspired by westerns.. And the few good men (or something like that!) was inspired by the 7 samurais.. So you can take the story and stick it into another setting, nothing new in that!
In my opinion, SF setting is more likely to hurt a book rather than help it.
To any SFWA and/or WSFS members out there, when the next nominating cycle rolls around, please be sure to consider Lucuis Shepard's review of 'The Time Machine'. It's the best SF short story I've read in about five years!
True, Seven Samurai was not a remake of The Magnificent Seven, but Kurosawa did acknowledge the general influence of Hollywood westerns.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Unfortuntely, Tim had had a limited edition of the book published in 2000 and was thus ruled ineligible by the SFWA. I know for a fact from a class I took from Tim in September that he had high hopes for the Nebula. It shows how much class he has that he accepted the decision graciously and stated that the rules were completely fair.
While all the nominees are great works, you really owe it to yourself to try to dig up a copy of Declare and read it for yourself.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Its like if somebody asked a committee "what would you title a mix between science fiction and romance?" Anyways could be agood book never read it. But its fun judging a book without even seeing its cover :)
I would have voted for Storm of Swords as well except that it's always been my impression that the Nebula favors science fiction and the Hugo favors fantasy. Not that this is always true but it seems like this break between the two awards is the norm.
As far as the fact that the main characters have a shorter existence than those red-shirted Star Trek guys, I personally find it refreshing. Having said this, a friend were talking over lunch last week and were trying to figure out if anyone will still be left alive when Winter is supposed to arrive in later volumes.
sigh
no wonder scifi has such bad rep in literature. What sucks is the good sci fi authors actually have to suffer for that.
George R.R. Martin is way better.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Though Slashdot didn't feel a need to post the obituary, you can find my remembrance of him here: http://www.sfwa.org/news/effinger.htm.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I think there is a pretty glaring difference between writing about love, which is a human emotion (rather, the human emotion), and writing in the "Romance" genre, which is, well, a genre. The two are not necessarily coincident, and I would argue that they are almost completely disjoint. :)
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Heisenberg didn't say you couldn't find them. He said that you could either know their positions or their velocities (speed + direction), but not both. :P
Let me guess: you went looking for them and for some reason chose a method that determined their velocities.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
This is one of the worst short stories I've ever read.
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
I spent the last few hours reading through most of the excerpts that are available for the finalists in the novel category. The only one I didn't read was for Storm of Swords. In general, I was very disappointed in the quality of the material that made it to the finals, which makes the selection of Quantum Rose semi-understandable. However, Eternity's End was much better at least by the excerpt. There seemed to be some inherent conflict in the the story. And beyond getting used to the description of flying the spaceship, the read was pretty good. In terms of sci-fi, I would have chosen this novel over anything else that I had read.
In searching for the possible reason why Quantum Rose had done so well, I went back to the preliminary award ballot. On it was a book I very much enjoyed entitled Calculating God by Robert Sawyer. This book was better than anything that I read in the excerpts from the books in the finals.
I admit that I am very picky when it comes to what I read and like, but the excerpts were very disappointing. For example, the Crossing Mars excerpt had nothing in it which would make me want to read the book. The sentence structure was plain and the plot just didn't interest me at all from what was available. I can only imagine that something happens which requires the crew of the spaceship to end up exploring more of Mars than they intended, but none of that was evident in what was available.
I hope that next year's nominees give me a lot more to look forward to.
-Ate a rotten goblin corpse and died.
...in Jerusalem" was (and remains) the Seder prayer among the Diaspora Jews (at least the Ashkenazim), and in less than 1900 years Israel is back. Maybe we SF fans should maintain the same attitude.
Best of all, every decade he published something still worth reading.
The plural of nebula (Latin: "cloud") is Nebulae. If you want some really good stuff, try Gene Wolfe or the short stories of Charles Stross ("Antibodies", "A Colder War").