Slashdot Mirror
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."
Never before has technology (the lingua franca of sci-fi) played such a role as it currently does, IMO.
Robert Heinlein wrote an editorial to John Campbell@Astounding/Analog to this effect circa 1956. It's pretty much been the staple belief of SF fans and writers everywhere, for as long as SF has been published -- with the publication of this series/book/etc, SF will be taken seriously. Next year, people will notice us.
Unfortunately, it hasn't happened, for reasons which probably say more about the people that DON'T take it seriously than it says about anything intrinsic to the genre. There is such an incredible canvas of ideas available to the SF writer, so many ways to interpret or define the human experience that simply are not available to the standard ho-hum fictioneer; I think the general publics ignorance of SF is one of the great tragedies of our age.
Well, maybe next year.
Then again, the fact that the SFWA gave tripe like "Crouching Tiger" a major award makes me a bit ashamed to think these things...
Rev. Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
I have nothing personal against mblase. I don't even necessarily disagree with what he/she/whatever said here.
But I have to just butt in and say that I long for the days before every single story that got posted to Slashdot had one or more highly moderated comments like this one.
Some people prefer to download music rather than buying CDs. Some people prefer to download movies rather than attending them or buying DVDs. Some people prefer to download books rather than buying them or borrowing them from their local library. There are evidently people out there-- although I don't mean to imply that mblase is one of them-- who believe they're entitled to free music, movies, books, and software.
I prefer to believe that these people are in the minority. I prefer to think that the vast majority of people out there believe in working for a living. I prefer to think that most people take pride in their hard work, and reject the ethics of entitlement.
But you wouldn't know it from reading Slashdot. Every damn day we see comments like this one: "It's nice to know that professional literature can still be free."
How about we rephrase this comment. Will all due respect to mblase, I think what you really meant to say was: It's nice to know that these authors have been so generous and cool to release their stories for free on the Internet. They did not have to do this, but they were cool enough to do it anyway. Everybody go download them, and if you like them, buy the author's book.
And egads! That excerpt!
Ugh! Augh! This stuff won an award? It's so bad it makes me wince.
I couldn't have done worse if I had made a special effort to be cliche. Describing someone with a reflection? "Heart-shaped face?" And that "at the moment," as though intentionally placed to break rhythm. I hadn't realized the Nebula people were so tasteless.