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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!
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.
...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?
Doesn't that depend on whether the extraordinary phenomena (flying and walking on bamboo shoots) are explained by supernatural or technological forces?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
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.
Agree - that's a nasty looking cover and I would have walked right by it at the store. Actually looks enjoyable, perhaps a little like Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan books - which are also largely romances
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
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
As a SFWAn (i.e., a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) I'll answer this:
SFWA, the organization which awards the Nebulas (and does lots of other stuff as well -- check out the Web site) is an organization for writers of both science fiction and fantasy, as the name implies. And yes, it was originally the Science Fiction Writers of America -- and then, briefly, SFFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, before we decided that changing a well-known acronym like SFWA (prounounced "sif-wa") was pointless, and held a vote to make the acronym SFWA regradless of what the actual name was -- and yes, the Nebulas have generally been dominated by science fiction at the expense of fantasy, but a) fantasy has gained a lot of ground over the last couple of decades, both critically and commercially, and it would be silly to ignore that, and b) the dramatic Nebulas (when we've awarded them -- we haven't always) have generally been a bit broader-based that the literary Nebulas, in recognition of the fact that Hollywood often turns out some really good SF/F while avoiding those labels for marketing reasons.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
Out of curiousity, why were there only 4 films nominated? There were at least a half dozen good SF films last year that didn't even make the preliminary ballot. Seems silly to have 18 novels on prelim, narrowed to 7 on the final ballot, and 10 novellas narrowed to 5, etc, and have 4 of 4 preliminary scripts make it to the final ballot (two of which require a very broad definition of SF).
Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
The fiction part is that the reaction is what you would only get in real life to real, cooked slowly on the top of the stove, constantly stirring, made from scratch, using only the best of ingredients, pudding.
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!
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."
To make the preliminary ballot, any work (literary or dramatic) needs to be nominated by at least ten active members of SFWA within a year of its release date. A lot of very good stuff is nominated by fewer than ten members and thus doesn't make the prelims. (Most of what I've nominated over the last few years made it to eight or nine nominations and then missed the cut by a vote or two ... sigh.) Then what makes it from the prelim to the final ballot is determined by a vote of the membership, and of course the winner is determined from the final ballot by another organization-wide (active members only) vote. It's not a perfect system, but it works.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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 :)
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 read the three-part excerpt in Analog last year, and it is definitely worth looking into.
Yes, it is mostly a romance story, but there's some interesting ideas in there as well, and Asaro has a very nice writing style. She publishes regularly in Analog, and she's fast becoming one of my favourites.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
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