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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 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.
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
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.
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
Jack Williamson, one of the winners, is 94 years old today. Warmest congratulations!
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.