The Nebula Awards

APRIL 2009 Los Angeles, U.S.A.

Nominees and Winners

View past nominees and winners of the Nebula Award.

Novels

Virtual library of Nebula and Norton novels at Shelfari.

Pictures

View images from the 2007 Nebula Awards Ceremony.

Links

A list of links to other sites & blogs of interest.

Bruce Sterling Interview

First, tell me a little in brief about Kiosk your Nebula nominated work - the why and what. Why did you write it and what do you hope readers will take from it?

I wrote that story in Belgrade after I’d become aware of how Belgrade people behave.  When I write stories set in other cultures, as I often do, I try to set myself a challenge—not to write the kind of story that Bruce Sterling would write about that locale, but to write the kind of story some local science fiction writer might write.
I’m trying to break up my own parochiality, and work myself into a different imaginative space. I rather hope readers will be carried along into the same position.

The Commercial vs the Artistic in writing - is there a genuine difference between these two philosophies or are they artifical attributes? Are they in opposition, and if so, can they meet?

Well, I hang out a lot in countries where the creatives write in minority languages, and really, that’s just not an issue for them.  They know what American commercial writing looks like, but they themselves don’t HAVE any “commerce.” There aren’t enough potential readers to establish a market.
What they DO commonly have is “political writing,” the kind of stuff that gets your fingertips broken by the secret police.  So: take a guy like recent Nobel-Prize winner Orhan Pamuk -- super-popular worldwide, a real old-school deep-thinking artsy literatus, and the crazy-fascist wing of the Turkish secret police are trying hard to kill him.  Now that guy is a writer’s writer. He’s got all those supposed oppositions stuffed into one refugee valise.  You know, fretting about a commercial sell-out is the least of Orhan’s problems.
Furthermore, it’s dead obvious that the writing problems that matter in America now are political rather than “commercial” or “artistic”.  America’s suffering a Civil Cold War.  Or at least, they were until the Right’s culture-warriors started losing it.

Which themes and ideas dominate the writing of Bruce Sterling? What do you think readers take from your work they get nowhere else?

I’d say my major theme is the passage of time.  I’m keenly interested in the future, and the past, and futurism, and historicity, and foresight and prediction, and hindsight and retro diction, and change-drivers, and interpretations of events, and forgotten byways of history, and radically differing future scenarios seen from minor demographic points-of-view, and ironic and sardonic unexpected developments, and planning and design versus accidents and the arbitrary . . . I dunno, my readers sure take a lot of punishment.

Will you still be read in a 100 years? Does it matter? Should writers write for the present or the future?

Well, I’ve done so much occasional journalism in so many different niches and fields that my writing will likely pop up by accident every once in a while.  It probably depends on how writers “get read” in a hundred years.  If it’s all about search engines for specialized weird topics like computer crime and Balkan warlords, hey, I’m in like Flint.
If it’s about literary values, well, most literature read a hundred years from now will be the classics people were reading a hundred years ago.  Some of that stuff was quite topical—like Dickens, because he was just superbly talented—but the classics, writing worth reading for decades on end, they’re cram-full of passionate virtuosity.
Compared to those, the planet’s established classic writers, I’m like some kind of off-the-wall stand-up comedian.  I tend to have a good time at the microphone with my firecrackers and my rubber chicken, but I’m not there to carry the weight of the civilized world on my shoulders.
Then again, some of us go out of our way to dig up work like that, after a hundred years or two hundred.  My favorite writers, they’re all freaks. I read stuff no sane man would touch with a barge-pole.

How (if at all) has science fiction evolved/ changed in the time that you’ve been working in the field? Does it still have value in the present milieu? Relevance to the future?

I could go on about that interesting subject for several pages, but it would all be about publishing technology, distribution methods, and changes in the media landscape.
Writers think highly of “value” and “relevance,” but the factors that really make science fiction evolve are phenomena like the death of the pulps and Hollywood’s special FX technology; also the dominance of big-box stores, the death of distribution chains, globalization, media conglomerates and publisher buy-outs.
They’re much the same driving forces that have changed politics, the military, commerce, theater, cinema, graphic design, pretty much everything else.

What is the story you’ve written you’re proudest of, and why?

Oh well, the stories of my own that I like best are good in different ways. There’s stuff I wrote that was meant to split the reader’s head wide open with the Stanislaw Lem “spearhead of cognition,” and then there’s also a lot of weird frothy gibberish that’s probably best suited for an audience of one: me.
I rather imagine that my unpublished notebooks and letters have my best writing.  Where I’m not trying to please the reader or do any literary push-ups—there, I’m just trying to get something into words.
I feel most proud of my abilities when I’m able to make something verbally clear that is truly obscure, far-fetched and peculiar.  I’m not a writer who dabbles in science fiction, but a science-fictional personality who happens to write.

The short story vs the novella vs the novel - what makes you decide to write an idea in one form over the other?

There are a lot of situations and conceits that make fine short stories, yet just don’t have the heft and gravity to occupy a reader for the length of a novel. Short stories tend to pack a single emotional punch.  Novellas wobble up and down two or three times, see-saw style.  Novels need to go for that immersive, multiplex, rich-tapestry-of-life effect.

You’re credited with having coined the term slipstream - expound on that: how did it come to be and what is it?

Oh, I’m quite the coiner of neologisms.  That one came up in a conversation with a book-collector pal of mine named Richard Dorsett.  Richard was and is a devotee of non-realist works that were wonky.  Not “science fiction,” not “fantasy,” not even “mainstream.” I agreed with Richard that there seemed to be a hell of a lot of books of this kind, and since I was a literary critic and he wasn’t, I made it my business to hunt down a bunch of these and to try to publicly describe what they were like.
There are rather a lot of “slipstream” books around now, but the meltdown of genres and categories is common across all the arts.  It’s in painting, cinema, music—I could probably name thirty different current subgenres of “science fiction and fantasy,” New Weird, Interstitial, New British Space Opera, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, New Wave Fabulism… and that coterie sounds entirely sober and sensible compared to the radical fractionation in pop music, where within techno alone you’ve got darkstep, gabba, jungle, breakcore, drum and bass, dancehall, garage, house, garage house, intelligent dance music, speed garage, doomcore… And those aren’t minor differences.
To the cognoscenti they’re quite obvious.
If you look at the way a contemporary slipstream writer like Jonathan Lethem or Kelly Link handles genre conventions, they have much the attitude of DJs using loops, breakbeats and samplers.  They’re simply not composing for an earlier orchestral medium where the brass was separated from the woodwinds.  There’s very little good reason for that to matter to them nowadays.

Inevitably, people link you to cyberpunk. And cyberpunk is often seen as being all about the cool gizmos and neat bodily gadgets, but there’s also a large socio-political aspect involved there, isn’t it? It’s not just about the amount technology impacts on and changes the individual human, but the amount of change it causes/ can cause in human to human behavior. What’s curious is how human social behavior adapts to new advancements in technology, and even how much tension develops between the desire for personal change/ modification with the inherent human social instinct. Would you say this is true? Does it play on your mind at all when you write? Is there a price we pay with technological advancements, something lost for something gained?

Well, people link me to cyberpunk with perfect justice because I was the loudest cyberpunk ideologue.
I’ve read a lot of earnest paragraphs like this one you just handed me, and although you’re not exactly missing the point or anything, it’s gotten hard for me to keep a straight face.  It’s as if you were asking Allen Ginsberg about beatniks in 1975.  “Allen, wasn’t beat about bongos, and not getting a job, and having facial hair—and forgive me for asking this, but didn’t marijuana, heroin and gay sex have a lot to do with it?” You know what was really cool about cyberpunks?  We didn’t blow anybody’s head off and no teenagers were knifed in Tangiers.
You want to talk seriously about technological impact?  Climate change.  You can put all the rest of that baloney in your back pocket, that was all the 20th century’s idea of a techno-threat.  You wanna ask if climate change plays on my mind when I write?  ‘Write,’ hell!  Texas is swarming with West Nile mosquitos and the price of food is skyrocketing.  That plays on my mind when I walk, breathe and eat!

Is cyberpunk dead?

It might well be, depending on how you define “cyberpunk” and “dead,” but that’s not gonna make any practical difference.  Me, Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, Shirley, Cadigan, Di Filippo, I doubt any of us give that issue a minute’s thought now.  Bear, Laidlaw, they’ve also got other things on their minds.  Kelly still seems kind of interested.  He edited a pretty good book on the subject lately.

Electronic vs Print publishing - any thoughts on the matter?

You should talk to my colleagues in newspapers.  If you can find any newspapers left.

I have to ask, the Turkey City Lexicon: how did it come about, does it still get revised and added to and do you think it accomplished its purpose?

I should do something with that.  People do find it useful.  There aren’t enough hours in the day.

What does the future hold for Bruce Sterling, the writer?

Got a new novel coming out this summer.  It’s a departure, it’ll be interesting to see if people think it’s any good.
The future looks seriously turbulent to me.  These are worrisome times, and yet, not worrisome enough.  I don’t feel that I need or ought to waste a lot of time fine-tuning my literary career under circumstances like today’s—and tomorrow’s.
Instead, I plan to multiply my options and see if I can find some coherent group of people, anybody, anywhere, who looks like they might be up to meeting the major challenges ahead.
If I can understand what they’re doing, or better yet befriend them, I rather imagine the writing will take care of itself.

* Read Sterling’s essay on Slipstream here.

bruce sterling

BRUCE STERLING is the author of The Hacker Crackdown, Holy Fire, Heavy Weather and co-authored with William Gibson, The Difference Engine. He has written for and been published in The New York Times, Newsday, Whole Earth Review, Details, Mondo 2000, BoingBoing, Interzone, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and is currently a contributing writer to Wired. 

 

DAVID DE BEER‘s short fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from venues such as Chizine, Alienskin and Courting Morpheus. He currently resides in Johannesburg, South Africa.

 

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Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems. But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days. When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

About the Author

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin

In the third entry in Ursula K. Le Guin's widely acclaimed Annals of the Western Shore saga (GIFTS and VOICES), Gav, a young slave, finds that he has amazing powers of recollection: he can remember a page of text after seeing it only once, and sometimes, he can even "remember" things that haven't happened yet. Gav's world is turned brutally upside-down when his sister is killed by a member of the household he has been taught to trust, and, blinded by sorrow, he runs away from the only world he has ever known, embarking on a journey of transformation and discovery.

About the Author

Ursula K. Le Guin writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children's books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts. She has published seven books of poetry, twenty-two novels, over a hundred short stories (collected in eleven volumes), four collections of essays, twelve books for children, and four volumes of translation. Few American writers have done work of such high quality in so many forms. Most of Le Guin's major titles have remained continuously in print, some for over forty years. Her best known fantasy works, the six Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home redefine the scope and style of utopian fiction, while the realistic stories of a small Oregon beach town in Searoad show her permanent sympathy with the ordinary griefs of ordinary people. Among her books for children, the Catwings series has become a particular favorite. Her version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, a translation she worked on for forty years, has received high praise. Three of Le Guin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, SFWA's Grand Master, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, etc.

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt

The year is 2255. The academy that trained the starfarers is long gone and veteran star pilot Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins spends her retirement supporting fund-raising efforts for The Prometheus Foundation, a privately funded organization devoted to deep space exploration. But when a young physicist unveils an efficient star drive capable of reaching the core of the galaxy, Hutch finds herself back in the deepest reaches of space, and on the verge of discovering the origins of the deadly Omega clouds that continue to haunt her.

About the Author

Jack McDevitt is a former English teacher, naval officer, Philadelphia taxi driver, customs officer, and motivational trainer. With the nominations of Infinity Beach, Ancient Shores, “Time Travelers Never Die,” Moonfall, “Good Intentions” (cowritten with Stanley Schmidt), “Nothing Ever Happens in Rock City,” Chindi, Omega, and Polaris,, "Henry James, This One's for You," and Seeker, his work has been on the final Nebula ballot ten of the last eleven years.

Brasyl by Ian McDonald

Think Bladerunner in the tropics... Be seduced, amazed, and shocked by one of the world’s greatest and strangest nations. Past, present, and future Brazil, with all its color, passion, and shifting realities, come together in a novel that is part SF, part history, part mystery, and entirely enthralling.

About the Author

Ian McDonald's mother is Irish, Fatrher Scottish, was born in England but has lived for almost all of his forty something years in Northern Ireland, more speciafically, in that narrow strip of land along the southern edge of Belfast Lough. From that vantage he's seen the Troubles start and also, he hopes, end. His first story was sold in 1983 to short-lived but very glossy local SFF magazine Extro. He bought a guitar with the money. His first novel, Desolation Road came out in 1988 from Bantam Spectra, this year PYR republish it for the first time since then in the US. His most recent novel was the Hugo and Nebula nominated Brasyl, just out from PYR in the US and Gollancz in the UK is Cyberabad Days, a collexction of stories from teh future India of his 2006 novel River of Gods, including Hugo winning novelette The Djinn's Wife. In progress is a new novel, The Dervish House, set in near-future Turkey. In daylight hours he works for local animation company Flickerpix.

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

The Ankh-Morpork Post Office is running like . . . well, not at all like a government office. The mail is delivered promptly; meetings start and end on time; five out of six letters relegated to the Blind Letter Office ultimately wend their way to the correct addresses. Postmaster General Moist von Lipwig, former arch-swindler and confidence man, has exceeded all expectations—including his own. So it's somewhat disconcerting when Lord Vetinari summons Moist to the palace and asks, "Tell me, Mr. Lipwig, would you like to make some real money?" Vetinari isn't talking about wages, of course. He's referring, rather, to the Royal Mint of Ankh-Morpork, a venerable institution that haas run for centuries on the hereditary employment of the Men of the Sheds and their loyal outworkers, who do make money in their spare time. Unfortunately, it costs more than a penny to make a penny, so the whole process seems somewhat counterintuitive. Next door, at the Royal Bank, the Glooper, an "analogy machine," has scientifically established that one never has quite as much money at the end of the week as one thinks one should, and the bank's chairman, one elderly Topsy (née Turvy) Lavish, keeps two loaded crossbows at her desk. Oh, and the chief clerk is probably a vampire. But before Moist has time to fully consider Vetinari's question, fate answers it for him. Now he's not only making money, but enemies too; he's got to spring a prisoner from jail, break into his own bank vault, stop the new manager from licking his face, and, above all, find out where all the gold has gone—otherwise, his life in banking, while very exciting, is going to be really, really short. . . .

About the Author

Terry Pratchett sold his first story when he was thirteen, which earned him enough money to buy a second-hand typewriter. His first novel, a humorous fantasy entitled The Carpet People, appeared in 1971 from the publisher Colin Smythe. Terry worked for many years as a journalist and press officer, writing in his spare time and publishing a number of novels, including his first Discworld novel, The Color of Magic, in 1983. In 1987 he turned to writing full time, and has not looked back since. To date there are a total of 36 books in the Discworld series, of which four (so far) are written for children. The first of these, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, won the Carnegie Medal. A non-Discworld book, Good Omens, his 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman, has been a longtime bestseller, and was reissued in hardcover by William Morrow in early 2006 (it is also available as a mass market paperback (Harper Torch, 2006) and trade paperback (Harper Paperbacks, 2006). Terry's latest book, Making Money, was published in September 2007 and was an instant New York Times and London Times bestseller. In 2008, Harper Children's will publish Terry's new standalone non-Discworld YA novel, Nation. Regarded as one of the most significant contemporary English-language satirists, Pratchett has won numerous literary awards, was named an Officer of the British Empire “for services to literature” in 1998, and has received four honorary doctorates from the Universities of Warwick, Portsmouth, Bath, and Bristol. His acclaimed novels have sold more than 45 million copies (give or take a few) and have been translated into 33 languages.

Superpowers by David J. Schwartz

Madison, Wisconsin: In the summer of 2001, five college juniors wake up with . . . not just a hangover, but superpowers. . . . Jack Robinson: Grew up on a farm, works in a chem lab, and brews his own beer. Age: 19. Superpower: SPEED. Caroline Bloom: Has a flair for fashion design and a mother who’s completely out of touch. Works as a waitress for a lunatic boss. Age: 20. Superpower: FLIGHT. Harriet Bishop: Studied violin, guitar, and piano . . . and was terrible at them all. Now writes about music for the campus paper. Age: 20. Superpower: ­INVISIBILITY. Mary Beth Layton: Is managing a 3.8, but feels like she’s working three times as hard as the people around her. Age: 20. Superpower: STRENGTH. Charlie Frost: Has an anxious way about him, and always looks like he’s on day 101 of his most recent haircut. Age: 20. Superpower: TELEPATHY. But how do you adjust to an extraordinary ability when you’re an ordinary person? What if you’re not ready for the responsibility that comes with great power? And how do you keep your head in a world that’s going mad?

About the Author

David J. Schwartz's short fiction has appeared in numerous markets, including the anthologies Paper Cities, The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Twenty Epics. He attended Odyssey in 1996 and has participated in workshops with the Semi-Omniscients, the Supersonics, and the Sycamore Hill Writing Workshop. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. You can visit his website at http://snurri.livejournal.com/.