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.

Joe Haldeman Interview

Interviewed by David de Beer on July 23 2008

Joe Haldeman has been nominated for and received the Nebula, Hugo, Ditmar, World Fantasy, Galaxy, Rhysling and James Tipree Awards.  The Accidental Time Machine is his 8th Nebula nomination. 

Tell us about The Accidental Time Machine, your Nebula nominated work. Why did you write it and what do you hope readers will take from it?

It’s the first humorous novel I’ve written in years, so the main thing I “hope readers will take from it” is amusement.  I had fun playing with aspects of MIT, where I’ve taught for 24 years, and a certain kind of MIT student, the semi-genius slacker.
I’ve always wanted to write a time-travel novel, one that had a certain degree of mathematical sophistication without being unreadable.  I loved doing the research about my institution in the nineteenth century.
Finally, I like love stories, but usually when I write about love it’s pretty complicated.  It was fun to write a story about two likable characters who really fall for each other.

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

Others have pointed out that my stories tend to be about the nature of identity and about the necessity for moral behavior in a godless universe.  I wouldn’t disagree, but I don’t know many writers who start a novel from such an abstract notion.
What a reader gets from a particular writer is that writer’s perceptions and a slice of the writer’s personality—“style,” which is what the writer gets for free.

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

If I were to pick up one of my books to read, it would probably be either The Hemingway Hoax or Tool of the Trade.  I think the Worlds trilogy and 1968 were my most ambitious and successful books in terms of what I was trying to do, and of course they made no money.
My current novel, Marsbound, is pretty good, and so will be the one I’m working on now, its sequel Starbound.

Tell us a little about Marsbound.

This is the Earth-girl-goes-to-Mars bildungsroman with a few differences.  Like skinny-dipping and xeno-ontology gone mad and a Mr. Potato Head (TM) you can really identify with

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

Sometimes I don’t decide—The Forever War started with a single line that could have been a short story or a novel; Buying Time started by putting a finger down on a random line in Roget’s Thesaurus.
You do have to sell a novel before you write it, so of course most of my books start out as a deliberate outline or prospectus.

The Forever War—your best known, and one of your earliest works. Has it been difficult trying to live up to the expectations created at having an early breakout? To what degree does the spectre of the book hover over your subsequent writing?

It’s not difficult to live up to its expectations, though I do get tired of “Why doesn’t he write another “Forever War”?  I’m not 26 years old anymore.
The Forever War was my fourth novel, even though a lot of people think it was my first.  If it actually had been my first, its success would have been more difficult to deal with.
I don’t believe it ever “hovered” over subsequent books.  I’ve written other books about war, but that’s because I was a soldier, and nothing that dramatic ever happened to me again.

You sold your first novel, and had a dream start to your career. So, getting started was easy for you, but what about after? What about now? Any setbacks along the way, and how did you deal with them?

It’s not an easy way to make a living, but I knew that when I chose it.  I deal with setbacks the way anybody else does—amplifying them way out of perspective, worrying more than I should, and so forth.  Sooner or later I just sit down and write another book.  Good advice that sometimes is hard to take.

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?

The big change, mostly commercial but also critical, is that the influence of Tolkien and George Lucas have reduced actual science fiction to a small subgenre of the glut of titles under that aegis in the bookstore.  It’s ironic in various ways, mainly because we do live in a science-fictional world; a world that’s not reluctant to acknowledge the importance of science fiction in its past.  They just don’t buy the books.
Are the books therefore less relevant, now and in the future?  I really don’t think that’s answerable.  Almost no one would have foreseen that garish pulp sf would change the world, but it did.
As to whether science fiction has literary value nowadays, the answer is a shrug.  The difference between mainstream writers who use science fiction tropes and plebeian science fiction writers is not as large as the mainstream writers and critics think.

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?

There’s nothing artificial about writing a book on assignment, purely for money.  I’ve done that five times in my life, and don’t apologize for it, but don’t think any of them was a good idea.  I needed money, but as it turned out, I would’ve made more money doing my own thing.
But if you were a serious painter and the rent was due, and someone wanted to hire you to paint a sign, would you say it was beneath you?  It’s still pigments and brush strokes, and there’s a difference between a good sign and an indifferent one.  You pay the rent and go back to the canvas.

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

I think most non-commercial writers write for themselves; commercial writers write more for a perceived “typical reader.” Of course there are states in between.
I hope that in a hundred years I will be such a hot-shot that whatever replaces PBS will do a series of my works and the New Yorker (nothing will replace it) will run a tired and supercilious article about why people still like me.

You were a soldier in Vietnam, a controversial war the American government got its people involved in. Today, the USA is involved in another controversial war, the Iraqi war. Do you think there are parallels here and would you like to share some thoughts on the matter?

In both cases the American government betrayed the American people in favor of people with lots of money.  In both cases we were sent into war because of deliberate lies that should have resulted in impeachment and imprisonment.
The differences are as important to me as the similarities.  This war is being fought by volunteers, much better trained and motivated than we draftees were.  They’re getting screwed even worse.
I never would have thought that I would be glad for having fought in the jungle.  But compared to fighting people who look just like civilians in a city environment, it was pretty easy. Always something to get under or hide behind.

What does the future hold for Joe Haldeman, the writer?

I was born a little too early to have an alternative to death, which makes me unhappy.  Otherwise the future looks like more, and I hope better, books.  Maybe a movie and a kidney-shaped swimming pool.  Or a new kidney.

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JOE HALDEMAN was born in Oklahoma 9 June 1943. Grew up in Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Washington, D. C., and Alaska. Currently lives in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife Gay Haldeman. As of August, 2008, they will have been married 43 years. He teaches a science fiction writing workshop at MIT and (in alternate years) Reading and Writing Longer Fiction and Reading and Writing Genre Fiction. He likes to travel, cooks for daily relaxation and has won a poker tournament, in Nassau 1989. Pastimes include: Amateur astronomy, drawing and painting, guitar playing; a lot of bicycling and a little fishing, canoeing, swimming, and snorkeling.
His new novel, Marsbound, will be released 5 August, 2008.

 

DAVID DE BEER was born in South Africa and mostly raised in Johannesburg, where he daily strives to perfect the art of dodging lions, zebras, tigers, bears and crazed taxi drivers. His short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in markets such as Chizine, Alienskin and Courting Morpheus.


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Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Powersby Ursula K. le Guin

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt

Brasylby Ian McDonald

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

Superpowers by David J. Schwartz

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/.