The Nebula Awards

APRIL 2009 Los Angeles, U.S.A.

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View past nominees and winners of the Nebula Award.

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Michael Chabon Interview

Interviewed by Leslie What on September 02 2008

In 2008, Michael Chabon was awarded the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus magazine and the Sidewise Awards for Best Novel, for his book The Yiddish Policemans Union.

Can you talk about the challenges of creating worlds that might, if not fully realized and artfully rendered, perhaps sound ridiculous or offensive?

I guess I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about whether the worlds I try to create might offend or invite ridicule. Not, at least, while I’m actually engaged in creating them. The “world-building” is not an orderly and logical process where I, say, begin with research, then extrapolate and propose general principles from the research, then apply those principles, then test the results against my research and my proposals, or against my anxieties about being offensive or ridiculous. For YPU I did a fair amount of research, and prepared all kinds of charts, diagrams, chronologies and maps. But most of that was done, like the writing itself, on an ad hoc basis, as the need arose at the site of writing. Mostly it’s a process of sitting down and just imagining, seeing, hearing, smelling, etc., my characters and the world they’re moving through; and then kind of allowing the result of that act of imagining to flow into the shapely vessels known as “sentences” that mysteriously appear, preconfigured and shaped by some unknown potter, right when I need them. Often if I get something wrong, a balloon of dread inflates in my belly, to let me know I’ve gone astray.

I hate to have it sound so nebulous and intuitive. Of course I do a lot of thinking and reflection, revision and correction, and I often break my brain. And when I’m not writing, I devote more than adequate time to worrying about the reception that might greet the work. But ultimately the writing itself, while hardly “automatic,” exceeds the power of anxiety and doubt to hold it back.

You said in another interview your were moved by the spirit of Ahf zu lochis (Yiddish for an impulse to make others angry.) Is The Yiddish Policemans Union an angry book?  Are you an angry author?

Go to hell!

Just kidding.

Uh, no, I don’t actually think I’m really all that filled with anger. But I can imagine being filled with anger, and if there’s a little gap implied by that act of imagination, maybe humor is what fills it.

What issues do you consciously explore in your work, and is everything fair game?

In all honesty I am not conscious of exploring any issues when I’m writing, only of exploring the world of my story and the language I have for telling it.

What would not be fair game? Stuff that embarrasses others or myself? Family secrets? Pathologies, neuroses, dirty linen, shame, weakness, unspeakable crimes, antisocial feelings? Losing all that doesn’t leave you a whole lot to work with.

One surprise of the novel is the way the shadow of the Holocaust remains in the background instead of the forefront the characters’ lives.  How do you find hope in the stories of Jewish history and do you worry about honoring the past through your invention of alternate history?

I don’t actually find hope in the stories of Jewish history, particularly. Only comfort. I take a lot of comfort in human history, generally, because reading it reminds me of how lousy things have always been.

Your writing frequently explores the gulf between father and son as well as man and woman.  What do you hope the reader understands about the world through these relationships?

I guess the whole business of reading and writing boils down, for me, to this gulf that separates each of us and the irrepressible desire we all have to bridge it. To this extent (and it’s a great extent) all literature is speculative fiction, because it obliges both the reader and the writer to pose the question, What if? What if I were someone else, living someone else’s life? Or: what if my own life, or that of another, were explicable, narratable, a story? What if I could bridge the gulf by telling a story? What kind of story would I tell? What if reading this novel could help me, for an hour or two, to slip the confines of this prison cell called myself?

Would you talk about the reactions you’ve gotten from Survivors?  From religious believers, Jew and Christian?  From Science Fiction fans?  From Native Americans?  From Alaskans?

No, not really. It would either sound like whining or like boasting. 

Who were some of the greatest influences on your work, and would that list of writers differ from the authors of your favorite books?

Conan Doyle, Poe, Le Guin, Susan Cooper, Bradbury, Crichton, L. Niven, Moorcock, Leiber, Chandler, Henry Miller, Perelman, Nabokov, Cheever, Fitzgerald, P. Roth, Proust, Hawthorne, Ballard, Calvino, Borges, Welty, Melville, Garcia-Marquez…

What’s your favorite piece of writing and is it different than what you think of as your strongest?

My favorite among my books, largely for sentimental reasons, is Wonder Boys, because it saved my life (my writing life, anyway.)

Why is it important for genre writing to be accepted into the canon of literature?  Do genre readers accord appropriate respect to the literary canon?

So-called genre writing is, in fact, the foundation of the canon. Most of the great works of Western literature up to about 1875 or so can be read profitably as works of genre fiction (adventure, mystery, romance, supernatural, horror, sf, fantasy). If we label the kind of fiction that arose toward the end of the nineteenth century, with its overwhelming emphasis on “realism” (and I think Modernism in literature is only a form of realism), a genre, and why shouldn’t we, it’s as rife with conventions and marketplace strategies as any other, then we don’t have to worry so much about this question.

I think “genre readers” (your term) are in the aggregate probably no more or less guilty of maintaining poor reading habits than any other group of representative humans.

What are you working on now and what can we expect to see soon?

A novel. And what, three books in a year isn’t good enough for you?

Michael Chabon with Novel trophy

MICHAEL CHABON is the bestselling author The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay a novel that received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.  His 2007 novel, The Yiddish Policemans Union won Locus and Nebula Awards as well as the Sidewise and Hugo Awards.  The book is a stylistic tour de force, a Raymond Chandler meets Jackie Mason meets Isaac Babel meets Michael Chabon narrative that follows the iconic Detective Meyer Landsman and his “Frozen Chosen” community in the months before the planned evacuation of a Yiddish-speaking Sitka settlement established for post-WWII Jewish refugees.  In the novel the land is about to revert to Alaskan rule, the Jews are being expelled and have nowhere to go, a murder is committed, and a thuggish JDL Hasidic sect is suspect.  Hilarity, suspense, yiddishkeit, game theory, love, and pathos ensue.

 

Leslie What

LESLIE WHAT’s new collection, Crazy Love received both Publishers Weekly and Booklist starred reviews.  She teaches writing at UCLA Extension the Writers’ Program and is still looking for the perfect pair of shoes. She previously won a Nebula for her short story The Cost of Doing Business

2 comments so far.

1. Stephanie Juarez on 07th September 2008 at 9:24 pm

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What perceptive questions and fascinating interview.

2. AoC Gold Guide on 01st December 2008 at 10:48 pm

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I’m really impressed with your article, that was exactly what I was looking for. I will be visiting you very often in the future for more! AoC Strategy Guide

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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/.