The Nebula Awards

May 14-16, 2010Cocoa Beach Hilton, Cape Canaveral, Florida

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.

Michael Chabon Interview

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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The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...

Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.

What Happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution? In The Windup Girl, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the world of "The Calorie Man" ( Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-winner, Hugo Award nominee, 2006) and "Yellow Card Man" (Hugo Award nominee, 2007) in order to address these poignant questions.

About the Author

Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing has appeared in High Country News, Salon.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It has been anthologized in various “Year’s Best” collections of short science fiction and fantasy, nominated for a Nebula and four Hugo awards, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best sf short story of the year.

The Love We Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak

In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate.

On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man’s life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet town an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives—and in that moment they become almost as one. In a small village a disaffected American teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo a girl named Love learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong.

From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection—uncovering the love we share without knowing.

Exquisitely perceptive and deeply affecting, Barzak’s artful storytelling deftly illuminates the inner lives of those attempting to find—or lose—themselves in an often incomprehensible world.

About the Author

Christopher Barzak grew up in rural Ohio, went to university in a decaying post-industrial city in Ohio, and has lived in a Southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, where he taught English in rural junior high and elementary schools. His stories have appeared in a many venues, including Nerve.com, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Strange Horizons, Salon Fantastique, Interfictions, Asimov’s, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His first novel, One for Sorrow, was published by Bantam Books in Fall of 2007, and won the Crawford Award that same year. He is the co-editor (with Delia Sherman) of Interfictions 2, and has done Japanese-English translation on Kant: For Eternal Peace, a peace theory book published in Japan for Japanese teens. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches writing at Youngstown State University.

Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman

Once, all power in the Vin Lands was held by the prince-mages, who alone could craft spellwines, and selfishly used them to increase their own wealth and influence. But their abuse of power caused a demigod to break the Vine, shattering the power of the mages. Now, fourteen centuries later, it is the humble Vinearts who hold the secret of crafting spells from wines, the source of magic, and they are prohibited from holding power.

But now rumors come of a new darkness rising in the vineyards. Strange, terrifying creatures, sudden plagues, and mysterious disappearances threaten the land. Only one Vineart senses the danger, and he has only one weapon to use against it: a young slave. His name is Jerzy, and his origins are unknown, even to him. Yet his uncanny sense of the Vinearts' craft offers a hint of greater magics within -- magics that his Master, the Vineart Malech, must cultivate and grow. But time is running out. If Malech cannot teach his new apprentice the secrets of the spellwines, and if Jerzy cannot master his own untapped powers, the Vin Lands shall surely be destroyed.

In Flesh and Fire, first in a spellbinding new trilogy, Laura Anne Gilman conjures a story as powerful as magic itself, as intoxicating as the finest of wines, and as timeless as the greatest legends ever told.

About the Author

Born in the late 1960’s in suburban New Jersey, Laura Anne endured only moderate trauma - and some good times - before escaping to Skidmore College. After graduation, given the choice between grad school and employment, the lure of a paycheck took her to NYC and a career in publishing, while working nights and weekends to get her writing career started. In 2004, she and corporate America decided they needed a break from each other. Her first original novel contract in-hand, Laura Anne became a full-time freelancer, and never looked back. She is the author of the Cosa Nostradamus books for Luna (the “Retrievers” and “Paranormal Scene Investigations” series), a YA trilogy for HarperCollins, and the forthcoming Vineart War books from Pocket, while continuing to write and sell short fiction. She also writes paranormal romances for Nocturne as Anna Leonard. Laura Anne is also an amateur chef, oenophile, and cat-servant. She lives in New York City, where she also runs d.y.m.k. productions.

The City & The City by China Miéville

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.

What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

About the Author

China Miéville is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, winner of the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award; Iron Council, winner of the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories; and Un Lun Dun, his New York Times bestselling book for younger readers. He lives and works in London.

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.

But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.

Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.

His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.

About the Author

Cherie Priest made her debut with the Eden Moore series of Southern Gothic ghost stories that began with Four and Twenty Blackbirds. She lives in Seattle, Washington, and keeps a popular blog at cmpriest.livejournal.com.

Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

Tasked with solving an impossible double murder, detective John Finch searches for the truth among the rubble of the once-mighty city of Ambergris. Under the rule of the mysterious gray caps, Ambergris is falling into anarchy. The remnants of a rebel force are demoralized and dispersed, their leader, the Lady in Blue, not seen for months. Partials—human traitors transformed by the gray caps—walk the streets brutalizing the city’s inhabitants. Finch’s partner Wyte, stricken with a fungal disease, is literally disintegrating. And strange forces are marshaling themselves against detective Finch even as he pursues his one clue: the elusive spymaster Ethan Bliss. How much time does Finch have before time itself runs out?

About the Author

Award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer's final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, Finch, has just been published in the US, and will appear in the UK from Atlantic's Corvus imprint. His writer guide Booklife and associated Booklifenow website focus on sustainable creativity. With his wife, he recently edited the charity anthology Last Drink Bird Head. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, and several year's best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The New York Times Book Review, the B&N Review, and many others. Murder by Death recently completed a CD soundtrack based on Finch./.