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.

Links

SFWA and Nebula online profiles:

SFWA.org
The official website of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

SFWA Livejournal Community
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America community on Livejournal

Shelfari
Visual display of current and previously nominated novels.

Facebook

MySpace

News, Reviews and Information:

SFWA News

Locus Online
Locus Online, which went online in April 1997, is a semi-autonomous web version of Locus Magazine. Like the magazine, Locus Online focuses on news of the Science Fiction publishing field and coverage of new science fiction books and magazines. 

Science Fiction Weekly
The leading electronic publication covering the world of Science Fiction with news, reviews, original art and celebrity chat.

Ansible
A Science Fiction newsletter covering both the professional and the fan communities associated with (primarily) written sf

SFScope
Source of news about the speculative fiction fields.

SF Signal

SF Site

The Fix
The Fix online provides you with in-depth reviews of short fiction and poetry from the full spectrum of magazines, webzines, anthologies, and single-author collections in the industry.

The Internet Review of Science Fiction
IRoSF publishes intelligent articles, essays, interviews, reviews, and criticism to illuminate the most interesting and important work in the genres of science fiction and fantasy.

SFRevu

Writer Beware
Writer Beware, a publishing industry watchdog group sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, shines a light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database
The ISFDB is a community effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, and forthcoming books.

Speculative Literature Foundation

Forums:

SFF Net
SFF Net is home to the most interesting authors, publishers, media pros, and consumers of genre fiction today.

Awards:

Hugo Awards
The Hugos are voted on by the thousands of members of the current Worldcon which is also responsible for administering them.

World Fantasy Award
The World Fantasy Convention is an annual gathering of professionals, collectors, and others interested in the field of Light and Dark Fantasy art and literature. The main features of the convention are the World Fantasy Awards, presented at a banquet on Sunday afternoon of each convention and the large Friday-evening autograph reception.

Arthur Clarke Award
The Arthur C. Clarke Award is the UK’s premier prize for science fiction literature.

James Tiptree, Jr. Award
The Tiptree Award is intended to reward those women and men who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

Phillip K. Dick Award
The Philip K. Dick Award is a science fiction award given annually at Norwescon sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and (since 2005) supported by the Philip K. Dick Trust, and named after science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. They are awarded to the best original science fiction paperback published each year in the US

Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award
The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction of the year was established in 1987 by James Gunn, Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at KU, and the heirs of Theodore Sturgeon, including his widow Jayne Sturgeon and Sturgeon’s children, as an appropriate memorial to one of the great short-story writers in a field distinguished by its short fiction.

John W. Campbell Memorial Award
Award for best science fiction novel of the year

John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award
The John W. Campbell Award is given to the best new science fiction or fantasy writer whose first work of science fiction or fantasy was published in a professional publication in the previous two years.

Sidewise Award
The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were conceived in late 1995 to honor the best allohistorical genre publications of the year.

Writers of the Future

Ditmar
The Ditmars are awarded annually for outstanding works of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror written by Australian citizens or by people who are permanent residents of Australia.

NSS Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award
The Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award honors those individuals who have made significant, lifetime contributions to the creation of a free spacefaring civilization.

Bram Stoker Award
Presented annually by the HWA, the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement in the field of horror, were named in honor of Bram Stoker.

Shirley Jackson Awards
In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, the Shirley Jackson Awards have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

International Horror Guild Awards
The International Horror Guild (originally the International Horror Critics Guild) was created in 1995 as a way to recognize the achievements of those who create in the field of Horror and Dark Fantasy.

Rhysling
The Rhysling Awards are an annual award given for the best science fiction, fantasy, or horror poem of the year.

Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association

SF Awards Watch
The science fiction and fantasy industry has lots of awards. We watch them, we report on them, we talk about them.

Crompton Crook Award
The Compton Crook Award is presented to the best first novel of the year written by a single author in the field of Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Horror by the members of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, Inc., at their annual Baltimore-area science fiction convention, Balticon, held on Memorial Day weekend in the Baltimore, MD area each year.

Gaylactic Spectrum Awards
The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards were created in 1998 by the Gaylactic Network to honor works in science fiction, fantasy and horror which include positive explorations of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered characters, themes, or issues.

Organizations:

Horror Writers Association

Romance Writers of America

The Mystery Writers of America

British Science Fiction Foundation
In 1958 a group of leading authors, publishers, booksellers and fans decided that Britain needed an organisation to encourage science fiction in every form.

Australian Science Fiction Foundation
The Australian Science Fiction Foundation’s main purpose is to sponser and encourage the creation and appreciation of science fiction in Australia.

Science Fiction Poetry Association

2008 Nebula and Andre Norton Award Winners

  • Best Novel: Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Best Novella: "The Spacetime Pool" by Catherine Asaro
  • Best Novelette: "Pride and Prometheus" by John Kessel
  • Best Short Story: "Trophy Wives" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
  • Best Script: WALL-E Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Original story by Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter
  • Andre Norton Award: Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) by Ysabeau S. Wilce

  • 2009 Award Honorees

  • A. J. Budrys -- Solstice Award
  • M.J. Engh -- Author Emerita
  • Marty Greenberg -- Solstice Award
  • Harry Harrison -- Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master
  • Joss Whedon -- Ray Bradbury Award
  • Kate Wilhelm -- Solstice Award

    View the 2008 Nebula and Norton nominees here.

    View the program for the 2009 ceremonies here.

    Go to archives for a listing of all past winners.

    Site Search

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/.