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.

Nebula Weekend 2009

LOS ANGELES—Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America will descend on Los Angeles, Calif., with an all-star lineup slated for the2009 Nebula Awards® Weekend April 24-26. 

Harry Harrison will be honored as the next Damon Knight Grand Master,while M.J. Engh will be honored as Author Emerita. Singer/songwriterJanis Ian will be on hand to serve as toastmistress.

Memberships for those who wish to participate in the weekendactivities is $125 per person, until March 1.  After March 1, theprice will rise to $150 per person. Membership in SFWA is not required for attendance. Nebula Awards banquet reservations are due by April 17.The Grand Horizon Room on the UCLA campus will host the awards banquet on Saturday night. Shuttle service will be provided by the host hotels.

The Luxe Hotel, a two-story, European-style hotel at 11461 Sunset Boulevard, will serve as the primary hotel for the weekend, featuring the hospitality suite, SFWA business meeting, a welcome cocktail party on Friday evening and a continental breakfast mixer with members of the WGA on Saturday morning.  Room rates are $229 nightly for Superior King/Doubles, $249 for Deluxe Rooms and $279 for Junior Executive Suites, plus 14 percent local tax.  Parking is $24 nightly, but there is a reduced $6 fee for local residents.  The group rate is good until March 23.  When reserving rooms, attendees must inform the clerk that the rooms are for SFWA Nebula Awards Ceremony to receive the grouprate.

Hotel Angeleno, a high rise located at 170 N. Church Lane, will serve as the overflow hotel. Both Deluxe King and Deluxe Double Doubles are $189 per night, plus local taxes and porterage fees.  Roll away beds are available for an extra fee of $20.  Valet parking is $18 nightly with full in-out privileges.  The group rates are good until March 26.  When reserving rooms, attendees must inform the clerk that the rooms are for 2009 Nebula Awards to receive the group rate. 

Attendees are encouraged to make hotel reservations as soon as possible due to the concurrent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the UCLA campus.  Weekend memberships will be available for purchase via theSFWA website soon.

About the Honorees

Harry Harrison is the creator of the Stainless Steel Rat and author of the novel that inspired the movie Soylent Green. Harrison published hisf irst science fiction story, Rock Diver, in the August 1951 issue of Worlds Beyond. From that point he went on to produce more than 62 novels, eight short fiction collections, six non-fiction books and countless short stories.  He also edited 35 anthologies over the span of his career. His active involvement in the science fiction community throughout the 1950s led to his becoming a charter member of SFWA.

Mary Jane Engh is the author of Arslan and Wheel of the Winds among other works. Under the pseudonym Jane Beauclerk, Engh published her first science fiction story, “We Serve the Star of Freedom,” in the July 1964 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Over the next four decades, her short fiction appeared in a wide range of markets including Universe 1, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Arabesques.  In 1976 Engh published her first novel, Arslan, about a future United States conquered by a third-world power, to widespread critical acclaim. She followed that with Wheel of the Winds in 1988 and Rainbow Man in 1993.

Janis Ian wrote and recorded her first hit record in 1965 at the age of 15, and in 1967 hit no. 1 on the singles charts with “Society’s Child.”That year also saw Ian garner her first Grammy nomination with her self-titled debut nominated for best folk album. Her 1975 album,Between the Lines, earned five Grammy nominations, winning two, including best pop female performance. She won another Grammy in 1982 for the children’s record IN Harmony II, and earned additional nominations in 1978 for her collaboration with Mel Torme on “Silly Habits” (best jazz duet) and in 1992 for Breaking Silence (best contemporary folk album). Ian has also published a number of speculative fiction short stories and co-edited an anthology with Mike Resnick titled Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian.Her autobiography, Society’s Child, was published in 2008.

Winners Presented in 2008

  • Novel: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
  • Novella: Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress
  • Novelette: The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang
  • Short Story: Always by Karen Joy Fowler
  • Script: Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro
  • Andre Norton Award: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

View the archives for a listing of all past winners.

List of archived Nebula Weekends



Site Search

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (winner) by Michael Chabon

Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell

The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson

Odyssey by Jack McDevitt

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.

About the Author

Michael Chabon is the bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell

The Benevolent Satrapy rule an empire of forty-eight worlds, linked by thousands of wormholes strung throughout the galaxy. Human beings, while technically “free,” mostly skulk around the fringes of the Satrapy, struggling to get by. The secretive alien Satraps tightly restrict the technological development of the species under their control. Entire worlds have been placed under interdiction, cut off from the rest of the universe.

Descended from the islanders of lost Earth, the Ragamuffins are pirates and smugglers, plying the lonely spaceways around a dead wormhole. For years, the Satraps have tolerated the Raga, but no longer. Now they have embarked on a campaign of extermination, determined to wipe out the unruly humans once and for all.

About the Author

A professional blogger and SF/F author originally born in Grenada, Tobias currently lives in Ohio with his wife, Emily. Tobias began reading at a young age and started submitting and writing multiple short stories while in high school. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy workshop in 1999. He sold his first story shortly afterwards, and has since gone on to sell over 30 more. He has written and sold three novels.

The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson

When an abandoned toddler appears on the shore of her Caribbean island home, Chastity Theresa Lambkin, aka "Calamity," becomes a foster mother in her 50s. Years previously, a one time, teenage experiment with a best friend unsure of his sexuality resulted in daughter Ifeoma. As Calamity, who narrates, now freely admits, Ifeoma bore the brunt of Calamity's immaturity, and their relationship still suffers for it. As Calamity relates all of this, things that have been missing for years inexplicably reappear, including an entire cashew tree orchard from Calamity's childhood that shows up in her backyard overnight. It could be island magic, or something much more prosaic. The rescued little boy's origins do have some genuinely magical elements (Calamity names him "Agway" after his foreign-sounding laughter), and Hopkinson's take on "sea people" and how they came to be adds depth and enchantment.

About the Author

Nalo Hopkinson a writer who has so far published a collection of short stories, four novels and an anthology or two. She has lived in Toronto, Canada since 1977, but spent most of her first 16 years in the Caribbean, where she was born.

Odyssey by Jack McDevitt

The world has discovered, despite all the promises held out by the champions of interstellar travel, that it offers few prospects for economic advantage. Public funding and private contributions for the Academy have been drying up. Even sightings of mysterious lights in the sky, once called UFO's, now known as moonriders, draw only skepticism. In an effort to recapture some of the glamor of earlier years, the Academy plans a well-publicized mission ostensibly to seek the truth about the moonriders. The mission will visit tour spots where they've been seen, while simultaneously — the real purpose of the flight — giving the general public a chance to get a good look at famous locations in the solar neighborhood.

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.

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

Since H. G. Wells' heyday, the time travel scenario has undergone so much variation that it's easy to envision the river of ideas finally running dry. But here the ever-inventive Haldeman offers a new twist: a device that travels in one direction only, to the future. Lowly MIT research assistant Matt Fuller toils away in a physics lab until one day he makes an odd discovery. A sensitive quantum calibrator keeps disappearing and reappearing moments later when he hits the reset button. With a little tinkering, Matt realizes that the device functions as a crude, forward-traveling time machine.

About the Author

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.