Nebula Awards

Comments (2)

1. Mark

   I’m making an effort to connect with the genre after having mostly not paid attention for many years. Would you say that reading through this list of candidates would give me a good overall view of where the genre is currently? In your opinion is there anything happening in the field that is being missed with these picks?

   I’d appreciate your point of view as a practitioner.

   Thanks

2. Good question. My answer has to be in at least two parts.

   First, as to it representing the field (or if there’s something left out) I have no idea. “The Field” has become as diverse as “Rock” in the music section. I mean, you tell me how both Metallica and James Taylor fit under the same heading. However, there’s a basic viewpoint both sort of share way down underneath all the surface differences that make it work.

   That said, part two: this is one of the most diverse slates I’ve seen. And I must caution you that my reading for the last several years has been at most a quarter in SF. I am by no means an authority. But.

   You have one full-blown fantasy novel, a full-bore Iain Banks style space opera, a more nuts-n-bolts interstellar adventure, a military SF novel, a physics-philosophical novel, and something from the Twilight Zone. That’s a wide range and the writers go from old-timers (McDevitt, Vandermeer) to new(ish) on the scene (Addison, Cixin). In the novellas, again, a wide range, from horror (Daryl Gregory) to well-established SF (Nancy Kress) to who knows what. I don’t read in short fiction unless someone puts something under my nose, so I can’t say one way or the other. I did nominate two of the novels and one of the novellas.

   Which leads me to suggest that this wouldn’t be a bad place to start a reintroduction to the field.

   As a side-note, all the noise being generated by some writers with noses out of joint about how the awards are being “taken over” by people who don’t do “traditional hard SF” prompts me to observe that my tastes have led me to the more philosophical side of SF for a long time. Coming from a reading background that privileges Delany and Ellison and Ian McDonald on the one hand and equally C.J.Cherryh, Iain M. Banks, and Gregory Benford on the other, with large dollops of Tiptree and Russ, what I’ve been finding in the last decade are some of the best novels ever written, by the likes of Mieville, Stross, and Brenda Cooper. All that supposedly mushy-headed anthropologically-oriented “philosophical” stuff being dumped on by the Sad Puppies is, in my opinion, exactly what SF was designed to do all along. It is an embarrassment of riches these days, not just within the genre but out in the mainstream, which has been publishing unapologetically SFnal work sans label and doing it quite well. Michel Faber, Emily St. John Mandel, Ernest Cline, Kate Atkinson…

   Hope this helps.

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