2010 Nebula Awards nominees

From http://www.sfwa.org/2011/02/2010-nebula-nominees/

Novel

The Native Star, M.K. Hobson (Spectra)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
Echo, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)

I see Ted Chiang has kept up his remarkable record: in 20 years he has produced only 13 works of short fiction and has won 3 Hugos (with 4 other nominations) and 4 Nebulas, and now a Nebula novella nomination for no 13.

He turned down one nomination, and he might well have won it that year.

Bit of a dull novel list - Willis, McDevitt... Okorafor and Jemisin have been getting a lot of commentary. The Hobson I've never heard of, and Kowal is of course SFWA vice-president...

McDevitt again. Does he have some damning videos or something?

He has been nominated 7 times in the past 8 years (including 1 win) for novels. All have been series books. Extend it back to 2000 and you can add another 2 novels. You can also add in 2 nominations for shorter work.

From what I have read Shades Of Milk And Honey is well written. But a Regency drawing room romance with magic isn't my bag so I'm not likely to rush to read it.

The Native Star - is apparently a weird west with witches and magic. A romance too.

Both are first novels. Both are fantasies. Both seem to have a watered down Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell vibe to them. Judging from the reviews that connection is explicit in the case of The Native Star as a lot of them quote "In the tradition of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" from the description.

There is already a sequel due this year for The Native Star.

I've only heard of McDevitt but never read any of his stuff and haven't heard of the others. Are any of these worth reading? I really don't like romance stories or fantasy.

The Willis is a single novel split into two, for no good reason (except perhaps the publisher's wish to make more money). It has been treated with derision by British sf fans as it contains a number of howlers. It's set in the UK during the Blitz and has, for example, a character catching an underground train on the Jubilee Line (opened in 1977 for Queen Elizabeth II's silver jubilee, hence the name).

The Okorafor and Jemisin are sf and fantasy respectively and have been much discussed in the blogosphere. Kowal is another Austen + magic novel.

>6 bj:: bj, for a discussion of the merits of Jack McDevitt generally, see this thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/91900

>8 RobertDay:: Thanks, I think I'll take your reccommendation from there and try A talent for war. The other books and authors on the nominee list don't interest me at all.

I've heard of Jack McDevitt but know nothing about him, so thank you, Robert for the link.

Connie Willis I know well, and am sorry to hear, Ian, that she committed such a howler. It's that sort of howler that spoils so many American authors' works for me (and yes, Dan Brown made many). Of course, any author is likely to make such howlers when writing about somewhere they have no experience of. I would expect, however, a big named author to have someone who knows the area or topic they're writing about to read their work before publishing.

That might be an interesting thread - Listing howlers one has found in the books one has read. It could be an extremely long thread. Once I've gotten Phoenix Convention VIII out of the way I might just start that thread, if someone hasn't beaten me to it.

The other moninees are totally new to me.

Are the nominees only drawn up from the sfwa membership?

What is the point of this award if it doesn't champion the best SF? At the level of the novel it now seems to a bunch of mediocre writers rewarding other mediocre writers. There is nothing, and no-one, on that list that you could point to and say to a non-SF reader, "Read that, it'll change your opinion about the genre".

#10

But that wasn't an isolated howler in Blackout. The book had quite a number of them.

#11 that's true of all the popular vote awards. The Hugo Award reflects the taste of that small group of people who go to Worldcons and vote for the award. Yet we stupidly treat the winners as if they've been chosen by the entire genre readership.

Given that the Nebula Wards are voted for by members of the SFWA, to which all the nominees probably belong... it's pretty incestuous.

>13 iansales: - I understand that but what really disappoints me about the Nebulas is that writers are choosing the winners. Any half-decent writer should have the ability to discern what is good writing, what is a well-constructed novel, or what is a glorious failure pushing the boundaries. I can accept fans saying "that's what I like" and voting for it regardless of any technical considerations. (I know nothing ever changes but I just felt like a rant).

#12 That's disappointing. I found her very entertaining on panels at Worldcon in 2005 (Glasgow) and enjoyed a couple of her shorter works. If she's making howlers like that I would find it difficult to finish her longer work.

As a counterpoint, I thought the short story nominees were very strong. I haven't (yet) read a single one of the novels that were nominated, but I spent a chunk of yesterday reading all five of the short stories that were available online. I'm not normally a short story fan, but these were all very engaging and quite well written. I particularly liked 'Ponies' (though the comments suggest that opinions were pretty divided on that one) and 'Arvies' (that's the one I'd put money on to win). And I'd never heard of the online magazine Lightspeed before, but their two nominees ('Arvies' and 'I'm Alive, I Love You, and I'll See You in Reno') convinced me to buy all 9 issues that have been published so far.

Now I'm planning to work my way through the 4 novelettes and novellas that are also online.

Kij Johnson has her fans, but I'm not one of them. Didn't like her story that won the Nebula last year, or the one that was nominated the year before that. Don't like the one from this year's shortlist either.

The Ellison is terrible, with some really clumsy writing in it.

Not read the others yet.

Hard to get excited about any of these. Howlers aside, Blackout was okay, although I haven't read the sequel All Clear. I have read some good things about The One Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

Hugo's are a more consistently readable than Nebulas. Did that litte registered mark next to Ellison's name make anyone else's eyes roll?

19: If anyone in the genre was going to do it it would be him.

Well, I've read the Ellison too, now. It's available online here (the others that I had already read I found through direct links from the Nebula Awards link given at the top of the page, so I figured I'd add this one here as well in case anyone's curious).

All in all, it's a pretty disappointing story. The writing is terribly uneven; several of the individual sentences are striking, but even more are flabby and mediocre. The story as a whole just reads as a paranoiac allegory of persecution. This was - by far - my least favourite of the short story nominees I've read so far.

And with that, I've just got 'Escape Pod' by Felicity Shoulders left to go in that category, available here in audio format.

I kept on thinking the same about the Ellison too: "how dare you disparage me! I'm a Big Name Author! So what if I groped Connie Willis's tit? Who else is going to do it, eh?!"

Yep, exactly. I kept expecting him to shout "Don't you understand? I am an iconoclast!?"

Mary Robinette Kowal serving as SFWA vp doesn't bear on the quality of her novel, which is quite Nebula-worthy in my reading.