Nebula Final Ballot Announced

The awards will be presented at the Nebula Awards® Weekend, April 24-26,2009 in Los Angeles, California. More info on attending the Weekend at http://www.nebulaawards.com

Novels
Little Brother - Doctorow, Cory (Tor, Apr08)
Powers - Le Guin, Ursula K. (Harcourt, Sep07)
Cauldron - McDevitt, Jack (Ace, Nov07)
Brasyl - McDonald, Ian (Pyr, May07)
Making Money - Pratchett, Terry (Harper, Sep07)
Superpowers - Schwartz, David J. (Three Rivers Press, Jun08)

Novellas
"The Spacetime Pool" - Asaro, Catherine (Analog, Mar08)
"Dark Heaven" - Benford, Gregory (Alien Crimes, ed. Mike Resnick, SFBC, Jan07)
"Dangerous Space" - Eskridge, Kelley (Dangerous Space, Aqueduct Press, Jun07)
"The Political Prisoner" - Finlay, Charles Coleman (F&SF, Aug08)
"The Duke in His Castle" - Nazarian, Vera (Norilana Books, Jun08)

Novelettes
"If Angels Fight" - Bowes, Richard (F&SF, Feb08)
"Dark Rooms" - Goldstein, Lisa (Asimov's, Oct/Nov 07)
"Pride and Prometheus" - Kessel, John (F&SF, Jan08)
"Night Wind" - Rosenblum, Mary (Lace and Blade, ed. Deborah J. Ross, Norilana Books, Feb08)
"Baby Doll" - Sinisalo, Johanna (The SFWA European Hall of Fame, ed. James Morrow & Kathryn Morrow, Tor, Jun07 trans. from the Finnish by David Hackston)
"Kaleidoscope" - Wentworth, K.D. (F&SF, May07)

Short Stories
"The Button Bin" - Allen, Mike (Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly, Oct07)
"The Dreaming Wind"- Ford, Jeffrey (The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Viking, Jul07)
"Trophy Wives" - Hoffman, Nina Kiriki (Fellowship Fantastic, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, DAW Jan08)
"26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" - Johnson, Kij (Asimov's, Jul08)
"The Tomb Wife" - Jones, Gwyneth (F&SF, Aug07)
"Don't Stop" - Kelly, James Patrick (Asimov's, Jun07)

Scripts
The Dark Knight
"WALL-E"
The Shrine - Stargate Atlantis, Aug 2008

Norton Award
Graceling - Cashore, Kristin (Harcourt, Oct08)
Lamplighter - Cornish, D.M. (Monster Blood Tattoo, Book 2, Putnam Juvenile, May08)
Savvy - Law, Ingrid (Dial, May08)
The Adoration of Jenna Fox - Pearson, Mary E. (Henry Holt and Company, Apr08)
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) - Wilce, Ysabeau S. (Harcourt, Sep08)

I think it's in the SFWA membership rules that you have to nominate a Jack McDevitt novel each year.

I realize it's been awhile since September 07 but I can't remember any buzz around the Le Guin.

#2 - Jack McDevitt is one of my favorites!

But this is the sixth year running that he has had a novel make the ballot. A feat only equalled by Robert Silverberg.

So far we have had the last four of the Hutch books and 2 of the Alex Benedict books. What's the betting that The Devil's Eye makes it next year as well?

It isn't that the books are particularly bad in comparison to some of the other shortlisted books, although I do think the shortlists have not been very ambitious for some years for the Nebula, it is just that they are very samey. Considering that the Nebulas have moved to a two-year eligibility rule it is a pretty lack-lustre selection - there are a number of books I would have expected to see.

If there is any justice in the world then Ian McDonald should walk it.

#3
The Le Guin is in her Annals Of The Western Shore series which is aimed at the YA market.

It is, in fact, a pretty crap novel shortlist. The McDonald is the only thing on it that's any good. Are we seriously supposed to think the other five are the best the genre has had to offer over a two-year period?

One day someone will have to explain to me what the SFWA is actually good for.

I thought Little Brother was excellent. Also enjoyed Making Money, but I don't think it is really Pratchett at his best or belongs on this list. Haven't read the McDevitt or the others, although I probably will. Some day. When I get through the massive stack of books already before me...

I've read "Powers" and "Making Money". "Powers" is mediocre at best, and although I enjoyed "Making Money", I don't think it's Pratchett's best, let alone one of the best science fiction or fantasy books written in the last two years.

Little Brother by Doctorow is startling & wonderful! I highly recommend it.

Superpowers by Schwartz is an amusing way to spend some hours, but hardly the best of the year-- and especially not two years.

The Norton Award is for best first book? Superpowers if it goes anywhere, should go here. But Perry Moore's Hero (also a first book) is better than the similarly themed Superpowers.

The Norton is for best YA sf or fantasy.

I agree that McDonald should walk it for best novel; the others range from being not terribly notable to downright terrible. Making Money, as has been said, is not Pratchett's best by some way. Little Brother has had mixed reviews; at best, the message seems to be that it's good, but flawed. Superpowers I thought was a terrible book that has no place at all on any shortlist.

Wall-E has to walk the script, surely? Given that its only competition is the Dark Knight (not science fiction!) and a Stargate script (a Stargate script!).

As for the Norton, I've heard good things about Wilce, and nothing about the others.

I think Brasyl might have been the best new SF i read last year. McDonald's been on a roll as of late.

Asimov's and Analog have made the short fiction from their magazines available online - hopefully the others will follow.

Ditto on the Pratchett. I think a case could easily have been made for his Nation to be up for a Norton--it is a powerful book! I've read the Wilce, enjoyed it a lot, and heard lots of good things about Graceling but not had a chance to read it yet.

From SFWA LiveJournal:

*****
Correction to Nebula Final Ballot
Upon a procedural review, we discovered an error in the final Nebula tally. Two works that should be on the final ballot were not listed: the novelette "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" - James Alan Gardner (Asimov's, Feb08) and "Mars: A Traveler's Guide" - Ruth Nestvold (F&SF, Jan08) in short stories. No other changes have been made to the final ballot. We apologize for the error and have made changes to the procedures to keep this sort of mistake from happening again.
******

So there are 7 novelettes, not 5.

#14

I thought less highly of Nation than what I did for Making Money. I like Pratchett, but those aren't his best books, let alone the SF&F's best for the last two years.

>11 HoldenCarver: - If Farthing is SF then "The Dark Knight" is SF in spades.

I'm a fan of the Stargates and have no problem with an episode winning for best script. Not having seen Wall-E, I can't comment.

"Wall-E" is half a great film and half an okay film.

>17 geneg:

So, you're saying that The Dark Knight is alternate history? O.o

Actually, what I'm saying is Farthing is not SF. However, I could see "The Dark Knight" as SF, what with all the gadgetry, the Bat Cave and so forth, much easier than I can see a not so riveting murder mystery set in the gentrified countryside of Albion's genteel Shores by a bunch of self important political whack jobs as SF.

agree w/ geneg - if any book has a plot line that deviates from what we know of history, it can, evidently, be slotted as "alternative history" and thence into SF.
the boys from brazil or the manchurian candidate - these are political thrillers.
farthing is a mystery set in an GB in which WW2 has ended rather differently from "history as it is writ"

#21

To help derail the thread, Farthing was pretty lazy as an alternate history novel. There's not a single mention of what happens to the Nazis in Germany, (or any other country, for that matter,) what Hitler does after WWII, what Germany's new territory and political situation is like, or what happens to any other countries besides Britain. And neglecting the Asian countries and America in an alternate WWII history is extremely lazy. In fact, there's nothing in world-extrapolation beyond Walton coming to the startling conclusion that Jews would be scapegoated after WWII if Germany won.

#22

I think that is because of the story that Walton is trying to tell. Lots of alt-histories don't really look at the entire world situation, they examine the world through their characters' eyes.

Quite simply the characters aren't concerned with other countries that much, apart from Canada which is talked about as a refuge from the madness in England. The situation in Europe is elided to at a couple of times during the book but certainly isn't dealt with at length partly because it isn't immediately relevant to the characters and partly because I imagine information would be quite hard to get hold of. In the later books in the series some more of what is going on on the continent is revealed.

The branch point for the Small Change trilogy was Hess's flight to Scotland. This was before the US got involved in the war, it was after the Tripartite Pact but before Japan attacked the UK or America, it was before Germany attacked Russia. So in summary the war didn't really turn global in the same way. At the time there was still a lot of US opposition (both political and popular) to getting involved in Europe so it is possible that they might just have sat things out had the UK had made peace with the Axis powers.

I was also unconvinced by Farthing's world-building, although chiefly in its "Gosford Park" England lasting until 1949. I'm not convinced six years of war were wholly responsible for the decline of the aristocracy and the move to a more egalitarian society in Britain. The murder-mystery was also lazy, as was the characters' adoption of anti-semitism. I don't think such virulent anti-semitism would be so consistent across all classes of British society. Also, making so many of the major characters gay - as if equating their treatment with the treatment of Jews - was cheap and unnecessary.

I've been asked to sit on a panel at the Eastercon about Jo Walton and the Small Change trilogy. I'm told the first book is the weakest of the three, but I've no desire to read the other two. So I don't think it's entirely fair I do the panel, and I've said as much to the organisers. No reply from them yet...

22>

I think you are using an overly narrow definition of "alternate history". They don't all have to be a sweeping look at the detailed ways in which an alternate world differs from ours, any more than other subgenres of SF do; they can equally be small-scale stories set in another world. It's told from limited POVs, after all; Lucy doesn't care about the national or world scene, until the very end, and Carmichael has more immediate concerns.

And if you're looking at this just as AH, and missing the rather blindingly obvious subtext of "how democracy slides into fascism", you may want to consider the time in which it was written, consider the surveillance society in the UK and the Patriot Act in the US, and think that maybe, just maybe, the late 1940s weren't the period Walton was primarily concerned with discussing.

24>

Also, making so many of the major characters gay - as if equating their treatment with the treatment of Jews - was cheap and unnecessary.

Yes, because gay characters must be gay for a reason, since as well all know everyone is straight until proven otherwise. Similarly, female characters should only be there if they can't possibly be male -- for instance, mothers or love interests to the male characters who really matter -- and non-white characters must be there specifically because their race is relevant to the plot. They can't just, you know, be people. People are straight white men, after all, and everyone else must be a symbol of something or other.

#23, 25

Sure, Farthing is an alternate history. I won't argue with that. But as AH's go, it was quite lazy, for the reasons I specified. Walton rarely looked past the homestead and the surrounding township, let alone England. I don't know enough about post-WWII European history to really care about what Walton's done, and what I did pick up was so mundane as to not be worth my time. 1984 became 1974, for example. That hardly interests me as a reader.

There's a whole world out there, and much of it was fighting in WWII. For Walton to only concern herself with England is either extremely lazy writing,
(there couldn't have even been a conversation included about current European politics instead of the rubbish otherwise discussed) or is unashamedly a jingoistic writer as Tom Clancy. I like my SF to challenge or entertain me in some way, and the rich aristocrats mentioned in the story do not meet this criterion for me.

Contrast Farthing to, say, PKD's Man in the High Castle, an alternate WWII history that I actually did enjoy. We learn about the fate of the major countries that fought - America, Germany, Japan, and Europe. We learn about what happens politically to these countries, particularly Germany, which has become a major world power.

#24: Iansales

What did you do to be able to sit on a panel like that, even if it is about Walton's books?

#26

I have no problem with what people get up to in the bedroom, but the fact that so many of the people in Farthing were gay stretched the credibility of the story, to be charitable.

And people that are immoral or evil and also "just happen" to be gay really annoys me. Does anyone besides myself think that this is really bad typecasting?

28>

You missed my point entirely.

Characters in a book are not necessarily randomly selected from a population. You might just as well complain that too many characters were English.

27>

No, it wasn't lazy.

The "whole world" just wasn't the story Walton wanted to tell. Clearly the story she did want to tell wasn't one you wanted to read, and there's nothing wrong with that -- nobody's asking you to like the book -- but it's grossly unfair to call an author "lazy" just because she didn't write the sort of story you wanted to read.

#26 Nope, that argument won't wash. In the world of the book - in the real world of the time - homosexuality was illegal. Homosexuals are also a minority. Contrasting the necessary deceptions used by the homosexuals with the star with which the Jews have to advertise their race is... cheap and unnecessary. If, as you say, that's the story Walton wanted to tell, then you can't claim she did just for diversity's sake.

#28 Nothing. They emailed me last week and asked me.

just by the by...social discrimination against Jews in high places was prevalent in US educational circles between the wars. The esteemed president of Harvard called for a "Jewish Quota" on admitted stundents since..it seemed that good, old family wasps like the bushes were being pushed out by academically gifted and hard working jewish student, often children of first generation immigrants. The arguments used against Jews then were VERY similar to arguments we've heard about Asian students over the last 15 years..Yeah..they study hard, get great greats, but ..you know, they just don't have that spark of "originality" that nice Anglo Saxon Wasps bring to to table. Having Ivy league parents of this era from both old line churchmouse poor protestant and the brilliant child an an of ambitious Jewish businessmen (my mom was in the grad progam in philosophy of science @ 19 @ Cornell, under the Jew Quota), i got guite an earful of this growing up..And then researched this, and yeah, James Conant of Harvard was the ringleader in this swell bit of "
welcome to the new world".

>31 iansales: "in the real world of the time - homosexuality was illegal. Homosexuals are also a minority."

Does this mean that gays are in the majority in Britain, now?

Lorax, why are you so desperate for this book to be some shade of SF rather than what it is, a rather poorly constructed murder mystery?

John Updike's Rabbit series is as much an alternative history as this is. Once you make up a character and place them into situations that never happened, and are populated by other non-existent characters, and if these people and events exist either in the literary present or past you have an alternate history. I will buy a genre that uses "alternate history" as it's central conceit, just don't call it SF unless it has some aspect of SF beyond jiggering the actual past into an imaginary past. This book did not use the alternate history as its central conceit, it used two murders. The alternate history was just window dressing.

Actually, I'm also happy for alternate history to be considered sf - it's traditionally been associated with the genre, and it certainly partakes of the same mode. Alternate history by writers who don't identify as sf writers notwithstanding. "Counterfactual" writers notwithstanding.

33>

It's not set in our world. It's SF by my definition. Quality doesn't enter into the equation -- you don't get to say "It sucks so it's not SF" any more than critics get to say "1984 is a classic so it's not SF".

If you think I said "it sucks so it's not SF" you need to reread my post. I said it's not SF so it's not SF.

You said "poorly constructed". Sure, it's a murder mystery, but like Asimov's Caves of Steel books it's an SF mystery.

Do you think alternate history in general is not SF -- in which case, we're simply having a disagreement about terminology -- or that AH has to have a sufficiently broad focus to qualify, in which case, why don't small-scale fantasy novels, or small-scale science fiction novels, similarly fail your test? (Or do they?)

You miss my larger point: all novels are fantasy, some just more outrageous than others. Tom Jones is a fantasy, does that make it SF? How about The Thousand Nights and a Night? Flying carpets, djins living in bottles, secret caves filled with treasure with voice activated locks. A better case could be made for it to be SF than for Farthing. I read 1862, a novel heavily invested in alternate history. There was not a whiff of SF about it. I have read Gates of Fire, a historical novel and have seen it described as SF. It used to be, back in the olden golden days, that historical novels were just that. How is it that they are now claimed by SF?

Alternate history does not SF make.

If the alternate history is caused by a muckup in the space/time continuum that's one thing. When the author decides to change the course of history for the purpose of speculating on what might have been, that's not SF.

Alternate history does not SF make.

Ah, well, that's where we disagree, and I don't find definitional arguments terribly interesting, so I think I'll stop here.

#38

On 1862. Well it seems that 8 out of the 46 owners disagree - they have tagged it SF, science fiction of sci-fi. Also it was on the short-list for the Sidewise Award (announced at Worldcon and which most people acknowledge is an award for science fiction). Now it might not be a very good alt-history but it seems that enough people think it is an alt-history and SF that we should consider it as belonging to the family.

#31

Surely you have done something for them to pick your name out from everyone else? Some achievement, such as publishing your short story in a magazine, or having a particular job, or so forth? I'm sure they don't pick people randomly from the electoral roll.

#30

It's not whether I am interested in what happens to the rest of the world after WWII or not. In fact, the pedestrian murder-mystery aspect would most likely mean that I would not have enjoyed the book in any case.

My complaint is that Walton does not make even a cursory attempt to think about the fortunes of the rest of the world, particularly when the story involves upper-class politicians and businessmen, whom would naturally be concerned with such things. These are the sort of people that do need to be concerned with the politics and economies of other major countries. The political takeover of England should have at least had the characters worried about the effect that this might have on the Germans, who beat them in armed conflict only five years ago.

For no character to be concerned at all over the fortunes of any country outside of England when it has a direct impact on their livelihoods is laziness.

#41 Well, I'm attending the convention - so obviously that's a requirement. But why they should choose me over the 700+ other people who are going, I don't know. I know some of the people who are running the con, but not the person in charge of the programme. I suspect my post last August about classic sf being rubbish came to their attention and that's why they want me to moderate a panel on that subject. No idea why they picked me for the Walton one... Bizarrely, I dreamt last night that I was reading the second book in the small Change trilogy - but I can't remember what the book was about...

#43

This is too funny. Reminds me of 1984:

He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would
still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue
overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small,
curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes
darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought
Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type
set up by the Party as an ideal--tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed
maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree--existed and even
predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people
in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that
beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing
stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and
fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes.

In what way?

#45

Funny ... those in charge of our literary experience nowadays. Don't you remember the 'sameness' of everything in Airstrip One. The difference now is we have our 'divas' and 'studs' of the media, good looks and little else, (try Search the Sky - Pohl & Kornbluth), to promote the 'sameness' ... but still it is the beetle-likes, that make all the decisions. 1984 arrived right on time ... much of everything is nothing.

Well as no doubt everyone has seen Powers by Ursula Le Guin has won this year's Nebula 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 (she likes her long titles her previous book in this series - which was nominated for the previous year's Norton - also had a huge full title) won the Andre Norton Award which is the prize for YA fiction.

In addition to what has already been said above I would like to ask if the Norton Award is now a second class award as 2 YA novels made the main Nebula final ballot but did not make the Norton final ballot? Did anyone take any notice of it anyway

It was a YA that won too.

And a YA novel has won the Tiptree as well - Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go. There were actually two winners. The other is Nisi Shawl's collection Filter House.

For the record, the rest of the Nebula winners are:-

Novella: 'The Spacetime Pool', Catherine Asaro (Analog Mar 2008)
Novelette: 'Pride and Prometheus', John Kessel (F&SF Jan 2008)
Short Story: 'Trophy Wives', Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Fellowship Fantastic, Ed Greenberg & Hughes)
Script: WALL-E

How can Powers possibly be better than Superpowers?