Nebula Award Nominees Announced.

Cafe Society
1

Novel

[ul]
[li]The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor)[/li][li]Trial by Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)[/li][li]Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)[/li][li]The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu (), translated by Ken Liu (Tor)[/li][li]Coming Home, Jack McDevitt (Ace)[/li][li]Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals; Fourth Estate; HarperCollins Canada)[/li][/ul]

Novella
[ul]
[li]We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory (Tachyon)[/li][li]Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)[/li][li]“The Regular,” Ken Liu (Upgraded)[/li][li]“The Mothers of Voorhisville,” Mary Rickert (Tor.com 4/30/14)[/li][li]Calendrical Regression, Lawrence Schoen (NobleFusion)[/li][li]“Grand Jeté (The Great Leap),” Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer '14)[/li]
[/ul]

Novelette
[ul]
[li]“Sleep Walking Now and Then,” Richard Bowes (Tor.com 7/9/14)[/li][li]“The Magician and Laplace’s Demon,” Tom Crosshill (Clarkesworld 12/14)[/li][li]“A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14)[/li][li]“The Husband Stitch,” Carmen Maria Machado (Granta #129)[/li][li]“We Are the Cloud,” Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed 9/14)[/li][li]“The Devil in America,” Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com 4/2/14)[/li][/ul]

Short Story

[ul]
[li]“The Breath of War,” Aliette de Bodard (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/6/14)[/li][li]“When It Ends, He Catches Her,” Eugie Foster (Daily Science Fiction 9/26/14)[/li][li]“The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye,” Matthew Kressel (Clarkesworld 5/14)[/li][li]“The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family,” Usman T. Malik (Qualia Nous)[/li][li]“A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” Sarah Pinsker (F&SF 3-4/14)[/li][li]“Jackalope Wives,” Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/7/14)[/li][li]“The Fisher Queen,” Alyssa Wong (F&SF 5/14)[/li][/ul]

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

[ul]
[li]Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. & Armando Bo (Fox Searchlight Pictures)[/li][li]Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)[/li][li]Edge of Tomorrow, Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth (Warner Bros. Pictures)[/li][li]Guardians of the Galaxy, Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)[/li][li]Interstellar, Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan (Paramount Pictures)[/li][li]The Lego Movie, Screenplay by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (Warner Bros. Pictures)[/li][/ul]

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

[ul]
[li]Unmade, Sarah Rees Brennan (Random House)[/li][li]Salvage, Alexandra Duncan (Greenwillow)[/li][li]Love Is the Drug, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)[/li][li]Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, A.S. King (Little, Brown)[/li][li]Dirty Wings, Sarah McCarry (St. Martin’s Griffin)[/li][li]Greenglass House, Kate Milford (Clarion)[/li][li]The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, Leslye Walton (Candlewick)[/li][li]About the Nebula Awards[/li][/ul]

2

I should add that does anyone have recommendations on which of these I should read in the next month?

3

That list makes me realize how out of touch I’ve gotten with current SF. I don’t think I’ve read a single one of those works.

4

I clicked on this link to see if Annihilation made the list, and I am glad to see it did. I am not generally a sci-fi reader, but I really enjoyed that book.The world he creates was fascinating and I loved his attention to detail.

5

Outside of the film category, I don’t think I recognize a single name… which, for someone who can list more than a dozen sf writers he knows on a first-name basis and perhaps forty more who would take his call without hesitation, is kinda saying something. What, I don’t know.

6

Well, the field is moving to honor younger writers and women and nonwhite authors. Some of the names have been around (Kress and McDevitt), some are new but have been doing impressive work (Liu, probably my favorite new author) and the rest are unknown to me (I read more short stories than novels these days, though). There are so many short story markets these days that it’s hard to keep up.

There are also political issues. There’s the Sad Puppy contingent, which wants the genre to concentrate on adventure and hard science and not literary values. (Which is silly; the genre has had both types of works since the 60s). They do think that the Nebulas are a lost cause, however (and I do have my issues with them), and concentrate on the Hugos.

7

Ann Leckie’s novel is the second of a trilogy; the first won the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Locus, and BSFA awards.

8

Hmm. I’ve read Annihilation (I think–I’ve read the first two in the trilogy), and I’ve read Ancillary Justice but didn’t even know Ancillary Sword was a thing. I must find it.

I’m a teeny bit disappointed that my favorite SF of the last year, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, got no love.

9

The genre tends to ignore novels that aren’t marketed as science fiction (unless they’re by Michael Chabon, who was a SFWA member for a time).

In this case, though, it sounds like the concept it take from Ken Grimwood’s Replay.

10

The “genre” or the “award”? Because it’s been nominated for the BSFA best novel award.

As for Replay, it does sound like there are some similarities in the concepts, although part of the delight of the book is how it plays so intelligently with the central conceit. Replay looks fun; do you recommend it?

11

Ancillary Sword is a sequel of a planned trilogy (And Justice was frickin awesome), Annihilation is the first of a trilogy that is already completed and is pretty damn amazing as a whole (if you search for Area X it has been collected as a whole in one volume, that’s how I read it, and that’s how I would recommend it.) 3-Body Problem has been translated from Chinese, and is seriously messed up in a good way. Goblin Emperor was well-regarded by several friends with good reading taste, but I just couldn’t get into it. The other novels I have not tried.

I don’t read as many novellas or shorts, so I can’t recommend or warn against them, but most of the authors are familiar to me.

I really like seeing a diverse lineup of authors, and hope the trend continues. We need more voices, we need different voices, we need lots of varieties of perspectives and backgrounds and styles represented so a larger range of readers can find something or someone they can identify with or in contrast, find something new and exciting to explore. The more the merrier.

12

Chabon has won Hugos/Nebulas; I meant other genre awards than the Nebula.

I can’t recommend “Replay” highly enough. Grimwood also gets all sorts of variations in the theme, and the conclusion is emotionally very affecting. It did win a World Fantasy Award.

13

A terrific book - I read it when it came out almost 30 years ago, and still remember it vividly.

14

I’ve only read a couple of the novels; Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation was pretty interesting although I’ve not yet got round to the others in the trilogy.
The Jack McDevitt seemed fairly pedestrian to me. I’ve really liked some of his books in the past, including the previous book in this series (I reread #1 a couple of years ago and read #5 and then #6 when they came out, without ever reading the three in between) but this one’s #7 in the series and it’s become a bit too formulaic.
The Addison comes out in the UK in paperback in a week or two, so I might read that soon…

Of the novellas I’ve only read the Daryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine which, after a rather dark beginning, was excellent.
His novels are generally very good, too.

15

Not to sidetrack the thread but has anyone read any of Grimwood’s other novels? I know he wrote several but only Replay has ever received any wide attention. The rest are very difficult to find. So I’m wondering if they’re worth seeking out or if it’s a case where an author wrote one great book and the rest of his work is forgettable.

Sorry if I godwinized the thread.

16

I very much liked Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword, and I think the second book is even better than the first. The protagonist is an AI who was embodied by a spaceship until an act of sabotage destroyed most of her, leaving her confined to one of her human “ancillary” bodies.

I liked The Goblin Emperor pretty well. The plot is unexceptional (previously disregarded young person unexpectedly inherits the throne and everyone doubts his capabilities) but it’s well written with an interesting setting. It felt like a young adult novel. I picked it up because Katherine Addison is a pen name for Sarah Monette, and I like her other angsty, decidedly adult fantasy.

17

Yeah, it’s like listening to Top 40 radio nowadays. Not only haven’t I read the works, I don’t even know any of the authors. Ever since my subscription to Analog lapsed (20 years ago?), I’ve completely lost touch of what’s going on in F/SF literature. Every once in a while some novel will make enough of a splash that I’ll pick it up, or I’ll run across an interesting anthology in the town library, but I no longer seek it out.

18

I read Grimwood’s Into the Deep, which was OK, but not much more.

I’ve started reading The Three Body Problem by Cixan Liu and it’s quite good. It’s interesting to read SF from another culture (the book was originally in Chinese), but what’s interesting is that it’s a hard-science novel based on ideas from Newtonian physics. SFWA is usually criticized for being “not real SF,” by the hard SF crowd, yet two of the six novels (I assume the McDevitt, because all his other books are) fit that subgenre.

BTW, many of the short stories and novellas are available online; most short fiction appears on websites these days.