Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

I don’t suppose there’s anyone who would maintain that the winners have been without question the best stories of the year. Just as the Oscars go to films chosen for reasons that, in retrospect, seem inexplicable, sometimes factors other than literary merit influence the outcome of the voting. Or people’s judgment just changes over time. Or there just isn’t room to give awards to all the worthy stories. At the 2011 Academy Awards Stephen Spielberg acknowledged these realities when he presented the best picture award, saying, “In a moment one of these ten movies will join a list that includes On the Waterfront, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, and The Deer Hunter. The other nine will join a list that includes The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, The Graduate, and Raging Bull!’

Past Nebula nominee Andy Duncan recently made a provocative point about awards:

Over the years, I have decided the primary purpose of an award is not to celebrate individuals, but to celebrate the field those individuals work in. We squirm when this is made overt, as in the sanctimonious aren’t-we-great speeches about the universal appeal of motion pictures at the Oscars every year, or that endless Grammys tribute this year to the music charities supported by the recording industry. Yet it’s true anyway; it’s less important who wins, say, the Hugos in any given year than the fact that, once again, the Hugos are given out, generating another opportunity to see one another, and applaud one another, and talk to one another about our field and how it’s doing—and, yes, to kvetch about who got robbed and who’s overrated and who the real winner is.

Jim: We don’t have to go to the history books for reassurance that the race does not always go to the best-known competitor: it seems to me that the takeaway from this year’s list of nominees is that fresh voices will be heard. With wins in novella and novelette, new writers Rachel Swirsky and Eric James Stone have posted their names on the marquee just a few years into their careers. Reminds me of 1982 when a couple of tyros named Connie Willis and John Kessel swooped out of nowhere and won all three short fiction Nebulas. And first time nominees like Vylar Kaftan, Amal El-Mohtar, Felicity Shoulders, Aliette de Bodard, Shweta Narayan, Christopher Kastensmidt, Caroline M. Yoachim, J. Kathleen Cheney, M. K. Hobson, N. K. Jemisin, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Nnedi Okorafor represent almost half of the ballot. It’s the largest such group in the history of the award.

Speaking from personal experience, the impact of a nomination on a new writer can be profound. It’s hard for any writer to know exactly how she is doing, once she starts selling regularly. Income doesn’t necessarily tell the story. Reviews are a crapshoot—are bad reviews worse than no reviews? Readers may or may not check in. And there are no promotions. Nobody gets to be Vice President of Slipstream or Project Manager for Space Opera or Director of the Zombie Division. Yes, we have to believe in ourselves and know in our hearts that what we have to say is worth saying, but it helps when our colleagues offer some validation. Best-of-the-year editors certainly have this power, but they are individuals whose sensibilities are theirs alone. But when an organization of your colleagues proclaims to the world that you have written an elite story, you have to believe them. I think that helps the next time your curl your fingers over a keyboard.

And that’s precisely why there is so much kvetching about the Nebulas. They matter. If we get it wrong, if the process of nominating stories and anointing one of the nominees does not spur the collective effort to write better SF and fantasy, then we’ve lost our way. My mentor Damon Knight would not be pleased.

I don’t think this is the case, obviously. But the problem is that there is no consensus about how to write better SF and fantasy. Do we honor stories that are in dialogue with stories from our past, as has been our tradition, or is all that stuff old-fashioned now? Should we seek to break down the walls between the genres, or between genre and the literary mainstream, or is that turning our backs on our mission? And just what is our mission? Do we even have one? The discussions and, yes, controversies that sometimes swirl around the Nebulas are as important a part of our continuing self-evaluation as the awards themselves.

John: If the impact of a nomination on a young writer can be profound, I can say from similar personal experience that winning a Nebula can be a test of character. When I wrote “Another Orphan,” which won me a Nebula on my first nomination, I paid less attention to marketability, and more to my own obsessive interests than I had for any story I had written up to that point. After I won, I spent a year spinning my wheels trying to figure out what winning meant I should write next. What did people expect to see from me? What was I supposed to write? It took me some time to find myself again after that experience.

The attention of your peers is powerful, for good or ill. As E. B. White reminds us when Wilbur the pig wins an award at the country fair in Charlotte’s Web, “It is deeply satisfying to win a prize in front of a lot of people.” The stress of winning causes poor Wilbur to faint dead away, for “he is modest and can’t stand praise.” Fortunately, winning a prize does not mean that Wilbur must be slaughtered and eaten; instead, he goes back to his barn at the end and lives pretty much as he did before. Let us choose Wilbur as our role model.

Jim: There are many paths to greatness. (Uh-oh, I’m starting to sound like a fortune cookie!) And we would be foolish to say that being nominated for a Nebula or even winning one was the only honor that counted in this or any other year. It is instructive to note that two of the awards given at the Nebula ceremony, the Bradbury and the Norton, are named for great writers who, while celebrated as SFWA Grandmasters, have never made the short list for the award, let alone won. That’s right: Ray Bradbury and Andre Norton have never appeared on the final ballot. Ever. And in their distinguished company are some of the most talented writers ever to grace our genre. For example: Iain Banks, Elizabeth Bear, Jonathan Carroll, Greg Egan, M. John Harrison, Alexander Jablokov, Jay Lake, Kit Reed, Rudy Rucker, and Sherri Tepper— to name but ten.

What does this tell us? Only that proximity to the stories of any given year distorts our vision. In our opinion, these are some of the very best stories of 2011, but it is up to future generations of readers to decide—fifty or a hundred years from now—which ones speak to the ages.

Until then, we are very proud to present this year’s Nebula Awards Showcase.

Children are not all monsters, but many little girls are. In my small town elementary school, I was informally seeded 22nd in my class of 24. I played with numbers 23 and 24 because they were the ones willing to play with me, and I like to think that I would not have thrown them under the bus if that had been the price for improving my position—but it never came up, and I’m grateful, now.

“Ponies” is about that, and the maiming so many little girls subject themselves to, just to survive childhood. My first published short stories were horror, the literature of effect. Later I moved into fantasy and other things, but last year I returned to horror with the science fiction story “Spar,” and found that I had more to learn about how fiction gets under the skin. “Ponies” is another exploration of that.