Sunday, April 27, 2008

Nebula Winners

I wasn't there this year -- a damn shame, since I wanted to get back to Austin after WFC, since it's a great city and my cousin lives there (and her daughter is just over a year old now) -- but that's the way of the world, isn't it?

The winners are an impressive list this year:
  • NOVEL: The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon
  • NOVELLA: "Fountain of Age", Nancy Kress
  • NOVELETTE: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", Ted Chiang
  • SHORT STORY: "Always", Karen Joy Fowler
  • SCRIPT: Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro
  • ANDRE NORTON AWARD: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
As previously announced, the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award (which really should come with a cookbook) went to Michael Moorcock.


SFWA has decisively shown that the claim that they never give awards to "outsiders" is untrue -- Chabon isn't quite an outsider, but Rowling definitely is. And Ted Chiang is now 4-for-4 on Nebula nominations; is that anyone's best record ever?

One other question, since I can't google quite the right collection of words: was Pan's Labyrinth one of the scripts available for SFWAns to read online?

(In related news, SFWA has also announced the results of this year's leadership election. The most important thing to note is that Andrew Burt lost.)

[via Locus Online and SF Scope]
Released into the wild

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Am I correct that the "Best Script" category is not very subtle figleaf for including a "Best Dramatic Presentation" award in what should be a bunch of awards for purely written works?

Because the whole "script" handwave is pretty dang hard to believe.

Sun Apr 27, 02:50:00 PM 2008
Andrew Wheeler said...

David: I've heard Paul Levinson -- whom I otherwise respect -- argue that SFWAns, being professional writers, can see a dramatization, and, using their massive brains and Secret Writer Powers, discern the precise words of the script from which that dramatization was made and thus make their choice purely on the basis of the script.

In more recent years, a fluctuating number of the scripts nominated have been available for SFWAns to read in their voting. Not all of them, no. And not available before the nominations, either. But at least some SFWAns can now make at least part of their decision based on the actual thing nominated, if they feel like it.

(The history of this category is twisted and complicated; there was something called the "Bradbury Award" for scripts for a little while, then that was killed, and then it came back in this form.)

Mon Apr 28, 09:46:00 PM 2008

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