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In case you missed it over the weekend, the SFWA has announced the winners of this year’s Nebula Awards. (You may remember the winner for best novel from an earlier post here at this site.) Congratulations to all!

AncillaryJustice

 

Novel

Winner: Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Nominees:
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Marian Wood)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (Morrow; Headline Review)
Fire with Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
Hild, Nicola Griffith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Red: First Light, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island)
A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar (Small Beer)
The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker (Harper)

Novella

Winner: ‘‘The Weight of the Sunrise,’’ Vylar Kaftan (Asimov’s 2/13)
Nominees:
‘‘Wakulla Springs,’’ Andy Duncan & Ellen Klages (Tor.com 10/2/13)
‘‘Annabel Lee,’’ Nancy Kress (New Under the Sun)
‘‘Burning Girls,’’ Veronica Schanoes (Tor.com 6/19/13)
‘‘Trial of the Century,’’ Lawrence M. Schoen (www.lawrencemschoen.com; World Jumping)
Six-Gun Snow White, Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean)

Novelette

Winner: ‘‘The Waiting Stars,’’ Aliette de Bodard (The Other Half of the Sky)
Nominees:
‘‘Paranormal Romance,’’ Christopher Barzak (Lightspeed 6/13)
‘‘They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass,’’ Alaya Dawn Johnson (Asimov’s 1/13)
‘‘Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters,’’ Henry Lien (Asimov’s 12/13)
‘‘The Litigation Master and the Monkey King,’’ Ken Liu (Lightspeed 8/13)
‘‘In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,’’ Sarah Pinsker (Strange Horizons 7/1 – 7/8/13)

Short Story

Winner: ‘‘If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,’’ Rachel Swirsky (Apex 3/13)
Nominees:
‘‘The Sounds of Old Earth,’’ Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed 1/13)
‘‘Selkie Stories Are for Losers,’’ Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons 1/7/13)
‘‘Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer,’’ Kenneth Schneyer (Clockwork Phoenix 4)
‘‘Alive, Alive Oh,’’ Sylvia Spruck Wrigley (Lightspeed 6/13)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

Winner: Gravity
Nominees:
Doctor Who: ‘‘The Day of the Doctor’’
Europa Report
Her
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Pacific Rim

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book

Winner: Sister Mine, Nalo Hopkinson (Grand Central)
Nominees:
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Holly Black (Little, Brown; Indigo)
When We Wake, Karen Healey (Allen & Unwin; Little, Brown)
The Summer Prince, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)
Hero, Alethea Kontis (Harcourt)
September Girls, Bennett Madison (Harper Teen)
A Corner of White, Jaclyn Moriarty (Levine)

Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award: Michael Armstrong

2013 Damon Knight Grand Master Award: Samuel R. Delany  

2013 Special Honoree: Frank M. Robinson

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What’s that? You’d like to read an interview with George R.R. Martin with lunch? Well, I happen to have just the thing for you, via the good people at Longreads:

George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview

 

In which GRRM discusses his history as a writer, the evolution of his epic (and as yet incomplete!) The Song of Ice and Fire cycle and how, despite the great swaths of death that characterize those books, his “worldview is anything but nihilistic.”

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8 Courageous Things Harry Potter Fans Did to Fight Real-Life Dark Forces by Katrina Rabeler.

If Harry Potter were a real person, he’d fight child labor, voter suppression, and poverty. Here are our favorite ways Harry’s fans have taken his values from the page to the real world.

For more details on what muggles can do when they put their minds to it, check out the full article at YES! Magazine.

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I planned to avoid the kerfuffle around Lynn Shepard’s call for JK Rowling to stop writing, because the idea that Rowling should quit for the good of other writers is flat-out ridiculous. The sensible approach to scarcity isn’t to fight over the last tiny slice; instead, make the pie bigger. Rowling has certainly done that.

Mark Pryor’s article says most of what I was thinking about Lynn Shepard’s essay, and I was glad to see it come out. Here he is on Rowling: “…authors like you actually bring more readers to our books. More books from you means more readers for us, not fewer.”

I do disagree with a point at the end of Pryor’s article, however. The part where the author says that writers don’t write to make money is an old excuse to explain away economic marginalization: “…writers don’t sit down and write books to make money… We write because we love to share our stories.”

It has been said before but bears repeating: Doctors don’t examine you out of the love of anatomy, plumbers don’t fix your pipes for free. Professional writers are, or should be, the same. Yes, most people can “write” in the broad sense of the word, but very few can do it at professional levels. It’s like dismissing an Olympic sprinter because “anyone can run.”

“…this is the sort of thinking, intentional or otherwise, that gives bad people cover to screw writers with regard to money, and gives uncertain writers a reason to shrug off being screwed.”
John Scalzi

Writers have a lot of motivations, and the pleasure of being read is certainly one. But we also write because (we hope) it pays the bills, because it’s less physically demanding than ditch digging, or because we have something to say. We write to entertain, to connect with other human beings, to understand the world and to communicate what we see. We write to make sense of a problem or an emotion and to pass that knowledge along. We write to provide adventure or mystery or humor or a place of refuge. If we do it well (and that’s what we’re all striving for, is it not?), we give to the reader, not the other way around.

And Ms Rowling does it well.

 

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Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America are pleased to announce the 2013 Nebula Awards nominees (presented 2014), the nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the nominees for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.

For more details, head over to SFWA and check out the full list of nominees.

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Ooh, shiny! John Joseph Adams (editor, anthologist and publisher of Lightspeed, among many other things) will be series editor for the new Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. See his blog post about this terrific development here. More details about the series, how to submit or nominate, and the first incarnation featuring Joe Hill as guest editor, may be found here.

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AncillaryJustice

I don’t post book reviews per se but I’m all for recommendations. I’ve just finished Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie and enjoyed it thoroughly. This space opera follows the humanoid remnants of a self-aware starship on a quest for justice. Well-written and beautifully developed, it was an entertaining and unexpected read. Worth reading for the reprogramming of your neural pathways around gender alone, and it’s so much more than that.

Recommended.

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Another year, another free Campbellian download!

Stupefying Stories has just made available M. David Blake’s “The 2014 Campbellian Pre-Reading Anthology.” This collection contains more than 860,000 words of fiction by authors eligible for this John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer award. Fabulous fiction, and all free free free!

Limited time offer, get yours today!

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Terrific, this award is very well deserved:)

Automattic Special Projects's avatarWhatever

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has named Samuel R. Delany its newest Grand Master. All the details are here.

I’m still doing my “no comments on SFWA for a year” thing, so I won’t discuss this substantively at the moment. I will say this: This is an award both well chosen and well deserved.

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“Never let perfect be the enemy of the good.”

I just passed 50,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project so I am officially done. Congratulations to the other winners and good luck to those still working!

Now it’s time to get back to… everything else:)

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