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SFWA Releases Nebula Suggested Reading List

Click here to get to the Suggested reading List; lots of good stuff on there.
Click here to get to the Suggested reading List; lots of good stuff on there.
This has been in discussion for a while now; I’m glad we’ve finally moved ahead on the project of making the Nebula Suggested Reading List public. The intent is to build awareness of the awards, help drive participation by members, and help the genre by providing a solid list of notable material from the year. Authors do not need to be SFWA members to make their work eligible.

Here’s the official press release about it:

As part of its mission to serve professional genre writers, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is pleased to announce that for the first time they’ll be making the Nebula Suggested Reading List public. The list is compiled from the suggestions of SFWA members and is available on the SFWA website at http://www.sfwa.org/forum/index.php?app=readinglist. All SFWA members are eligible to add items to the list throughout the year, providing a list of notable speculative novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, and dramatic works from the year. Inclusion on the list is not an endorsement by SFWA.

From November 15 through February 15, 2016, Active and Associate members will be able to make actual Nebula nominations as well as nominations for the Bradbury and Andre Norton Award. The votes will be tallied and the final ballot will be released on or before February 20 for voting on by the membership. Winners will be announced at the Nebula Awards Weekend, to be held May 12 -15 at the Palmer House in Chicago. The banquet and awards ceremony will take place the evening of May 14. Other awards presented at the weekend include the Grand Master Award, the Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award, and the Solstice Award.

Nebula Commissioner Terra LeMay says “Even before I became the Nebula Awards Commissioner, I’ve always thought the Suggested Reading List was one of the best resources I’ve ever encountered for finding the most exciting new science fiction and fantasy works each year. It is a great privilege to have helped bring this list out to the public where any reader may benefit from it.”

SFWA President Cat Rambo notes, “Every year there’s plenty of terrific stuff to read. I hope that providing a list that draws upon the wide spectrum of tastes represented in the SFWA’s membership of professional writers helps up the discoverability of great writing that should be considered for awards. For me the Nebula Awards remain the most meaningful in the field, chosen by writers working in the genre, who understand and appreciate craft and who possess an understanding of the works that have shaped our field. SFWA has had a productive year in 2015, and it’s a pleasure to share yet another result of our members working together.”

For more information please email pr@sfwa.org.

Recent high notes for SFWA include the Accessibility Checklist being made available to the public, an event Lee Martindale blogged eloquently about. Several conventions have expressed interest in the checklist already and we’ve gotten some useful feedback on how to update them to make them even more useful.

Stick with us; there’s even more cool stuff coming in 2016.

49 Responses

  1. Although some folks are worried about any ranked list turning into a slate, I think those fears are overblown. I’m doing my own non-profit recommendation site, http://www.rocketstackrank.com, and I got a little of that at the start, but people got used to it. It helps that we’ve got more than one ranking, I suppose.

    A trick I used at Microsoft and Amazon to get a bit more control over lists is to use the law of large numbers. Take the square root of the total number of votes. Anything with fewer votes than that goes into two buckets: “one vote” and “more than one vote.” Then rank the rest using their actual vote totals. This handles the fact that there isn’t much real difference between things with small numbers of votes–random chance dominates.

    Reply

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And For My Next Trick: AKA The Amazing Disappearing Nebula Nomination

Picture of Cat Rambo in a Cthulhu ski mask.
There’s power in looking silly and not caring that you do. -Amy Poehler
Well.

Short version: I’ve withdrawn my story from the Nebula ballot. Many congratulations to Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, whose excellent story The Orangery replaces it on the ballot.

Long version: One of the best parts of being SFWA President or Vice President is that you get to be one of the people calling the Nebula nominees to tell them what’s up. This is a lot of fun because giving people good news is almost always a terrific experience. I’ve ever gotten to call former students on occasion, and thought my heart would burst from joy, because that is a terrific feeling.

This year I woke on February 16, the day we would be making the calls, to find a message from our Nebula Awards Commissioner asking me to give her a call. I did, and she presented me with news that both delighted and horrified me, that my novelette, “Red in Tooth and Cog,” was on the ballot.

Delighted, because I like that story, and think it’s a good one. A number of people whose opinion I value highly have expressed praise for it, and it’s also something that represents a victory for me. I was grimly determined to be published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction ““ it was a publication that represented an enormous milestone to me ““ and that acceptance was my 44th submission to the magazine over the course of 12 years. It wasn’t that the other stories were bad ones. One of them, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” even went on to become a Nebula nominee in 2013.

And horrified, because I don’t want things to look like the Nebulas are motivated by concerns other than literary excellence, and it seemed to me that this could look like that since I have engendered a little popularity while President, mainly because I am so goddamn personable. And I was sure there would be a certain amount of grumbling about it. So before we moved forward, I had to decide whether or not to withdraw it

I made some coffee, went for a walk, and spent a good bit of time thinking about it, talking to my spouse and my best friend, as well as a number of other SFWA folk. I was aware that there was precedent for either decision. In the end, I thought that to withdraw it would be a disservice to the members who liked it and wanted to see it on the ballot. If I wasn’t satisfied that it’s a good story, if I hadn’t previously had a story on a ballot when not involved with the SFWA Board, then I might’ve made a different decision and there are undoubtedly parallel universes where our ballot was different. But if I was appearing on the ballot just because of the Presidency, the time for that would have been last year, when my first novel came out. I think. Maybe. Who knows? Maybe in another universe it did.

However, back in this universe, apparently the fact that in the course of editing the 8,000 word story, what emerged was actually short story rather than novelette length, had managed to escape us all over the course of the past year, and so my happiness at finally getting a chance to tell everyone, huzzah, came to an end a bit precipitously. You’ll forgive any rawness to my tone; I think it’s natural.

This presented me with a new dilemma. I could allow it to be moved to the short story category, which would have bumped off not one, but three stories, which had tied for that slot. But that seemed pretty unfair, and made three people pay for the screw-up, instead of just one. So, I’m withdrawing the story. Kudos to the wonderful reading still on the ballot — there is a ton of great stuff on there and you should read it all.

Should the length issue have gotten caught before now? You bet. But if it had to happen on my watch, I am relieved that it happened to me rather than someone else. Is it a solid gut punch? Sure. But there have been others in my life and this is hardly the worst. I still get to go to the Nebulas and enjoy them as one of the ringmasters of that circus. So…wah! Very sad in some ways, but so it goes. Sometimes one puts one’s big girl pants on and soldiers forward without too much entitled whining.

I will, though, try to squeeze a few drop of lemonade from this lemon. If you like what I’m doing, and if you want me to keep persevering, there’s several ways of encouraging me. You can:

Here is a link to the story.

Today’s been crazy. Tonight I’m working my way through some Tillamook chocoloate peanut butter ice cream, Black Jack, and a few levels of Skyrim.

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Yes, I am the New Vice President of SFWA
Preparing to take on the challenges ahead.

I’m delighted and a little daunted and planning on lots of things.

Right now I’m composing a blog post about self-publishing and why SFWA”s looking at it, as well as my own adventures, past and planned, in self-publishing.

...

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