The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America are pleased to announce the 2015 Nebula Awards nominees (presented 2016), for the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the nominees for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.
We are personally very proud to announce that three Tor.com novellas and one Tor.com short story have been nominated: Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor, “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn” by Usman T. Malik, ‘‘Waters of Versailles” by Kelly Robson, and “Damage” by David D. Levine.
Congratulations to all of the nominees!
Novel:
Raising Caine, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (Saga)
Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard, Lawrence M. Schoen (Tor)
Updraft, Fran Wilde (Tor)
Novella:
Wings of Sorrow and Bone, Beth Cato (Harper Voyager Impulse)
‘‘The Bone Swans of Amandale’’, C.S.E. Cooney (Bone Swans)
‘‘The New Mother’’, Eugene Fischer (Asimov’s 4-5/15)
‘‘The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn’’, Usman T. Malik (Tor.com 4/22/15)
Binti, Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com)
‘‘Waters of Versailles’’, Kelly Robson (Tor.com 6/10/15)
Novelette:
‘‘Rattlesnakes and Men’’, Michael Bishop (Asimov’s 2/15)
‘‘And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead’’, Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed 2/15)
‘‘Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds’’, Rose Lemberg (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/11/15)
‘‘The Ladies’ Aquatic Gardening Society’’, Henry Lien (Asimov’s 6/15)
‘‘The Deepwater Bride’’, Tamsyn Muir (F&SF 7-8/15)
‘‘Our Lady of the Open Road’’, Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s 6/15)
Short Story:
‘‘Madeleine’’, Amal El-Mohtar (Lightspeed 6/15)
‘‘Cat Pictures Please’’, Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld 1/15)
‘‘Damage’’, David D. Levine (Tor.com 1/21/15)
‘‘When Your Child Strays From God’’, Sam J. Miller (Clarkesworld 7/15)
‘‘Today I Am Paul’’, Martin L. Shoemaker (Clarkesworld 8/15)
‘‘Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers’’, Alyssa Wong (Nightmare 10/15)
Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Ex Machina, Written by Alex Garland
Inside Out, Screenplay by Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley; Original Story by Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen
Jessica Jones: AKA Smile, Teleplay by Scott Reynolds & Melissa Rosenberg; Story by Jamie King & Scott Reynolds
Mad Max: Fury Road, Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nick Lathouris
The Martian, Screenplay by Drew Goddard
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy:
Seriously Wicked, Tina Connolly (Tor Teen)
Court of Fives, Kate Elliott (Little, Brown)
Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan UK 5/14; Amulet)
Archivist Wasp, Nicole Kornher-Stace (Big Mouth House)
Zeroboxer, Fonda Lee (Flux)
Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older (Levine)
Bone Gap, Laura Ruby (Balzer + Bray)
Nimona, Noelle Stevenson (HarperTeen)
Updraft, Fran Wilde (Tor)
About the Nebula Awards
The Nebula Awards are voted on, and presented by, active members of SFWA. Voting will open to SFWA Active members on March 1, and close on March 30. You can find more information here!
About the Nebula Awards Weekend
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Annual Nebula Awards Weekend will be held at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, Illinois, May 12th through May 15th, 2016. The weekend will include tours and workshops, plus the prestigious 50th Annual Nebula Awards hosted by comedian John Hodgman, taking place on May 14th.
Congratulations! I’m surprised at how much of an impression Barsk made in just a couple of months, I thought the year-end release would work against it.
Bit surprised KSR’s Aurora didn’t get nominated. It was the most polished SF novel I read all last year. Maybe guild readers had issues with its argument against expansion into space?
Yes, Sunspear, KSR’s Aurora was a masterpiece. Why wasn’t it selected?
And the book wasn’t really “against expanding into space”. It was a fairly radical, anti capitalist, pro-ecological book which attacked a very specific, dangerous line of contemporary thinking: the notion that you can ruin the planet (cough, Interstellar, cough) and then get out of jail free by hopping on board a spaceship. Space is fine, the book says, but sort out the planet first. Sort out your home.
KSR’s already written several books about galactic expansion. Aurora, his best book in my opinion, is more subversive, especially given our mad contemporary economic/political climate.
@3: Also, maybe it was too literary for them. The last section reads like it could have been written by Virginia Woolf, a stream of consciousness from the PoV of the main character of what (to her) is essentially an alien planet.
Btw, check out KSR on the Coode St podcast, where he’s a bit more categorical and pessimistic that humans will ever reach another solar system. He sees space travel as too hard (and possibly a death sentence for anyone sent outbound), which is somewhat divergent from his previous views. He also calls Interstellar ridiculous or a joke (something along those lines). Guess he doesn’t allow for any future discoveries in exotic physics, somewhat analogous to Einstein never reconciling with quantum physics.
Strahan and Wolfe both have said they see Aurora as the best SF novel of last year. But then, just like the Oscars, the Nebulas may be more of a popularity and who you know/who knows you thing.
Will check out the podcast. Thanks.
I found Aurora’s last sections to be very powerful.
KSR does drag on and on in all his books – he seems to be obsessed with conveying “banality” – but Aurora’s earth sequences I found to be very touching. You sense KSR’s real love for the world, the waters, the sands and the beaches. And I loved how the book ended with a scifi trope being inverted: humans were now terraforming Earth!
Aurora’s final passages also reminded me of Stanislaw Lem’s Return from the Stars. Lem, of course, was one of scifi’s greatest pessimists. In that novel, an astronaut similarly comes to the conclusion that his life as a spacejock was a waste of time.
Got anymore book recommendations? As you liked Aurora as well, I’d be curious to hear what else you recommend.
I met Charles Gannon for the first time at Boskone yesterday, and he was a very happy man. His first three books have now all received Nebula nominations. And in my mind, the honor is well deserved; the Caine Riordan series is a lot of fun, and populated by some interesting and very different alien races, which keep you guessing as to what will happen next.
Lot of stuff I haven’t read yet. Need to get to it.
Love that JJ got a nom. Going to be tough to beat the likes of Max and The Martian but man, what a line up for dramatic this year.
And congrats to Kate Elliot. Loved Court of Fives.
@Trent: Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon was good, though it’s just part one of the story. Had a few Dune homages with the plot of several houses fighting over a resource, even a Baron Harkonnen type. It’s a bit more commercial than McDonald’s other writing (being developed as a TV series). I admire the more artistic and culturally dense novels, but have a harder time sinking into them (didn’t finish Dervish House).
Stephenson’s Seveneves is worth reading. Although… The last section after the time jump is impressive for its world-building, but it’s attempt to employ Neo-Lamarckism and revive inherited trait theory is questionable. One character undergoes evolutionary change twice… in her own lifetime. Another group, isolated for thousands of years underground emerges completely unchanged, when they should’ve turned into mole people, or at least partially blind.
Then there’s the laughable bit about how memory in future devices is so severely restricted that simple text files like e-books have to be deleted to make room for new ones. This is because an ancestor was addicted to porn and was deemed to have misused his tech. The moral lesson for the descendants is to become afraid of the “misuse” of the tech and go super-neo-space-puritan. So ok, maybe it’s not a full recommendation…