2010 Nebula Award Winners!

Sat
May 21 2011 9:00pm

2010 Nebula Award Winners!

Since 1965, the Nebula Awards are given each year by the Science Fiction Writers of America for outstanding works of science fiction, fantasy, or related fiction genre. This year’s presentation was held at the Washington Hilton in Washington D.C. Tor.com would like to extend hearty congratulations to all the winners and nominees!

TOASTMASTER: Michael Swanwick

SHORT STORY

WINNER: “Ponies,” Kij Johnson (Tor.com 1/17/10)
WINNER: “How Interesting: A Tiny Man,” Harlan Ellison® (Realms of Fantasy 2/10)
“Arvies,” Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed 8/10)
“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno,” Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed 6/10)
“The Green Book,” Amal El-Mohtar (Apex 11/1/10)
“Ghosts of New York,” Jennifer Pelland (Dark Faith)
“Conditional Love,” Felicity Shoulders (Asimov’s 1/10)

NOVELETTE

WINNER: “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made,” Eric James Stone (Analog 9/10)
“Map of Seventeen,” Christopher Barzak (The Beastly Bride)
“The Jaguar House, in Shadow,” Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s 7/10)
“Plus or Minus,” James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s 12/10)
“Pishaach,” Shweta Narayan (The Beastly Bride)
“The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard van Oost and Oludara,” Christopher Kastensmidt (Realms of Fantasy 4/10)
“Stone Wall Truth,” Caroline M. Yoachim (Asimov’s 2/10)

NOVELLA

WINNER: “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window,” Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer 2010)
The Alchemist, Paolo Bacigalupi (Audible; Subterranean)
“Iron Shoes,” J. Kathleen Cheney (Alembical 2)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
“The Sultan of the Clouds,” Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s 9/10)
“Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance,” Paul Park (F&SF 1-2/10)

NOVEL

WINNER Blackout / All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)
The Native Star, M.K. Hobson (Spectra)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
Echo, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)

BRADBURY AWARD BEST DRAMATIC PRODUCTION

WINNER: Inception, Christopher Nolan (director), Christopher Nolan (screenplay) (Warner)
Despicable Me, Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud (directors), Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul (screenplay), Sergio Pablos (story) (Illumination Entertainment)
Doctor Who: “Vincent and the Doctor,” Richard Curtis (writer), Jonny Campbell (director)
How to Train Your Dragon, Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders (directors), William Davies, Dean DeBlois, & Chris Sanders (screenplay) (DreamWorks Animation)
Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, Edgar Wright (director), Michael Bacall & Edgar Wright (screenplay) (Universal)
Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich (director), Michael Arndt (screenplay), John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, & Lee Unkrich (story) (Pixar/Disney)

ANDRE NORTON AWARD

WINNER: I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday; Harper)
Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
White Cat, Holly Black (McElderry)
Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press; Scholastic UK)
Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, Barry Deutsch (Amulet)
The Boy from Ilysies, Pearl North (Tor Teen)
A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner (Greenwillow)
Behemoth, Scott Westerfield (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)

THE SOLSTICE AWARD (for impact on the field)

WINNER: Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, JR.
WINNER: Michael Whelan

SERVICE TO SFWA

WINNER: John E. Johnston III

1. Kim Richards Gilchrist

Saturday May 21, 2011 10:09pm EDT

Congratulations to all the winners! Thank you to SWFA for bringing them to us.

2. toryx

VIEW ALL BY | Saturday May 21, 2011 10:42pm EDT

I'm really happy that Connie Wilson won for Best Novel. Congratulations to her and all the winners!

3. brentus

VIEW ALL BY | Saturday May 21, 2011 11:03pm EDT

Congratulations to the nominees and winners! I'm really happy about Blackout /All Clear, Inception, and I Shall Wear Midnight; I would have picked all of those. I haven't read much in the shorter fiction categories so I can't comment on those.

4. BookGoblin

VIEW ALL BY | Saturday May 21, 2011 11:16pm EDT

Congratulations to all the winners!

I'm more surprised that "Ponies" won than I was that it was nominated. Not that it doesn't deserve awards, it was a chilling story that left me uncomfortable and a bit shaken, which is a marvelous accomplishment for fiction, but it didn't feel particularly "sci-fi" as I preconcieved my notion of science fiction.

Granted, life sized magical ponies with cotton candy blood are clearly fictional and violate our understanding of science, but it felt more like a horror story than a sci-fi story in my mind. A really REALLY good horror story.

Thankfully, the voters for the Nebula didn't share my limited vision of what sci-fi was, and gave the award to a truly wonderful piece of work.

5. jec81

VIEW ALL BY | Saturday May 21, 2011 11:28pm EDT

i am really not pleased with the willis victory, but i am apparently the only one who is mystified by her popularity. i think i'd like her books if they were each 250 pages shorter.

6. Laura S.

Sunday May 22, 2011 12:42am EDT

@ jec81 She writes wonderful short stories and novellas as well (Fire Watch, Inside Job, Remake, and Lincoln's Dreams are all great shorter pieces, and Fire Watch is published with a collection of her short stories), so maybe you can test out that theory. :)

7. Nicholas Whyte

VIEW ALL BY | Sunday May 22, 2011 12:59am EDT

Congratulations to the winners, especially Sir Terry, and Rachel Swirsky who is the first Hugo or Nebula winner to have been born in the 1980s!

8. mcwetboy

VIEW ALL BY | Sunday May 22, 2011 09:25am EDT

@BookGoblin: “a chilling story that left me uncomfortable and a bit shaken” could be applied to most of the nominees in the Best Short Story category, actually. I’m not even sure “Ponies” was the nastiest story on the list.

9. louww

Sunday May 22, 2011 10:10am EDT

Can someone explain to me how Connie Willis won with what was two novels? If Blackout / All-Clear was supposed to be one novel (as it has been treated for the Nebula), why wasn't it published as such? Was the entire manuscript of both books submitted to the publisher at the same time?

10. SF_Fangirl

VIEW ALL BY | Sunday May 22, 2011 12:59pm EDT

I too am bothered by Willis's win because I hate split books with a firery passion. Props for her for getting them published in a short time frame and insisting that it was single story/book, but she needed to convince her publisher of that first.

This sets a bad precedent for duologies and series for future book awards. "I'm not voting for the last book published last year, I'm voting for the entire series up to now."

11. Brad V.

Sunday May 22, 2011 03:27pm EDT

12. brentus

VIEW ALL BY | Sunday May 22, 2011 09:04pm EDT

@ louww - Yes, I believe that the whole thing was a single manuscript but the publisher decided that it should be released in two volumes due to the length. The two volumes are not standalone at all. It's not a series; it's a single two-volume book that is part of a series of 3 books.

13. N. Mamatas

Sunday May 22, 2011 10:10pm EDT

Brad @11. Terry Pratchett has won almost no major awards:
http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/NomLit105.html#4199

Never a Hugo, this is his first Nebula, and the only World Fantasy was a lifetime achievement last year.

(And no, I don't consider the Locus a major award.)

14. James Davis Nicoll

Monday May 23, 2011 12:39am EDT

If Blackout / All-Clear was supposed to be one novel (as it has been treated for the Nebula), why wasn't it published as such?

One factor could be that bookstores are reluctant to stock SF hardcovers over 120K words (IIRC) except from a small handful of Names like Peter Hamilton and David Weber.

15. Pamala Knight

Monday May 23, 2011 10:01am EDT

Congratulations to all the winners AND the nominees. An awesome lineup of talent to choose from and I don't envy the judges.

16. JeffR23

Monday May 23, 2011 12:32pm EDT

N. Mamatas@13:

Pratchett has declined at least one Hugo nomination, though. (Going Postal, 2005)

And even if the Carnagie Medal isn't a major award, surely the O.B.E. is...

17. mcwetboy

VIEW ALL BY | Tuesday May 24, 2011 09:46am EDT

@SF_Fangirl: I’m not sure that the “bad precedent” isn’t already happening now: I rather doubt Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won the Hugo solely on its own merits. Series books win awards all the time. For a split book to win—i.e., a single novel published in two volumes for commercial reasons—both parts would have to have been published in the same period of eligibility. That doesn’t happen often: the only other recent cases I can think of off-hand are Peter Watts’s ßehemoth and Scott Westerfeld’s Risen Empire/Killing of Worlds diptych.

18. MichaelWalsh

VIEW ALL BY | Tuesday May 24, 2011 10:27am EDT

SF_Fangirl wrote: "This sets a bad precedent for duologies and series for future book awards."

A work published serially has always been eligible, but only oncc and only in the year the last part appeared.

Hugo rules state:
"3.2.6: Works appearing in a series are eligible as individual works, but the series as a whole is not eligible. However, a work appearing in a number of parts shall be eligible for the year of the final part."
http://www.wsfs.org/bm/const-2009.htm

19. Adam S.

Thursday May 26, 2011 02:53pm EDT

Kij Johnson, Eric James Stone, and Rachel Swirsky were good choices. But Harlan Ellison (R), Connie Willis, and Terry Pratchett have garnered enough in the way of honors already. The SFWA needs to spread the love further: more surprises next year, please, and fewer of the usual suspects.

I'm not sure I understand this view of things... Aren't awards intended to be representative of the best works over the past year (as viewed by the SFWA, of course)? If that's the case, whether or not an author has won numerous awards in the past should be a moot point. "Spreading the love further" can then be reworded as "watering down the field" since those who've previously won major awards cannot be eligible.

20. gaylesmith5

Thursday May 26, 2011 04:42pm EDT

I am thrilled that Connie Willis won. The books were fantastic.

21. fringecup

Friday May 27, 2011 02:10am EDT

I'm so pleased that Connie Willis won the Nebula Award this year! I had never read anything written by her and tried Blackout because it sounded interesting. Well!! The nights I spent up until 3:00 finding out about the latest antics of Alf and Binnie (two evacuated London children) and the problems dealt with by the various time-travelling students! I thought both books were truly inspired writing - I can hardly wait to read another Connie Willis novel!

22. Pawyilee

Friday May 27, 2011 09:17am EDT

I'm happy “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made,” won, and hope it is the first part of a trilogy.

23. StargateJean

Friday May 27, 2011 10:40am EDT

fringecup, if you thought Blackout and All Clear were good, you really, really need to read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It will blow you away!

24. Merlin Falcon-Gates

Tuesday August 02, 2011 11:49pm EDT

I am dreadfully disappointed that Ted Chiang didn't win for novella. It was by far and away the most interesting treatment of AI's in ages.