The Nebulas, they are a-changing

The Nebula Awards, the annual award given by SF/F authors to their peers for best works in the field, have undergone some tweaking.

The SFWA Livejournal has the update here:

Some of the key changes include: the elimination of rolling eligibility and a return to the calender year system, the elimination of the script category as a Nebula Award, and a new, streamlined process for getting to the Final Ballot.

I commend them for the change. You can see the potential weirdness of the rolling eligibility rule (originally created to help authors with work published late in the calendar year feel that the award was fairer to them) starkly highlighted this year: of the 10 novels nominated for the 2008 Nebulas, which will be presented in April 2009, only 1 single novel was published in 2008: Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. The others (as wonderful as the books may be), are all middle-to-late 2007 novels.

You get a situation where a novel published in mid 2007 is getting noticed in mid 2009, 2 calendar years later, for excellence. It’s no wonder that while writers are justifiably proud of their achievement, that readers in the field may feel less interested in paying attention to the awards lists as they feel the Nebulas are often out of date. The very first comment on the Nebula Awards website was someone asking why all the novels were 2007 ones.

The pattern holds throughout the award’s preliminary ballot. Novellas, 2 of the 4 are 2007, so it’s at least balanced. Novelettes, 4 of 9 are 2008, so that category favors 2007 pieces again. Of short stories, 2 of *14* are 2008 pieces.

I’ve seen some writers who’re published in late 2008 getting upset already. But with a piece of my own in late 2008, I have to say it’s still a very good step for the organization. I have to raise the glass for SFWA trying something new, which is always scary for an organization. I think bringing the Nebulas to a calendar year system will make them something to pay attention to as a reading list for people looking to find the field’s interesting work.

Kudos.

Filed under the topic Journal on January 15th 2009 at 1:52 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.