Hello all! I have 10 eBook copies of the Nebula Awards Showcase that I'd love to give away. Retweet to enter! Only open to USA citizens not residing in WA, due to SFWA's status as a nonprofit (sorry!). I will choose winners at random on Friday, Jan 8th, at 7PM CST. pic.twitter.com/JjFcTeRvH0

— Mary Robinette Kowal@🏡 (@MaryRobinette) January 4, 2021

Click on the image to go to Twitter.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA) is pleased to announce that Nalo Hopkinson has been named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master for her contributions to the literature of science fiction and fantasy.

The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award recognizes “lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.” Hopkinson joins the Grand Master ranks alongside such legends as C. J. Cherryh, Peter S. Beagle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Ray Bradbury, and Joe Haldeman. The award will be presented at the 56th Annual Nebula Conference and Awards Ceremony, held online the weekend of June 4–6, 2021.

Hopkinson’s first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, was published as the winner of the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest in 1998 and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. She has published five additional novels, including the Andre Norton Award–winning Sister Mine, and three collections of her short fiction.

Hopkinson has also proven herself an adept editor, guest-editing an issue of Lightspeed Magazine and editing five anthologies, including Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction and So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. Hopkinson has also won the British Fantasy Award, the Aurora Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and the Sunburst Award. She has taught at Clarion East, Clarion West, and Clarion South and is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal adds:

“I have loved Nalo Hopkinson’s work since 1999 when I discovered her through the short story “Precious” in a Datlow/Windling anthology Silver Birch, Blood Moon. Each new piece continues to delight me and stretch me as a reader and makes me bolder as a writer.

“Naming Nalo as Grand Master recognizes not only her phenomenal writing but also her work as an educator who has shaped so many of the rising stars of modern SFF.”

The 56th Nebula Awards®  will be presented during the annual SFWA Nebula Conference, which will run June 4-6, 2021. The conference features seminars and panel discussions on the craft and business of writing, SFWA’s annual business meeting, and receptions. Due to COVID-19 concerns, this will be the second virtual Nebula Conference. Registration is available for purchase for $125 at events.sfwa.org.

Were you one of the lucky passengers that got to experience SFWA’s first virtual convention? Did you miss out only to scroll through social media and wish you had attended?

We have some exciting news!

The SFWA Airship Nebula will be returning in June 2021, and we’d love if you could join us. Due to the ongoing pandemic and in the interests of safety of all our attendees, members, staff and their families, we have decided to plan another fully virtual event. We completely understand that this news may be bittersweet. Many of us miss seeing our friends and colleagues in person. We do hope to once again host a hybrid event should the situation improve in the future.

For now though, we’d love if you could embark on another journey in our truly fantastic virtual airship. The best thing about an all-online conference is that you can join from anywhere in the universe!

Captaining the ship this year, SFWA is also very pleased to announce that L.D. Lewis is joining the Nebula Conference team.

Lewis is an award-winning SF/F writer and editor, and serves as a founding creator, Art Director, and Project Manager for the World Fantasy Award-winning and Hugo Award-nominated FIYAH Literary Magazine. She primarily writes stories of ordinary Black women and femmes with extraordinary powers in equally extraordinary worlds.

Coming off the success of helming FIYAHCON last month, L.D. will be acting as the project manager for all of the exciting year-round events associated with the Nebula Conference. We hope you join us in welcoming L.D. aboard.

With smaller events leading up to our main conference, the team is working on elevating our content and offerings again this year, and celebrating the best that science fiction and fantasy have to offer with our annual Nebula Awards ceremony.

So, please join us for another weekend full of professional development, workshops, and opportunities to network in one of the coolest virtual spaces there is. There will be more dance parties, karaoke, and social meet-ups around special interests. We’ll also be bringing back our conference-specific mentorship program and office hours.

We had it all last year, and we’ll be doing it all again in 2021.

Cost: $125.00

Dates: June 4th – 6th, 2021

Where: Entirely Online

Register: events.sfwa.org

We’ll be announcing so many great things in the coming months and we hope you’ll join us for what will be another amazing weekend among the stars.

Important Note: If you are registering for the 2021 Nebula Conference Online only, you will not have access to the remaining 2020 events. We have lowered the price if you’d like to still get involved and attend! Please visit events.sfwa.org for more information on how to register for 2020 content. For 2021 registrants, your access will begin in May.

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Nebula Awards Showcase 54
Edited by Nibedita Sen

The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, selected by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America!

The latest volume of the prestigious anthology series, published annually across six decades! The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published yearly since 1966, reprinting winning and nominated stories of the Nebula Awards, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). This year’s editor is Nibedita Sen, a Hugo, Nebula, and Astounding Award-nominated writer and editor. This year’s Nebula Award winners include Mary Robinette Kowal, Aliette de Bodard, Brooke Bolander, and Phenderson Djèlí Clark.

Stories and Excerpts by:

Mary Robinette Kowal
Aliette de Bodard
Brooke Bolander
Phenderson Djèlí Clark
José Pablo Iriarte
Lawrence M. Schoen
Andy Duncan
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and R.R. Virdi
Tina Connolly
Alix E. Harrow
Sarah Pinsker
A. T. Greenblatt

Table of Contents:

Introduction by Nibedita Sen

“It’s Dangerous to Go Alone” by Kate Dollarhyde

“Into the Spider-verse: A Classic Origin Story in Bold New Color” by Brandon O’Brien

“The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” by P. Djèlí Clark

“Interview for the End of the World” by Rhett C. Bruno

“And Yet” by A. T. Greenblatt

“A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow

“The Court Magician” by Sarah Pinsker

“The Only Harmless Great Thing” by Brooke Bolander

“The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections” by Tina Connolly

“An Agent of Utopia” by Andy Duncan

“The Substance of My Lives, The Accidents of Our Births” by José Pablo Iriarte

“The Rule of Three” by Lawrence M. Schoen

“Messenger” by R.R. Virdi & Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Excerpt: “The Tea Master and the Detective” by Aliette de Bodard

Excerpt: “Fire Ant” by Jonathan P. Brazee

Excerpt: “The Black God’s Drums” by P. Djèlí Clark

Excerpt: “Alice Payne Arrives” by Kate Heartfield

Excerpt: “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach” by Kelly Robson

Excerpt: “Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries” by Martha Wells

Excerpt: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

Biographies

We hope everyone had a great time getting your haunt on at last night’s SFWA Halloween Costume Party!! This is a reminder of our programming items scheduled for November.

Writing Dates – Writing dates take place every Sunday afternoon at 2:00pm Pacific Time. Here are our upcoming hosts:

•  TODAY, 11/1: Curtis C. Chen

•  11/8: Cecilia Tan

•  11/15: No Host

•  11/22: No Host

•  11/29: Christine Taylor-Butler

•  12/6: S.B. Divya

Author bios are available on the event website for each individual writing date on the schedule. Never fear! On weeks when there is no specific host for the writing date, our Flight Crew of volunteers will step in and lead the session. They make for great wingmen, we promise. Make sure to launch onto the Airship Nebula from the event schedule.

Narrative Worlds – Our first episode of Narrative Worlds was a great success! The video is now available for viewing on YouTube here. Last month’s topic was “How Much Worldbuilding is Too Much? How Little is Too Little?” and the guest was Tade Thompson.

Who will Kate Elliott host for her next deep-dive into worldbuilding? Zen Cho!

On Sunday, November 15 at 1:00pm Pacific Time, Kate and Zen will discuss “Prose Style as Worldbuilding.” We hope you’ll join us live via the Nebula event page here. As with all Narrative Worlds episodes, the recording will be made free for public viewing on YouTube a week later.

Zen Cho is the author of the Sorcerer to the Crown novels and a novella, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, as well as the short story collection Spirits Abroad. She is a Hugo, Crawford, and British Fantasy Award winner, and a finalist for the Locus and Astounding Awards.

Archive

Have you caught up on all the panels and presentations available in the 2020 Nebula Conference Online archive? With over 10,001 views from 34 countries so far, a lot of you have taken advantage of those replays! The archive remains open to all conference members through April 2021. Simply head here and click on the content you missed or you’d like to rewatch. How about “Planetology for Writers” or “The Small Press Experience: How to Get What You Want”?

The Bulletin Issue #215 Released

The next issue of The Bulletin, SFWA’s quarterly magazine, is now available for Nebula Conference members to download in PDF format! Issue #215 features our first guest editor: L.D. Lewis, who is FIYAH magazine’s art director, and FIYAHCON’s director. The cover art is “Merman” by Paul Kellam, and the issue includes articles from authors Tochi Onyebuchi, Shiv Ramdas, Arkady Martine, Karintha Parker, Henry Lien, and Evan Winter.

Download your copy from the Nebula event website here!

NaNoWriMo Cheering Section

Courtesy of NaNoWriMo

Recognizing that a great many of our Nebula attendees take part in the National Novel Writing Month, we want to give those of you participating a little extra motivation. Here are a few ways we plan to offer support, beginning November 1 and running through the month.

• A dedicated channel on the Nebula Slack. You can join the Nebula Slack by following this link. Once there, choose to add the #nanowrimo channel and take part in cheering each other on.
• Twitter check-ins. The SFWA Twitter account will tweet a 9:00 am Eastern Time reminder to get those words down every day. At 6:00 pm ET and 9:00 pm ET, we’ll also ask folks to share their daily word counts so we can celebrate our progress together or encourage each other to keep going.
• Surprise Motivators! NaNoWriMo offers its own rewards, of course, and completing a manuscript draft is the biggest prize of all. But who couldn’t use an extra carrot now and then? SFWA will be tweeting encouragement for Nebula attendees participating in NaNoWriMo. Simply register here, and you may become the target of special support from our cheer squad, while supplies last!
• Pep talks. Check the SFWA Twitter account occasionally for pep talks and tips from SFWA members who’ve won NaNoWriMo in years past

Thank you for your support for the 2020 Nebula Conference Online!

Dear 2020 Nebula Conference Online Attendee,

We are pleased to announce a new webinar series as part of your registration for the ongoing 2020 SFWA Nebula Conference Online!

On Sunday, October 11, at 1:00 pm Pacific Time, Narrative Worlds will premiere, and you are invited to take part at the Nebula event website: events.sfwa.org. Log in just as you did during the Nebula conference in May, and settle in for a great webinar with host Kate Elliott. Live chat discussion will be rolling along with the vidcast!

This monthly Sunday series will dig into the idea of narrative worlds and the theory and practice of building the worlds in which stories are set. Rather than focusing on a survey of basics like “What elements do you need to create a setting?” your host will discuss a specific single topic in more depth each month with a guest. Topics will include technology, language, power, cosmology, use of details, agriculture, material culture, social space, and more.

The first Narrative Worlds guest will be Tade Thompson! Tade and Kate will discuss How Much Worldbuilding is Too Much? How Little is Too Little? Upcoming guests include Zen Cho, Ken Liu, Nilah Magruder, Aliette de Bodard, Rebecca Roanhorse, and N.K. Jemisin!

A videocast offers a format that can reach as many people as possible. The live vidcast is scheduled to fit a spread of time zones:

6 am Sydney, Australia / 1 pm PT USA / 2 pm MT USA / 3 pm CT USA/ 4 pm ET USA / 5 pm Rio de Janeiro / 8 pm Dakar / 9 pm UK / 10 pm Western Europe

It will also be recorded and available afterward at the event website for viewing at your leisure, or if you were asleep in Australia or Singapore or Mumbai—sorry about that! It’s the fault of the world being round.

The general outline of the one hour videocast will be an introduction, forty minutes of dialogue, and 15 minutes of Q&A, if needed. This is not a class or a workshop. There will probably not be power points or illustrations, unless a guest wants to bring something along to share, and there will likely not be practice exercises on offer, although it’s possible worldbuilding exercises may be suggested now and then.

We hope you will join us, and don’t forget that our weekly Sunday writing dates are also ongoing! Indeed, on 10/11, you can roll right into one after Narrative Worlds premieres—that should be inspirational for you! Here are the next two dates and hosts:

• – October 4: Zoraida Córdova, award-winning author of the Brooklyn Brujas series.
• – October 11: Jeffe Kennedy, award-winning author of the Uncharted Realms and the Twelve Kingdoms series, and a SFWA Board member.
• – October 18: Mary Robinette Kowal, award-winning author of the Lady Astronaut series, and SFWA President.

All Nebula writing dates take place Sundays at 2:00 pm P.T. Upcoming dates for Narrative Worlds are November 15, December 20, January 17, February 21, March 21, and April 18. Mark your calendars!

—

KATE ELLIOTT’s most recent novel is Unconquerable Sun, gender spun Alexander the Great in space. She is best known for her Crown of Stars epic fantasy series, the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alt-history fantasy (with lawyer dinosaurs) Cold Magic, and YA fantasy Court of Fives. Her particular focus is immersive world building and centering women in epic stories of adventure and  transformative cultural change. She lives in Hawaii, where she paddles outrigger canoes and spoils her schnauzer. You can find her online at kateelliott.substack.com and @KateElliottSFF on Twitter.

Elevation, Connection, Celebration

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA, Inc.) is pleased to announce the winners of the 55th Annual SFWA Nebula Awards.

Originally scheduled to take place in Woodland Hills, California, a decision was made to create a virtual conference in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Aboard the virtual flagship zeppelin, The Nebula, on Saturday, May 30, 2020, Toastmaster Aydrea Walden presided over the award ceremony which featured a star-studded lineup of science fiction and fantasy luminaries as presenters.

Novel

✬ A Song for a New Day, Sarah Pinsker (Berkley)

Novella

✬ This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (Saga; Jo Fletcher)

Novelette

✬ Carpe Glitter, Cat Rambo (Meerkat)

Short Story

✬ “Give the Family My Love”, A.T. Greenblatt (Clarkesworld Magazine 2/19)

Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

✬ Good Omens: “Hard Times”, Neil Gaiman (Amazon Studios/BBC Studios)

Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction

✬ Riverland, Fran Wilde (Amulet)

Best Game Writing

✬ The Outer Worlds, Leonard Boyarsky, Kate Dollarhyde, Paul Kirsch, Chris L’Etoile, Daniel McPhee, Carrie Patel, Nitai Poddar, Marc Soskin, Megan Starks (Obsidian Entertainment)

Additional awards and honors presented that evening included the SFWA Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, presented to Lois McMaster Bujold, the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award, presented to both John Picacio and David Gaughran, and the Kevin J. O’Donnell, Jr., Service to SFWA Award, presented to Julia Rios.

Presenters joined virtually from around the country, including Sam Weller, Sarah Pinsker, Rebecca Roanhorse, Lillian Stewart Carl, Greg Bear, George R.R. Martin, Jeffe Kennedy, LeVar Burton, Sarah Gailey, Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, and Charlie Jane Anders. Additionally, Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun addressed the festivities with a message for the Nebula audience.

For a full list of nominees and winners, click here.

About the Nebulas

The Nebula Awards® are voted on, and presented by, full members of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. Founded as the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1965 by Damon Knight, the organization began with a charter membership of 78 writers; it now has more than 2000 members, among them many of the leading writers of science fiction and fantasy.

Since 1965, the Nebula Awards® have been given each year for the best novel, novella, novelette, and short story eligible for that year’s award. The Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation was added in 2000, followed by the Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction in 2005, and the Nebula Award for Best Game Writing in 2018. An anthology including the winning pieces of short fiction and several runners-up is also published every year.

For Immediate Release

May 29, 2020

For More Information

Kevin Lampe (312) 617-7280

kevin@kurthlampe.com

BREAKING NEWS 

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s (SFWA) 2020 Nebula Awards Ceremony will be available in Virtual Reality (VR) for the first time this Saturday, May 30, 2020, at 5 PM PDT/8 PM EDT/midnight UTC. SFWA will welcome their newest Grand Master, Lois McMaster Bujold, and reveal the winners of this year’s Nebula Awards.

“We are excited about exploring VR Events with Oculus and look forward to what the future holds,” said Mary Robinette Kowal, SFWA President.

Please visit https://www.oculus.com/experiences/event/628499264406152/ for details about viewing the ceremony in VR.

About the Nebulas

The Nebula Awards® are voted on, and presented by, full members of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. Founded as the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1965 by Damon Knight, the organization began with a charter membership of 78 writers; it now has more than 2000 members, among them many of the leading writers of science fiction and fantasy.

Since 1965, the Nebula Awards® have been given each year for the best novel, novella, novelette, and short story eligible for that year’s award. The Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation was added in 2000, followed by the Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction in 2005, and the Nebula Award for Best Game Writing in 2018. An anthology including the winning pieces of short fiction and several runners-up is also published every year.