Finalists for the 59th Nebula Awards
March 14, 2024 9:19 PM   Subscribe

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has announced the finalists for the Nebula Awards.

Most finalists for Novelette are available online: All finalists for Short Story are available online: Finalists for Novel: Finalists for Novella: Finalists for the Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction: Finalists for Game Writing:
  • The Bread Must Rise, Stewart C Baker, James Beamon (Choice of Games) -- Steam / Website
  • Alan Wake II, Sam Lake, Clay Murphy, Tyler Burton Smith, Sinikka Annala (Remedy Entertainment, Epic Games Publishing) -- Epic
  • Ninefox Gambit: Machineries of Empire Roleplaying Game, Yoon Ha Lee, Marie Brennan (Android) -- Website / Author's website / Yoon Ha Lee previously on Metafilter, including relevant stories
  • Dredge, Joel Mason (Black Salt Games, Team 17) -- Steam / Website / previously on Metafilter
  • Chants of Sennaar, Julien Moya, Thomas Panuel (Rundisc, Focus Entertainment) -- Steam / Website / previously on Metafilter
  • Baldur's Gate 3, Adam Smith, Adrienne Law, Baudelaire Welch, Chrystal Ding, Ella McConnell, Ine Van Hamme, Jan Van Dosselaer, John Corocran, Kevin VanOrd, Lawrence Schick, Martin Docherty, Rachel Quirke, Ruairí Moore, Sarah Baylus, Stephen Rooney, Swen Vincke (Larian Studios) -- Steam / Website / previouslies on Metafilter
posted by Wobbuffet (41 comments total) 50 users marked this as a favorite
 
Sure, it's not like I wanted to keep reading my book. :)
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:18 PM on March 14 [8 favorites]


Oh, glee, Chants of Sennar is on the list! Such a great story.
posted by Callisto Prime at 10:34 PM on March 14 [1 favorite]


Oh, wow, I left out the TV/film category: Nimona, The Last of Us ("Long, Long Time"), Barbie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and The Boy and the Heron.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:18 PM on March 14 [6 favorites]


Author Martha Wells has graciously declined her nomination as a novel finalist this year for System Collapse published by Tordotcom. In 2022, Wells also declined a nomination for novella and felt that the Murderbot Diaries series has already received incredible praise from her industry peers and wanted to open the floor to highlight other works within the community.

I was wondering why I didn't see it on the list.
posted by Avelwood at 1:24 AM on March 15 [30 favorites]


Classy move by Wells.

I'm once again struck, post-Sad Puppies, at how few white men there are on these shortlists. While it doesn't make up for decades of discrimination, it's pleasing to see that other groups are being recognised. And that the Puppies lost, so so badly.

Now, off to read some of those links.
posted by Pink Frost at 1:58 AM on March 15 [13 favorites]


Thank you for this post!

I'm about halfway through The Saint of Bright Doors. I've been a fan of Chandrasekera's work since 2016 because I read "Applied Cenotaphics In The Long, Long Longitudes" and it instantly became one of my favorite SF stories. Not only is it a great story, but how can you not like saying the title? It feels so luxurious and soothing in the mouth.

I think this is the first time that I've really followed someone's work from relative obscurity to relative fame and I have to admit, I'm surprised by how much press the book has been getting because I have an instinct for things no one else likes. I was nervous when I saw that there was a novel coming out, because what if it wasn't that good? Then I'd feel vaguely demoralized and either have to just be disappointed or try to make the best of it. I was very relieved to start reading it and find it to be reassuringly good.

It feels like there's been a shift in tastemakers' taste such that books I like no longer sink like rocks. So far, Bright Doors reminds me a bit of the contemporary passages in The Devourers - Fetter's unease and alienation in the city reminds me a bit of Alok's, and the tones seem to chime. And seriously, no one in my immediate milieu except for one friend with immaculate taste recognizes how good The Devourers is. Maybe it's just that both characters are sort of mopey and easy to identify with, of course. (If you like Bright Doors and also suffer from this kind of sink-like-a-rock syndrome, you might want to check out Aqueduct Press - they haven't published anything that reminds me of this book, but they have published a lot of interesting odd stuff that you'll read and then never ever meet anyone else who has ever read it, as if it had just dropped in from a parallel timeline.)

Further, it strikes me that this novel (and several others I've really liked lately) gets past the thing I hate in so much "literary" SF, where in the name of importing "psychological depth" the characters all become banal suburban liberals at the apocalypse and it's just a marriage-failure/parenting anxieties/muted-middle-class-emotions novel but with a plague or environmental collapse. The characterization here is strong and real and detailed, but even though there's, like, dating and some of the normal appurtenances of contemporary life, the people feel like new types of people appropriate to the setting.

I think it's really good! I haven't read any of the other nominees - still backlogged on my SFF because the pandemic totally cut off my ability to read anything except novels written before about 1970 until recently - but it's certainly Nebula-award-worthy.

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon has been on my list for a while.

I read Thornhedge and it was nice and charming. I like T Kingfisher but their work seems so light to me - it's hard for me to really understand how to weigh it against good quality but more serious and ambitious work. I guess I'd say that if you like elements of Sherri Tepper but are put off by the proto-terfism and extremely judgemental stuff, you'd probably like Thornhedge.

There's a lot of good stuff out right now, and a lot of new kinds of good stuff getting more press. I haven't felt this excited about the general milieu since I think about 2004, when I read both The Scar and Dark Matter: Reading The Bones and they both felt kind of watershed-y.

~~
On a related note, it's amazing how many of the recent SFF novels I've read turn out to end with revolutions or attempts at revolution, and not in the metaphorical sense either. History says w-w-w-w-watch out, I guess.
posted by Frowner at 2:03 AM on March 15 [11 favorites]


Thanks for the post.
The Terraformers is a fun read, but also very eyes wide open about real estate developers. There should be more books with talking moose, Whistle really adds zest.
posted by unearthed at 2:10 AM on March 15 [4 favorites]


"Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont" by P.A. Cornel is phenomenal.
Disclosure: we're friends, but it's still phenomenal.
posted by signal at 4:27 AM on March 15 [4 favorites]


Oh good, as if my TBR pile wasn’t already threatening to teeter over and crush me.

I tried “Witch King” but just could not get into it. A rare DNF for me.
posted by synecdoche at 5:46 AM on March 15 [3 favorites]


To Shape A Dragon's Breath is so fun in a storytelling way. For a while it seems nothing happens, bit the stories within the story really demonstrate this is a reflection of First Nations storytelling, and I really recalled some volumes of Ojibwe tales I read as a kid. Plus the world building is So Ambitious and mostly pulls it off (this is "Vikings never left North America plus there are no Christians and dragons do magocal chemistry") and the food descriptions!
posted by I claim sanctuary at 5:47 AM on March 15 [4 favorites]


I've read the Hugo awards novel nominees for the last few years. Now that the kids are bigger and I have some time over for reading again, maybe I should try and get through the Nebula nominees as well? This way I've read quite a few books that I wouldn't otherwise pick out of a bookshelf, and many of them have been excellent.
posted by Harald74 at 5:58 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]


Translation State is another great read on gender, society, and choice from Ann Lecke.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 6:00 AM on March 15 [7 favorites]


The Crane Husband has been sitting on my kid’s nightstand for months now. If he isn’t going to read it, maybe I should. I bought it because he had enjoyed prior novels from Kelly Barnhill. Bought the first book I saw from her because she’s in our neighborhood, bought the rest because she’s a great writer.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:29 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]


Translation State is another great read on gender, society, and choice from Ann Leckie

The best book I've read this year, hands down. I immediately had to re-read the Ancillary ______ series.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:33 AM on March 15 [6 favorites]


And yeah, it's very clear how much the Sad Puppies were the last bark of "sff so white and male". Zero white males for Best Novel, one white guy in all the other non-game categories (plus one Brazilian guy, I'm not qualified to comment if he counts as white in Brazil because it gets complicated). I suspect the Hugo noms will be similar. Diverse storytelling has well and truly won.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 7:04 AM on March 15 [3 favorites]


I also think it's a change in fandom and SFnal expectations. What I don't really see on this list is hard SF (or Golden Age-ish SF even). It's not that literally only white men write hard science fiction, but the specific history of the subgenre meant that it was mostly by and for white straight men in wealthy countries, and reflected those experiences and viewpoints.

I feel like through the nineties/early 2000s all kinds of things developed new fandoms, leading to, proportionally, a lot more interest in soft/social sciences/lyrical/etc science fiction - a lot more people are now aware that science fiction is interesting. (Snowball effect in re Ursula Le Guin's work, development of YA fantasy, snowball effect of Octavia Butler fandom, the long slow struggles to publish more diverse work through the nineties/early 2000s really paying off, etc. I really think Butler is a key figure here - awareness of her work seemed to burst onto the scene after her death and had all kinds of powerful effects. I wish she was still alive; 2006 was before I was super plugged in to the SF internet and I read about her death in a fanzine. I still remember the very evening.)

I wouldn't be surprised if, as with space opera, there's a bunch of neo-hard-science fiction in the future which takes into account new fandoms and new potentials.

Also video games and anime are big deals; when you're dealing with people under about 35, even the straightest whitest cisest malest fan on the block grew up seeing different types of SFF than were widely available when, eg, I was growing up. Sad Puppies and chuds aside, I think it's pretty easy for white male fans to read and enjoy The Water Outlaws or The Terraformers or Murderbot. That doesn't mean the world is fair and all men glad and wise but I think that fandom is just foundationally in a better place than it was twenty or thirty years ago.

~~
As with pop music and TV, the heights may not be higher now but the floor has definitely been raised - it's not so much that the world-beating novels of today are better than the world-beating novels of yesteryear, but the standard "good enough" novel is a lot better than it used to be.
posted by Frowner at 7:58 AM on March 15 [8 favorites]


games and cinematic writing still has a long way to go when it comes to not just having cisgender white male names dominate the entire category. it's not what the Nebula is about but I am curious to know what the search/inclusion criteria were, if it's handled by a different committee, and if it might simply be a reflection of the landscape - for my money, I'd think that a much broader criteria inclusive of indie games, short films, etc could really work towards fixing the wight infestation
posted by paimapi at 7:59 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]


Thank you so much Wobbuffet for this post! As a lifelong Scifi fan who doesn't follow the genre as much anymore, I can't wait to dive into some of these stories.

It's interesting to look at the Scifi/Fantasy best seller lists to see how different they are from the above. That Amazon list is almost entirely filled with only three authors: Frank Herbert (because of Dune 2 just being released, of course) and then Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, authors of big multi-volume fantasy. Is this because there is always a huge waiting audience for that particular subgenre? Has fantasy overtaken scifi for most of the reading public? Or maybe it was always thus, ever since Lord of the Rings?
posted by gwint at 8:23 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]


I have to say that that I'm startled to see Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon on the list. It soured a strong start with quite a lot of misogyny.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:26 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]


The Sound of Children screaming is both excellent and terrible.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 8:28 AM on March 15 [3 favorites]


Is this because there is always a huge waiting audience for that particular subgenre? Has fantasy overtaken scifi for most of the reading public? Or maybe it was always thus, ever since Lord of the Rings?

It's that a lot of people who aren't really SFF fans per se read the occasional SFF novel if it grabs them or their friends are reading it. Similarly, I've met a large number of people who have no interest in SFF in general who bought Samuel Delany's Dhalgren in the seventies because it made a big splash. Some of them actually succeeded in reading it even though it's a challenge, and I know for I have met them.

Similarly, there are a lot of big books that "everyone" in fandom reads and that get awards because they're pretty good and widely read, even though on technical points a small press/much less well-known book might be better-written but its approach or subject doesn't grab most people the same way. (With the broadening of fandom, I think there's a lot more space for those small but outstanding books, just because with a bigger fandom, the 5% of readers who will fall in love with your book is a much larger absolute number. )

Mainly, the more universal the readership pool, the more the books will usually approach generic bestsellerdom - that doesn't mean they're bad books, it just means that they hit a lot of beats that work for many, many people across many, many genres.

I think that as long as there have been bestseller lists, there has always been fantastic fiction and scientific-future fiction (even if not exactly as we understand these genres today) that sells massively - think HG Wells or ghost stories or gothic novels or 19th century utopias. These grab people due to novelty value, story and maybe ideas, but they don't necessarily turn people into genre fans, because what people like may or may not be the genre itself.
posted by Frowner at 8:55 AM on March 15 [5 favorites]


I'm not familiar with any of the works nominated (I've been mostly out of SFF for a long while), so I look forward to exploring this.

One general question for those who are, in fact, familiar with the science fiction field: Were there works this year by cis white men that should've received nominations? Or is it that, the fig leaf of privilege ripped away, the emperor truly has no clothes? I'm very curious about this across creative fields, as there is a welcome tide of diversity I've seen rising in other fields, such as music, as well.
posted by the sobsister at 8:57 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]


That's not a fair question at all.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:26 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]


As an indirect answer about what other titles are being recognized, Hugo Book Club's recommendation list has a lot of overlap with the Nebula finalists. Locus's recommended reading list puts first novels in a separate category, so SF and Fantasy wind up weighted toward familiar names. Both Locus and File770 track different awards worth looking at.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:33 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]


That's not a fair question at all.

Could you explain why?
posted by the sobsister at 9:55 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]


I guess the closest I've read to hard SF lately is Adrian Tchaikovsky. I haven't caught up with the series he finished last year (there are too many good books!) but both Children of Time and Elder Race were mind-blowing in that best hard SF tradition. Children of Time won the best series Hugo last year and Elder Race got a novella nomination the year before, plus he's won a bunch of UK awards, so it's not impossible for a well-written book to get noticed in current fandom.

Andy Weir's latest also got a Hugo novel nomination, Scalzi pops up regularly (last year's Locus Best SF novel, for example), James S.A. Corey is two white guys. Male written hard SF is still out there, it just has to compete with stuff like Furious Heaven (Alexander the Great as epic Dune-style SF by Kate Elliott), so it's no longer the default or the only game in town.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:29 AM on March 15 [7 favorites]


i claim sanctuary: i concur with you on almost everything in your above post, but neither Scalzi nor Corey is writing "hard SF". Also, plenty of non-men also write "hard SF". Linda Nagata and Nancy Kress are at least in the ballpark of what most people mean when they say the phrase!

(Myself, i think "hard" vs "soft" SF is inherently a problematic distinction, for all sorts of reasons including how bad most of the "hard SF" writers have historically been at sciences like biology and sociology.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 11:07 AM on March 15 [5 favorites]


I admit I wasn't going by personal experience - I bounced off all of the above save Tchaikovsky (and Elliot) pretty hard. It takes all kinds, and I've always preferred Herbert, Lem and Simak to Asimov and Heinlein. Not my home subgenre at all.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:12 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]


Damn straight that episode of The Last Of Us got nominated.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:15 PM on March 15 [2 favorites]


I LOVED the Oakmont story and Tantie Merle. An adorable robot who learns to knit and crochet while trying to figure out how to not get eaten by a goat? LOVE IT.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:19 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]


I just want to say thanks for including the Story Graph links! This makes building my to-read list so much easier.
posted by misskaz at 4:21 PM on March 15 [2 favorites]


I'm once again struck, post-Sad Puppies, at how few white men there are on these shortlists. While it doesn't make up for decades of discrimination, it's pleasing to see that other groups are being recognised. And that the Puppies lost, so so badly.

Just a personal anecdote, several years ago someone (or maybe someones) here on mefi were talking about spending a year reading only women authors. I thought it sounded cool so after that spent more time specifically prioritizing non white-male writers. Somewhere along the line I stopped actively doing this, but when I check out my reading list today it is much, much more diverse than it was like ten years ago. Not sure if that exercise changed my approach, or if maybe just the entire landscape has changed, but my reading habits are definitely changed since back then.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:33 PM on March 15 [4 favorites]


It's just clear that as publishing gets at least somewhat more representative, the percentage of straight cis white male SFF writers is going to go down, because when you compare the percentage of humans who are straight white cis men to the percentage of humans who are Not, straight white cis men are a minority (just as when you compare, eg, queer cis white people to everyone else who is not a queer cis white person, or French people to everyone who is not a French person, etc).

And given that writing talent is pretty ubiquitous, unless you are really truly attached to the perspectives that only straight white cis men have, you're going to end up reading more non straight white cis men over time. You don't even need to get goal-oriented about it, you just need to like to read SFF - you'd need to be ideologically committed indeed to avoid The Three Body Problem and Murderbot and Too Like the Lightning and A Master of Djinn and Babel and all the other widely-read, accessible, various major SF by people who are not straight white men.

It seems pretty clear to me that fandom expansion/mass SFification really solidifies around 2010-2012 - so many cultural factors really start to pay off, including the influence of Janelle Monae and other popularizers of Afrofuturism. Looking back, it was around then where I stopped even trying to keep up with all the work I could find by writers of color, because there was more than I could realistically read. When I was younger, I used to read any SFF by writers of color that I could find, because there was so little of it in English/in the US and I wanted to keep up on everything.

There's still plenty of market for all the stuff people were enjoying in 2005 - it's just that there's a lot more market than that too.

~~~
One thing I wonder about: If we ever really get large scale systematic translation of Chinese SF, how is that going to affect the sort of SFnal ecology? There are a lot of Chinese SF fans, and in theory I think a book could legit be a huge success in China, largely unread in the rest of the world and still have a bigger audience than anything else. And of course, where there are a lot of fans, there are a lot of writers - it could well be that if society doesn't fall apart and the world doesn't burn and we don't have more big stupid wars and we can organize enough skilled translation, we could all be reading a very high volume of Chinese SF in twenty years. That would be pretty neat - when I think of my one puny eighties-ish secondhand English language Chinese SF collection that I looked and looked to find back when I was in college!
posted by Frowner at 6:00 PM on March 15 [4 favorites]


And one other thought - I'd say that I've been paying fairly sustained attention to science fiction as a genre since about 1995, and there have been three periods where I just felt like maybe this was it, I was done with SFF, I couldn't find anything I really liked. Even as recently as a year or two ago, I was really not feeling it, and that was totally from a standpoint of "I'm glad that people I agree with are getting published, but it feels like everything is anodyne cozies and the suburbs-go-to-the-apocalypse, something something millennials are killing SFF"...and now in the last six or seven months I've read three or four books I love and have iron-clad recommendations for more books I'm pretty sure I'll love, so millennials did not kill the field by publishing some books I did not enjoy.

It amazes me that it was so easy to feel grumpily like there was nothing in particular good happening and then whoops just months down the road I have more lined up to read than I can possibly get to again. When we're operating in good faith and not just secretly chuds, I think it's pretty helpful to bear in mind that even if we think the Hugos/Nebulas/etc suck this year or whatever that doesn't really mean much SF as a genre, etc.
posted by Frowner at 6:20 PM on March 15 [6 favorites]


Not sure if that exercise changed my approach, or if maybe just the entire landscape has changed, but my reading habits are definitely changed since back then.

Just watched a Youtube video today that may shed light...it's more about "why people buy more books than they read", but it has some interesting things to say about "BookTok" and their combined powers of suggestion - and the fact that BookTok seems to find more books by marginalized authors.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:38 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]


To Shape A Dragon's Breath is really, really good.

Ditto almost everything by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
posted by Gadarene at 8:50 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]


My friend Rachael had me beta read "The Sound of Children Screaming." I told her at the time that she was going to win an award for it.

Called it.

:coolguysunglasses:
posted by Scattercat at 9:41 PM on March 15 [9 favorites]


Due to an unshambling mob of the unread, I don’t pick up much shiny new SFF, but I’ll happpily get Mammoth at the Gates.

I did read Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race and liked it well enough, but it was a bit of a strain because the anthropology of the future seemed like it was from the 19th, or early 20th, century.
posted by house-goblin at 12:21 AM on March 16 [1 favorite]


Good gods, The Terraformers was nominated for an award? This book was so bad on every level—prose, plot, world-building, especially character—that my jaw was dropped that it had been published at all. I had to actually write down on a slip of paper which characters were which, because they were so undifferentiated I couldn't tell them apart. It had some classic how-not-to-write "action" sequences... I made myself finish it because it was such a trainwreck that it made Becky Chambers seem readable. I'm... well, I'm not often gobsmacked anymore.

Translation State was pretty good, though I did have to ask myself a couple of times whether it would have made a lot of sense had I not read the original trilogy. Witch King read like the classic "people love my other books, here's this one I never managed to get published back when". Now I need to read the others.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:25 AM on March 17


The Terraformers was one of my favorite books of the year—the decade actually. I especially dug the amazing world building, characters, the politics, and the hot cat-on-train action.
posted by signal at 12:22 PM on March 17 [3 favorites]


Liked it so much I voted for it, in fact.
posted by signal at 2:00 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]


« Older They don't make them like they used to   |   Magnets for fantasists, plutocrats, oddballs, and... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments