Nebulous is Nebumore

Posted on March 4, 2009 by JE

My latest post on the Blog Gate is up, this one a quick snark-around-the-block covering the stories on the final ballot for the Nebula. Because, hey. Why not? (Please don’t tell me why.)

About JE

James Enge is the author of the World-Fantasy-Award-nominated novel Blood of Ambrose (Pyr, April 2009). His latest book is The Wide World's End. His short fiction has appeared in Black Gate, Tales from the Magician's Skull, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and elsewhere.
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4 Responses to Nebulous is Nebumore

  1. scbutler says:
    March 4, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    The nominating and voting processes for all these awards (Nebulas, Hugos, World Fantasy) are all a bit suspect. Could the problem lie with us, our viewpoint changed now that we are behind the curtain?

    Nah.

    • JE says:
      March 4, 2009 at 7:31 pm

      I think the recently discarded nominating system (five recommendations per member over some strangely indefinite period of time) was really weird, and I’m glad they dropped it. One rec per member for some work published the previous year strikes me as sensible. If people want to log-roll (which seems to concern some of the members on the SFFNet boards a lot), I say let them roll. People have a way of doing what they want to do.

      The major structural problem with the awards may be that they assume a lively magazine market which is still limited enough in size for significant numbers of people to have a good acquaintance with most of it. That’s not true anymore and it’s never going to be true again. So I suspect people will continue to find the short fiction awards problematic from now on.

      • scbutler says:
        March 4, 2009 at 11:58 pm

        There’s also the self-selecting phenomenon due to the small size of the voting communities. I’ve heard that you can make the Campbell short list with less than 20 nominations.

        • JE says:
          March 5, 2009 at 6:12 pm

          I’m sure the active (as opposed to the merely dues-paying) membership is kept small by the weirdly exclusive and fragmented online presence of SFWA. There’s supposed to be a new design on the way. But I’m getting a weird handwriting-on-the-wall vibe from the SFFNet newsgroups.

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