Nebula Awards Showcase 2008

by Ben Bova

  TOMORROW AND TOMORROW…

  In “All Our Yesterdays…” Bud Webster cast a look back on the history of science fiction and fantasy. In “Quo Vadis?” Orson Scott Card surveyed the field’s present situation and direction. Now Mike Resnick looks to the future of the field and finds new opportunities to be explored—and exploited.

  Mike Resnick is the author of more than fifty science fiction novels, close to two hundred stories, and two screenplays, and the editor of almost fifty anthologies. He has won a Nebula, five Hugos, and other major awards in the USA, France, Spain, Poland, Japan, and Croatia. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In his spare time, he reports, he sleeps.

  I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE—AND IT AIN’T GOT A LOT OF DEAD TREES IN IT

  MIKE RESNICK

  Let me start by saying that I love books and magazines. I like the heft and feel of them. I grew up with the printed page. I can’t remember ever having a house where most of the wall space wasn’t covered by overflowing bookshelves. I don’t especially like reading my science fiction off the computer screen.

  But as a science fiction writer—and one who has to pay the bills with his science fiction—it’s my job to look ahead and see what’s coming, and whether I like it or not makes no difference. It is not a matter of Good or Bad, but rather of True or False. And the truth is that we’re not going to be pulping as many forests in the future.

  Twenty years ago, when the Internet was just taking off, just about every established science fiction writer was approached by start-up publishers. The pitch was always the same: give me something for free today and I’ll make you rich tomorrow (or maybe next week, or possibly in seventeen years, or conceivably in…). Every one of them went belly-up.

  Then Omni Online, which certainly had deep pockets (or at least could borrow from Penthouse’s), came along, and suddenly we had a paying market. It lasted long enough for Ellen Datlow to become the very first to win a Hugo for editing an electronic publication. But it didn’t last a lot longer than that.

  Then we had GalaxyOnline.com of sainted memory. My God, we writers loved it! Half a buck a word (if you wrote the minimum; it was a set amount). But it was a loss leader for a film and TV company that never made any films or TV shows, and it was gone within a year.

  Then there was Scifi.com, which paid more than double the going rate of the digests, and lasted long enough to win Ellen Datlow another Hugo for editing another electronic magazine…but it, too, bit the dust.

  So what’s with the title to this article (I hear you ask)? All these places had high hopes and high pay rates, and they all wound up in publishing’s graveyard.

  What can I tell you? The first few settlers who tried to reach the West Coast didn’t make it either.

  But they paved the way for those who came after them.

  The first success story came from an unlikely source: Fictionwise.com, which publishes only reprints. They started out in 2000 with a small handful of science fiction writers—Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, myself, just a few others. And they paid twice as much for a short fiction reprint as the average anthology paid. And we all thought: wow, how long has this been going on? It’s like stealing!

  And we never thought of it again—until later that same year, when the royalty checks came, and we realized that, hey, there are thousands of people out there who, when confronted by trillions of free words of drivel on the Internet, prefer to pay for reprints by known authors.

  That was only eight years ago. These days Fictionwise.com has literally thousands of authors, including such heavyweights as Dan Brown, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and that whole crowd.

  They proved you could sell literally billions of words of electronic reprints, many (in fact, in the beginning, most) of them science fiction. So it was only a matter of time before a major science fiction publisher took a look at the direction the world was heading and decided it was time to go electronic. As I write these words, the pioneer is Baen Books with Jim Baen’s Universe, but I’m sure by the time you read this (maybe a year from now) others will have joined the parade.

  And I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the major houses start publishing novel-length science fiction online as well.

  Will they have any trouble getting writers?

  Not a chance. The online magazines can pay three and four times what the print magazines can pay, and the book publishers can easily offer 30 to 40 percent royalties to the author, rather than the 10 to 12 percent most hardcovers pay and the 8 to 10 percent that usually goes for paperbacks.

  How can this be?

  Easy.

  Let’s take a print magazine. It sells, let us hypothesize, for $5.00, give or take a nickel.

  What does it cost to get that magazine into your hands?

  Well, first of all, the publisher has to buy the stories.

  There’s an office, which means an overhead.

  There’s paper for the magazines to be printed on.

  There are color separations for the covers.

  There is the cost of printing tens of thousands (formerly a couple of hundred thousand) of copies of the magazine.

  There are shipping costs. The subscribers don’t drive to the printing plant to pick their copies up. Neither do the distributors. Neither do the stores.

  There are the distribution costs, both for the national and local distributors. They’re good guys, but they don’t place the magazines in the stores for free.

  There are the stores themselves. If they sell a $5.00 magazine, most of them are going to want $1.75 or thereabouts for their trouble.

  There are warehouse costs for those magazines that are neither sold nor pulped.

  And a month later, every copy has vanished from the newsstands and bookstores, to be replaced by the next month’s issue, and the publisher will never make another cent on that out-of-date issue.

  Now let’s take a look at how these expenses affect an electronic magazine.

  There is no office expense and no overhead, because the editors work out of their houses.

  There are no paper expenses, because the magazine doesn’t appear on paper.

  There are no color separations, because they simply post the artwork right on the screen.

  There are no printing expenses, because the magazine is not printed.

  There are no shipping costs, because the magazine is not shipped.

  There are no national or local distribution costs, because they are not distributed. They’re right there online, and they don’t have to pay anyone to put the magazine in your physical proximity.

  There is no cut for the bookstores, because the magazine is not sold in bookstores. Or newsstands. Or supermarkets. It’s online. You pay the price, you get the magazine, and there are no middlemen. (You might think about that. When you pay $5.00 for a digest magazine, the publisher might wind up with about $1.85 of it—and that’ll be his average only if he sells the entire print run, which never happens, or even comes close to happening these days. You pay $5.00 for an electronic magazine, and the publisher gets $5.00.)

  There are no warehouse costs, because the magazine exists in electronic phosphors, not paper pages. They’ll post the next issue in another month or two, but this one won’t be through earning money, because it will always be available for anyone who wants it.

  Do you begin to see where the print magazines are at a bit of a disadvantage?

  Now it should be clear to you why electronic publishers can outbid the print publishers for the writers they want. The print magazines are paying authors, overhead, color separations, paper, printing, shipping, national distributors, local distributors, bookstores, and warehouses.

  And the electronic publishers? They’re paying…authors.

  Period.

  So of course they can triple or quadruple what the print magazines pay. (I assume we don’t have to go over the whole thing again with books. Just cut to the last sentence: S
o of course they can triple or quadruple the hardcover and paperback royalty rates.)

  Ah, but is there an audience out there in the vast electronic wilderness? After all, buying The Da Vinci Code or The Shining or the Foundation trilogy from Fictionwise.com is one thing, but will computer users go for new science fiction? (The obvious answer is: Certainly they will. An electronic story has already won the Nebula, and another one has just been nominated for a Hugo the same week I am writing this. But those are voters, not masses of buyers, and you want numbers, right?)

  Okay—numbers you want, numbers we got.

  I’m a Luddite, especially in a forward-looking community like science fiction writers and fans. Last summer I didn’t even know what the word “podcast” meant. Then the young man who runs a website called Escape Pod, one of many such sites, bought reprint rights to some of my stories. I didn’t give it another thought until he mentioned, a few months later, that the story of mine he had run most recently had received twenty-two thousand hits in its first month online.

  Twenty-two thousand hits? The issue of the science fiction magazine it had appeared in had only sold 18,500 copies. More people heard my story online (or on their iPods) than read it.

  I was sure it had to be an aberration. So when my next story, which was not a traditional science fiction story, but had been sold to a young adult anthology, came out, I waited two weeks and then asked how it was doing.

  Fourteen thousand hits. In two weeks. For me. Not for Kevin Anderson or Anne McCaffrey or Robert Jordan or someone else who lives on the bestseller list.

  That’s when I knew beyond any doubt that the world was changing, that the readers are still out there in quantity, but they’re not necessarily browsing the bookstores or the newsstands anymore.

  No sea change ever happens smoothly, especially not in as hidebound, old-fashioned, and unimaginative a business as publishing. Some of the start-ups that look good today may be dead by the time you read this. But if so, others will take their place. There are thirty-seven holes in the dike, and traditional publishers have only ten (figurative) fingers.

  Like I said, I still love the feel of a book, the smell of an old pulp, the pleasure I get just from browsing a bookstore.

  But I also can see the future coming at full speed, and I don’t think anything’s going to stop it. Certainly not me. I may not like reading electronic pages, but I’m editing an electronic prozine, and I’m selling to every podcaster I can find, and more than two hundred of my books and stories have been sold as electronic reprints.

  I’m not happy with electronic publishing. I probably never will be. But I’d be a hell of a lot less happy if I was left behind.

  THE ANDRÉ NORTON AWARD

  MAGIC OR MADNESS

  BY JUSTINE LARBALESTIER

  The André Norton Award for Best Young Adult Science Fiction honors the memory of one of the field’s most prolific and most beloved authors, André Norton. Equally adept in science fiction or fantasy, she was a major force in developing both genres for young readers.

  The 2007 André Norton Award winner is Justine Larbalestier, for her novel Magic or Madness. She lives in Sydney and, she says, travels too much. In addition to the Magic or Madness trilogy, Larbalestier has written Ultimate Fairy Book and the nonfiction Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. She has also edited the scholarly anthology Daughter of Earth.

  She writes:

  Magic or Madness arose out of my desperate desire for a quicker way to get between Sydney (where I am from) and New York City (my husband’s home). A way that did not involve twenty-four hours of taxis, airports, and planes. What if, I thought to myself, there were a door between there and here? Which led to other thoughts, like, Would you still get jet lag (or, rather, door lag) as you traveled between the two? Who would make such a door? How? And what kind of a world would have that kind of magic?

  The book (and trilogy—Magic or Madness is the first of three) was also shaped by my exasperation with a certain kind of fantasy novel. The kind that usually has a scene like this:

  “I am in trouble!” quoth the hero. “Fortunately I have a magic pill of trouble-destroying properties! I will swallow it! All will be well.”

  I couldn’t swallow it. I have never been able to swallow it. I wanted to write about a world where magic wasn’t there to fix every problem the hero (or author) encounters; a book where, indeed, magic is the problem.

  Quite a nasty problem, actually. As the title suggests, the choice is between magic or madness. If you’re born with magic but don’t use it, you go mad. Not merely eccentric, but must-be-locked-up-because-dangerous mad. Yet if you use your magic, you shorten your life span. Most magic wielders don’t make it much past thirty. In the Magic or Madness trilogy magic is not a blessing, it’s a curse.

  Make ’em suffer, after all, is an excellent prescription for page-turning novels and one at the heart of a great many young adult novels. That, and a set of questions centered around not just identity (learning who you are) but also questions of place (learning your world, literally and metaphysically). One of the many pleasures of writing for young adults is being free to explore such questions without having to send in an envoy from another planet to investigate this one. All teenagers are envoys from another planet.

  On this planet right now it’s an extraordinary time for young adult literature. Not only has the audience expanded hugely in the last ten years (thank you, J. K. Rowling), but so, too, has the quality and quantity of the work, not to mention the support of publishers, booksellers, librarians, readers, and other YA writers. Bliss it is in this dawn to be alive, but to be a young adult writer is very heaven.

  ABOUT THE NEBULA AWARDS

  Throughout each calendar year the members of SFWA recommend novels and stories for the annual Nebula Awards. The editor of the Nebula Awards Report collects these recommendations and publishes them in the SFWA Forum. Near the end of the year the NAR editor tallies the endorsements, draws up a preliminary ballot, and sends it to all active SFWA members. Each novel and story has a one-year eligibility period from its date of publication. If the work fails to make the preliminary ballot during that year it is dropped from further Nebula consideration.

  The NAR editor then compiles a final ballot listing the five novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories that garnered the most votes on the preliminary ballot. For purposes of the Nebula Award, a novel is defined as consisting of 40,000 words or more; a novella is 17,500 to 39,999 words; a novelette is 7,500 to 17,499 words; and a short story is 7,499 words or fewer.

  SFWA also appoints a novel jury and a short-fiction jury to supplement the final ballot’s five nominees with a sixth choice in cases where a presumably worthy work was neglected by the membership at large. Thus, the appearance of extra finalists in any category may stem either from a jury selection or a tie vote in the preliminary balloting.

  Founded in 1965 by Damon Knight, the Science Fiction Writers of America began with a charter membership of seventy-eight authors. Today the organization has more than a thousand members and its name has been augmented to Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

  Early in his tenure as SFWA’s first secretary-treasurer, Lloyd Biggle Jr., proposed that the organization periodically select and publish the year’s best stories. This idea quickly evolved into the elaborate balloting process, an annual awards banquet, and a series of Nebula anthologies, the latest of which you now hold in your hands. Judith Ann Lawrence designed the Nebula trophy from a sketch by Kate Wilhelm. It is a block of Lucite containing polished rock crystal and a representation of a spiral galaxy made of metallic glitter. The trophies are handmade, and no two are exactly alike.

  PAST NEBULA AWARD WINNERS

  1965

  Best Novel: Dune by Frank Herbert

  Best Novella (tie): “The Saliva Tree” by Brian W. Aldiss “He Who Shapes” by Roger Zelazny

  Best Novelette: “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny

>   Best Short Story: “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison

  1966

  Best Novel (tie): Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

  Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

  Best Novella: “The Last Castle” by Jack Vance

  Best Novelette: “Call Him Lord” by Gordon R. Dickson

  Best Short Story: “The Secret Place” by Richard McKenna

  1967

  Best Novel: The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany

  Best Novella: “Behold the Man” by Michael Moorcock

  Best Novelette: “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber

  Best Short Story: “Aye, and Gomorrah” by Samuel R. Delany

  1968

  Best Novel: Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin

  Best Novella: “Dragonrider” by Anne McCaffrey

  Best Novelette: “Mother to the World” by Richard Wilson

  Best Short Story: “The Planners” by Kate Wilhelm

  1969

  Best Novel: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

  Best Novella: “A Boy and His Dog” by Harlan Ellison

  Best Novelette: “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” by Samuel R. Delany

  Best Short Story: “Passengers” by Robert Silverberg

  1970

  Best Novel: Ringworld by Larry Niven

  Best Novella: “Ill Met in Lankhmar” by Fritz Leiber

  Best Novelette: “Slow Sculpture” by Theodore Sturgeon

  Best Short Story: No Award

  1971

  Best Novel: A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg

  Best Novella: “The Missing Man” by Katherine MacLean

  Best Novelette: “The Queen of Air and Darkness” by Poul Anderson

  Best Short Story: “Good News from the Vatican” by Robert Silverberg