Speculative Awards Season Begins

The ruthless season of movie awards ends with tomorrow's Oscars telecast, but the award season's just getting started for lovers of speculative fiction. This week the nominees for the Nebulas were announced. Those awards will be presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in June.

The Nebulas give out prizes not only to books but also to dramatic presentations, which is good news for movies and television shows that don't traditionally get much Oscar love. Unusually, this year one movie could nab both Best Picture and Outstanding Dramatic Presentation award, since Birdman is nominated for both. Other shared Oscar/Neblua nominees include: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Visual Effects), Guardians of the Galaxy (Makeup and Hairstyling, Visual Effects), and Interstellar (Score, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Production Design, Visual Effects). Notably absent from the Academy's slate but rounding out this list is last year's hit The Lego Movie.

I haven't read any of the Best Novel nominees, though two (The Goblin Emperor and The Three-Body Problem) are on my reading list this year as part of the Worlds Without End reading challenges. Unlike with movie awards, though, many of the shorter published works nominated for a Nebula are available to read for free online. Here are some links (note: I have not read these works, and so can not speak to their content).

• "Sleep Walking Now and Then," Richard Bowes (Tor.com 7/9/14)
• "The Magician and Laplace’s Demon," Tom Crosshill (Clarkesworld 12/14, also recorded as a podcast)
• "A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i," Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14, not available online)
• "The Husband Stitch," Carmen Maria Machado (Granta #129)
• "We Are the Cloud," Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed 9/14)
• "The Devil in America," Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com 4/2/14)

• "The Breath of War," Aliette de Bodard (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/6/14)
• "When It Ends, He Catches Her," Eugie Foster (Daily Science Fiction 9/26/14)
• "The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye," Matthew Kressel (Clarkesworld 5/14, also recorded as a podcast)
• "The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family," Usman T. Malik (Qualia Nous anthology, not available online)
• "A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide," Sarah Pinsker (F&SF 3-4/14, not available online)
• "Jackalope Wives," Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/7/14, also recorded as a podcast)
• "The Fisher Queen," Alyssa Wong (F&SF 5/14, not available online)

The annual Hugo awards (named for pioneer magazine editor Hugo Gernsback) opened to nominations back in January and will accept them through March 10, with awards to be presented at the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in August. This award also gives prizes to spec films, so anyone who missed out on Oscar and Nebula glory still has a chance to walk away with something.

The INSPY Awards, a book award given out by bloggers (and which I've had the privilege to twice serve as a judge in the speculative category), closed for nominations about the same time the Hugos opened, and will announce awards in June. No word yet on when the Clive Staples Award for Christian Speculative Fiction will begin accepting nominations, though it will likely again be awarded during this year's Realm Makers conference in August.

Join me on Twitter as I live tweet the Oscars tomorrow evening and find out which speculative flick gets this award season started with a bang.