Just got home last night from an overall amazing weekend at the Nebula Awards in San Jose. No, I didn’t win. The award went to Rachel Swirsky for her story “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” and was well deserved. I’m not going to lie and say I wasn’t hoping to win. But it was wonderful to see so many of my friends nominated and winning awards, Rachel included. One of the highlights for me was simply being nominated, as evidenced by my goofy smile here as I received my Nebula nomination certificate:
Huzzah!
It was also great to meet the other nominees, some of whom I had met before, like Rachel Swirsky and Ken Schneyer, and the others whom I met for the first time, Sofia Samatar and Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. We were all interviewed together by Jaym Gates for a podcast to go up on the SFWA site sometime in the near future, and what I loved was our diversity of thought. What a smart, talented, and most of all friendly bunch! Seriously, if ever there were a group of people I’d wish to be nominated beside, it’s them. Here’s a group photo of us with our certificates, and also one just prior to the ceremony.
2013 Nebula Award nominees, clockwise from top-left: Sofia Samatar, Matthew Kressel, Kenneth Schneyer, Rachel Swirsky, Sylvia Spruck Wrigley
2013 Nebula Nominees, from left: Kenneth Schneyer, Rachel Swirsky, Matthew Kressel, Sofia Samatar, Sylvia Spruck Wrigley
Other highlights of the weekend include meeting Larry Niven. I’ve read his books since I was a boy, and his Ringworld books especially developed in me a love of reading and especially science fiction, so it was more than cool to tell him how much I adore his work. He was very kind too.
I also moderated a panel called “New Directions in Fantasy.” My fear was that the panel would be sparsely attended, but to my surprise the room was nearly full. Fellow panelists Gregory N. Bossert, Daryl Gregory, Helen Pilinovsky and Helene Wecker all had interesting things to add to the discussion: where is fantasy headed? The answer? We don’t know, and we leave that to the historians to decide, however, we did notice a trend in meta-narratives, i.e. a breaking of the fourth-wall as a way of making old tropes new. (This in itself is nothing new, but trends tend to be cyclical recombinations of what’s come before.)
We had so much fun there, and it was great to hang out with John Joseph Adams and Christie Yant, and John’s staff from Lightspeed. I could spend all morning trying to remember everyone I hung out with, but I’d probably forget someone, and that wouldn’t be fair because I loved hanging with everyone. No, I didn’t win, but it was great just to be there, as this was my first ever nomination for my writing.
And what would a trip to northern California be without a visit to wine country? A travesty, I tell you. Hence the smile on my face in the picture below, this one from Robledo winery in Sonoma Valley.
Not drunk yet: me beside the fountains at Robledo Winery
I took some photos of the weekend if you wish to take a look, gallery here.
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