Fandom as a familial collective of readers and writers has existed since at least the 1920s, when lurid pulp fiction magazines encouraged Lovecraft’s quirky circle of acolytes to pen and critique their own tales of cosmic horror, scientific fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery epics. This path of transition from fan to pro is now made explicit for the curious by events like last month’s Nebula Conference, a four-day convention featuring panel discussions and an awards ceremony celebrating the most significant writing released during the previous year. This time held at the Pittsburgh Marriott hotel downtown, the Nebula Awards, given annually since 1965, are the Oscars of genre fiction, voted on by fellow writers, editors, publishers, and book agents.
It is worth noting that out of the five awards given for short story, novelette, novella, novel, and young adult novel, four went to women writers, one to a man, and three to people of color — a big change from 1965, when all the winners were white and male. All Systems Red (Tor), by Texas native Martha Wells, won Best Novella with an ironic glimpse into the mind of a very fed-up and angry security android. Kelly Robson won Best Novelette for “A Human Stain” (Tor), which she describes as “Lesbian Gothic Horror.” From the podium, Sam J. Miller, winner of the Andre Norton Award for Outstanding Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy for The Art of Starving (HarperCollins) noted that when he’d worried aloud if there was too much cursing and gay sex in his YA novel about bullying, anorexia, and ESP, his husband assured him the book contained “exactly the right amount of cursing and gay sex.”
Leave a Reply