Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Nebula Award for Best Novel



Since 1965, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) have voted and given out this pretty trophy (and $0.00 in cash) for Best Novel published in the USA during the previous year. Note: the "previous year" bit makes their awards, annoyingly, not correspond By Year to the Hugo awards.

Notable winners: Ursula K Le Guin has won four times for Best Novel...Joe Haldeman has won thrice. I've read two of the three Haldeman winners (The Forever War and Camouflage), and thoroughly enjoyed both of them (you can see my thoughts on them here and here).

A quick justification/qualification/rationale for posting stuff about these awards here: while these books aren't all necessarily Post-Apocalyptic, in the purest Spam-In-Bunker/Mad-Max-Thunderdome (or Tank Girl, if you prefer) style, they do almost all take place in the Future--and usually the Future is a less than perfect place, wherein something Really Bad happened to the Past (i.e. Our Present) to make it End, and hence, allow the Future to become What It Is (which is, usually, Dystopian). You follow?

As for why to be listing these award winners at all: the SFWA's website is a mess, with links to pages that don't exist for basic things (such as, um, list of Best Novel Award Winners). And while Wikipedia has this info, it's in a jumbled format, mixed in with Other Nominees (i.e. LOSERS) and incorrect statements such as, "William Gibson has won SIX times."--He's only once for Best Novel (Neuromancer), although he's been nominated many other times--and may have won a few times for short stories, novellas, or screenplays...but that's hard to determine for the above reasons. I know I could correct Wikipedia, because that's what it's all about...but I'd rather just post The Truth here.
Embedded below is the table of Nebula winners by year, while the actual excel sheet (should you like to create some sort of pivot table) is available here.

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