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.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence

William Gibson told me about this book in this article, wherein he said, "It's a book you really have to read to see why." Elsewhere, in a New York magazine article listing his top ten Sci-Fi books, he said it describes a "a heart-rending and perpetually more likely near-future Manhattan."
I agree with him on both counts.
Looking around online I see a lot of people describing it as "thrilling" and "hilarious." I think the people who think that are the Ones Who Will Be First To Die when It happens.
Random Acts is the diary of a 12-year-old girl living in Manhattan in the not-distant future. America is in Trouble, and the rest of the world isn't doing too well, either. It's not so much Post-Apocalyptic as simply Apocalyptic. From what the 12-year-old tells us in snippets of reports of what she saw on TV news, it seems to be an Economic crash that's led to Los Angeles and every other city burning. The National Guard and Army are trying to keep rioting Brooklynites from lobbing mortars across the river onto Manhattan. Presidents keep getting killed. Nobody has a job, inflation is out of control, and tuberculosis is common.

Two books I thought of while reading it:

 1) The Basketball Diaries--except instead of Heroin the problem is Overpopulated, Underemployed America.

2) The Fan Man--there's a Mister Mossbacher in Random Acts whom I envisioned as Horse Badorties, had he eaten some of the Brown Acid and not had a good heart.