Views from Medina Road

Friday, February 22, 2008

Interesting Nebula Observation

Locus Online's version of the final Nebula ballot is now posted (and integrated into the SF Awards index, at least insofar as the Nominee Indexes are concerned), and I couldn't help but noticing a significant fact: that, despite the rolling 2-year eligibility rule for Nebula nominations, almost all of this year's final ballot consists of books and stories published last year, 2007, with only a very few leftovers from 2006. I checked, and the proportion of recent to leftover eligibles has never been higher than on this year's ballot.

Don't know that that means anything...; certainly the disconnect between nominees and the favorites of the various Locus Recommended Reading List is just as wide. I'm not *quite* as cynical as CNB about the Nebula nominating process (see February's editorial), but the facts, er, the nominations, speak for themselves.

1 comments 6:25 PM

Comments:

I think the reason is fairly simple -- it's tied to the "nomination drive" late in the process. People noticed that embarrasingly few stories had received the requisite 10 recommendations to make the preliminary ballot, so there was a last minute push for people to rec stories. But of course stories can only be recommended in the 12 month period following their publication -- so only 2007 stories (and some late 2006 stories) benefited.

I've already made my view of the nominations clear -- while the stories on the ballot are almost all decent, they aren't for the most part the BEST stories of the last year (or two). The problem isn't so much the stories nominated -- none of them are bad -- it is the really outstanding stories that aren't on the list.

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Rich Horton

# posted by

Rich Horton : 5:44 PM