The Drabblecast is still as awesome as ever, and continues to be my favorite source of short fiction, bar none. I particularly look forward to Lovecraft month every August when they solicit brand new Lovecraft-style stories from established authors.
You may notice that four of the five nominees here are also nominees for the Ray Bradbury award this year, which I also reviewed. So, yes, I did just move my review of those four into this article. If you read that previous article and you want to just read the new stuff, The Hobbit is the only nominee that was nominated for Hugo but not for Ray Bradbury, so you can skip ahead to that part.
Anyway, this was a very enjoyable batch of movies this year!
Semiprozine is one of those Hugo categories that’s a little hard to understand. They can’t be professional magazines, where professional means that either the magazine provides more than 1/4 the income of any person or is owned/published by an entity that provides more than 1/4 the income to any one person. And it has to pay its contributors or staff in something other than copies of the magazine, or is only available for paid purchase.
As it happens, all five of the semiprozine nominees are magazines that I’ve read before.
On to the next category of the Nebula awards, the Best Novelette, which covers fiction between the word counts of 7,500 and 17,500 words. Generally I’m not a big fan of novelettes because to me they feel like short stories that have overstayed their welcome. Even though they can be more than twice as long as a short story I rarely feel like they have more meaningful content than a short story and so the story is just diluted in a larger space. It’s an awkward length, I think, not enough room to spread into more plot arcs like a novel would do but too long for the appealing conciseness of a short story.
The After Death anthology with my story “I Will Remain” is now available for sale. It’s anthology of stories that take place after death, one of my favorite topics to contemplate and write about.
The Ray Bradbury Award isn’t exactly a Nebula, but it keeps company with the Nebulas, voted for by the SFWA members and presented at the same ceremony. Its full name is the “Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation.”
There are six nominees. Three of them I’d already seen by the time the nominees were announced, and I figured it would be fun to rent the other three as well. I love science fiction movies, and a few hours watching a list of the most popular movies is a great use of time.
This is the first, and quite possibly the only, year that I’ve been eligible to vote for the Nebula Awards. The Nebula Awards, for those who don’t know, are one of the biggest awards of science fiction fandom. This is the one voted by members of Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America, as opposed to the fan-voted Hugo awards.
So to make the most of it, I’m reading as many of the nominees as I can find to do before the voting period ends. Here are my rankings of the Short Story category in order of preference from favorite to least (for the voting I pick only one, but to flesh it out as a full review I found this helpful). The Short Story category covers all speculative fiction stories of 7500 words or less.
I’m a bit tardy in posting this, but in February Daily Science Fiction published another of my stories: “Coin Op”. It’s a comedy, based around sex. It is definitely mature content, so if you don’t care for that sort of thing, just skip it. And feel free to let me know what you think of it. Here it is.
Enjoy!
Some big changes at Escape Pod in 2012:
1. They were officially added to the SFWA list of professional markets, the first audio market to do so.
2. Mur Lafferty announced her resignation of the editor position, official at the end of the year, citing too many projects that she’s signe don for.
In 2012 Podcastle published 51 feature stories, with 8 miniatures.
