In light of the recently announced overhaul of the Nebula Award rules (see this article), we talked with SFWA President Russell Davis about those changes.
SFScope: You’ve changed rolling eligibility back to calendar-year eligibility, which will probably make the whole process easier to explain to outsiders, but do you think it will slight either short works published early in the year, or long works published later?
Davis: No, I don’t. There are a number of problems introduced by rolling eligibility, but most literary awards are based on a calendar year. The truth is that it can be argued from both sides, i.e., works published earlier have an advantage/disadvantage or works published later have an advantage/disadvantage. The nature of award rules is that arguments about fairness will inevitably arise.
SFScope: The limited nomination window seems to make the job of the Nebula Awards Report administrator much easier, but limiting it will force the members to remember what they like throughout the year. Good? Bad?
Davis: In general, I think it’s a good thing. I believe that most writers—and that’s our voting pool—remember what they read that’s really good anyway. Having the suggested reading list in place will, hopefully, act as a tool for helping people keep track.
SFScope: Limiting each member to five nominations per category, while it does bring the Nebulas more in line with other awards, seems to detract a bit from the ability to recommend works as “this is good.”
Davis: We discussed this quite a bit. The challenge for members, I think, will be in deciding how to use their nominations for the works they believe are the most deserving. Ultimately, I think it will improve the awards.
SFScope: Removing the preliminary ballot from the process, again, obviously saves SFWA time and money, but it is a major change to the process. Comment?
Davis: This was really a question of smoothing out the process and making it more efficient from a time and money perspective.
SFScope: Personally, removing the juries makes perfect sense to me: all that work throughout the year just for the chance of adding one work to the ballot always struck as weird. But are you sending any specific signal with this change? Especially since you’re keeping the jury for the young adult award.
Davis: Another topic that was very seriously discussed, and the end result was a compromise between positions. Keeping the jury for the Andre Norton is, at least right now, very much needed. And we debated a jury for the Bradbury, but decided to wait and see how it worked for a year. There really wasn’t a specific signal we were sending except, perhaps, that the Nebulas are professional peer awards.
SFScope: And speaking of the YA award: looking at the past few years, it appears to have been far easier to get works recommended for the YA award than for the script award. Why did you feel the need to keep the YA jury, while losing the script jury?
Davis: Doing away with the Script Nebula has been long overdue. I think having a non-Nebula award as we’ve done with the new rules makes much more sense, and it’s more honest. The vast majority of us are fans, too, and that’s fine. It makes sense to me for us to say, “Wow, we really loved these SF movies/television shows/whatever and want to recognize them.” It makes far less sense to assert that we’re reading scripts and making some kind of literary judgment about them. Movies are more than a script—it’s a mixed medium made up of a lot of parts—and the Nebula Awards are literary awards.
SFScope: Do you think reclassifying the YA and script awards as “not Nebulas” will really mean anything? Other than making works eligible for both a Nebula and the YA award (which seems to give potential for dispute).
Davis: I hope so. And it’s probably worth mentioning that we talked about a Nebula for Young Adult works, but we already have the Andre Norton in place and there doesn’t seem to be a pressing need to change that right now. Keep in mind that the script award is gone. It’s now the Ray Bradbury Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, which used to be a Nebula category. We truly wanted the Nebulas to be purely literary awards, to keep the YA category as it was, and to be able to recognize good SF or F movies, etc., without trying to make the claim that they were purely script readings. Hopefully, these changes accomplish that.
SFScope: Thanks for your time.