did porn win the nebula award

I didn't see anything about Spar before it came out. I don't think it's terribly controversial as fiction, though it'll doubtless trigger lots of geek-gabs like this one. I have seen situations though where I've felt "nudged" by author blogs to vote for them. (Which is irrelevant since I'm not a member, but it didn't pass unnoticed.) I imagine that if authors are nudging in blogs, friends and fansites may well be campaigning.

Ruv Draba said:

I didn't see anything about Spar before it came out. I don't think it's terribly controversial as fiction, though it'll doubtless trigger lots of geek-gabs like this one. I have seen situations though where I've felt "nudged" by author blogs to vote for them. (Which is irrelevant since I'm not a member, but it didn't pass unnoticed.) I imagine that if authors are nudging in blogs, friends and fansites may well be campaigning.

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Authors certainly post lists of their eligible stories, but I haven't seen much connection between those posts and the winners. Probably because too many people are posting for it to be an effective way to nudge people.

To highlight that, Scalzi has a very popular blog. He gets nominations, but he doesn't win (I believe he's never won a Hugo or a Nebula, though if I'm wrong in that, I know he's failed to win a number of times). His influence isn't translating into award wins.

This page is also interesting... some authors win a whole bunch of Nebulas and Hugos, but there are many people who only win once:

http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/nh2.htm

Influence will have an impact. I can see an unknown author with a story in an obscure publication will have more trouble getting nominated, as no one knows they exist. But I'm not convinced it's as important as people say, or the major names in SFF blogging would always win and the person who manages to win once would never have won.

Polenth said:

Authors certainly post lists of their eligible stories, but I haven't seen much connection between those posts and the winners. Probably because too many people are posting for it to be an effective way to nudge people.

To highlight that, Scalzi has a very popular blog. He gets nominations, but he doesn't win (I believe he's never won a Hugo or a Nebula, though if I'm wrong in that, I know he's failed to win a number of times). His influence isn't translating into award wins.

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He's actually won two Hugos, one for best fan writer in 2008 and one for best related book in 2009; he also won the Campbell award for best new writer in 2005, and was elected SFWA president in 2010. His blog probably didn't hurt with any of this (a friend and colleague of mine was nominated for a Hugo in the same category one of those years, so I got to see a little more about the process), but he's a legit writer regardless; in my opinion he won for his work, not his influence.

Greg

Shadow_Ferret said:

By innocense, I mean how for many of us, Sci-Fi was bold space stories, like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, or even things like War of the Worlds and The Martian Chronicles. Stories that made us go "Gee whiz!" before we discovered there is no life in our galaxy.

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Wow, I missed that memo.

JimmyB27 said:

Wow, I missed that memo.

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Sorry. Yes, there probably are forms of life we haven't yet discovered. I meant life that builds spaceships and flies to earth to threaten us. Mars certainly doesn't have any tentacled monsters like HG Wells portrayed, or the martian types Ray Bradbury wrote about. It certainly doesn't have beautiful Barsoomians and Venus doesn't have tree cities.

ETA: Dagnabbit. Have a bad cold, thinking not straight it is. Not the whole galaxy. We haven't really even gone beyond our Solar System.

Shadow_Ferret said:

We haven't really even gone beyond our Solar System.

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Because we really haven't.

Greg Wilson said:

He's actually won two Hugos, one for best fan writer in 2008 and one for best related book in 2009; he also won the Campbell award for best new writer in 2005, and was elected SFWA president in 2010. His blog probably didn't hurt with any of this (a friend and colleague of mine was nominated for a Hugo in the same category one of those years, so I got to see a little more about the process), but he's a legit writer regardless; in my opinion he won for his work, not his influence.

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I probably missed them because I was looking at professional fiction wins. So more accurately, he hasn't won a Hugo for professional fiction. I still can't see more than nominations for the Nebula and he lost in the 2009 awards.

Given that he is president, you'd think if anyone had enough influence to rig the voting, it'd be him. Which is why I think he makes a good example... because he keeps not winning.

(I don't follow the Campbell award, so I can't really comment on it).