Tag: nebula

The Tea Master and the Detective won a Nebula Award!

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The Tea Master and the Detective won a Nebula Award!

The funny thing about living in Europe is that I blearily woke up this morning, made a tea to try and wake up while still rubbing my eyes, and while I was making a bottle of milk for my youngest I saw that my twitter mentions had exploded.

Which is basically how I found out that my gender-swapped space opera Sherlock Holmes retelling The Tea Master and the Detective (set in the Xuya Universe  and published by Subterranean Press and by JABberwocky) had won a Nebula Award for Best Novella (the awards were in Los Angeles so 9 hours behind me).

°_°

Below is the full text of my acceptance speech as kindly delivered for me by my good friend Fran Wilde, acceptor extraordinaire:

Uh. Whoa.

That was not expected.

I would like to thank Fran Wilde for accepting this award on my behalf, my editor Yanni Kuznia, Geralyn Lance, Bill Schafer, Gwenda Bond and everyone at Subterranean Press who worked on this book; my cover artists and designers Maurizio Manzieri, Gail Cross at Desert Isle Design and Dirk Berger, my agent John Berlyne as well as the JABberwocky team (Joshua Bilmes, Lisa Rodgers, Patrick Disselhorst) for the non-American edition. To my friends and supporters: Likhain, Zen Cho, Alis Rasmussen, Tade Thompson, Vida Cruz, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, Cindy Pon, Kari Sperring, Liz Bourke, D Franklin, Zoe Johnson, Jeannette Ng, Nene Ormes, Ken Liu, Elizabeth Bear, Stephanie Burgis, Alessa Hinlo, Inksea, and Mary Robinette Kowal, as well as everyone who spread the word, nominated this and voted for it.

I wrote this book for fun: it was a story that mashed together two of my childhood idols, Sherlock Holmes and Judge Dee, one that came with no deadlines or expectations attached to it. One thing I realised was that it’s easy for writing–for any writing–to feel frivolous and self-indulgent. There are always more important things to do, especially as a mother of colour–children, family, day job, politics in an environment that feels like it’s swinging back to darker days, with people stopping me in the streets and telling me to go back home. It’s so easy to take the path of least resistance and put writing last, to always find something more important that needs to be done.

It’s so easy to choke for lack of self-care.

The truth, of course, is that writing matters. It is frivolous, it is self-indulgent, but it is also necessary. It is breathing space and act of resistance and escapism on my own terms. Stories shaped me as a child and continue to shape me as an adult. And it is a great and potent reminder of how far this particular one has gone to be accepting this award, now.

Thank you.

(picture thanks to Fran Wilde)

Breath of War up for a Nebula

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Breath of War up for a Nebula

Aka, OMG OMG OMG I have been sitting on this for a week and it’s been killing me.
I’m very please to announce that my short story “The Breath of War” is up for a Nebula Award.

I am… humbled and overjoyed to be on the ballot, which looks truly fantastic (and very happy that some of my suggestions/suggested authors are on there, too–congrats to Alyssa Wong, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Tom Crosshill among many others–and I’m happy, though in a bittersweet fashion, to share the ballot with Eugie Foster, who left us far too soon). My deepest thanks to everyone who read the story and everyone who nominated it; and a special thanks to Scott H Andrews who had the good taste to publish it ^^ It’s a very special one for me, aka “the one with the snakelet in it”, and I’m very very glad it’s up there.

I don’t know yet if I’ll be able to attend the Nebula Awards Weekend–I would love to, but negotiations are in progress with the father of the snakelet on the subject…

Full list below:

Novel
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor)
Trial by Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu (Tor)
Coming Home, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals; Fourth Estate; HarperCollins Canada)

Novella
We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory (Tachyon)
Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)
“The Regular,” Ken Liu (Upgraded)
“The Mothers of Voorhisville,” Mary Rickert (Tor.com 4/30/14)
Calendrical Regression, Lawrence Schoen (NobleFusion)
“Grand Jeté (The Great Leap),” Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer ’14)

Novelette
“Sleep Walking Now and Then,” Richard Bowes (Tor.com 7/9/14)
“The Magician and Laplace’s Demon,” Tom Crosshill (Clarkesworld 12/14)
“A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14)
“The Husband Stitch,” Carmen Maria Machado (Granta #129)
“We Are the Cloud,” Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed 9/14)
“The Devil in America,” Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com 4/2/14)

Short Story
“The Breath of War,” Aliette de Bodard (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/6/14)
“When It Ends, He Catches Her,” Eugie Foster (Daily Science Fiction 9/26/14)
“The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye,” Matthew Kressel (Clarkesworld 5/14)
“The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family,” Usman T. Malik (Qualia Nous)
“A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” Sarah Pinsker (F&SF 3-4/14)
“Jackalope Wives,” Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/7/14)
“The Fisher Queen,” Alyssa Wong (F&SF 5/14)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. & Armando Bo (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
Edge of Tomorrow, Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Guardians of the Galaxy, Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
Interstellar, Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan (Paramount Pictures)
The Lego Movie, Screenplay by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
Unmade, Sarah Rees Brennan (Random House)
Salvage, Alexandra Duncan (Greenwillow)
Love Is the Drug, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)
Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, A.S. King (Little, Brown)
Dirty Wings, Sarah McCarry (St. Martin’s Griffin)
Greenglass House, Kate Milford (Clarion)
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, Leslye Walton (Candlewick)

Nebula Award post thoughts

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Nebula Award post thoughts

Uh. I would appear to be the owner of a brand-new Nebula Award for Best Novelette, for my Xuya space opera “The Waiting Stars”.

Copy-pasting my acceptance speech here:

I am honoured–and vaguely shocked–that I get a repeat performance at the Nebulas this year. Many thanks to everyone who voted for me and helped spread the word, and to my co-nominees, who all made this category such a difficult one to vote in! This story wouldn’t have come to pass without the fabulous Athena Andreadis and Kay Holt and their awesome anthology project of female-dominated space opera. I am indebted, as always, to Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for the friendship, to Ken Liu for being such a great first reader; to Sylvia, who kindly accepted to deliver this speech; and, as always, to my family for the support and love. Many thanks.

Many many thanks as well to everyone working behind the scenes to make the awards possible; and in particular to Steven H. Silver (who, among many other things, bugged me for my acceptance speech and is making sure I get the award mailed home). I am sorry I didn’t make it to San José this year–I would have loved to meet everyone, but the thought of a 12-hour international flight with the snakelet in my arms was…. a little too much? :p (I’m a little miffed as well–I didn’t actually realise the time difference was so important and assumed the Nebulas were happening in the middle of the night for me; in reality, they must have been handing the award about 30 minutes before I got up this morning–though to be fair, I got up early because the snakelet didn’t want to sleep anymore…).

And many congrats to the other winners–Ann Leckie, Vylar Kaftan, Rachel Swirsky, Alfonso Cuaron and Nalo Hopkinson, and Grand Master Samuel Delany. It is an awesome slate this year, and I am very proud to be part of it (am now crossing my fingers Ancillary Justice gets a well-deserved Hugo).

Anyway, this is me in a state of shock. I will go off and see why the snakelet is screaming his head off… #proudmom

(picture courtesy of Kennedy Brandt)