A few items of interest from the 2007 Nebula Awards:

  • Nebula Award winners with Clarion links include Karen Joy Fowler, president of the Clarion Foundation and author of Wit’s End, for her short story, “Always”; and alum Ted Chiang, for his novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.  Two out of five isn’t bad, I guess.
  • Another contribution to the ’are we mainstream or are we not?’ debate surrounding sf and fantasy came when literary mainstream author Michael Chabon won the Novel award for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
  • Ted Chiang’s win reminded me of a December 2003 interview available here, in which he had the following to say about Clarion’s effect on his writing: ”Clarion encouraged me to keep on writing. Before I was accepted to the workshop, I hadn’t received any encouragement about my writing, and I was on the verge of giving up. Clarion was the first time anyone told me they liked my work. Clarion also introduced me to the SF community. Before I attended, I hadn’t known anyone who read SF, let alone wanted to write it, so meeting my fellow students there was like discovering a family I’d never known I’d had.”
  • And lastly, the runup to the Nebulas, held in Austin, TX this year, included a very nice Dallas Times piece on science fiction in Texas, home to 71 members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  Robert E. Howard was perhaps the most famous and most quirky of the state’s sf progeny, but now only one among many.  Most of those, it notes, are clustered around Austin, the state capital — not overly surprising, if you’ve seen the rest of Texas.