2015 Nebula Award Nominees

Location: Chicago, Illinois.

Comments: For the second year in a row, Charles E. Gannon secured a Nebula Award nomination on the strength of a well-written book. This, once again, blows apart the Sad Puppy claims that there is some sort of terrible cabal keeping Baen authors from being nominated for awards. If you write very good stories, and that means writing one of the six or so best stories of the year in the category, you can secure a nomination. And while the entirely all white-male slate the Sad Puppies proposed for the Best Novel, Best Novella, and Best Novelette categories has some moderately decent stories, most of them are nowhere near being in that top six.

Leaving behind the fact-free whining of the Sad Puppies, this year's slate of nominees looks like a great representation of the many facets of the science fiction and fantasy field. Ann Leckie returns to the slate with Ancillary Sword, the follow up to last year's Nebula winning novel Ancillary Justice. Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series gets recognition with the nomination of its closing volume Annihilation, and authors like Katherine Addison and Cixin Liu are recognized for their excellent books The Goblin Emperor and The Three-Body Problem. Up and down the ballot are excellent examples of well-written and thought-provoking science fiction. Which is how the ballot should be.

Best Novel

Winner:
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Other Nominees:
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
Coming Home by Jack McDevitt
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)
Trial by Fire by Charles E. Gannon

Best Novella

Winner:

Yesterday’s Kin by Nancy Kress

Other Nominees:
Calendrical Regression by Lawrence Schoen
Grand Jeté (The Great Leap) by Rachel Swirsky
The Mothers of Voorhisville by Mary Rickert
The Regular by Ken Liu
We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory

Best Novelette

Winner:

A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Other Nominees:
The Devil in America by Kai Ashante Wilson
The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado
The Magician and Laplace’s Demon by Tom Crosshill
Sleep Walking Now and Then by Richard Bowes
We Are the Cloud by Sam J. Miller

Best Short Story

Winner:

Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon (reviewed in 2015 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Other Nominees:
The Breath of War by Aliette de Bodard
The Fisher Queen by Alyssa Wong
The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye by Matthew Kressel
A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide by Sarah Pinsker
The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family by Usman T. Malik
When It Ends, He Catches Her by Eugie Foster

Ray Bradbury Award

Winner:

Guardians of the Galaxy

Other Nominees:

Birdman

Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Edge of Tomorrow
Interstellar
The Lego Movie

Andre Norton Award

Winner:

Love Is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Other Nominees:
Dirty Wings by Sarah McCarry
Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future by A.S. King
Greenglass House by Kate Milford
Salvage by Alexandra Duncan
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
Unmade by Sarah Rees Brennan

Go to previous year's nominees: 2014
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2016

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