Comments: In the second year in a row that the Nebula Award for Best Script was given out, the movie Galaxy Quest won the prize. It is perhaps a mark of how influential the Star Trek franchise is that a parody that pokes fun at it would win a Nebula award. What is really interesting about the selection of Galaxy Quest as the Nebula winner is that the original source material that inspired it was never even nominated for a Nebula Award. Not the original show, not the Next Generation spin-off. Not the Deep Space Nine or Voyager spin-offs. Certainly not the often overlooked but still quite good animated series. And not any of the movies, either featuring the classic cast or cast members of more recent vintage. Star Trek, it seems, is strong enough to engender a Nebula-winning parody, but not strong enough on its own to even get a nomination.
As is typical in many Nebula years, the Best Novel category was fairly uninteresting, as a good book won the award over a collection of other good books. In the Best Novella category, the most interesting thing for me wasn't the winner, but rather the story Ninety Percent of Everything, a title that was clearly an homage to Theodore Sturgeon who famously opined that "Ninety percent of everything is crud". The thing that I wonder about the story is why it took three authors to write a single novella. It seems like a little bit of overkill to have three authors on a story that, by definition, is less than 40,000 words. Then again, I'm not a published author, so maybe there was a good reason they needed to do that.
Best Novel
Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear
Other Nominees:
A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold
Crescent City Rhapsody by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Forests of the Heart by Charles de Lint
Infinity Beach by Jack McDevitt
Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
Best Novella
Goddesses by Linda Nagata
Other Nominees:
Argonautica by Walter Jon Williams
Crocodile Rock by Lucius Shepard
Fortitude by Andy Duncan
Hunting the Snark by Mike Resnick
Ninety Percent of Everything by Jonathan Lethem, James Patrick Kelly, and John Kessel
Best Novelette
Daddy's World by Walter Jon Williams
Other Nominees:
A Day's Work on the Moon by Mike Moscoe
Generation Gap by Stanley Schmidt
How the Highland People Came to Be by Bruce Holland Rogers
Jack Daw's Pack by Greer Gilman
A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows by Gardner Dozois
Stellar Harvest by Eleanor Arnason
Best Short Story
macs by Terry Bisson
Other Nominees:
The Fantasy Writer's Assistant by Jeffrey Ford
Flying Over Water by Ellen Klages
The Golem by Severna Park
Scherzo with Tyrannosaur by Michael Swanwick
You Wandered Off Like a Foolish Child To Break Your Heart and Mine by Pat York
Best Script
Galaxy Quest by David Howard and Robert Gordon
Other Nominees:
Being John Malkovich by Charlie Kaufman
Dogma by Kevin Smith
The Green Mile by Frank Darabont
Princess Mononoke by Hayao Miyazaki and Neil Gaiman
Unbreakable by M. Night Shyamalan
Ray Bradbury Award
2000X - Tales of the Next Millennia
Other Nominees:
None
Go to previous year's nominees: 2000
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2002
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