The Nebula Process
I just posted these comments in a fit of passion over on Rich Horton's newsgroup in sff.net (on a thread that begins here), and I thought I should take ownership of them. If I'm going to stir the pot, I should do it here in my own kitchen. Now that the final ballot for the Nebula Awards, which includes the Norton, is announced, and I have forever taken off my Norton jury member hat, I have some thoughts on the Nebula process.

Both the rolling eligibility rule and the mix of recommendations/jury picks are counterproductive to the best interests of the Nebula.

With rolling eligibility, 4 out of 6 novels, 2 of 4 novellas, 4 of 5 novelettes, and 5 of 6 short stories were published in 2005. (And one of the two 2006 novels and the only 2006 short story were jury selections.) So, over 70% of the final ballot is from 2005, meaning that the 2007 Nebula Award is, for all practical intents and purposes, given to the best fiction of 2005. Some of these stories and books have already been on other award ballots in 2006 (To Crush The Moon was one of our finalists for the P. K. Dick Award, I know.) It makes the Nebula look out of date and, I suspect, rather irrelevant to readers -- outside the core group of voters -- as a reading list of current exceptional fiction.

The mixed system of jury/recs leads to similar problems. We ask publishers to provide books and magazines to a variable number of jury members throughout the year, changing the jury members from year to year, as if the juries have power to set the ballots the way they do in other awards. On the one hand, there's an expectation, as you state, later in the thread, that the jury will add work from more obscure sources (but not, fer goshsakes, Tor!), and yet at the same time, it is only the major publishers, like Tor, that seem to be able to afford to go to the trouble of sending out all the extra reading material to juries. To me it looks like, "We want your free books, but we mostly aren't going to pick them, and if we do, there will be a controversy about it." It just makes the process look silly. Not even bothering to add a story to the novella category, when it is short, and when half the stories on it are from 2005, makes the jury appear irrelevant. I like the Shunn and Melko novellas a very great deal, but do you mean to say that there were no other novellas published in 2006 that deserve to be on the ballot with them? Oh, wait, rolling eligibility... if they're really any good, members will rec them in time for the 2008 ballot so there's no need for the jury to act. Never mind that the shelf life of short fiction is even shorter than that of novels, and that the two-year delay makes the short fiction ballot look even less relevant as a reading list.

I think we should stick with the rec system but fix it. Make the Nebula only eligible for works in the immediate preceding year. Extend the deadline for recs from the last day of December to the last day of February, to give late-in-the-year publications a fair chance. In any category where not enough pieces have ten recs, the pieces with the next highest number of recs are taken to fill out the preliminary ballot. Move the date of the Awards if necessary, but let us come out ahead of the Hugos, for the same year, and same fiction as covered in the Hugos, so that the Nebula ballot can have some relevance. Trust the members of SFWA, and the rec process, so that we don't need the juries as a safety net.

If SFWA's not willing to fix the rec system, then get rid of it and turn the job completely over to the juries.

Either way, make the Nebula timely and relevant again.

Edited to remove the comment that short fiction markets send fiction to the Nebula jury: based on comments by former short fiction jury members below, apparently they don't.