Nebula Awards celebrate stars of sci-fi literature

By Mark Rahner
Seattle Times staff reporter

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Elizabeth Moon's "The Speed of Dark," a first-person narrative of an autistic man given the chance for a cure, took the best novel prize at Saturday's Nebula Awards ceremony in Seattle.

Along with the Hugo Awards, the Nebulas, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, are the literary genre's most prestigious. Saturday's event at the Westin Hotel was its first time in Seattle, a landmark moment for the city soon to house Paul Allen's Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. (A number of the SFWA authors are on its advisory board and toured the museum on Sunday.)

"One of the differences between this and an entity like the Oscars," said Seattle-based "Cryptonomicon" author and toastmaster Neal Stephenson, "is we don't have the glitz and we certainly don't have the money, but we can use a word like 'entity.' "

In a keynote presentation fraught with technical glitches, Rick Rashid, a senior vice president for Microsoft research, recalled some old predictions of the future that didn't quite pan out — for instance, that someday computers could weigh as little as 1.5 tons, and that there would be a world market for perhaps five of them.

"Science-fiction writers give us the dreams that help drive what we do," Rashid said. He showed a few current wondrous gadgets, such as a "phraselator," similar to "Star Trek's" universal translator, meant for military use (when it works properly); and a program that can chart and illustrate hand-written equations and rudimentary drawings.

One of the evening's highlights came when legendary writer Harlan Ellison accepted the best novella award for Neil Gaiman's "Coraline" in Gaiman's absence. The notoriously uncontrollable Ellison — who at one point ripped the microphone out of its fixture — had agreed to read Gaiman's acceptance speech verbatim, only to find that the bulk of the speech focused on embarrassing things Gaiman could make Ellison say.

Moon, an ex-Marine and former paramedic, said her own autistic son inspired "The Speed of Dark."

Other winners:

• Best Novelette: "The Empire of Ice Cream," by Jeffrey Ford.

• Best Short Story: "What I Didn't See," by Karen Joy Fowler.
 
• Best Script: "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair and Peter Jackson, based on J.R.R. Tolkien's book.

• The prolific Robert Silverberg received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in the field. Beginning in the pulp magazines of the '50s, Silverberg has written more than 400 short stories and 74 novels, including "Lord Valentine's Castle."

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com

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