Nebula Winners Analysis Part One
Splitting this into two parts…one this week and one next!
This week I’m going to talk about the three awards that are not for adult literary works - the Game Writing Award and the Andre Norton and Ray Bradbury. Next week, the other fiction awards.
The Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction
Winner: To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose.
I was torn here between two books I really liked, in very different ways.
Naomi Kritzer’s Liberty’s Daughter is climate fiction about a young woman growing up on a cluster of libertarian seasteads, each of which is experimenting with a different form of libertarianism, including full blown no laws anarchy.
Kritzer does a great job of presenting libertarianism in the “This would work and this wouldn’t” vein, the MC is awesome.
However, the actual winner was a very different book. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is a queer magical school story with dragons…and anti-colonialism. Moniquill Blackgoose shows us her own culture…an indigenous culture that has not really been highlighted much in theory. And her dragons breathe nuclear fission. Riders train their dragons to do, basically, alchemy. This has everything I need, including
So I’m definitely happy with the result here. Kritzer has won more awards, so I was leaning towards Blackgoose anyway.
Nebula Award for Game Writing
Winner: Baldur’s Gate 3
I haven’t played any of the nominated video games, so I don’t have a lot of opinions on them. I’m unsurprised that Baldur’s Gate 3, about which I’ve heard so much, won.
(We do have a computer in the house that will just about run BG3, but we’re waiting for it to be on sale. The other video games won’t run on Macs at all).
The Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Winner: Barbie
I missed a chance to watch this at Balticon because I was cross scheduled. I need to see it. It’s going to win the Hugo.
I was less sure about the Nebula, because it was up against a Hayao Miyazaki and I thought a bunch of writers might give the award to the master.
But no, Barbie took it. And not undeservedly by all accounts. Everyone I know who watched it loved it. My pick was the amazing Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which was a fantastic work of visual LitRPG…you could see the dice rolls.
But it’s a bad year not to be Barbie almost as much as last was a bad year not to be Everything Everywhere All At Once.
WB didn’t send an acceptor, unsurprisingly…so a well-prepared volunteer came up and had a Barbie doll in a cocktail dress accept the award for them, to general laughter.
Next week (which I’m scheduling now because I won’t be back from Origins until dinner time) will be a slightly longer analysis of the winners in the other categories.