It’s award time again, and I’m not talking about the Oscars.  My little segment of the fiction-writing world has two major awards: the Hugo Award presented by the World Science Fiction Society and the Nebula Award presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).  This week, the SFWA announced the Nebula Award nominees for 2013, and I’m happy to seem some familiar faces, some news ones, and even a few I know.

While the Nebulas cover many categories, I’m most interested in the short fiction categories, so I’ll cover those today and get to the other award categories in another post.  Where possible, I’ve supplied links to the stories so you can check out the ones available for free online reading.

The nominees for best novelette are:

• “Paranormal Romance,” Christopher Barzak (Lightspeed)
• “The Waiting Stars,” Aliette de Bodard (The Other Half of the Sky) 
• “They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (Asimov’s) 
• “Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters,” Henry Lien (Asimov’s)
• “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King,” Ken Liu (Lightspeed)
• “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” Sarah Pinsker (Strange Horizons)

and for short story:

• “The Sounds of Old Earth,” Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed)
• “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons)
• “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer,” Kenneth Schneyer (Clockwork Phoenix 4)
• “‘If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” Rachel Swirsky (Apex)
• “Alive, Alive Oh,” Sylvia Spruck Wrigley (Lightspeed)   

While none of my stories were nominated, it’s nice to see publications where I’ve had stories appear get recognized, with a special congratulations to Lightspeed Magazine (and editor John Joseph Adams), which published a quarter of the stories nominated in the short fiction categories!  Very impressive for such a (relatively) new online venue.  (I  also notice that, with the exception of Asimov’s, the other two “Big Three” print publications are conspicuously absent in the short fiction categories.)

As a member of SFWA, I’m eligible to nominate and vote for the Nebula Awards.  I’ve only read a couple of the nominated stories, so I’ve got some reading to do before the voting closes on March 30th.  The winners will be announced in mid-May.

UPDATED 3/4/2014: I updated this post to remove Ken Liu’s “The Waves” from the list of the nominees.  Ken’s story was nominated last year; sorry about the error.  I also added links to the two stories published in Asimov’s, which made their nominees available for free reading on their website (temporarily I would assume, so read them while you have the chance).