Last Saturday I attended the 40th Nebula Awards ceremony — my first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was a finalist for best novel — in Chicago (the winners were Lois McMaster Bujold, Walter Jon Williams, Ellen Klages, Eileen Gunn, and The Return of the King). Neil Gaiman was the toastmaster and gave a doozy of a speech, which he has subsequently blogged:
Forty years on and we’re now living in a world in which SF has become a default mode. In which the tropes of SF have spread into the world. Fantasy in its many forms has become a staple of the media. And we, as the people who were here first, who built this city on pulp and daydreams and four-colour comics, are coming to terms with a world in which we find several things they didn’t have to worry about in 1965.
For a start, today’s contemporary fiction is yesterday’s near-future SF. Only slightly weirder and with no obligation to be in any way convincing or consistent.
Gaiman speech Link, Official results, Nebulas tag on Flickr
(Thanks, Tommy!)