“Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.”
– N. K. Jemisin The Stone Sky, Book Three of The Broken Earth Trilogy

Our Nebula Conference Programming Starts with You

The theme for this year’s Nebula Awards Conference is Worldbuilding and Worldbreaking, in tribute to the work of this year’s Damon Knight Memorial Award Grand Master, N. K. Jemisin. Our programming will foster professional development and writing craft by celebrating worldbuilding on the page, in our broader genre community, in the world at large, in history, and works of alt-history.

We also invite programming that explores worldbreaking. We define worldbreaking as any departure from restrictive social norms that creates pathways for deeper understanding, empathy, and liberation. Our core focal points are as follows:

• Worldbuilding and worldbreaking on the page: How do we convey the limits of our narrative worlds, and move beyond them?
• Worldbuilding and worldbreaking in SFF community: How do we create resilience, care, curiosity, audience shares, professional uplift, and dynamic conversations around our SFF?
• Worldbuilding and worldbreaking in the broader world: How does the work we do on the page translate to the world we live in, and how does the world we live in inform the work we create?
• Worldbuilding and worldbreaking in history: Who has some wonderful lore to share with us, about the ways in which SFF has worked in other generations to imagine better and shatter preceding norms?
• Worldbuilding and worldbreaking in alt-history: There is a special slice of SFF dedicated expressly to imagining our world in a slightly different historical light. If you’re a creator of such work, let’s talk together about the strengths and challenges of writing in this dynamic subgenre and form.

Tips for Successful Programming Applications

Remember your audience! The Nebula Awards Conference is a celebration of professional and professionalizing writers, so we’re going to be looking for pitches that can offer more nuanced approaches to the craft. This is not a conference focused on fan-oriented deconstructions of existing work, and we’re going well past Writing 101 in our discussion of early-, mid-, and late-career challenges.

Lean into a diversity of writing styles! We especially want panels that can cultivate cross-medium and cross-genre discussions, because it enriches all of us as writers to hear how a given challenge or idea is managed in other SFF forms.

We love pitches that incorporate more worldly perspectives, including SFF from distinct cultural traditions and subject positions. However, those pitches should come with a strong understanding of how much wonderful work is already being done in your chosen subfield. A pitch that only focuses on how a given cultural tradition is not represented in “mainstream SFF”, or which configures another cultural tradition in SFF as merely “non-Western”, is still centering the conversation on a single, monolithic idea of SFF as both genre and community. Lean into the joy of your chosen cultural tradition and/or subject position! Bring exciting recent work and conversations in active practice around the world of SFF to the table instead.

Do not self-reject. Nebula attendees will only ever benefit from having a wide range of professional voices around the table, and we are keen to explore different ways of knowledge-sharing as we develop this year’s worldbuilding and worldbreaking program. If you are unsure of an idea you would like to propose to this team, please write to us at programming@sfwa.org for more support in its development.

Thank you for your interest in your programming! We look forward to seeing you out, either in Chicago or online!