More on the Nebulas: Past, Present, and Future Conversations
Happy Nebula Season! The celebration continues.
On March 15, 2025, it was our privilege and delight to celebrate this amazing group of new finalists. For over 60 years, the Nebulas have recognized the best in speculative fiction writing, and that tradition continues with this year’s incredible cohort, which includes writers from more forms of SFF than ever before.
First Steps in a Continuing Mission
In 1965, we started with four categories. Want to know more? Last year, Past President Michael Capobianco gave us a brief history of “The First Nebula Awards”, which gives you a sense of how far we’ve come and how exploration has been part of the process since the start.
Over time, we came to celebrate speculative fiction across more forms. Sometimes new award categories stuck, and sometimes they fell away. As our History Committee pursues interviews with past presidents and Grand Masters this year, more of SFWA’s wild and wonderful Nebula lore will be added to our archives, and we can all deepen our understanding of this dynamic industry and its shifting priorities over the decades. As the board liaison for the History Committee, I can’t wait to dive deeper into the past, contextualizing it for current and future members.
But in every season of the Nebulas, one core truth prevails: We empower creators across our industry to KEEP ON WRITING. As I said in our finalist announcement, what a joy it is to now honor poetry and comics with Nebula Awards, and to bring them into the Nebula conversation.
The Joy of New, Great Writing
Our Poetry and Comics Committees worked hard for the inclusion of these latest awards. Thank you to everyone who spearheaded this work, from the initial rules to final edits, to spreading the word about fantastic eligible works.
On SFWA.org, we’re rolling out new Nebula celebration spaces, like our Nebula Finalist Page, that will support readers and voters wanting to learn more about all the works on our ballot and the creative teams that support the writers listed there. The Nebula Award Reading Packet is now also available for voting SFWA Members, on the Action Items bar in our Membership Portal. Please remember that these materials are shared among SFWA members as a courtesy from publishers, and do not distribute any of their contents with the broader community.
Next Steps for Promising New Awards
The days of a simple flat ballot being the sum total of finalist representation are behind us.
This ballot is rich, multilayered, and diverse. We have tough decisions ahead of us as we log in to vote on our final choices. I’ve already read many of this year’s works myself, and I have been downloading the rest onto my Libby account, gathering friends to play some new games, and ordering new books and magazines from my local indie.
Launching a new award is the beginning, not the end, of the conversation.
When the Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and our Nebula Award for Game Writing first launched, they prompted the same questions about creative teams that are now raised by members of the greater comics community. It is not always easy to differentiate the writing from other key components in these mediums – like the incredible illustrations, lettering, titles, and coloring on these works of art.
At the same time, the Nebulas are SFF writers’ “Oscars”: awards chosen not by general fans, but by fellow writers celebrating the craft they know best. These writers are at the top of their craft, and it is our honor to celebrate their works at the Nebula Awards in June.
Still, we have work to do as we continue to build the genre and the teams that make these works shine!
How the Community Is Pitching in
Along with Finalist Cards that include more creators in the overview of each work on the ballot, we are working with our Comics Committee to honor artists at the Nebula Conference in Chicago this June, while celebrating the core focus of our writing organization’s awards.
We also invite your feedback via sarc@sfwa.org to support the rules committee’s upcoming review of Nebula procedures, since we now have three multimedia awards that will benefit from more consistent standards for representation.
We heard your feedback, and we thank you for taking the time to share it. The Board meets on April 9 to select a name that better represents the award’s purpose of honoring comics writing, but we are also already united in our belief that comics – like games, and dramatic presentations – are art forms where the sum of their parts is far more than words on the page.
While three of our comics finalists this year are written and created by authors who were also their own illustrators, creating a comic, graphic novel, or illustrated work is frequently a collaborative process. Many of the writing finalists for our inaugural Comics Nebula are part of truly spectacular teams, and we encourage you to check out what such collaborations can create.
Next Steps for Our Other Multimedia Awards
The multimedia teams involved in Games and Dramatic Presentations also raised another conversation this year.
As you know, this was our first year asking writers if they had used LLMs in the writing of their works. The resounding answer was NO (with quite a few expletives thrown in, “FUCK no!” being my favorite), but the team approach to these art forms creates a different challenge for a writers’ organization trying to promote writer-focused awards. We are still waiting to hear back from Bradbury and Game finalists on award acceptance and their responses to the LLM question. Those entries are marked as provisional on the ballot.
Our industry is changing, but the rich history of SFWA’s Nebula Awards shows that it’s always been changing. That’s why SFWA is at its best when we approach new sites of creative tension with curiosity, in community, whenever they arise. With every new award and rule change, we need to support our core mission of writer uplift, advocacy, education, and defense.
We’re so glad to be celebrating this giant leap with Poetry and Comics with you.
And we stand firm in our commitment to keep growing with the needs of our genre community.
Keep writing – and reading!
The Final Nebula Ballot closes 11:59pm PDT on April 15. Support these writers and read their work (you’ll be glad you did)!
Write on,
Kate Ristau
SFWA President