On the Nebula Awards Rules for Our Current Nominations Cycle 

Nebula finalist nominations are flowing in. Thank you for your patience and encouragement as we set up a new system that is responsive, interactive, and secure. Members can visit their new Membership Portal today to read more about the Nebula process from our Nebula Awards Commissioner, Marcus Whitnell.

Since 1965, the Nebula Awards have been one way we honor the speculative fiction creators who bring us groundbreaking work that challenges expectations and opens up new possibilities. 

I have worked on the Nebula Awards since 2020, producing the ceremony in 2023 and 2024. Behind the scenes, the team tried to read through every piece, play every game, and watch every show that hit the final ballot. I may have spent a lot of time with Karlach in Baldur’s Gate…

In all that time, the quality of the ballot continues to shine as bright as the brightest…Nebula. 

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself with the obvious metaphor.

But the rules we used in 1965 to prepare the ballot and support voting would not stand up to scrutiny in 2025. Over the years, the SFWA Board, staff, the Nebula Awards Commissioner (NAC), and the SFWA Awards Rules Committee (SARC) have worked to make sure the rules provide a secure, fair, legitimate, and legal framework for nomination and recognition.

This year’s review process raised several questions in genre categories, as well as around category minimums, appeals, and the use of LLM tools.

Vice President Anthony Eichenlaub detailed the rules revision process, beginning with the genre discussions, as follows:

“What ended up as a few bullet points in the official Nebula rules was actually a collaborative effort with the SARC, the NAC, and the comics and poetry committees. The words ‘poem of any length’ was the result of a long discussion on the nature of poetry and how our rules could possibly define the difference between poetry and very short prose fiction. We ultimately decided to trust the nominators and the voters. A lot of our philosophy comes down to that. Trust the voters.”

These rule revisions saw several rounds of back and forth between committees, members, board, and staff, revealing more areas of concern. 

“While we were updating the rules for poetry and comics, we also addressed some minor pain points,” Anthony explained. “Our CFO, Jonathan Brazee, was the NAC before he was a Board member, and he had fantastic insight into the behind-the-scenes process. We changed how we do category minimums and added clarification on how rules can be appealed.”

These changes helped to refine the nominations process, with an emphasis on clarity and consistency.

One of the most complex and difficult decisions of 2025 was in rules additions around the use of artificial intelligence: a topic of many SFF stories, and now an active part of the world in which they are created.

Our 2023 statement on AI/ML points to the fact that “writing and publishing genre fiction is a business with important norms.”

At SFWA, we believe in our creators, and we want the Nebula Awards to recognize work that is human-created and expansive.

We want to reinforce industry standards while also encouraging the industry to do better: from crediting authors to valuing their work, to promoting transparency and open dialogue among creators.

Our Complete Nebula Awards® Rules take this approach to heart. The rules state:

• Works that are wholly written using generative large language model (LLM) tools are not eligible.
• Works that used LLMs at any point during the writing process must disclose this upon acceptance of the nomination, and the nature of the technology’s use will be made clear to voters on the final ballot.

To repeat, works that are wholly written using generative large language model (LLM) tools are not eligible. The Nebula Awards honor writers and the work they create, not the LLMs they employ. 

When finalists are contacted, before they appear on the ballot, they will be asked to disclose any LLMs they used in the production of their work. The voters can then decide if they would like to vote for these works.

As of now, the industry standard overwhelmingly favors human-created work, from submissions guidelines to awards lists. As your SFWA President, I hope we continue to move in a direction that honors, supports, compensates, and celebrates the humans behind the great stories and poems we have the honor of reading, playing, and watching. 

I have no doubt our upcoming final ballot is going to present an incredible list of finalists. I personally can’t wait to read what you honor with your vote. 

Write on (and make your nominations),

Kate Ristau

SFWA President