What Are Awards Actually For?
The Nebula Awards are coming tomorrow - I have a few thoughts, and it's not what you think...
The Nebula Conference starts tomorrow in Chicago, which means Science Fiction (and fantasy) is entering one of those ‘most sacred rituals’ in the world of creatives; a gathering of creatives to discuss, vote, and ultimately award those in their midst who are deserving of recognition.
Publishers and influencers wait with bated breath to cash in on the results of the winners and losers.
This year’s Nebula Awards are the 61st, honoring works published in 2025, and have added two new categories of awards; Best Poem and Best Comic. Seeing as I’ve never really considered myself a poet, my submission for Best Poem shall follow;
Nebula’s lights dare:
Phantom Starlight should be there,
Maybe next year’s fare?
Yeah, writing a haiku is hard. Phantom Starlight is a novella I wrote in High School and have spent the last twenty plus years writing and rewriting into a novel. My novel would have to content with nominees like this years class [non-Affiliate Links]1;
When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou
Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell
That’s quite a reading list, and frankly, I haven’t heard of any of those novels. Which, honestly, is kind of one of the best things award season does. Not the part where it picks “the best.” It is of course the whole point of the ceremony and a great honour for the writer, but it’s not the actual “best” part about the Nebula awards. The best thing about them is discovery, exposure, and really the ability to raise stories above the noise and let the readers and the Science Fiction community decide what they like best.
Because, let’s be honest, Science Fiction fans don’t get “told” what to like best.
We live in a time when there is more science fiction and fantasy than any one person could possibly keep up with. Books are coming from major publishers, small presses, indie authors, magazines, games, comics, audio drama, streaming, film, and whatever category we’re eventually going to invent for I-wrote-my-novel-one-chapter-at-a-time-on-Substack (this is me).
Awards help cut through that bulk, they give readers a door. Maybe you don’t usually read novellas, or have never given a novelette a second thought and, if pressed, would admit you are not entirely sure where a novelette ends and a novella begins. Maybe you love novels but ignore short fiction because short fiction feels like it’s too-easy, or whatever. Then Nebula season rolls around and suddenly there is a list. Yes, eventually, someone will say one of them are the “best,” but for the rest of us, there’s a list. A list of something to read, something that stood out enough to be nominated. That is useful in a genre as sprawling as ours.
Awards also help form canon, which is a fancy way of saying they help decide what future fan will use to be inducted into the genre. When a book wins or is nominated, it becomes easier to find later. The book gets added to recommendation lists, stocked in libraries, it gets a sticker the cover. Truthfully, it gains a second life beyond the publication window, which is important because publishing windows be brutally short. A book can spend years being written and then get about nine minutes of cultural attention before the algorithm points everyone towards the next random thing.
Awards say: “Wait, don’t lose this one yet.”
So, yes, there will be winners, and there will be finalists. There will be speeches and applause and probably at least one deeply cringy moment and one deeply emotional moment. But that’s for the authors, and the publishers, and the influencers, and the people making money on winning. But for the rest of us, the useful thing starts before the ceremony.
Look at the list.
Pick one thing you would not normally read. Not the obvious one. Not the one already sitting in your comfort zone, pick the strange one. The one with a premise you can’t quite summarize. The one from a category you usually skip. The one that makes you think, “I don’t know if this is for me.”
That is what awards are good for.
Not telling us what to love, but giving us an excuse to go find out.
These links just go to Goodreads, I lost my Amazon affiliate account since my affiliate links never got used, so I figured why not just link to Goodreads and let you all decide where to buy them yourself.
I've already looked these up, when looking at the Hugo nominees. Looked at sample chapters, synopses, core themes, etc. Not a single one even remotely appealed to me. At least, the Hugo nominated Shroud, which I am seriously considering giving a read.
My hot take is that SFF awards in 2026 are more for writers than they are for readers.
As a digital marketer I often think about products (be they games or books or toasters) about point-of-purchase decision making. It is very hard for me to imagine a reader on the fence about a purchase who bites the bullet and buys it because they realise "oh, this book won an Aurora!"
But man, if I'm an SFF author cold pitching a new publisher or agency and I can flex a Hugo for my short story? That's absolutely a point-of-purchase decision factor for Orbit Books.