It’s awards season, and BSFWers are up for some. Does that include you? Maybe! Here are some of the basics: The two big awards are the Hugos [named after early SF publisher Hugo Gernsback] and the Nebulas. [No, we won’t explain that one. I mean, LMGTFY.] The Nebulas are awarded by SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Nebula eligibility - both for voters and for stories - is more restrictive than Hugo eligibility, but easier to determine. The Hugos are awarded by the World Science Fiction Society, and they are wide open – both in terms of who can vote, the number of categories, and the works and recipients that are eligible. Nebulas are awarded by SFWA’s membership. SFWA’s members are “professional writers of SFF” - that is, folks who have made a certain number of sales in “qualifying markets” or made more than a certain amount of money selling their work. Both full members and associate members (who have made fewer sales) can vote. Here are the big Nebula eligibility rules:
Hugos and the World Science Fiction Society are…different. The World Science Fiction Society is less a freestanding club than it is a neural-network-distributed, ad hoc organization to create the Worldcon and award the Hugos for the next year. To Wikiquote: WSFS has no standing officers, only small standing committees, and a large membership composed of the members of the current Worldcon. Its main activities are running the selection (voting) process for the annual convention and various awards. The conventions themselves are run by non-profit, volunteer fan organizations, who bid to host the event. The WSFS constitution and the Hugos eligibility can change every year, and there have been attempts to game the Hugo nomination/voting process in the past. However, the Hugos are both a (slightly) bigger deal than the Nebulas and more open to campaigning and to newcomers. Anyone who attends the Worldcon (or has a membership to attend) can nominate and vote for works published in the previous year.
Ted RabinowitzAfter working as a story analyst, producer, and professional gambler, Ted Rabinowitz (a.k.a. Ted Mendelson) now writes marketing copy and speculative fiction, two entirely different kinds of imaginative literature. Ted is the author of The Wrong Sword, a comic fantasy. His latest short story, A Dog of Wu, appears in the March/April 2018 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
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