The nominees for this year’s Nebula Awards were announced yesterday, to great acclaim from most of the people I follow on Twitter. I was very pleased myself. Based on what I have read, the quality is very good. The list is also very diverse, and there are very few of the usual suspects. Here are a few people I’m very pleased to see on the ballot:

Kameron Hurley, Genevieve Valentine, N.K. Jemisin, Catherynne M. Valente, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Kij Johnson, Ken Liu, Rachel Swirsky, Charlie Jane Anders, Geoff Ryman, Tom Crosshill, Aliette de Bodard, E. Lily Yu, Nnedi Okorafor, Delia Sherman.

There are also many people I’m not familiar with, particularly in the Norton Award.

I am, of course, particularly delighted that one of the books on the Best Novel list is in my bookstore. If you would like a copy of Mechanique (and why wouldn’t you?) then you can buy it here. It’s only £4.49.

I’m also pleased to see two Clarkesworld stories on the ballot, and several from other online venues: Lightspeed and Tor.com. Obviously these stories are free to read should you want to, but as they are now Nebula nominees I’d like you to consider helping out the magazines and authors by paying them some money. Here are some stories you can buy from me.

• Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente (Wyrm) – £1.99
• “The Old Equations,” Jake Kerr (Lightspeed #14) – £1.99
• “Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son,” Tom Crosshill (Lightspeed #11) – £1.99
• “Her Husband’s Hands,” Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed #17) – £1.99
• “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld #55) – £1.99

Finally I’d like to note that good nominee lists don’t happen by accident. It wasn’t that long ago that the Nebula lists were a bit of a laughing stock. A lot of hard work by John Scalzi and his team has turned this around. Jason Sanford has an interesting post about how changes to the procedures have made it easier for new and exciting works to get noticed, while avoiding the taint of log-rolling. Other awards could learn a lot from this.

Sadly it won’t help the Hugos. SFWA is a representative democracy. You can vote for change and sit back while other people make it happen. WSFS is a participatory democracy, and consequently it is much slower to change.