I won a Nebula Award!

My story "Close Encounters" has won the 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novelette, selected by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Here's the complete list of winners and nominees in each category. This was my first Nebula win and seventh nomination.

I wasn't able to attend the May 18 awards banquet, which was in San Jose this year, for the excellent reason that Sydney and I were attending a family wedding on the other side of the continent, in Virginia Beach. So I wound up sitting in the Founders Inn lobby very late that night, watching the live feed of the Nebula ceremony on my iPhone, so that I wouldn't wake Sydney.

Moments before Liza Trombi from Locus began to read out the names of the nominees in my category, a large and boisterous family invaded the lobby, so I could hear nothing, and had to run outside, just in time to hear Liza announce my story as the winner. Elated, I pumped my fist and danced on the sidewalk ... right out of range of the lobby Wi-Fi, so I lost my signal and missed awards administrator Steve Silver reading my acceptance speech in absentia. Here's what I said, via Steve:

This is a great honor. Thanks to the members of SFWA for the encouragement, and to my fellow nominees for the inspiration. Thanks to the editors of Fortean Times for the idea. Thanks to Mark Wingenfeld for research assistance, to Nick Gevers for commissioning the story, to Jim Goddard for editing it, to Pete Crowther for publishing it, to Gordon Van Gelder for re-publishing it, and to Chris Roberts and Kent Bash for illustrating it. More general thanks to my parents; to my classmates and teachers, especially at Clarion West 1994; to my students, especially Clarion  2004 and Clarion West 2005; to my editors, especially Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Jonathan Strahan; to ICFA, Sycamore Hill, Norton Island and the KGB Bar; to John Kessel, who grew me from a bean; and to my wife, Sydney, for everything. Finally, I’d like to propose a toast to Sydney’s cousin Andrea Ward and her groom Justin Wiley, who got married in Virginia earlier this evening; that’s where I am this weekend. May they have SFWA’s best wishes for a long, happy life together in this increasingly science-fictional world.

UPS is scheduled to deliver my Nebula to the house this coming Wednesday, June 5. In the meantime, here's a photo of it that my bookseller friend Glennis LeBlanc thoughtfully took at the banquet:

Nebulas are beautiful, aren't they? Nebulas make Pulitzers look like Employee of the Month certificates. (Not that I'd decline a Pulitzer, either.)

If you want to read my winning story, you've got a lot of chances. "Close Encounters" was first published in my 2012 collection The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, from PS Publishing. It was reprinted as the cover story of the September/October 2012 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, with a fine cover illustration by Kent Bash. Here's Lois Tilton's rave review of the story in Locus Online.

Since then, "Close Encounters" has been reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Seven, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books, 2013), and has been picked up by three upcoming year's-best anthologies: The Year's Best Science Fiction: 30th Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin's, 2013); The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction Five, edited by Allan Kaster (AudioText, 2013); and Year's Best SF 18, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor, 2013).

That would make five reprints, putting "Close Encounters" in a tie with "Zora and the Zombie" (2004) for my most-reprinted story. However, if "Close Encounters" also is in the next Nebula Awards Showcase volume, to be edited (I believe) by Kij Johnson -- and why wouldn't it be? -- that'll be reprint No. 6, and "Close Encounters" will be my new champ.

According to Mark R. Kelly's invaluable Science Fiction Awards Database, previous winners of the Nebula for Best Novelette include ... well, you can see the list here. It's a parade of classics, is what it is. Do I think my story is as good as (to pick only four) "Gonna Roll the Bones," "The Bicentennial Man," "The Screwfly Solution," or "Bloodchild"? No. Am I nevertheless ecstatic to be listed with them, now and in perpetuity? Absolutely.

A New Year's Eve news roundup

Secret Weapons. Agence France-Presse reports on researcher Ray Waru’s discoveries in New Zealand’s national archives, including a top-secret World War II effort by New Zealand and the United States to create a “tsunami bomb” that would devastate coastal cities (via The Anomalist): http://www.france24.com/en/20121230-ufos-tsunami-bomb-nz-archive-secrets-revealed

Space Travel. Prolonged exposure to radiation could hasten Alzheimer’s among space travelers, says a new study in PLOS ONE. Lots of coverage, including Space.com (http://www.space.com/19082-space-radiation-astronauts-alzheimers.html) and Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121231180632.htm). 

UFOs. Saturday Night UFOria has posted a tribute to ufologist J. Allen Hynek, including the text of his speech at a then-classified 1960 symposium at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida (via The Anomalist): http://www.saturdaynightuforia.com/html/articles/articlehtml/ourspeakertonight-drhynek.html

Werewolves. Geneticist Ricki Lewis reports at PLOS.org on the latest genetic research into Ambas syndrome, a rare disorder that gave the world Fedor Jepticheff – whom P.T. Barnum christened Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Man – and may have influenced Hollywood’s depiction of werewolves: http://blogs.plos.org/dnascience/2012/12/27/the-curious-genetics-of-werewolves/

Casinos vs. Casinos

Who's funding all the anti-casino ads in Maryland this election year? Casinos in West Virginia, reports Slate.

My latest Appalachian Independent article ...

... has been posted: "Veteran Congressman Helps Dedicate New Sustainable-Energy Lab." It includes my brief interview with U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., about his prospects in next week's election.

1962: It was a very good year

Although I don't see it on the World Fantasy Convention's current schedule, the organizers at one point considered a retrospective panel on the fantasy books of 1962 -- which had become classics, which await rediscovery, and so forth.

This inspired me, with the help of the invaluable Internet Speculative Fiction Database, to come up with this partial list of the fantasy books of 1962 (including science fiction as a subset of fantasy, of course). It was a very good year!

All hail to the five writers on the list (that I know of) still Among Those Present -- honored friends and colleagues, all.

• Joan Aiken, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
• Brian W. Aldiss, Hothouse
• J.G. Ballard, Billennium
• J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World
• J.G. Ballard, The Voices of Time
• J.G. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere
• Robert Bloch, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper
• Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones and Labyrinths (first English translations of these collections)
• Ray Bradbury, R Is for Rocket
• Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
• John Brunner, No Future in It
• Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail-Safe
• Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
• Avram Davidson, Or All the Seas with Oysters
• Samuel R. Delany, The Jewels of Aptor
• August Derleth, ed., Dark Mind, Dark Heart
• August Derleth, Lonesome Places
• Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
• Harlan Ellison, Ellison Wonderland
• Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
• Russell Kirk, Old House of Fear
• Russell Kirk, The Surly Sullen Bell
• Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
• John D. MacDonald, The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything
• Katherine MacLean, The Diploids
• Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman
• H. Beam Piper, Little Fuzzy
• Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, The Wonder Effect
• Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth (first, posthumous publication, 50 years after Twain’s death)
• Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

"Andy Duncan: Fashioning the Fantastic"

A new profile of me by Lindsey Lowe just was posted at Alumni Extra, published by the University of Alabama alumni office.

Servers' Birthday Chant

(With handclaps.)
We would sing 'Happy Birthday'
But it's still in copyright
And so we wrote this drivel
To foist on you tonight
Hey!

Servers' Birthday Chant by Andy Duncan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at beluthahatchie.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://beluthahatchie.blogspot.com/.

The buzz on drone journalism

My student Shawn Pillai shares a link to a reblogged Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times editorial about airborne surveillance drones, coming soon to airspace near you:

Legislation just signed by President Obama directs the Federal Aviation Administration to open the skies to remotely controlled drones within the next three years. It will begin in 90 days with police and first responders ...

Shawn calls this "scary," and he's right. Keep in mind, however, that not only police agencies are planning to deploy drones. Case in point: the four-month-old Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Lab founder Matt Waite -- who declares, "Drones are an ideal platform for journalism" -- demonstrated one of his drones to an exhilarated (and jittery) crowd at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference in St. Louis in February. Here's John Keefe's video of the takeoff and landing.

In Urbana, Ill., meanwhile, Matthew Schroyer has founded the Professional Society of Drone Journalists. Here's Schroyer's overview of the topic.

Maybe Frostburg State faculty in journalism, computer science and engineering should get together to talk about this.

Busted

Today’s postal mail brought an unpleasant surprise, my first speed-camera ticket. According to Maryland State Police automata, I was going 68 mph in a 55 mph work zone at 9:42 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 22, at I-70 and South Street in Frederick County, Md.

I was driving three students to the Baltimore airport to catch a plane to a conference. I guess being busted by a speed camera beats being pulled to the roadside by a police officer, with the attendant embarrassment and delay.

Instead, the shame has followed me to my house, where it’s aggravated by the fact that I was driving Sydney’s car at the time. No matter who is driving, the automata write tickets to the car’s owner, so the ticket arrived addressed to Sydney. Imagine her delight when she opened the envelope. Imagine her warm words.

Since May 2011, cameras at that location have written 3,414 citations, an average of 341 a month. Assuming $40 a pop, and assuming further that everyone cited actually paid, that’s $136,560 in total revenue, or $13,656 a month.

That’s peanuts compared to the lucre generated by the I-95 cameras in Baltimore County, between I-695 and I-895. They’ve generated 384,062 citations since November 2009, or $15.4 million. See for yourself.

According to Maryland SafeZones Facts, these cameras are mounted on white sport utility vehicles marked with the SafeZones logo, and by the time I passed them, I already had passed work-zone warning signs, plus an electronic sign displaying my speed.

So it’s a fair cop, as Monty Python used to say -- though I apparently could have sped past the cameras with impunity had I been going 1 mph slower.

I’m still disconcerted that my public movements are so much more easily tracked by the government than they used to be.

Read in 2011

Of the books I read in 2011, a few favorites, in publication order.

Fiction:

• Jim Thompson, The Getaway (1959). Scary and increasingly surreal. Arguably a dark fantasy novel.
• Stephen King (as Richard Bachman), The Long Walk (1979). Relentless. A lifetime ahead of The Hunger Games.
• Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010). As with all Chiang's best work, it's not only moving but keeps you thinking for months after you put down the book.

Non-fiction:

• Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974).  A spellbinding police procedural, courtroom drama, and personality study. 
• William R. Corliss, Science Frontiers: Some Anomalies and Curiosities of Nature (2 vols., 1994 and 2004). An annotated bibliography of thousands of eyebrow-raising articles in the scientific literature. Astonishment on every page.
• Ed Cray, Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (2004). Honest about the man's countless flaws, but awe-inspiring nonetheless.

Marcellus Shale gas overestimated by 80 percent

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says it will cut its estimate of the total natural gas in the Marcellus Shale by 80 percent to match the U.S. Geological Survey estimate, according to The New York Times.  "They’re geologists; we’re not," an EIA analyst said, rather sheepishly.

To be sure, 84 million cubic feet is still a lot of natural gas, but that USGS estimate itself is generous, because it counts all the gas that's "technically recoverable," meaning using every iota of extraction technology available on the planet.  How much of that would be economically feasible, even amid boom natural-gas prices, is another story.

That supposedly scientific estimates of Eastern gas reserves seem to vary so wildly, depending on who's making the estimate and what's being counted and what time of day it is and whether you hold your mouth just right, is deeply troubling.  I agree with Bill Powers, publisher of Powers Energy Investor:

If the country is going to embrace natural gas as the fuel of the future, there needs to be a lot more transparency in how these estimates are calculated and a more skeptical and informed discussion about the economics of shale gas.

(Thanks to Dale Sams for passing this along.)

Can a bar of soap in the bed prevent leg cramps?

I've heard for years, especially from Sydney's family, that a bar of soap in the bed prevents nocturnal leg cramps.  Having never suffered that malady, I've never had occasion to try it.  Now Snopes.com labels the folk belief "undetermined," on the assumption that no one has proven or disproven it.

I'm inclined, like Snopes, to attribute any benefit to the ever-reliable placebo effect, but I'd still like to know whether any scientists have tested this belief.

A Father's Day remembrance on the Outer Banks

While running errands today, I saw two women and two boys planting a cross beside the U.S. 158 bypass in Kill Devil Hills, N.C.

I stopped to talk and learned the cross marks the site where Victor Wilson of Kill Devil Hills was fatally injured on his motorcycle in May 2010.  The boys are Wilson's sons, who were 13 and 6 when he died. Planting the cross was the family's Father's Day observance.

Here's the original Virginian-Pilot account of Wilson's death, which credits police as saying that a pickup-truck driver leaving the Outer Banks Brewing Station across the highway pulled in front of Wilson's Harley about 7:30 p.m. on May 21, 2010. "Charges are pending," says the story, but I find no follow-up online.

Here's the online obituary, courtesy of Twiford's Funeral Home in Elizabeth City, N.C.

The new cross is in the corner of the Captain George's lot on U.S. 158, a.k.a. South Croatan Highway, at the Goddard Avenue intersection. We drive by dozens of such markers every day; every one is a story.

Procrastination wins again

In our absence this week, the bell post in our front yard finally fell down of its own accord, sparing us a chore we'd been putting off for five years. The timing is good, as Big Trash Day is next week.

This summer's Write-a-Thon(s)

I haven't tried this before, but since I am working on several writing projects this summer, I have declared solidarity with the Clarion West and Clarion UCSD students, and joined the Write-a-Thon fund-raisers for both workshops. Writers and readers, please help me spread the word, and consider joining and/or pledging. Here's my Clarion West Write-a-Thon page, and here's my Clarion UCSD page.

A fine alternate-history illustration

This fine Richard Hess cover for The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes (Oxford UP, 1985) is a work of alternate history, unlike the book it was commissioned to wrap around. 

I wonder whether Hess read Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series -- though in Farmer's novels, all the world's most famous military leaders didn't wake up on the same patch of riverbank, fortunately.  Moreover, most of Hess' characters are clearly older than 25.

ICFA-31: Sydney

This photo of Sydney Duncan fits none of my other groupings, but I like it, and she's my wife, and she did a great job as author wrangler this year, so she gets a posting all to herself. John Kessel took this photo at the (excellent) Thursday-morning Kathy Goonan / Kij Johnson / Tom De Haven reading.

ICFA-31: The wrap party

Below: The Dell Award finalists barely could contain themselves. Anthony Powers, Lara Donnelly, Rebecca McNulty, Rachel Sobel, Rachel Halpern (almost visible) and Miah Saunders.Below: Rebecca McNulty, Anthony Powers (almost visible), Rachel Sobel, Rachel Halpern, Lara Donnelly and Miah Saunders.Below: Rebecca McNulty, Rachel Halpern, Miah Saunders and Lara Donnelly.Below: Lara Donnelly and her dad, Richard Donnelly, who's so proud of her he will overlook the hat.Below: Pepe Rojo and Sydney Duncan.Below: Chrissie Mains.Below: Elizabeth Hoiem.Below: P. Andrew Miller.Below: Bill Senior.Below: Elizabeth McManus, winner of this year's Graduate Student Award for her Friday-afternoon paper "Protecting the Island: Interior and Exterior Space in Lost."Below: Jedediah Berry, winner of this year's Crawford Award for best first book of fantasy for his novel The Manual of Detection.Below: Jim Casey, new president of the IAFA, with the unclaimed power cord he cherished for much of the evening. Jim and I were classmates at the University of Alabama, where we had such hopes.Below: Joe Berlant and Mark Wingenfeld, dazed by their release from the book room.Below: Amelia Beamer and Rick Wilber.Below: Ellen Klages, Amelia Beamer and Charles Vess.Below: F. Brett Cox and Francesca Myman.Below: Two views of Liza Trombi and James Patrick Kelly.Below: Veronica Schanoes, Jeana Jorgensen and Marie Brennan.Below: Ellen Klages fails to frighten Russell Letson.Below: Amelia Beamer successfully frightens Peter Straub and Gary K. Wolfe.

ICFA-31: Ambushing people in the lobby

Below: Gary K. Wolfe, Joe Haldeman and Peter Straub.Below: Rachel Sobel, Rebecca McNulty and Joe Haldeman.Below: Steven Erikson and Aidan-Paul Canavan.Below: Stephen R. Donaldson and Jennifer Cox.Below: Nora Jemisin and Karen Burnham.Below: Liza Trombi and Amelia Beamer.Below: Liza Trombi, Amelia Beamer and Francesca Myman.Below: Jeanne Beckwith and F. Brett Cox.Below: Graham Sleight.Below: Peter Straub.Below: Rusty Hevelin.Below: Rusty Hevelin and Gary K. Wolfe.Below: Tom and Santa De Haven, Rachel Sobel and Rebecca McNulty.

ICFA-31: Saturday banquet

Below: Kij Johnson and John Kessel.Below: Jen Gunnels and Ellen Klages.Below: Three photos of Sydney Duncan, Liza Trombi and Karen Burnham. Their conversation eventually focused, as you can see, on Karen's amazing tattoo, a 14-hour job I should have gotten a photo of.Below: Sydney Duncan, Karen Burnham, Liza Trombi and Amelia Beamer.Below: Daphne Grace and Kij Johnson.Below: James Patrick Kelly and Ted Chiang.Below: F. Brett Cox and Jeanne Beckwith.Below: Jen Gunnels and the ever subtle Stefan Hall.Below: David G. Hartwell and Amy Branam.Below: Andy Duncan (photo by John Kessel).