Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

Nominations have been announced for the Nebula Awards, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which includes the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation. (Strictly speaking, the Bradbury Award isn't a Nebula - the winner receives a different type of trophy - but it is balloted for, and given, along with the Nebulas. Shown here is Neil Gaiman's Bradbury Award for a 2011 Dr Who episode.)

Here are the nominees:

Doctor Who: ‘‘The Day of the Doctor’’ (Nick Hurran, director; Steven Moffat, writer) (BBC Wales)
Europa Report (Sebastián Cordero, director; Philip Gelatt, writer) (Start Motion Pictures)
Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, director; Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, writers) (Warner Bros.)
Her (Spike Jonze, director; Spike Jonze, writer) (Warner Bros.)
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence, director; Simon Beaufoy & Michael deBruyn, writers) (Lionsgate)
Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, director; Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro, writers) (Warner Bros.)

It will be interesting to see what the SFWA membership makes of this. Gravity would seem to be the natural winner, but my impression is that it has had quite a critical reception among SF types. While the general filmgoing audience might have found it novel, seasoned SF old-timers see Gravity as 1930s or 1940s SF, the kind of story that Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke (or Bradbury) could have bashed out in an afternoon.


Winners will be announced later in the year. Details of all the Nebula nominees can be found on the SFWA website. Previous winners are listed on Wikipedia, here.

And the Bradbury Award goes to...

At the recent Nebula Awards ceremony, the Ray Bradbury Award was given to Neil Gaiman for an episode of Dr Who. Neil has posted a photo of the award on his blog, showing the trophy sitting next to his Jim Henson Creativity Award - which he describes as "the only other award goofy enough to make me laugh". Here's the photo:

This isn't the only award named after Bradbury. There's also the Ray Bradbury Creativity Award. This was recently given to Kirk Douglas, with the actor Bo Derek standing in for Ray - this was a few weeks before his death, and he was too ill to attend.

Ray and Bo go back a long way. If you Google both names, you will probably find stories about how they met. Ray and Kirk also go back a long way: in the 1950s, Kirk Douglas worked with  Bradbury to prepare a TV series called Report From Space, which was to adapt stories from The Martian Chronicles and other Bradbury books. Unfortunately, the project fell through. Twenty-some years later, Kirk's son Peter Douglas would produce the Disney adaptation of Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The Creativity Award ceremony was filmed by Blair Bones Media. Jeremy Blair kindly sent me a link, so please enjoy the event:




Ray Bradbury Creativity Award 2012: Kirk Douglas from Jeremy Blair on Vimeo.

Ray Bradbury Award Shortlist

The Science Fiction Writers of America have just announced the shortlist for the 2011 Nebula Awards, which includes the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation.

The Bradbury nominees are as follows:

• Attack the Block, Joe Cornish (writer/director) (Optimum Releasing; Screen Gems)
• Captain America: The First Avenger, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely (writers), Joe Johnston (director) (Paramount)
• Doctor Who: “The Doctor’s Wife,” Neil Gaiman (writer), Richard Clark (director) (BBC Wales)
• Hugo, John Logan (writer), Martin Scorsese (director) (Paramount)
• Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen (writer/director) (Sony)
• Source Code, Ben Ripley (writer), Duncan Jones (director) (Summit)
• The Adjustment Bureau, George Nolfi (writer/director) (Universal)

I confess to only having seen a few of these, although I know of most of them. I personally found "The Doctor's Wife" disappointing, and have a feeling that it is the novelty of Neil Gaiman writing for Dr Who that drew attention to it, rather than the quality of the work itself. (We saw a similar phenomenon when Richard Curtis wrote an episode of Dr Who, which was neither the best Who episode of its season nor the best TV writing Curtis had ever done.)

I don't for one minute think that this award should in any way reflect what Bradbury would like, but suspect that either Hugo or Midnight in Paris would be more his cup of tea.

Full details of the Nebula nominees can be found on the SFWA website. Previous winners are listed here.

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Today I have discovered a whole pile of comments that people have submitted to various blog posts I made over the last year. For some bizarre reason, I hadn't been notified of these comments, and so I was unaware that they were awaiting moderation. If you have posted a comment but never seen it appear, I offer you my sincere apologies.

I think I have now fixed the problem (which seems to be due to Blogger "forgetting" my email address, even though it clearly hasn't forgotten it), so comments and responses should appear more swiftly in the future.

Meanwhile, if you'd care to scan through the old posts, you might well find that old comments have now appeared and been responded to.

And The Bradbury Award Goes To...

The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) have announced that the 2009 recipient of the Ray Bradbury Award will be Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. The award is given for outstanding work in a dramatic medium.

Whedon is quoted as saying:

Like everyone who picks up a pen, I was a rabid Bradbury fan and as greatly influenced by him as any other writer I read. To receive the award named for him is an honor I'd not dreamed of. In my defense, it didn't exist back then. What did exist were the very lovely, very twisted and very human stories that warped my impressionable mind, and that I have tried, in whatever medium they will let me, to measure up to.

The full story is on the SWFA website, here. The award will be presented at the annual Nebula Awards bash in April.

Reviews of Bradbury's latest book We'll Always Have Paris are popping up around the place. I haven't had time to read the book yet myself, but I'm encouraged to see some positive press being received for this volume. See what the Los Angeles Times has to say here. And the Toledo Blade here.