The Jack McDevitt anomaly

Chaos Horizon analyses the Nebula Award nominations for best novel and stumbles over Jack McDevitt:

Case in point: Jack McDevitt, who now has have 12 (!) Best Novel Nebula nominations. The constant McDevitt nominations are the strangest thing that is currently happening in the Nebulas. That’s not a knock against McDevitt. I’ve read two of McDevitt’s book, The Engines of God and the Nebula winning Seeker. They were both solid space exploration novels: fast-paced, appealing characterization, and professionally done. They didn’t stand out to me, but there’s never anything wrong with writing books people want to read. Still, I’m not sure why McDevitt deserves 12 nominations while similar authors such as Peter F. Hamilton, Alistair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, etc., are largely ignored by the SFWA voters. To put this in context: McDevitt has more Nebula Best Novel nominations than Neal Stephenson (1), William Gibson (4), and Philip K. Dick (5) combined.

Because the Nebulas are voted on by the SFWA membership and campaigning and voting for it therefore doesn’t happen out in the open as much as it does for the Hugos, it’s difficult to get to understand why McDevitt, out of all decent but not spectacularly good authors has so many nominations but only one win. If it was purely a block of voters liking a certain type of traditional sf novel, you’d expect other, similar authors to show up more, but instead it’s McDevitt year in, year out. Perhaps he just has a lot of friends in SFWA or campaigns well?

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