Neil Gaiman's Nebula Awards Speech

Posted on May 6, 2005

Bestselling author Neil Gaiman gave an excellent Toastmaster's Speech at the Nebula Awards on April 30th in Chicago, in which he talked about the importance of the Nebulas, and how SF has changed over the years.

"I always liked the idea that SF stood for Speculative Fiction, mostly because it seemed to cover everything, and include the attitude that what we were doing involved speculation. SF was about thinking, about inquiring, about making things up."
"The challenge now is to go forward and to keep going forward: to tell stories that have weight and meaning. It's saying things that mean things, and using the literature of the imagination to do it."
"And that's something that each of us, and the writers who will come afterwards, are going to have to struggle with, to reinvent and make SF say what we need it to say."

He also makes the interesting point that "today's contemporary fiction is yesterday's near-future SF [emphasis added]."