SFWA.org

by Michael Capobianco

Read by Robert Greenberger

Giving democratically chosen awards for writing isn’t easy. When the authors themselves are designing the process, there is additional pressure to make the process “fair.” It was even tougher before the Internet, when nominations and updates had to be mailed. In what was then called Science Fiction Writers of America, a small group of dedicated volunteers carried most of that burden. They were the Nebula Awards Report (NAR) Editors. 

Creation of the Nebula Awards was suggested by SFWA’s first Secretary-Treasurer, Lloyd Biggle, Jr., as a way to collect the contents of an annual award anthology that would help fund the nascent organization as well as promote the best science fiction. Founder and then-SFWA President Damon Knight ran with the idea, and the Nebula Awards were born. Modeling them from various sources, including the decade-old Hugo Awards, the awards would be voted on by the Active and Associate Members of SFWA. The first vote would be for works published in 1965 and there would be a Nebula Awards Banquet in Spring 1966.  From the very beginning, the process involved the publication of nominees submitted by members. The first set of Nebula rules was published in the September 1965SFWA Bulletin and included:

“6. All SFWA members in good standing, whether active or associate, may nominate and vote on stories and novels. Stories and novels may also be nominated, but not voted on, by the editors and publishers who originally published them. Such nominations will be accepted from one representative of each publishing firm.”

“7. Nominations will be published, and ballots distributed to members, in the November 1965 issue of the Bulletin. If three or fewer nominations are received for any story or novel, the names of those making the nominations will be listed in the Bulletin.”

A 1965 nomination ballot for short story, “novelet,” and novella was mailed with the November 1965 SFWA Bulletin. Nominations for novel would continue until December 30. These ballots were to be returned to a law firm for unbiased counting. Time was tight. Final votes would happen in February 1966 and the Nebula Awards Banquet was scheduled for March 11. (Read more about the inaugural ceremony in “A Brief History of SFWA: The First Nebula Awards” by Michael Capobianco.)  

Page 1 of Nebula Awards Report Volume 3, Number 5, Copyright (c) 1975 SFWA.

The January issue contained the first recommendations for 1966 along with a request from President Damon Knight:

“Members are asked to drop the Bulletin a postcard whenever they read an outstanding science fiction story or novel. If this procedure is confirmed when we vote on it in March, it will become part of the SFWA Awards nominating system; even if not, I think it will be a valuable service to members.”

Knight primed the pump with the first nominations for 1966, for “Apology to Inky” by Robert M. Green, Jr. (F&SF) and “An Ornament to His Profession” by Charles L. Harness (Analog). 

The winners for 1965 were announced in the April 1966 issue (which included coverage and photos from the New York and Los Angeles Nebula Banquets) and, importantly, the first list of new Nebula nominations for the year 1966. It included nine recommendations from four members: six by James H. Schmitz, two by James Blish, and one each by Greg Benford and John Brunner. The June 1966 issue contained six recommendations; August’s had 20 nominations, several with more than one nominator; September’s had 11 and November’s 11. At this time, SFWA had approximately 200 members.

For whatever reason, the Final Ballot for 1966 was underpopulated, with only three candidates each for novel, novella, and short story. Knight’s two recommendations made the final ballot but didn’t win. James H. Schmitz’s nominee for best novel, The Last Castle by Jack Vance, made the ballot and won. (For more on the Nebulas’ physical look, read “Planets and Plastic: A History of the SFWA Trophies and Awards” by Michael Armstrong.)

From this distance, if the process was supposed to let members know of worthy prospects, it looks pretty shaky. No listings for the 1967 Nebulas were published until the August 1967 Bulletin, which included a more formal listing of nominees by category and had 20 entries. October had 30, and December another 18. Nominating was catching on. In 1968, the rules were revised and regularized, with, significantly, the addition of Rule 4.(c):  

“Any title receiving a total of three (3) or more nominations will be considered to qualify for placement on the Ballot in its appropriate category. Any title with fewer than three (3) nominations will be disqualified.”

Now a single recommendation wasn’t enough, and so recommendation counting became a group pastime.

Page 2 of Nebula Awards Report Volume 3, Number 5, Copyright (c) 1975 SFWA.

The last full list of Nebula recommendations in the SFWA Bulletin appeared in issue 41/42 in July 1972. It was accompanied by a note saying that Vonda N. McIntyre was now assisting Hal Clement in preparing the list. 

Then the crystal ball grows hazy. SFWA has a complete run of Bulletins, but it’s missing some issues of its other publications from this time. The next time we encounter the NAR is the September 1974 issue of the SFWA Forum. Vonda N. McIntyre is the editor and nominations go to her. She has created a distinctive heading and the contents are well-organized. This basic format (see photos) will persist right to the end of the NAR in 2008. 

This stand-alone NAR is among the most ephemeral of SFWA’s publications. None of the original paper copies have survived in SFWA’s archives. Frank Catalano, who edited the NAR in the early ’80s, tells what it was like to edit and mail it.

“What I remember the most was the physical challenge of actually getting the report out the door. I will qualify this by stating my memory of the details of the process, 40+ years ago, may be flawed. But I recollect that Nebula recommendations would come in on postcard, mostly, some by letter. They’d be tallied and organized, and then printed on multiple sheets of letter-sized paper, folded in half, stapled, labelled, stamped and mailed. Among those who’d show up for these mailing parties at my apartment were Vonda N. McIntyre and, I think, Greg Bear. (…) What I remember the most was just the camaraderie and conversation. The need to get it right. And all of the damp sponges required to attach the stamps.”

Seven SFWA volunteers have been given the Kevin. O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award because of their work on the NAR: Chuq Von Rospach (NAR Editor 1989–1996), Brook and Julia West (NAR Editors 1989–2008), and Vonda N. McIntyre (NAR Editor 1972–1976). Other members who have taken a turn: C. L. Grant, George W. Proctor, Frank Catalano, Elizabeth Waters, Orson Scott Card, and Mark Van Name.

So, why did the NAR end? Rule changes made the Nebula more and more cumbersome to administer, and the awards were no longer tied to a specific year. Former SFWA President and current SFWA Operations Manager Russell Davis offers this summary: “The Nebula Award rules when I took office in 2008 were extraordinarily convoluted.” In 2009, the nomination process  changed to the simpler one still in place in 2026.

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Michael Capobianco is co-author, with William Barton, of the SF books Iris, Alpha Centauri, Fellow Traveler, and White Light. He has published two solo science fiction novels, Burster and Purlieu as well as short fiction. Capobianco was President of SFWA from 1996 to 1998 and again in 2007–2008. He currently serves as SFWA’s Authors Coalition Commissioner, Chair of SFWA’s Contracts Committee, Co-chair of SFWA’s Legal Affairs and Estates-Legacy Committees, and is a member of SFWA’s History Committee.

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by Melynda Hill-Teter

Read by Liz J. Bradley

Every first draft begins with words on a page and a plan. As a writer, I tracked story ideas, outlined plots, sketched scenes, developed characters, and logged worldbuilding details. But I reached a point where ideas and notes needed structure.

I wanted uninterrupted blocks of two to three hours a day at my laptop to make writing progress, but this mindset backfired, leading to procrastination. Writing ideas clicked into place, but I couldn’t find the time to write for a few hours a day.

Between work and long train commutes, I set out to build a consistent writing routine. That’s when I realized voice typing—or dictation—could help me start an outline or first draft. Basically, it’s talking into an app on a mobile device or computer and letting speech-to-text create your draft.

How Dictation Programs Work

Although language models have been around since the 1980s, the adoption of deep learning algorithms for speech recognition has dramatically improved performance over the past 15 years. Speech-to-text programs use deep learning models, training datasets, and artificial intelligence to convert spoken language to text. Over time, they adapt to each speaker’s voice, including accent, tone, pace, and preferred vocabulary.

Google Docs Voice Typing uses Google’s speech recognition AI, which is integrated with Google Workspace applications. Microsoft Dictate is built on Azure’s AI-powered speech engine and allows for dictation across Microsoft applications. Other options include Otter.ai, which converts speech into transcription, and Dragon Dictate, the first consumer speech-recognition software that allows users to dictate documents and emails and create individual voice profiles. 

When choosing dictation tools, consider if the language model can adapt to your speaking style over time to improve accuracy, support regional accents, correct misheard words by voice or keyboard, and handle noisy environments or crosstalk.

Dictation apps use editing phrases: predefined voice commands that the app recognizes as instructions for modifying text. Editing phrases include: “add comment” to add a blank comment; “delete” to remove the last word; “new line”; “start list”; “em dash”; “new paragraph”; “comma”; “period”; “question mark”; “apostrophe”; and more.

These apps pause to capture audio before transcribing several words at once. The resulting draft often requires cleanup and formatting.

My Dictation Process

I use Word Dictation and Google Docs on my iPhone, but there are many note-taking options, such as Evernote, Notion, Microsoft OneNote, Google Keep, Obsidian, and Apple Notes.

Working in a quiet location minimizes the background noise picked up by a microphone. When commuting, I sit in a quiet section of the train, away from energized voices, which helps me feel less self-conscious when dictating in public. I speak directly into my iPhone to ensure clear audio capture. There are good options, such as Apple AirPods or wireless earbuds, if you don’t want to hold your device in your hand while dictating. And some people like to walk while dictating, since sitting may feel static. 

On my iPhone, I turn on Do Not Disturb to silence notifications and calls before I begin. Dictating an outline is the first step to capturing my ideas. I then auto-save the draft to the cloud and fix a few misheard words by using the on-screen keyboard. I make sure to email the outline to myself as a backup. After the dictation session, I edit the cloud copy on my laptop to develop the next version.

I block off time on my calendar for writing while commuting and on weekend afternoons. Using Google Calendar, I schedule writing tasks for specific dates and times, such as outlining, to-do items, and next steps. At the end of the week, I revisit the calendar items to verify that I accomplished each task.

Workflow for Word Mobile Dictation

Estimated setup time: 15 minutes.

Purchase a Microsoft 365 personal license, then install and sign into the Word Mobile and OneDrive apps on your phone. This feature converts speech to text, requiring a microphone and a reliable internet connection.

To get started, open Word and tap the Create button, then tap the blue plus button to open a blank document. Tap the microphone icon at the bottom-right corner to start dictating.

To apply a heading style, place your cursor at the end of the heading, tap the three dots on the bottom toolbar, tap Styles, tap the heading you want to apply, such as Heading 1.

To clear formatting, place the cursor at the end of the line where you want to remove the formatting (such as a Heading style) and say “select that” and “clear formatting.”

To save time punctuating while in a live document with the microphone enabled, tap the gear button (bottom-left corner) and enable Auto Punctuation.

To auto-save your draft in OneDrive, tap More Options and enable AutoSave or Save. 

If you accidentally close Word during a dictation session, you can find your draft by tapping Browse at the bottom-right corner of the Home screen, then Recovered Drafts.

Workflow for Google Docs Voice Typing

Estimated setup time: 15 minutes. Note: Google Docs uses the term voice typing instead of dictation.

Install the Google Docs Mobile and Google Drive apps on your phone. Your draft will be automatically saved in Google Drive once you sign into both apps.

To get started, open Google Docs and tap the bottom-right plus button to open a blank document. Tap New Document and name your document, and tap Create. To begin voice typing, tap the microphone icon on the on-screen keyboard.

To bold a word, touch and hold the word, tap Select > Bold on the formatting toolbar. To apply heading styles, touch and hold the heading, tap Select > Font (top-right corner). Under the Text group, tap the right arrow next to Styles, and select your heading.

To clear document formatting, touch and hold the word, tap Select > Font > Text > Clear Formatting.

To restore previous versions, go to Google Drive on a computer and open the document, then go to File > Version History > See Version History and select a version to restore.

Experiment with Your Process

This process might not work for everyone. Some people feel uncomfortable dictating, especially in public. Still, I found that dictating and editing helped move ideas out of my head and into an outline, a draft, and then a story. The key is to stay curious and keep experimenting until you discover what works best for your writing process.

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Melynda Hill-Teter holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology and a Certificate in Technical Writing. She is a freelance writer with 20+ years of experience as an IT analyst, specializing in user support and Microsoft applications. Melynda is currently writing her debut novel, inspired by her grandfather’s intriguing claim that he invented FM radio and built a 1923 alpha radio set—one said to receive transmissions from the future.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Celebrating Roger Zelazny, SFWA’s Infinity Award Recipient for the 61st Annual Nebula Awards

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

San Francisco, CA – April 15, 2026

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is pleased to announce that the SFWA Infinity Award will be presented this year to Roger Zelazny at the 61st Annual SFWA Nebula Awards® ceremony on June 6, 2026.

The SFWA Infinity Award was created to highlight the life and work of creators who achieved a distinct and tremendous legacy in science fiction and fantasy. Although they are no longer with us to celebrate this honor, these writers helped to lay the foundation for today’s science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. Their memory abides not only in the works they published, but also in the worlds they inspired fellow and future writers to dream up in their wake.

SFWA President Kate Ristau reflects fondly on the power of Zelazny’s worlds:

“One of my first deep dives into science fiction was the Chronicles of Amber. Zelazny drew me right into the story with his world-building and world-breaking. Characters could manipulate their reality, walking between worlds, and they didn’t always make the decisions you wanted. There were heartbreaking moments and series-wide challenges that were epic and unforgettable; they lingered with you. Zelazny’s impact lingers on with us, shaping how we think about multiverses and how we create characters that are complicated, nuanced, and sometimes deeply flawed. I am honored to present him with this year’s Infinity Award.”

Challenges of a Multiverse

Roger Zelazny entered our genre’s publishing record in 1962, the same year as Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin, and the era of his ascension as a writer was marked by heated debates about the nature of science fiction and fantasy. Some called the work that he and his peers published “New Wave”, a term bound up in contemporaneous social criticism about the uptick in experimental and more “worldly” art, film, literature, and music.

This catch-all term was used in a positive light by some, to suggest a transformation in the genre: a coming-of-age for SFF as a thoroughly “literary” form, featuring more comfortable and slipstream uses of science-fictional and fantastical tropes to tell more nuanced human stories. It was also used in a negative light by some critics, to cast aspersions on SFF writers who played too poetically with language, “wrote back” against ancient myths and story structures, and wrestled with recent insights from psychology and sociology in their prose.

As for the writers themselves, including Zelazny?

Most were less interested in the labels used by critics to describe their work, and more in how to keep growing their craft – often in publishing contexts we can also learn a great deal from today.

Zelazny developed as a writer in an era when magazines were common incubators for novel-length masters of the craft. Widely read by paying customers, the major magazines of Zelazny’s day had different opportunities to curate budding and distinct voices like his.

That’s why, after publishing in magazines like Amazing and Fantastic, Zelazny was able to win a Hugo for Best Novel with what was first a serial production, delighting readers over two issues of F&SF in 1965. Zelazny’s This Immortal (first printed as “…And Call Me Conrad”) would tie for that Hugo with another patchwork publication by another SFWA Infinity Award recipient: Frank Herbert’s famed fix-up novel, Dune.

Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967), nominated for a 1968 Nebula and winning the Hugo, would then entrench his distinct voice and approach to mythic world-building as a key component of mid-century SFF canon. That year, he would also support SFWA’s internal curation of canon, by editing our third-ever Nebula Award Stories anthology and providing thoughtful remarks on each tale.

Zelazny also won two Nebulas, for novelette and novella, at the very first Nebula Awards: “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” (F&SF) and “He Who Shapes” (Amazing Stories). “Home is the Hangman” (Analog) won for Best Novella in 1975, and he earned many other nominations over the decades of his career.

Writers new to Zelazny’s work might be pleasantly surprised to pick up a volume today; most of his stories boast lush language and a fantastical interweaving of science-fictional conceits with allegorical and/or psychologically rich characters.

George R.R. Martin describes Zelazny as follows:

“He was a poet, first, last, always. His words sang. He was a storyteller without peer. He created worlds as colorful and exotic and memorable as any our genre has ever seen.”

Perhaps just as importantly, Zelazny operated in a community of dreamers, experimenters, and literary incubators. He was loved by many of his peers, and flourished within a network of fellow creators. To read Zelazny’s work today, and to reflect on the context in which it was written, is to remember how much the writers of SFF today share with generations of innovators come before.

The Legacy Continues

From June 3-7, SFWA is celebrating living and posthumous lights in our genre community at our 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Conference prices for in-person tickets rise May 1, and Banquet tickets for the acclaimed Nebula Awards Ceremony on June 6 are in limited supply.

There, in a special presentation with our latest Grand Master, N. K. Jemisin, we’ll be learning how to build and break down worlds in our prose. With fellow Grand Master Joe Haldeman, we’ll also be exploring how the world of SFF industry has transformed over the last few decades. We will mark Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient David Langford’s contribution to genre history, and the power of our Nebula Finalist fiction to keep light alive even in an author’s absence.

And with the support of Roger Zelazny’s family, friends, and still-avid readers, we will mark this year’s worthy recipient of the SFWA Infinity Award: a writer whose worldbuilding shattered and reformed notions of SFF. Zelazny’s work forged a path for future writers to “write back” on shared mythologies, and to reimagine science-fiction and fantasy conventions with greater confidence — knowing that the gift of creating a well-told and inventive tale, irrespective of the labels outsiders assign to it, is always its own reward.

Join us for the memories, and to revel in the history and future of SFF together!

Get your tickets for the Nebula Awards Conference today

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by Angelique Fawns

Read by the author

One of the most daunting questions every author faces is: How do we get our words out into the world?

If you’re like me, you look at the careers of Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, or Kelley Armstrong and wish for that kind of success. A rabid fan base, movie and TV deals, and that most elusive of all goals: a full-time, profitable fiction writing career. But the truth is, those careers are the product of decades of hard work, timing, and luck. Most of us can’t bank on a bestseller falling from our fingers tomorrow.

So the real question becomes: What can we do right now to grow our platforms and share our writing?

I’ve been exploring different options since 2018, and after years of trial and error, I finally found the tool that works best for me: Substack. It might not be the tool for everyone, but it has provided me with an easy way to finally showcase my short stories and serial fiction. Other writers swear by Medium and Wattpad, and I’m hoping to learn more about them as I continue my writing journey.

Escaping the Gatekeepers

Like many indie authors, I wanted to find a way to share my stories without handing all my power—and my earnings—to gatekeepers. That’s not to say I don’t believe in traditional publishing (I have my first novel on sub with an agent right now, hoping to sell it to the Big Five). But if there is one refrain I’ve heard from all the successful authors I’ve interviewed, it’s that you must have multiple streams of income.

Self-publishing on Amazon seemed like a solution at first, but (for me at least) that quickly turned into a way to lose money fast. You don’t just upload your book and wait for readers to appear. It’s a screaming crowd of millions, and unless you pay the “algorithm gods” for ads, your work could sink into oblivion. 

I needed something different: a platform where I could control my own content, connect directly with readers, and not go broke while doing it. 

The Serial Fiction Route

There are other platforms that are free to distribute your work. I tried Patreon at first, and I know it works very well for others, but I was not able to get any traction on it. Like, literally, I had fewer than 20 followers. My issue was discoverability. At its heart, Substack is a newsletter provider. But it’s grown into something much bigger—a haven for writers, journalists, and creators of every kind. What I found intriguing (though it was off-putting at the start) was how writers can monetize their work right away. When I first joined, I turned on paid subscriptions almost as an afterthought. I wasn’t sure anyone would actually click that button. To my shock, people did—some simply because they liked my work and wanted to support it. That kind of generosity floored me.

Taking the Leap

I moved from Mailerlite to Substack for my newsletter when my follower base crested 1,000. (That’s when Mailerlite began charging users; they’ve recently lowered that number to 500.) There are other free platforms, such as Medium, but their email/newsletter system is tied to their ecosystem. My email list was full of names of people who weren’t Medium members.

I joined Substack in March 2024 with my thousand names. As of today, I have over 2,600 subscribers. My current content focuses on researching the short story markets and posting no-fee, paying short story calls, but I recently expanded my content into posting serial fiction. My followers aren’t as enthusiastic about my fiction as they are about my short story research, but I am hoping to find more readers who do.

Researching the markets is fun, and I feel like I’m providing a service for the community, but my goal is to be a WRITER. So, every Wednesday, I now publish a new 1,000-word chapter of my ongoing space opera, The Chronicles of Roxie Vega.

An author will never be “discovered” if their work isn’t out in the world. The best novel ever created will molder sitting on your hard drive. So far, I’ve been very happy with the response. Followers comment on the content, and the instant feedback is fabulous. I might not have tons of readers yet, but this experiment has just begun. At least I’m seeing some traction, whereas my free fiction was read by maybe one person on Patreon. My open rates on my short stories are closer to 1,500 or 2,000 on Substack.

Making It Work 

Part of what gave me the courage to try serialization was seeing other writers succeed with it. I remember watching a TED Talk by Elle Griffin, who talked about how she serialized her novel Obscurity. Though I listened to that talk almost a year before I tried my own serial fiction, I kept thinking about it. I started looking at Wattpad and Medium, but wasn’t sure how I could find an audience.

The setup phase of Substack isn’t entirely intuitive, so it took longer to get it going than I had anticipated, and the “tags” that you assign to content are nothing like hashtags on other social media. Instead, a “tag” is a way to organize content on your landing page.

As a Canadian writer, I’ve had no issues using Substack’s Stripe-based payment system, but I’ve heard from other creators who aren’t as fortunate. Stripe isn’t supported in many countries, which means international writers outside its network can’t get paid or monetize their newsletters directly.

Substack’s openness to nearly all viewpoints has also drawn criticism, especially after reports that extremist newsletters were operating on the platform. Some writers left in protest, while others see it as the price of creative freedom online. The majority of the content and interactions I’ve had on Substack have been positive and supportive, but I do respect that others may have a different opinion.

Even if I never find huge monetization with my serial experiment, the worst-case scenario is having a complete novel at the end of this process. Beyond getting our words into the world, just creating them consistently is a challenge. Committing to posting 1,000 words a week means I must (at a minimum) write those thousand words. Motivation!

Could Serial Fiction Work for You?

For me, Substack has answered many of the questions I used to struggle with. I was spending so much money trying to create a platform for myself, but making nothing. Paying for newsletter hosting, paying for podcast hosting… Now I have a platform that is free and even pays me a little. 

Another issue was visibility. How do you find followers in an oversaturated world of talented authors all hoping to capture reading eyes? Substack’s community talks freely in the “Notes” area, and I have found new writing and reading friends by commenting on the posts of others. I’ve had followers tell me that I should try Medium, and I might branch out as I get more established. I still often feel like I’m screaming into a void, but at least I know a few people can hear me now. If you are sitting on the fence about putting your words into the world, there is no time like the present. Why not try serial fiction?

Explore more articles from Writing by Other Means

Angelique Fawns is a journalist and speculative fiction writer. She began her career writing articles about naked cave dwellers in Tenerife, Canary Islands. After selling her first story to EQMM, she fell in love with weird fiction, which is ACTUALLY stranger than non-fiction. You can find her lurking at @angeliquefawns on X, blogging about upcoming calls at https://angeliquemfawns.substack.com, or gazing into the abyss, hoping it stares back at her.  Over 100 stories published. Find some in Mystery Tribune, Amazing Stories, and Space & Time.

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by Jason P. Burnham

Read by Naching T. Kassa

Whoopsie-doodle! Your protagonist has just been written into a world where the infrastructure for antibiotic production no longer exists. Perhaps you’re writing in the near future, and climate change has progressed to the point of the complete collapse of global commerce. Perhaps the aliens from the first Independence Day movie have blown up all the major centers of production around the world. Or maybe the antibiotic production infrastructure has yet to be invented because you’re writing in the past or a pre-technological fantasy world. Wherever you’re creating, no one is making antibiotics. Protagonists living a “life after antibiotics” (or before, as may be the case) is becoming an increasingly relevant theme/scenario for modern speculative fiction. What’s a protagonist (and author looking to write such a setting with believable medical accuracy) to do?

Before we dive into what your main character’s options are for making/acquiring antibiotics, first we must consider the spectrum of conditions for which you might need antibiotics. Some common bacterial infections are those of the urinary tract, lungs (pneumonia), ears, skin and soft tissue, bones, and meninges (meningitis). Add to that diarrheal illness and sexually transmitted infections. If there are no antibiotics, what can your protagonist do for the afflicted? 

Note: We won’t cover antivirals or antifungals here. For unchecked fungus, see The Last of Us, the empty pool scene from the movie Annihilation, or various National Geographic documentaries. The immune system tends to take care of viral infections without antivirals, though some people would die without supportive care in a hospital. Unchecked HIV without an antiviral infrastructure should be its own Planetside article, but you could also just read up on what happened in the 1980s (see And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts).

Managing Infections Without Antibiotics

Control of a bacterial infection’s source is paramount, and for some infections, this can be done surgically in a way that doesn’t necessarily require any antibiotics (think of draining a boil). Unfortunately, if there aren’t any antibiotics at your protagonist’s disposal, there probably aren’t any anesthetics either (ouch!). So, if you’re the unlucky protagonist (or patient/family member/love interest of the protagonist) who has toe gangrene in this story, break out the mouth guard, the whiskey, and the sleeping incantation, as the most readily available chopping/cutting instrument is sharpened in preparation for gangrenous appendage removal. Make sure the post-operative wound is cleaned and bandaged appropriately, keeping it free of water and dirt. 

These methods (cutting instead of finding an antibiotic) could also be applied to conditions/procedures like the lancing of boils and draining of other purulent collections from festering wounds that are close enough to the skin’s surface to be reached easily with whatever tools of the trade are available in Protagonist World. Note: You’ll want to consider how people with amputated parts are going to be received by others (is this an inclusive world or an ableist dystopia?) and what assistive devices might be fashioned/DIY-ed to make sure they have a chance of outrunning the zombies or rogue AIs or plutocrats.

But what about infections where “chopping it off” isn’t an option or “draining pus” just won’t fly? After all, you can’t cut out the urinary system if it burns when you pee (though your protagonist may think that preferable given their symptoms), nor can you cut out the meninges (yes, I see you autocracy who empties skulls to implant the next-gen brain/spine implant for mind-controlled super soldiers—meninges explant is not allowed!). So, what can the protagonist do? For a urinary tract infection, the best strategy may be an ounce of prevention. Something as simple as having your protagonist drink extra water will reduce the risk of getting a urinary tract infection. “But clean water is limited.” Touché. Perhaps your protagonist has access to cranberry juice or the extracts of urine of pregnant mares to reduce UTIs. But eventually, a character (perhaps even a main one) is going to get an infection that cannot have been prevented and can’t be cut or drained away. What then?

Ancient Recipes

In the last decade, scientists have recreated a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon recipe for an anti-infective salve used for eye infections. Known as Bald’s Eyesalve, this remedy was rediscovered in Bald’s Leechbook (archived in the British Library) by a team of microbiologists and experts in Old English. The concoction involves onions, garlic, wine, and a cow’s bile salts combined in a brass vessel (talk about a witch’s brew). When applied in a lab to Staphylococcus aureus (a bacterium that causes more than a million deaths per year globally), the concoction showed excellent killing activity. The Dark Ages aren’t sounding so dark now, huh? 

Bald’s Eyesalve is just one example—perhaps your protagonist has access to other forgotten or dismissed remedies. An ancient text, only recently discovered. An Indigenous remedy known only through oral tradition, in danger of being phased out of history by colonial violence. Lost scrolls from antiquity stumbled upon in a cave, desert, or island that are previously unread, but provide crucial insights into antibiotic properties and preparations from commonly available plants, fungi, insects, or other plot/world-convenient source. It is entirely plausible! One of the first-line drugs against malaria was discovered by a Chinese researcher in the 1970s, who went through thousands of ancient texts and folk manuals to identify potential anti-malarials! Consider also that wounded Confederate soldiers from the first American Civil War were treated with Native American remedies derived from plants ranging from white oak to devil’s walking stick to tulip trees. The sources of nature-derived antibiotics are myriad in real life and can be in your fiction too.

So, where does this leave our protagonist? If the infection can plausibly be cut out/off, this may be the route to go. If an infection can be prevented, this will save much grief. For those infections that can’t be cut or prevented, an herbal/plant concoction from a plausibly arcane tome/text/scroll may just save the day (and limb)! If you want your story to be a commentary on loss, maybe the concoctions have great promise and the ancient text swears they work, but despite your protagonist’s best efforts, the loved one still dies. But if you’re going for hope, these ancient remedies are going to do just the trick!

The Aftermath

One final note: In a world without antibiotics, disabilities will arise in survivors—limb loss, deafness (meningitis is a common culprit), blindness, gait problems, and debility, among others. Accommodations for and coping among the infirm and the recovered can be powerful points in your story (if you so choose). Happy apocalypse writing!

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Jason P. Burnham (he/him) loves to spend time with his wife and children. He dearly misses his dog. He is an infectious diseases physician and researcher.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Welcome to Our 61st Annual Nebula Awards Programming!

San Francisco, CA – April 6, 2026

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is proud to launch its preliminary program for its 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference, running from June 3-7 in Chicago, Illinois.

The Nebulas are an opportunity to celebrate SFWA’s latest finalists and their works in Chicago this June 3-7, along with SFWA’s 42nd Grand Master N. K. Jemisin, latest Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient David Langford, and current Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award recipient Gay Haldeman.

The Nebula Awards Conference is also an excellent opportunity to network with fellow writers, expand industry horizons, and pursue professional development goals in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres.

This year’s conference is packed with in-person and virtual offerings and strongly celebrates our theme of Worldbuilding & Worldbreaking. You can check out our preliminary schedule at our new programming station on SFWA.org. Full panelist complements and final modifications will be added soon.

New Merch Alert!

You can also celebrate this year’s Nebula conference theme with new items at the SFWA Store, where $25 USD from every purchase of these specialty goods goes to our Finalist Scholarship Fund.

Many of this year’s Nebula Finalists would love to celebrate their achievement in community this June in Chicago, and you can help us get them there – while snagging a great new t-shirt or notebook for longterm use. Direct donations to the fund are always welcome.

Spread the Joy in Community

A ticket to the online Nebula Conference also gets you online attendance to the 10th Annual StokerCon – completely free! At StokerCon, which runs from June 4 to 7, you can celebrate Linda D. Addison, one of this year’s inaugural Nebula Award Finalists for Best Poem, and a Guest of Honor at the 10th-anniversary event run by the Horror Writers Association.

Congratulations to our peer organization, the Horror Writers Association, on its decade of conference craft for genre writers!

Details will be sent to registrants. Enjoy two cons for the price of one!

Get to Know Some of Our Headlining Presenters!

Toastmaster Tananarive Due is not only guiding our Nebula Awards Ceremony on Saturday, June 6, but also presenting a Crash Course in Speculative Screenwriting on Saturday, with accomplished husband and creative partner Steven Barnes. This creative duo has made significant contributions to the world of speculative horror, with a focus on Black histories within the genre and the role of genre in general for the heady work of resistance and renewal.

Are you ready to deepen your thematic storytelling in multimedia forms? Join us for this enriching conversation in June!

Gay Haldeman is receiving this year’s Service Award for a career of building out SFF culture in support of her husband’s writing, including through her work with SFWA. On Thursday, June 4, we’ll be hearing from SFWA Grand Master Joe Haldeman himself, in an insightful panel titled “Historical Perspective: The Evolving World of SFF”. This conversation is a critical part of this year’s conference theme, because writers are forever building upon layers of lore that are easily lost in the shifting landscape of our industry.

Where are we reinventing the wheel? What has consistently preoccupied us in genre, and where are we forging new ground? What is uncannily similar and wildly different about the way writers have built their creative lives and careers over the decades – and where might all these historical signs be pointing us next?

Join us for an excellent panel discussion with a star writer who has embodied dedication to his ever-changing community for decades.

And on Friday? Well, that’s when Grand Master N. K. Jemisin will offer a special presentation, a Crash Course in Worldbuilding and Worldbreaking. Learn more from the master herself about how many ways our worldly expectations – of a world, a city, a culture, or a shared reality – can be spun up in readers’ heads and then brought crashing down, only to be remade in more interesting forms.

This spotlight event will lift you up and invigorate the writer in you before we head into our very special evening of star-studded celebrations. After our Nebula Finalist Reception, our Nebula Finalists and VIP Autographing event will be open to the public, and a terrific opportunity to mingle and get to know some of the brightest lights in our “Nebula” this year.

RSVP today to be added to a giveaway draw, too – so tell all your friends in Chicago and its vicinity to bring their books for signing!

Remember: Nebula Banquet Tickets Are in Limited Supply! Purchase Yours Today! WRITERS!
GET YOUR HEADSHOTS AT THE NEBULAS

We are honored this year at the Nebula Awards Conference by the repeat appearance of photographer Kaitrin Acuna, who last year made our 60th anniversary shine, and left smiles on the faces of authors who secured appointments for headshots. (Check out last year’s gallery yourself!)

This year, Kaitrin is back, and with an incredibly generous offer to help SFWA support the general SFF community. When you book an author headshot appointment with Kaitrin for a window during our conference in Chicago, 15% of the fee will go to our Givers Fund, a SFWA-driven outreach program that distributes micro-grants to SFF projects every year.

Thank you – and Kaitrin – for supporting the future of SFF at the Nebulas! Lock in your Nebula Conference Tickets today!

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Celebrating David Langford, SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award Recipient for the 61st Annual Nebula Awards

San Francisco, CA – March 31, 2026

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is pleased to announce that the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award will be presented this year to David Langford at the 61st Annual SFWA Nebula Awards® ceremony on June 6, 2026.

The Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award is bestowed by SFWA upon a person who has made significant contributions to the community sustaining science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. The award was created in 2008, with Wilhelm named as one of the three original recipients, and it was renamed in her honor in 2016. Our latest recipient joins a storied list of winners, including Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Octavia Butler, Neil Clarke, Gardner Dozois, Joanna Russ, Stanley Schmidt, Nisi Shawl, Arley Sorg, and Sheila Williams, among many others.

How does one do justice to the work of a science-fiction creator whose wide-ranging pursuits, publications, and accolades include the long-standing and ongoing curation of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (SFE) itself?

As SFWA President Kate Ristau notes, “With his work on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Langford has not only built, supported, and challenged the field of SFF; he has literally helped to define it. His decades of work have made science fiction a richer and more inclusive field. We are more than happy to present him with the Solstice Award in recognition of his career filled with positive, focused, and uplifting contributions.”

A Pillar of Service to Community

Those decades of service to our genre have taken many forms, all necessary for a thriving ecosystem in SFF publishing. Published authors of science fiction and fantasy are made possible by avid readers, equally avid commentators, fans dedicated to the cultivation of spaces to share and discuss great work, historians and archivists marking down events in genre of note, non-fiction writers offering supplement and story-seed to all our fantastic prose, editors sharpening one and the same, and publishers painstakingly building homes for all of the above.

Langford has been all of these, and more. He has handily merited his record-holding 29 Hugo wins out of 55 nominations, among a wealth of other honors in genre. Nor has his service to our ever-expanding community reached an end; along with SFE, Langford continues to sustain Ansible, a UK newszine covering SFF events and happenstance.

Langford’s dedication isn’t just known through titles, either, but also in his tonal range. Here is a commentator who would make readers laugh on one genre outing, then inspire serious reflection with the next. For decades, Langford’s editorial work took care where care was needed with the living history of our medium. His fan-community work brought joy where joy was needed in SFF, too.

“I am delighted to celebrate David Langford as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Association 2026 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient,” says SFWA Executive Director Isis Asare. “His witty sense of humor and encylopedic knowledge of speculative literature has fostered an international discourse on science fiction. The measure of Langford’s impact cannot be overstated.”

The Celebration Continues

Please join SFWA in celebrating the achievements of David Langford, and all our other special guests and Nebula finalists, this June 3-7 at our 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Conference prices for in-person tickets rise May 1, and Banquet tickets for the acclaimed Nebula Awards Ceremony on June 6 are in limited supply.

Be part of our ongoing history, in a genre that dedicated community-builders like David Langford have curated for us for so long, and so well.

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by Ben Nadler

Read by Maggie Ayala

Although Abraham Lincoln’s life was cut short by a pro-Confederate terrorist in 1865, he has found continuing afterlives as a speculative fiction character trope. Over the past century, this figure has appeared in works by a range of writers, including Vachel Lindsay, George Saunders, Philip K. Dick, Rod Serling, and Tony Wolk.

Each of these works contains a different Abraham Lincoln. They are not the same character. Still, these Lincolns share a common origin, as each of their authors has found a way to use speculative fiction conceits to build their own Lincoln from historical record. What’s more, these conceits offer ways to displace Lincoln from history and bring him into contact with different times and realities. These encounters provide readers and writers of speculative fiction with new understandings of the past, present, and future of this country.  

Abraham Lincoln, 1863. Photo from the Smithsonian Institution from United States, via Wikimedia Commons Why Lincoln?

It is not incidental that Lincoln, of all US historical figures, has taken on this role. “The Great Emancipator” has long functioned as a liberatory figure in American culture. Historian Nina Silber notes that during the Great Depression, Lincoln “offered an imaginative repository” for hopeful responses to the era’s crises. He has filled a similar function for authors in the intervening decades. 

Exploring how different writers have deployed Lincoln in their fictional narratives provides an understanding of Lincoln’s enduring cultural role. At the same time, comparing uses of this character trope by very different authors also provides insight into methods available to speculative fiction writers when working with the past. In these Lincoln examples, we see how the genre devices of hauntings, robotics, and time travel can all be used to access history. 

To and From the Cemetery

In his 1914 poem “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” Vachel Lindsay writes: “Here at midnight, in our little town / A mourning figure walks, and will not rest.” The long-dead president, unable to sleep in his tomb, walks into downtown Springfield, Illinois. The current unfolding of World War I troubles him: “It breaks his heart that kings must murder still.”

A century later, the prominent slipstream writer George Saunders uses a similar conceit in his award-winning 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders’s Lincoln leaves the White House in 1862 to enter a Georgetown cemetery inhabited by ghosts. The most recent arrival is Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie, killed by typhoid. The grieving president visits Willie’s crypt, holding him one last time. The ghosts observe the president throughout the night. Ultimately, the spirit of a formerly-enslaved man inhabits Lincoln’s body.

President Lincoln and Family Circle. Photo from Popular Graphic Arts, via Wikimedia Commons.

A key problem that a fiction writer working with a well-known historical figure has to address is how to build an original character from historical records. Saunders has two solutions. In the cemetery chapters, the ghosts perceive Lincoln without preconceptions, such as when one observes: “An exceedingly tall and unkempt fellow was making his way toward us through the darkness.” In other chapters, however, Saunders leans into the textual record, montaging historical quotes (actual and fictive). For example, one chapter is constructed entirely of negative statements made about Lincoln by his contemporaries. This move plays with the tension between the historical Lincoln, the myth of Lincoln, and Saunders’s own character of Lincoln.

Your Next Stop: The Twilight Zone!

Saunders’s fiction is indebted to the uncanniness of the original Twilight Zone TV series. Bardo, in particular, recalls the 1961 episode “The Passerby”, which depicts Northern and Southern soldiers trudging home at war’s end. The protagonist is a Confederate who comes to realize—in a classic Twilight Zone twist!—that he and everyone else on the road were killed in the war. Eventually, Lincoln himself rides down the road and tells a resistant Confederate widow, “I’m dead too. I guess you might say I’m the last casualty of the Civil War.” The conflict can finally be laid to rest.

Lincoln’s Tomb, Springfield, Illinois (approximately 1879). Photo from Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

“The Passerby” aired as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining ground. Host and scriptwriter Rod Serling comments on the 20th-century end of segregation through his 19th-century characters, just as Lindsay comments on the violence of WWI through his wandering Lincoln. Because Serling’s Lincoln is a ghost who now exists outside mortal time, he can speak to audiences in different eras.

Mechanical Statesmen

Not all speculative depictions of the Abe Lincoln character rely on the supernatural. In Philip K. Dick’s 1972 novel We Can Build You (originally serialized in Amazing Stories as A. Lincoln, Simulacrum), Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, are recreated as androids by an electronic piano company. This connects to Dick’s use of androids in other works, notably Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), as well as to the real-world Lincoln robot Disney debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair.

Edwin M. Stanton. Secretary of War (between circa 1860 and circa 1865). Photo by Mathew Benjamin Brady, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dick’s near-future novel touches on issues such as housing justice, corporate power, and lunar colonization, but its primary subject is mental illness (particularly schizophrenia). This concern is embodied in the robotic Lincoln, who exhibits the president’s notorious “melancholy.” “Lincoln was this way,” argues one of the android’s engineers. “He had periods of brooding.” Like Saunders’s, Dick’s depiction of historical figures draws directly on historical record: The androids are programmed with punch-tapes of real sources, such as Carl Sandburg’s exhaustive Lincoln biography.

Fourscore and Seven Years into the Future

Rather than androids, Tony Wolk’s 2004 Abraham Lincoln: A Novel Life (the first in a trilogy), uses another established sci-fi mechanism to bring Lincoln into the 20th century: time-travel. Wolk is not as well-known as Dick, but he has his own role in sci-fi history, such as co-teaching workshops with Ursula K. Le Guin.

At the beginning of Wolk’s novel, Lincoln finds himself transported in the middle of the night from 1865 Washington, D.C. to 1955 suburban Chicago. “Suddenly,” Wolk writes, “there he was, on Howard Street, reeling, as if he were perched on the edge of a cliff, peering over.” As in many time-travel novels, such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the temporal leap isn’t fully explained, but the reader follows along for the journey.

The time-travel allows Lincoln to experience a few last moments of reprieve before his assassination. It also allows him to perceive Cold War America. Early on, he tries to wrap his mind around the atomic bomb by comparing it to a Civil War battle: “He was picturing the disaster with the Petersburg mine, but now above ground and engulfing a whole city, a Philadelphia, a Boston.” 

To the Ages

As we enter new eras of American political and social life, the Lincoln trope will no doubt continue to be deployed by authors trying to make sense of our conditions. We will have to see what new Lincolns are brought to life in the decades to come. When the historical Lincoln was assassinated, Stanton famously stated, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Through his role in speculative fiction, he truly does.

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Ben Nadler is a writer working between New York City and the Philadelphia area, where he teaches English at Widener University. He is the author of The Sea Beach Line: A Novel and Punk in NYC’s Lower East Side 1981–1991. His next novel, Prairie Ashes, is forthcoming from American Buffalo Books. More at bennadler.com.

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