My Nebula Award trophy

Carolyn decided the picture of my Nebula Award trophy on my website sucked -- and it did; it was a low-res scan of a print that we'd put up back in 1996.

So she took a new one, and here it is:



I won the Nebula in 1996 for my novel The Terminal Experiment.

That was the period when William Rotsler, the artist who hand-crafted the trophies each year, was designing the best-novel trophies based on the winning author's work.

For Greg Bear, the year before, who had won for Moving Mars, the Lucite block contained a large polished red sandstone sphere that looked like Mars; for Nicola Griffith, who won the following year for Slow River, the lapidary stones in the Lucite had mostly settled to the bottom.

For me, he actually honored my Far-Seer trilogy by featuring a giant polished agate that resembled a Jupiter-like planet, with a too-close moon orbiting around it (you can't see the little moon on the face-on view, but it's clearly visible in the side at the right of the picture and also at the top).

At the top, there's a spiral nebula -- the one constant element in all nebula designs.

The Nebulas are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; they are the field's "Academy Award."

Oh, and here's an essay about the night I won the award.

Here's another new shot:



And here's the now-retired old .gif photo:

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site