Anyway.

Something that, after half a lifetime in this field and a lifetime as a reader, I think worth mentioning and reminding people of, is that we are a community.

More than any field in which I’ve been involved, the people in the worlds of SF have a willingness to help each other, to help those who are starting out.

When I was twenty-two, half a lifetime ago, I went to a Brian Aldiss signing at London’s Forbidden Planet. After the signing, at the pub next door, I sat next to a dark, vaguely elfin gentleman named Colin Greenland who seemed to know a lot about the field and who, when I mentioned that I had written a handful of stories, asked to see them. I sent them to him, and he suggested a magazine that he’d done some work for that might publish one of them. I wrote to that magazine, cut the story down until it met their word-count requirements, and they published it.

That short story being published meant more to me at the time than anything had up to that point, and was more glorious than most of the things that have happened since. (And Colin and I have stayed friends. About ten years ago, he sent me, without the author’s knowledge, a short story by someone he’d met at a workshop named Susanna Clarke . . . but that’s another story.)

Six months later I was in the process of researching my first genre book. It was a book of SF and fantasy quotations, mostly the awful ones, called Ghastly Beyond Belief. [And at this point in the speech I wandered off into an extempore bit of quoting from Ghastly Beyond Belief, by me and Kim Newman, mostly about giant crabs. And space crabs too. I’m not going to try and reproduce it here, sorry.]

. . . and I found myself astonished and delighted by the response within the field. Fans and authors suggested choice works by authors they loved or didn’t. I remember the joy of getting a postcard from Isaac Asimov telling me that he couldn’t tell the good from the bad in his works, and giving me blanket permission to quote anything of his I wanted to.

I felt that I’d learned a real lesson back then, and it’s one that continues to this day.

What I saw was that the people who make up SF, with all its feuds—the roots of most of which are, like all family feuds, literally, inexplicable—are still a family, and fundamentally supportive, and particularly supportive to the young and foolish.

We’re here tonight because we love the field.

The Nebulas are a way of applauding our own. They matter because we say they matter, and they matter because we care.

They are something to which we can aspire. They are our way—the genre’s way, the way of the community of writers—of thanking those who produced sterling work, those who have added to the body of SF, of fantasy, of speculative fiction.