This may be the biggest night of the year in Hollywood, but I’m over here refreshing SFWA’s Instagram page on repeat as they announce this year’s Nebula nominees.
Stewart C. Baker, coordinator of the team that won last year’s Game Writing award for A Death in Hyperspace and co-nominee two years ago with James Beamon for The Bread Must Rise, is still on a roll, with a nomination for Spire, Surge, and Sea. Congratulations to him, and to the CoG editorial team who have seen him through their game development process twice now and have two Nebula nods to show for it.
Congratulations are also due to Natalia Theodoridou, three-time nominee with CoG and also part of last year’s winning team, whose debut novel, Sour Cherry, is up for Best Novel.
This is most excellent news. Hell, I’m just glad to see the Nebula’s doing this as well; proof that gaming has also grown/adapted/etc. I mean, I remember when Nebula’s was just for books
I’m not familiar with any of the other games aside from having heard of Hades II, but I’m seeing some stuff in other categories that I have either enjoyed, or want to read. There’s last summer’s Superman, Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, The Incandescent by Emily Tesh.
Seriously, it is a truly outstanding ballot this year, I feel like even more than most years. I definitely am not holding my breath but I’m sincerely thrilled to be in such objectively awesome company!
THANK YOU, @AletheiaKnights for the shout-out, and I recommend everyone go check out Natalia’s Sour Cherry if you like eerie, unsettling fairy tell retellings that move beyond just a tired re-tread of the original. It’s a fantastic book!
It’s the game where a character you’ve hung out with twice and not actually done anything romantic with yet forms a connection with another character that they’re willing to set aside in favor of you if they like you enough. Or rather, it was. The author made some changes to the game after it was published.
I’m guessing the members of SFWA are a lot more focused on other aspects of the story than a romance that comprises only a few pages of content anyway, and I doubt the ones who nominated this game had any idea about the ratings. Most of them probably played the game in the first place because they’re fans of the author’s work, and they enjoyed the prose quality, worldbuilding, political machinations, and badass mythological bird battle in the end.
I’m just going to say this now, because in the past there have been a lot of misunderstandings flying around about the nomination process:
Choice of Games did not nominate this game. Choice of Games did not submit this game for consideration. SFWA forbids authors, editors, and publishers to nominate their own work.
This game was not nominated specifically over other CoG games. There isn’t a designated nomination slot for CoG; some years they have had multiple games nominated for the Nebula and one year they didn’t have any. This game was nominated because SFWA members enjoyed reading it, and most of them probably read it because they like the author’s other work. If you’re wondering how this game could possibly have beaten out your favorite 2025 release for the nomination, the simplest answer is that the game you would have preferred was most likely never on their radar.
SFWA is a literary organization. What its members enjoy is not necessarily what members of this forum, or CoG readers in general, enjoy. None of the previous CoG Nebula nominees were super popular. The game that won the Game Writing award last year, A Death in Hyperspace, was originally written as an IFComp entry and didn’t even place in the top 20, but SFWA members loved it. SFWA isn’t wrong, and neither are you if you played this game and didn’t like it. You just happen to have different tastes.
)