The Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America announced their annual Nebula Award winners this weekend in Austin, TX. The non-profit association honors writers of speculative fiction each year with the awards, and this year’s list of winners included some familiar names and series to fans of comics and science-fiction/fantasy:

Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

Novella: "Fountain of Age" by Nancy Kress

Novelette: "The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate" by Ted Chiang

Short Story: "Always" by Karen Joy Fowler

Script: Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

The group also held its annual election, which I probably wouldn’t report on here were it not for some of the intriguing write-in candidates for the positions. Spiro Agnew as Vice President, eh?

Donna Hinckley Stacey Troy has had as many different origins as any other DC hero, but unlike the rest she currently remembers all of them.

In her original origin, Donna was an orphan (her parents were killed in a fire) who had been saved by Wonder Woman and taken to Paradise Island, where the Amazons used the mysterious Purple Ray to grant her Amazonian powers. Donna then joined several other junior heroes to form their own super-team, the Teen Titans—she took the name "Wonder Girl," which until she adopted the alias “Donna Troy,” was her only name.

As Wonder Girl, Donna became a well-known figure in the DC Universe. Many years later, she was recast as Troia, champion of the mythic Titans. She later gave up her powers to become human, marry, and have a son, but years later (and after losing her husband and son in a car accident), regretted her decision. When the Titans refused to take her back, Donna became a Darkstar instead.

After leaving that group, Donna discovered she was actually a magical duplicate of Diana, the true Wonder Woman, and regained her powers before being acknowledged by Queen Hippolyta as a true Amazon princess. Since then Donna has discovered the existence of the Multiverse and the fact that she is the only person to remember all of her changing origins. As such, she has become the key to nurturing and protecting the new Multiverse.

Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
By James Sturm & Rich Tommaso
Jump at the Sun/Hyperion, 2007, $16.99

This is a profoundly worthy book — produced under the asupices of The Center for Cartoon Studies, by two respected, serious modern cartoonists, published by the premier imprint for African-American children’s books, and about possibly the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball. Luckily, it’s not as dry and dull as that might make it sound.

It’s not really a biography of the great pitcher [[[Satchel Paige]]], though it looks like one — it follows the life and very abbreviated Negro Leagues baseball career of an Alabama man named Emmet. (His last name isn’t revealed.) Emmet faced Paige in one of his first at-bats for the Memphis Red Sox, but broke his leg in stealing home — he made the run, but lost his career. Emmet’s life intersects Paige’s again, much later, but he also follows Paige’s career, and compares it to his wn life along the way.

Satchel Paige opens with Emmet’s fateful at-bat against Paige, and then moves on from there, with a few vignettes of Emmet’s life from the late twenties to the early forties. Emmet’s a sharecropper, a poor man in a poor part of the world, and moderately oppressed by the local white landowners. (His son is beaten once, and we see the aftermath of one lynching, but Emmet himself kowtows enough to keep himself and his family safe. Perhaps the correct word for his condition is “terrorized.”) The book makes it clear that those white landowners own everything — at one point Emmet thinks “walkin’ out your door is trespassing if they choose to call it that.”

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