The Seattle Times: Arts & Entertainment: Nebula Awards celebrate stars of sci-fi literature
“One of the differences between this and an entity like the Oscars,” said Seattle-based “Cryptonomicon” author and toastmaster Neal Stephenson, “is we don’t have the glitz and we certainly don’t have the money, but we can use a word like ‘entity.’ ”
In a keynote presentation fraught with technical glitches, Rick Rashid, a senior vice president for Microsoft research, recalled some old predictions of the future that didn’t quite pan out — for instance, that someday computers could weigh as little as 1.5 tons, and that there would be a world market for perhaps five of them.