Nebula Award for Best Novel in the context of "Dune (novel)"

Kim Stanley Robinson (born March 23, 1952) is an American science fiction writer best known for his Mars trilogy of novels. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes, featuring scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the World Fantasy Award. The Atlantic magazine has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to an article in The New Yorker magazine, Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers."

The Mars trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning 187 years, from 2026 to 2212. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster.

The three novels are Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996). The Martians (1999) is a collection of short stories set in the same fictional universe. Red Mars won the BSFA Award in 1992 and Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1993. Green Mars won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1994. Blue Mars also won the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1997.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (/ˈkroʊbər lə ˈɡwɪn/ KROH-bər lə GWIN; née Kroeber; October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author. She is best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. Her work was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and more than a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said that she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".

Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, to author Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber. Having earned a master's degree in French, Le Guin began doctoral studies but abandoned these after her marriage in 1953 to historian Charles Le Guin. She began writing full-time in the late 1950s, and she achieved major critical and commercial success with the novels A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969); these have been described by Harold Bloom as her masterpieces. For the latter volume, Le Guin won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, becoming the first woman to do so. Several more works set in Earthsea or the Hainish universe followed; others included books set in the fictional country of Orsinia, several works for children, and many anthologies.