Nebula Award Stories 3
Roger Zelazny Edits the 1967 Nebula Award Winners and Runners-up
Mar 17, 2008
By the time Roger Zelazny edited the third annual collection of the best sci-fi stories of the year (as selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America), certain writers were beginning to dominate the awards. But new voices were also appearing, spurred on by the ferment of the 1960s.
Roger Zelazny
Zelazny himself had three works on the final ballot; his novel Lord of Light was a runner-up to Samuel R. Delany’s equally-groundbreaking The Einstein Intersection, while his novelettes ‘The Keys to December’ (which originally appeared in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine), and his mountaineering-epic-love story ‘This Mortal Mountain’ were both contenders.
Zelazny recused his work, leaving space for other worthy stories; J. G. Ballard’s ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral-D’ is one of his Vermilion Sands stories, set at a decadent desert holiday resort of the future, where hang-glider pilots carve the clouds into works of art. Gary Wright’s ‘Mirror of Ice’ is a sinewy story of jet-propelled toboggan racers.
Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions
Two of the Nebula winners in 1967 came from a single anthology, the first time this had happened.
As well as Best Novel, Samuel R. Delany captured Best Short-Story with ‘Aye, and Gomarrah.’ Spacers need to be surgically altered to survive exposure to deep space, which effectively castrates them, but there are those who would gladly copulate with those who most of humanity considers freaks, as Delany shines a mirror darkly on his own homosexuality, and the then prevalent view of it.
Equally obliquely autobiographical is Fritz Leiber’s ‘Gonna Roll The Bones,’ which captured Best Novelette. It’s a traditional horror piece in which Joe Slattermill sneaks out for a night on the tiles, and ends up playing dice for his life.
Both stories came from Harlan Ellison’s ground-breaking anthology Dangerous Visions, which contained not only those stories, but contributions from Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Robert Bloch, Norman Spinrad and Zelazny and others. Theodore Sturgeon’s ‘If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?’ in DV was one of the runners-up for the Best Novelette.
On the same ballot and included in the anthology is Ellison’s ‘Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,’ where another gambler –this time in Las Vegas—plays the slot machines. It’s as much about character as about plot, and has perhaps the most memorable last line in speculative fiction.
Nebula-Award Best Novella
The competition for novella highlighted what an outstanding year for short stories 1967 was. It also showed how much the year was dominated by four men.
As well as Ellison and Zelazny, while Delany won two Nebulas, he was unsuccessful with his novella ‘The Star Pit.’ As was Robert Silverberg, whose ‘Hawksbill Station’ has criminals sent back to the Cambrian Epoch, and Philip Jose Farmer’s contribution to Dangerous Visions, ‘Riders of the Purple Wage.’ But none of these stories made the selection, because of ‘Weyr Search,’ Anne McCaffrey’s glorious, mythic introduction to the world of Pern and its dragon-riders. In any other year it would have won.
But in 1967 the quartet was completed by Michael Moorcock, whose ‘Behold The Man’ told the story of Karl Glogauer, neurotic time-traveller, martyr, and the man who travels back to first century Judea to find that Jesus is a hydrocephalic idiot, and takes his place on the cross, to ensure that our history is maintained. It’s a timely piece to read at Easter, especially as Moorcock is the latest SFWA Grand Master, forty years after one of the most powerful pieces of SF ever written.
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