The 2005 -- and the 39th annual -- volume of the annual Nebula Awards Showcase by which the Science Fiction Writers of America honour the best science fiction and fantasy published in the USA in the year in question was at the time of it's preparation precisely half the age of genre science fiction.
With each passing year time covers the past with another layer of sediment, until, what in genre terms The Dawn of Time (ie the 1920s) is buried so deep that the contents of the volume in question would all but unrecognizable as science fiction to a reader of Amazing Stories of that epoch.
In previous years, editors had taken to reprinting a narrow selection -- the winners, a runner-up short story, novelette and/or novella, mostly from Asimovs, often already widely available -- but Jack Dann instead significantly improves the coverage by including as many of the short story and novelette finalists as possible, some of which will be unavailable to all but the most omniverous and far-reaching of readers. He's also crammed in the poetry winners, a symposium on the newest movements within the field, and autobiographical essay by veteran but controversial author Barry Malzeberg, and reprints from Author Emeritus, the (sadly) late Charles L. Harness, and Grand Master Robert Silverberg.
Most of the stories -- from the opening "The Mask of the Rex," by Richard Bowes, Jefrrey Ford's novelette winner "The Empire of Ice Cream," through more traditional science fiction such as James van Pelt's "The Last of the O-Forms," and "Lambing Season," by Molly Gloss, and even Cory Doctorow's post-cyberpunk "0nzered" -- are individually excellent, although the extracts from the winning novella, Neil Gaiman's Coraline, and the winning novel, Elizabeth Moon's Speed of Dark are amongst the weaker efforts.
Paradoxically, Dann's comprehensive selction highlights a couple of depressing trends when the contents are viewed as a whole. The longer-form ballots are dominated by SF (Gaiman's is the fantasy on the novella ballot) but the short story and novelettes indicate much of the SFWA membership preferring a headlong reatreat from SF (particularly hard SF) toward a crypto-contemporary quasi-fantasy. The second trend is that too many of the authors are busy mining the shallow shale of earlier works to dig deep into the virgin territory of new ideas, preferring instead to show off gems that are only the polishings of fossil classics. Carol Emshwiller's award winning short story, "Grandma," is a revisionist superhero story; Harlan Ellison offers '[if] James Hilton...had written...Ionescu's "Rhinceros"', Karen Joy Fowler presents a response to Tiptree's classic "The Women Men Don't See," and Adam-Troy Castro is two thirds of the way through his story before he leaves behind Le Guin's Omelas, and ventures into uncharted territory. Sadly, Silverberg's magnificently audacious "Sundance" from 1969, is the strongest story in the book.
A brave attempt by Dann, undermined by his own fellow members.
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