Nebula Awards Showcase 2007
Science Fiction Writers of America’s Choice Edited by Mike Resnick
The SFWA's choices include an extract from Camouflage by Joe Haldeman, stories by Nancy Kress, Robert J. Sawyer, two by Kelly Link, and a 'lost' Harlan Ellison novella.
Mike Resnick is now one of the SF genre’s most experienced editors, and his experience helps the latest volume of the SFWA’s choices for Best of the Year become one of the best.
Kelly Link
Kelly Link’s magnificent ‘Magic for Beginners’ opens the fiction pages with the story of a self-referencing television series set in a world-spanning library; there are hints that it's not fictional at all, but glimpses into different realities, including the 'real' one of the central character, fifteen-year-old Jeremy Mars. Full of eccentric and rounded characters, it deservedly won the novella category, and may be one of the best stories of the decade.
Link returns with her winning novelette ‘The Faery Handbag.’ Link is only the eighth writer to win two Nebulas in one year, but while this story of a handbag made from a dog's skin, and the tall-tale-telling Grandmother from a near-unpronounceable country improves on re-reading, it isn't quite up there with her best.
Nebula Nominated Short Stories
Four of the short-story finalists appear, starting with the winning ‘I Live With You’ by Carol Emshwiller. A solitary woman is adopted by an eccentric who looks much like her, but who is determined to make her involuntary landlady actually live.
Dale Bailey’s ‘The End of the World As We Know It’ is a fascinating deconstruction of the cliches found in apocalyptic fiction, including Bailey's own reactions. Funny, poignant, and fascinating.
‘Still Life With Boobs’ by Anne Harris by contrast is an inspired piece of lunacy about the night a woman's breasts decide that they're bored, and go off and have some fun on their own. Bridget Jones meets Boris Karloff.
‘My Mother Dancing’ by Nancy Kress is set a thousand years in the future when humanity has spread across an otherwise lifeless galaxy, and features the dilemma of an evangelical society faced with getting what it actually wants -- and finding that, maybe after all, they don't want what they thought they did.
Robert J. Sawyer
Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer is a powerhouse nominated as Canada's 17th most influential writer, according to Quill & Quire. Sawyer has lent his name to a small publishing house that produces three titles each year, and his article on Canadian Sci-fi and fantasy is an impassioned piece of polemic.
As well as contributing the overview, Sawyer’s ‘Identity Theft’ was a novella finalist, and is a fine piece of crossover fiction, mixing sf tropes likepersonality downloading, androids, domed Martian colonies, but refracting them through a distinctly Chandler-esque PI. One of the best stories in the book, and that really is saying something.
There is an excerpt from Joe Haldeman’s winning novel Camouflage.
In James Patrick Kelly’s ‘Men Are Trouble’ Aliens called devils have ‘disappeared’ all men, leaving a broken, barely-functional future in which most menial work is done by bots, and the women who have survived are ‘seeded’ by devils. It’s dense and multi-layered.
The anthology ends with Harlan Ellison’s eponymous ‘Lost’ novella, later published as ‘The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie.’ (Editor Barry Malzberg’s original title is far superior to the public one) It’s debatable whether a mainstream novella belongs in the book, but the quality of Ellison’s prose and the unfashionably bleak ending mark it out as very much a story of 1968’s New Wave.
As well as the fiction, there are articles on SF anthologies, artwork, independent publishers, and potential opportunities for open-minded writers by Kevin J. Anderson, and the Rhysling poetry winners.
