Nebula Awards Showcase 2008

Each year the Nebula Awards volume gathers winning short story, novelette, and novella together with an extract from the winning novel into an anthology. Included are some of the unsuccessful finalists in each category and various other items, depending on the interests of the. The forty-second such volume is now out.

Nebula Award Winners

Lately there has been a trend to cluster the award winners at the front; this year is no exception.

Elizabeth Hand won her second Nebula --after a gap of eleven years-- for her short story "Echo," which opens the anthology.

Of the others, James Patrick Kelly's "Burn" has already been reviewed on this site. At over one hundred and twenty pages, it takes up more than a third of the entire book, which only makes Bova's choices for the rest of the book harder.

Peter S. Beagle

All three of this year's debutant winners are veteran writers, boasting over a century of writing between them. Peter S. Beagle accounts for nearly half that. His first novel, A Fine and Private Place, was published in 1959 when he was nineteen; in 1968 his landmark fantasy The Last Unicorn appeared. His Hugo and now Nebula winning novelette "Two Hearts" is a sort of sequel.

Once the winners have been included, whatever space is left is the perogative of the editor, and it is this that marks out the comparative success of each volume.

Bova, as befits a former editor of the two magazines with the largest proportion of fact in their contents (Analog's sub-title is 'Science Fact and Fiction') has selected three articles on the state of the SF field, past, present, and Mike Resnick's view of the future. Resnick's assertion that said future does not include print magazines is bold, until one remembers that Resnick has in the last year taken over as editor of Baen's Universe, the leading e-zine in the field, so he is hardly impartial.

Science Fiction Poetry

Joe Haldeman leads what may be the most extensive poetry review in the series, with an insightful introduction (Haldeman is an award-winning poet as well as a noted prose writer) and then the three award winners.

The Grand Master for 2006 was James Gunn. His most famous story "The Listeners" is included, with Gunn's profile. There is a suspicion that Gunn was given the award more for his academic work than his writing, and Bova's decision to reprint a story that appeared in the 1968 volume only adds to that suspicion, implying that Gunn has written nothing else worth reprinting, which is nonsense.

The anthology is rounded off with an extended extract from the winning novel, Jack McDevitt's Seeker.

The careful reader will note that no mention has been made of the usual crop of runners-up. This is because with the exception of Eugene Mirabelli's "The Woman in Schrodinger's Wave Equation," no runners-up have been included.

This may be deliberate on Bova's part, a choice to focus on the periphery rather than the core of the ballot, or it may be a symptom of a deeper malaise. There seems to be a pendulum effect at work when it comes to the length of Nebula Award anthologies; the volumes shrank at the start of the decade, grew longer again three or four years ago, and are again now shrinking, through use of a larger font (so each story takes up more pages).

Cover for Nebula Awards 2008

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