his is the 35th-anniversary volume in the well-respected series which traditionally presents a sampling of stories--all the winners, plus some of the also-rans--from each year's Nebula Awards ballot. (The candidates in this collection derive from the period 1998-1999.) Editor Silverberg opens with a candid, witty and informative essay concerning the history of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the organization responsible for awarding the Nebulas. He also provides a fluent introduction to each piece.
Winner in the Novella category was Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life." A linguist assigned to learn the language of some newly arrived aliens finds that contact with the "semasiographic" tongue of the visitors is having unanticipated repercussions on her own mentality, leaving her distanced from her fellow humans. Mary Turzillo, winner in the Novelette category for "Mars Is No Place for Children," chronicles in the first person the anguish and adventures of Kapera Smythe, an ailing teen born and raised on the Red Planet but now threatened with exile to Earth.
"The Cost of Doing Business," by Leslie What, which took the Short Story laurels, is a near-future vision of a strange profession whose practitioners suffer greatly. An excerpt from Octavia Butler's Nebula-winning novel, The Parable of the Talents, gives us a gritty view of life in a post-apocalyptic United States, where a beneficent cult known as Earthseed promises mankind access to the stars.
As a midpoint marker, Gary Wolfe's perceptive essay, "Unhidden Agendas, Unfinished Dialogues," notes the highpoints of the genre for the period under discussion and draws some interesting conclusions about the health of the field. Following is David Marusek's "The Wedding Album," one of the Novella candidates, which tracks the biography of a "sim." Michael Swanwick's "Radiant Doors" (a Short Story runner-up) conjoins a future dystopia with present-day politics via time leaks. Harry Harrison contributes a preface to a reprint of "Judas Danced," by Grand Master Brian Aldiss, and Barry Malzberg performs a similar gatekeeper function for a segment of Daniel Keyes' memoir, Algernon, Charlie and I. Lastly, two Rhysling-Award-winning poems--Bruce Boston's "Confessions of a Body Thief" and Laurel Winter's "egg horror poem"--round out the collection.
A strong but nostalgic anthology
Maybe I was lulled into a nostalgic, retrospective mood by Silverberg's rose-colored introduction. Or perhaps Keyes' memoir about a story nearly 40 years old contributed to my mood. But whatever the explanation, this edition of the annual Nebula Awards Showcase struck me as a gloss on past glories rather than an arrow aimed at future triumphs for science fiction. Each piece here raised echoes in my mind of allied--and, in their time, more striking--predecessors
The Chiang story seemed to me a fusion of Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" with James Tiptree's "Backward, Turn Backward." The Turzillo fell neatly into the juvenile-protagonist mode of so many classic SF stories, as produced by authors ranging from Wilmar Shiras to David Palmer to David Gerrold. Octavia Butler's novel is the most old-fashioned of all, harking right back to Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow. What's "extrapolation of a single trend to its maximum stretch" but pure Galaxy magazine fodder? Marusek's long-view-from-an-odd-perspective parallels Greg Egan's explorations of digital existence, and Swanwick's society-upset-by-inexplicable-intrusions recalls Michael Bishop's "The Quickening."
Now, this is not to say that all these stories were not honest, craftsmanly efforts, written from authentic visions. But I do maintain that in their collective "dialogue with the past," to employ Gary Wolfe's phraseology, they all climb to the pinnacle of what SF has accomplished without erecting any new superstructure, however tentative or shaky, that would grant access to new dimensions of the ideational stratosphere. In their assembled high-gloss perfection, they fail to exhibit the mad willingness to leap and possibly fail found in such noble ancestors as Delany's "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" or John Varley's "The Persistence of Vision." But the flaw, if such it be, is not in the stars, Father Gernsback, it's in ourselves.
