Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 15, 1990 TAG: 9007200006
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The Nebulas are given annually for stories voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as best of the year (in this case, 1988). This is the 24th anthology to be devoted to them. So why does it seem that this year's editor, Michael Bishop, a two-time Nebula winner himself, is constantly questioning the judgement of his SFWA peers?
The only Nebula winner not included is the novel, Lois McMaster Bujold's "Falling Free," which has its own book. Bishop opens the Nebula anthology with horror novelist Ian Watson's wide-ranging overview of 1988 fantasy and science fiction, which starts out by putting down Bujold's winning novel as "an out-and-out juvenile . . . do members of SFWA want this to be seen as their pinnacle, their height of achievement?"
The novel involved a group of humans bioengineered to work in space on a job which gets cancelled, leaving them with futures as cripples living on a gravity world - until the engineer-hero hijacks their space habitat and heads for the stars. Watson seems to favor the "soft" sciences or outright fantasies, and seems put off by an old-fashioned "hard-science" story winning.
At the 1988 Nebula awards banquet, SFWA named writer Ray Bradbury as the 10th "grand master," and Greg Bear furnishes an essay of unabashed admiration for Bradbury's work. It is followed by a Bradbury poem and an essay, which Bradbury wrote in 1977 as an afterword to the 48th printing of his novel, "Fahrenheit 451," on book-burning and would-be censors.
Other writers contribute warm tributes to Robert A. Heinlein and Clifford D. Simak, two of the field's top authors who died in 1988. Also included are poems by Bruce Boston, Suzette Haden Elgin and Lucius Shepard which won Rhysling Awards (Rhysling was the name of Heinlein's tragic blind poet 40 years ago in "The Green Hills of Earth"). And Bill Warren gives his annual survey of movies for the year (generally, he finds, they stunk - but that does not mean his survey is not worth reading).
All of that makes for fascinating reading, and we haven't even gotten to the stories yet.
Connie Willis' "The Last of the Winnebagos," with its humanizing of post-holocaust survivors, won for the best novella. George Alec Effinger's "Schrodinger's Kitten" took novelette honors, and James Morrow's "Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge" won among the short stories.
We also get Jack McDevitt's short story, "The Fort Moxie Branch" and Neal Barrett Jr.'s novelette, "Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus," both of which were Nebula finalists; along with a story by Gene Wolfe; a poem by Robert Frazier; and an essay by Paul Di Filippo.
All told, it's an interesting collection made even more interesting by Bishop's introductions to all the items included.
by CNB