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We don't get much discussion of books and stories in here, so I thought I might get some started by talking a bit about the Nebula award anthologies that get printed every year, as I've been reading these anyway, and the university library has a fairly complete collection.
The Nebula award, for those not familiar with it, is given each year by the Science Fiction Writers of America. It comes in four categories, not counting things like best dramatic presentation or best script: Best novel, best novella, best novelette, and best short story.
It seems I should have started sooner, however, since I've more or less forgotten a lot of information about this particular collection. Oh well.
So, here's the book for the awards of 1968.
This year the book is edited by Poul Anderson, whose work I'm sure I've read but I couldn't tell you anything about it, other than listing a few titles. Nebula introductions come in three flavors; the "we're finally part of the mainstream now!" cheer, the "mainstream literature is garbage, long live the ghetto!" rant, and the technical and rather dry description of SFWA business. Anderson here writes in the second mode, including a very odd sentence about science fiction being about grand ideas and the big picture, rather than, and I quote, the "neuroses of some sniveling fagot." This presumably does not mean what I think it means. But, ouch. The New Wave was much on everyones' mind at the time. The stories this year seem rather traditional to me, which is interesting since next year we get both a Delany story and the decidedly New Wavey (look mom, swears!) "A Boy and his Dog." And the year before a Moorcock story won! But more on that in another thread.
There's also an essay about the state of the SF novel, by someone or other.
Best short story: "The Planners," by Kate Wilhelm. About which I remember next to nothing. I think, however, this might be a story about a project to increase the intelligence of chimpanzees, told from the point of a view of a scientist who is not entirely sure about his own life. I recall liking it.
Best novelette: "Mother to the World," by Richard Wilson. A tedious Adam and Eve story about the last two people left alive after some sort of biological doomsday device, which leeches all of the water out of the human body, I think, killing everyone who wasn't in an hermetically sealed room, which the protaganists happened to be in by chance. For some reason it didn't effect most other animals or plants. The twist here is that this Eve appears to be mentally retarded. Over time the Adam characters grows more and more fond of her, eventually falling in love and deciding to repopulate the human race. We leave the story with the two having started a family. The children, incidently, are apparently fine, developmentally. The inevitability of incest is a plot point. This story is far less icky than I'm making it sound, though it is kind of icky. What's worse, two people are a long ways from constituting a viable genetic pool anyway, making you wonder why they're bothering.
Best novella: "Dragonrider," by Anne McCaffrey. The first Pern story, maybe. On a distant planet, where human colonists have forgotten their history, the inhabitants must fight a continuous struggle against some weird funguslike things called Threads which cross space from another planet in the system whenever the orbits of the two come closest to each other. At the time of the story this hasn't happened in "400 Turns," leaving the people responsible for fighting the things at a bit of a disadvantage, organizationally. Also, there are dragons. TELEPATHIC dragons. Who burn up the Threads with their firey breath. Oh, and they can teleport. THROUGH TIME AS WELL. Our heroes use all these talents of their friendly dragon companions to fight off the Threads when they finally arrive.
Telepathic, teleporting, time-traveling dragons are so not my thing. Toss in the annoying "Turn" used instead of "year," and some very creepy sexual politics (whenever the dragons mate, their riders are compelled to as well), and you have a novella that I did not happen to care for much.
Other stories: "The Dance of the Changer and the Three," by Terry Carr. A alien fable, of sorts, related by a scientist who was studying them. Unfortunately, the aliens are inscrutable. Really, really inscrutable. In the end, it seems that carbon-based lifeforms and self-aware concentrations of ionized gas just don't get each other. I liked this story much more than any of the actual winners.
"Sword Game," by H. H. Hollis. I don't remember anything about this.
"The Listeners," by James E. Gunn. The administrator of a SETI program begins to wonder if all this listening with little chance of hearing anything is worth the time. The answer turns out to be yes, but not because they hear something. A nice little midlife crisis story, but with science.
Not included in the book for obvious reasons but a Nebula winner anyway: Best novel: Rite of Passage, by Alexei Panshin. Never read it.
Registered: Mar 1999
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