Nebula Awards Showcase 2000
edited by Gregory Benford -- The Essential SF Library
The 34th edition of the anthology series featured title changes, but little else new; as Benford is a scientist, his choices inevitably run to SF rather than fantasy.
The thirty-fourth annual edition of the Nebula awards anthologies featured a change to the titles, from a straightforward numbering system to the rather bizarre 'Nebula Awards Showcase 2000.'
It's bizarre because it's so confusing; the stories in the anthology refer to the 1998 Nebula Awards, presented in 1999 (unlike the Hugos, which take the year of attribution, rather than the year of the story) and to make matters worse, half of the stories in the anthology were first published in 1997. Under SFWA rules, stories can be nominated for twelve calendar months from publication.
The assumption is that the magic number 2000 was such an inherently science-fictional year to put in the title that the marketing department at Harcourt simply couldn't resist the opportunity to put it in the title, however confusing it might be to the readers.
What of the collection itself? Edited by Gregory Benford, it contains six stories from the final ballot, three of them novelettes and one a novella. Plus an extract from the winning novel and a 1942 reprint from Grand Master Hal Clement at the very beginning of his career. There are also the (by now) almost obligatory poetry winners of the Rhysling Award, and overviews of the year by various pundits.
The book opens with Sheila Finch's winning novella 'Reading The Bones,' one of her on-going 'lingster' series about the translators of the Guild of Xenolinguists. On a backward planet, the hitherto docile aliens have rebelled and slaughtered the Governor and his wife, leaving their two children, one a child, the other a rebellious teenager, in the care of an alchaholic lingster; his only hope is to get them to base, but their transport crashes, stranding them alone in a hostile jungle. It's one of the outstanding stories in the book, and deserved it's Nebula.
At the other end of the finalists is Mark McGarry's stunning 'The Mercy Gate,' a magnificent Zelazny-esque piece of instellar baroque, about star-gates spanning the galaxy, and the plague that has swept through them in the past. Individually it is perhaps the very best story in the book, and should have closed the whole anthology, rather than simply acting as a guillotine to the core selection.
Benford is a scientist, so it is perhaps inevitable that his selection of runners-up would feature only science-fiction, rather than fantasy, but it does lend a rather one-dimensional feel to the selection. Only two of the winners -- Jane Yolen's novelette 'Lost Girls,' a disturbing yet poignant story about a modern girl’s abduction by Peter Pan, and Bruce Holland Roger's winning short story ‘Thirteen Ways to Water,’ a powerful, moving piece on enduring love and the power of names set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and it's aftermath -- are not SF, yet they are two of the three most powerful pieces in the book because they are so atypical. They are far closer to this world than the Zelazny inspired clones of Walter Jon William's 'Lethe,' the future Sarajevo of 'Winter Fire' by Geoffrey A. Landis, or the war-riven future Latin America of the extract from Joe Haldeman's winning novel 'Forever Peace.'
That is not to say that the aforementioned stories are not good ones individually, but collectively there is insufficient variety, and with Benford splitting the book into sections, in effect shunting the 'tail' of the selections, poetry and retrospective awards to the end, he is in effect splitting the book into chunks, a tactic that simply doesn't work.
Nonetheless, in many ways a depply flawed book, it's worth getting, if only for the Finch, McGarry and Rogers stories, which eluded any of the Year's Best selections.
