Nebula Awards Showcase 2002
edited by Kim Stanley Robinson -- the Essential SF Library
After the low-point of the Nebula Awards anthologies with the 2001 volume, the series began to slowly improve in quality, starting with Kim Stanley Robinson's choices.
After the low-point of the Nebula Awards anthologies with the 2001 volume, the series began to slowly improve in quality, starting with Kim Stanley Robinson's choices in 2002. Again, there are only two runners-up, but at least they were new to all but the reader's of Asimovs magazine.
Robinson opens with brief articles on the Nebula Awards, including a full list of the runners-up (doubly frustrating, because the list highlights the fact that with the exception of the short-story and novellette winner, and Michae Swanwick's Hugo-winning 'Scherzo with Tyrannosaur' from the previous year, the editors of the various Year's Best missed the entire ballot).
Appreciations of the Grand Master and Author Emeritus (Philip Jose Farmer and Robert Sheckley respectively) follow, before Robinson finally gets to the nitty-gritty of the selection, with the winning novellette, Walter Jon William's chilling but inventive "Daddy's World," a dark parable about the interface between humans and the electronic world.
Robinson includes a novellette-long extract from Greg Bear's winning novel "Darwin's Radio," another of Bear's apocalyptic transformations of humanity, this time as a result of a virus unleashed by the excavation of Neanderthal bodies in the Caucasus Mountains.
Terry Bisson's "Macs" is a savage parable of a use for clones that may be unique, and on the corrosive nature of capital punishment.
"Stellar Harvest," one of the novellette runners-up, by Eleanor Arnason, is an interplanetary romance set on a frontier world, and is one of her 'Lydia Duluth' series about a future film-maker from off-world, and a native convict escaped from prison.
The highlight of the collection for the third consecutive year is the winning novella, Linda Nagata's magnificent "Goddesses," a near-future tipping point as our own world becomes a utopia, and crucially the price the Third World may exact along the way. If one story is worth the price of the book, it is this, the first print incarnation of the first electronically printed story to carry off the prize -- and all this for a story that was only added to the ballot at the behest of the Nebula Award Jury, who may nominate one work in each category that they feel has been overlooked.
The length of "Goddesses" precludes much else from being included, although a commentary forum is led off by Gwyneth Jones, before aonther of the novellette contenders, the complex and rewarding "A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows," rounds off the book.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2002 is a book that manages to rise above its limitations; for all the limited choice, there are no dud stories in the book.
