Nebula Awards Showcase 2003 edited by Nancy Kress, includes Jack Williamson's The Ultimate Earth, Kelly Link's winning novellette, and an ewxcellent Mike Resnick story.
Nancy Kress is one of the foremost writers of SF over the last twenty-five years or so, but the Nebula Awards Showcase 2003 marked her debut as an editor. Kress' selection was competent and secure, but uninspired, following a formula so tried and tested as to be taking on the symptoms of rigour..
The book opens with Severna Park's winning short story, "The Cure for Everything," a meditation of the potential pit falls of genetic engineering, redolent with the heat and humidity of the Amazon rain forest. It's one of the best stories in the book.
Following on from an appreciation of the late Betty Ballantine, is perhaps the weakest story in the volume, which is sad, since Jack Williamson was one of the founding fathers of SF, but the truth is that strip away the sentiment that the SFWA is pereversely prone to, and "The Ultimate Earth," a barely-novella length story is a pedestrian and uninvolving infodump.
Better is Kelly Link's winning novellette, "Louise's Ghost," is better, a subtle and poignant examination of the lives and loves of two women, both called Louise, one of whom dies.
These are the stories that Kress has no control over -- they are chosen for her as editor by the collective will of the SFWA. Where she shows a distinct lack of imagination is with the choices that she makes, where she does have control of the contents.
For the third consecutive year, both runners-up come from Asimov's magazine, which presents any potential buyer toying with the idea of paying twenty dollars cover price with a good reason not to buy the book if they also subscribe to Asimov's.
"Undone" by James Patrick Kelly was probably the best single story on the ballot in any length, but the cold, harsh reality is that this fine novellette had been chosen by all three editor's of the previous Year's Best, so was already widely known. Kress seemed to be adhering over-literally to the notion of picking the best stories, but making an editorial selection is more than simply picking a handful of stories in isolation. Each story also needs to be looked at in relation to its impact on the book as a whole.
The now-obligatory Rhysling Poetry Award winners are another of Bruce Boston's excellent canopy of spousally-themed poems, and a longer one by Joe Haldeman, using the same structure as he did for 'DX' some fourteen years earlier.
After the equally now-obligatory symposium on the state of SF, Kress finishes with a novellette length extract from The Quantum Rose, Catherine Asaro's winning novel. Interestingly enough, Asaro's "The Roll of the Dice" was on the final novella ballot, but Kress clearly felt that the autheticity of an extract from the novel was more appropriate than a free-standing story which wasn't directly connected to the novel, despite there being precedent for each case.
To be fair to Kress, this is not a bad book, and while Nebula Awards Showcase 2003 is of little interest to the experienced reader who is not a completist, it would be an ideal primer for any reader new to SF.
