Nebula Awards Showcase 2004
edited by Vonda N. McIntyre -- The Essential SF Library
Vonda McIntyre edited Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 into the best of the series for a decade, with stories by Richard Chwedyk, Megan Lindholm, Katherine Maclean and others
The 2004 edition of the annual anthology gathering the Nebula Award winners and the pick of the runners up is arguably the best of its kind in the last decade.
The anthology opens with Richard Chwedyk's winning novella, 'Bronte's Egg,' one of a series of warm, almost sentimental stories of abandoned, sometimes abused sentient pets and their attempts to recover from that abuse, and to make sense of the world around them.
From the sentimental to the rigorously exacting, Ted Chiang's 'Hell is the Absence of God' posits a world in which God manifestly exists and tells of a man who tries to love the God who has taken his wife away from him, but cannot. Winner of the Hugo for Best novellette as well as the novella, this is Chiang at his best.
The extract from the Best Novel (Neil Gaiman's American Gods) is shorter than previous years, which frees up enough space to include a runner-up novella, Adam-Troy Castro's 'Saturday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl's,' one of many Manifest Destiny stories to appear in Analog, in which the Moon is substituted for the Wild West as a point of nostalgic yearning.
There is both a profile and a new short story from Grand Master Ursula K. Le Guin, which is a bonus, as often the relative scaricty of new stories from previous nominees precludes anything but reprinting obscure or classic stories.
There is a similar double appearance for Author Emeritus Katherine MacLean albeit with an obscure reprint rather than a new story as her contribution, while separating the two appointees are three from the short story category;
'Nothine Ever Happens in Rock City' by Jack McDevitt is an understated short-short about first contact, while Megan Lindholm's 'Cut' looks at the contentious subject of female circumcision, while Michael Swanwick's 'The Dog Said Bow-Wow,' is the Hugo winning story of Darger and Surplus, human and augmente canine con artists in the far future.
For once the poetry winners are omitted, which is sad for the writers themselves, but they can be found elsewhere, they are not a core part of the charter, and their periodic omission makes their presence all the more noticeable when they are included.
Charles Stross' novellette 'Lobsters' is one of the better known novellettes, and like several others in the book is part of a series, this one Manfred Macx.
The volume ends with Carole Emshwillers winning short story, 'Creature,' one of her all too infrequent dinosaur stories, and one that is a deserved winner.
What Vonda N. McIntyre has done well is to pick several stories from the runner-up ballot that aren't available anywhere else; admittedly, there is the now-almost obligatory bow to the section of the ballot that appeared first in Asimov's and were reprinted in Dozois' (and Hartwell's) Year's Best, but apart from the Swanwick and the Stross, the rest of the runners-up should be less than familiar to general readership. In fact, of the seven sources of short stories on the ballot, only two fail to have a presence in the anthology, which is sad for M. Shayne Bell, and infuriating for Strange Horizons, whose stories regularly seem to be those excluded, as Tim Pratt's 'Small Gods' is in this instance.
These are small quibbles though, for a superior volume in what is overall an excellent series.
