Nebula Awards Showcase 2006
Edited by Gardner Dozois -- The Essential SF Library
Gardner Dozois edited Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 with an extract from Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Lost Souls and Anne McCaffrey's original story The Ship Who Sang.
Gardner Dozois is the most experienced editor to have edited a Nebula Awards volume; twenty years editor at Asimovs Science Fiction, he has shaped SF more than any editor since the legendary John W. Campbell in the 1940s. His championing of the resurgent British hard SF writers of the early 1990s boosted the careers of a dozen writers, and established the wide-screen space-opera revival. This influence has been furthered by the twenty-four volumes of his Year’s Best SF.
Editing a potentially competing anthology therefore poses unique problems. Does he pick Asimov’s stories, or ignore them? Does he pick stories that appeared in his Year’s Best? If not, is he saying that his choice is not the best of the year? If he does, he risks potential reader fatigue.
The anthology opens with Walter Jon Williams’ stunning Best Novella, “The Green Leopard Plague.” The end of our world and the chaotic birth of a new utopia seen from a far-future perspective, and a gripping murder mystery, it’s a worthy winner.
Also a worthy winner is “Basement Magic,” Ellen Klages’ re-telling of a classic fairy tale against a backdrop of the Kennedy Space Program. It’s a dark and twisted and complex novelette.
The first of the runners-up is a novelette reprinted from Asimov’s, William Sanders’ “Dry Bones,” another return to the middle years of the last century, this time in the sub-genre of what Sanders himself terms “the Great Lost Scientific Discovery.”
After the annual forum about the State of SF, the next selection is another runner-up novelette, Christopher Rowe’s “The Voluntary State.” A complex, demanding story, it almost won both Hugo and Nebula, but ended up with neither. But it’s not only appeared in Dozois’ own Best SF, but the Strahan volume as well.
Grand Master Anne McCaffrey is appreciated, and her classic short-story “The Ship Who Sang” is reprinted. Later it would become the basis for a best-selling novel.
Eileen Gunn’s winning short story “Coming to Terms” is an atypical Gunn story in that it’s neither manic nor amusing, but instead a moving tale of a daughter packing her dead father’s books up.
“Embracing-the-New” by Benjamin Rosenbaum is perhaps the best short story on the ballot, and a textbook example of how to write a short story with aliens set on another world.
There is a short extract from the winning novel, Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold, which cannot do a big, bursting fantasy justice, but it’s a valid attempt.
“Zora and the Zombie,” by Andy Duncan is a 1930s-set voodoo story that takes place in Haiti, featuring Zora Neale Huston, to whom many of Duncan’s stories are homages. It’s perhaps the weakest story in the book, an unsuccessful attempt to update a rightfully dead sub-genre.
Better is Mike Resnick’s “Travels with My Cats,” which -- with the Rosenbaum -- is another Asimov’s story that vies to be the best in the book. It’s another exercise in nostalgia, which seems to be preoccupying the SFFWA membership to a disproportionate extent, but it’s effective, nonetheless.
The book ends with Vernor Vinge’s “The Cookie Monster,” one of the poorest novellas to win a Hugo in many years, and proof that one can fool all of the people all of the time. It’s an extended fan-boy homage to earlier stories that’s meaningless to an outsider.
Apart from that last story and the Rowe, Dozois has picked lesser-known stories, and he’s tried to avoid solely picking runners-up from his own magazine and anthology. It’s not as good as the McIntyre, but that apart, the 2006 is the best Nebula Awards showcase of the decade.
