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The annual
Nebula Awards are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to honor the best novel, novella, novelette, and short story of the previous year.
Nebula Awards 33 editor and six-time Nebula winner Connie Willis reveals her love of the Nebula collection tradition:
"In those 33 eventful years, I've won Nebula Awards and lost them (or, as this year's toastmaster, Michael Cassutt, put it, I've been 'differently victorious'). And I've read another 31 Nebula Awards collections and all the stories in them.... And you know what? I'm just as dazzled, just as awed and impressed, by the Nebula Award stories as I was that first time."
Nebula Awards 33 features Jane Yolen's Best Short Story winner, Sister Emily's Lightship, a tale of poetic inspiration from the stars; The Flowers of Aulit Prison, Nancy Kress's winner for Best Novelette, which beautifully examines the persistence of memory; the Best Novella winner, Jerry Oltion's Abandon in Place, an extraordinary space-ghost story; and an excerpt from Vonda N. McIntyre's lush historical fantasy The Moon and the Sun, which took Best Novel honors.
A terrific selection of "differently victorious" pieces rounds out this outstanding collection, along with the essays, author profiles (of Nelson Bond and Poul Anderson), and Rhysling Award winners (for science fiction poetry) we've come to expect in the Nebula series. The Nebula nominees represent some of the best science fiction and fantasy published each year, and Nebula Awards 33 is full of high-caliber writing, great ideas, and fascinating insight into the minds and hearts of the nominated authors. --Therese Littleton
From Publishers Weekly
The latest collection of trophy-winners and runners-up for the Nebulas, which are awarded by the SFWA, is a rainbow of styles and content. Editor Willis (Bellwether), herself a six-time Nebula winner, introduces each selection with an enthusiastic appreciation. Each story is followed by the author's notes on its creation. There are also insightful short essays on the year's science as well as its fiction by expert authors and editors, plus older stories by 1997's Author Emeritus Nelson Bond and Grand Master Poul Anderson, the latter contributing a fine space yarn with a Platonic drama of ideas and a knockout surprise ending. The prose ranges from the futuristic lighting of Michael Swanwick ("The chauffeur wore combat-grade photomultipliers") to the gracefully mythopoeic style of Vonda McIntyre ("The wild eerie melody quickened Marie-Jos?phe's heart"). All the fiction entries are richly imagined; some are polished literary constructions as well. Karen Joy Fowler is represented by a deft experimental conflation of historical Elizabeths, including Borden, Cady-Stanton and one of the queens, and there is a little of the expected "hard" SF, too. Gregory Feeley's "The Crab Lice" is one of several pieces that wonderfully illuminate present events by imagined ones in the past instead of the more typical SF sallies into the future. Feeley shows us Aristophanes at loggerheads with the god Dionyos; Jane Yolen gives us Emily Dickinson chatting with an extraterrestrial. Overall, this is an excellent skimming of the current SF crop, conveying a good sense of the field's variety, sophistication and breadth.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
