Nebula Award Stories 11 [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Ursula K. Le GuinThe Nebula Award is an objecta lovely cube of lucite and rock-crystal. The Nebula Awards are also a process, which works like this: throughout tlie year the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America nominate for the award works of science fiction printed in the United States during that year, and early in the following year they vote on the nominated works in four categories, novel, novella, novelette, and short story. This procedure, like most democratic procedures and the flight of the bumWebee, seems, to the analytic eye and logical mind, impossible. The list of works nominated gets so long that only a super-speed full-time bookworm could possibly read them all. What the members do is vote for the ones they like best from those they have read. This is not perfect justice. But then, perfection seems not to be a human province; and anyhow, it works. The bumblebee gets off the ground. A fine work may now and then be missed, but the Nebula Award has never yet been given to trash, and year after year the Awards reliably signify excellence.Therefore the job of the editor of a Nebula Award volume is a heartbreaker: all those grand also-rans that can't be squeezed in, not to mention the novels, which can't be represented at all. We were formnate this year in obtaining a story by Joe Haldeman which is actually a part of his Award-winning novel. The Forever War. But I can only mention the names of the top runner-up novelsThe Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Poumelle, Delany's Dhalgren, Russ's Female Man. The variety in style, subject, scope, intent of just these four novels is shining proof of the versatility and venmre-someness of the sf novel today.