Nebula Awards 23: Sfwa's Choices for the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 1987

by Michael Lawson Bishop

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151649308
• ISBN13: 9780151649303
• Release Date: April 1989
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Year the Nebula Awards for Novels Take a Turn to the Mundane and Worse

but there's still some good short fiction awarded as in this compilation. 1987, the year this anthology of Nebula Award winners for science fiction (sic) is the year of the Feminist take over of the then-called Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA). The SFWA didn't officially change their name to the Science fiction AND FANTASY Writers of America (with the F in SFWA changing from Fiction to Fantasy) until 1991 but it unofficially did so in the year of this anthology, 1987. The S in SF today can pretty much be changed to mean Speculative (or Sub-par or other choice words for what S means), but this is the start of the turn to the worse. Feminism is obviously rampant starting this year and for the prevailing decades, particularly for the novel the Nebula was awarded to. To call the novel science fiction would be re-writing the laws of physics and I thought I knew what fantasy was and I would not have called the novels that. Fortunately, the short stories haven't been adversely effected for this year but are quickly afterwards. In fact I recommend this anthology. Originally I thought all of the 3 Nebula winners collected here (for novella, novelette, and short story) were from women, with two showing indications of having been written by women, but one really having stuck out. Haha, what irony it was to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson was a man, and is the author of what I think is the strongest work of any of the collections pieces. "The Blind Geometer" by Kim Stanley Robinson and "Forever Yours, Anna" by Kate Wilhelm, the Nebula Award winners for novella and short story, respectively, are the best stories in this anthology, are alone worth the price of admission, and are why I have held on to my now-yellowing copy of Nebula Awards 23. The protagonist in "The Blind Geometer", written by Robinson before his Red/Green/Blue Mars series, is a mathematician and is as well blind. Robinson gives a good sense for what life is like for the character with this handicap, and his disadvantages and advantages over those not blind. The protagonist is also on the cutting edge of mathematics and there are those (and the mystery of who they are) wishing to obtain that knowledge for their own means and thus the confrontation between them eventually ensues. "Forever Yours, Anna" is a tender love story, or really a love triangle of a convoluted kind. There are agents looking for some important missing documents and the protagonist is a detective that has only some mutilated love letters to work by and you get to learn of the three characters by this process. By the end you understand events that you didn't think were important and with that knowledge you willingly go back and reread sections or the whole story with that understanding. Having recently reread the above two stories years after having first read them, I can notice that they both have strong elements of mystery novels in them and of that significance to the SFWA. The SFWA is stigma