Nebula Awards 33: The year's best SF and fantasy chosen by the Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (Nebula Awards Showcase) (Hardcover)

by Connie Willis (ed) (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (April 29, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151003726
• ISBN-13: 978-0151003723
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,940,431 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, January 17, 2000

By	Gerard Hildebrand (Bethesda, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nebula Awards 33 (v. 33) (Paperback)

History repeats itself: Two years ago I read Nebula Awards 31. The only story that engaged me was by Grand Master AE Van Vogt - a story written over 50 years ago. I don't remember much else about that volume.

Nebula Awards 33 concludes with a story by Grand Master Poul Anderson written about 40 years ago. It's easily the best thing in the book. If I were to guess what this means about contemporary short science fiction, I would say the genre is not only short on new ideas, but it has lost the joy of the narrative. Indeed, little happens in many of these stories. And, as the earlier reviewer noted, many really aren't sf. Jane Yolen's award-winning story about Emily Dickinson and a spaceship is silly and unnecessary. Gregory Feeley's story is interesting, but there's no narrative. John Howard Gardner's story has perhaps the best science fictional idea. It deals with certain snake-like analogues in human blood which have a religious significance that affected society. But, it's just some conversational set-pieces with no narrative. Nancy Kress's piece starts good, gets better, and then just ends. (Is there a novel in the works?) The one story with spaceships is actually a ghost story.

Science fiction and fantasy writers are perhaps entitled to pat themselves on the back from time to time - after all few others do. But editor Connie Willis's gushy endorsements do nobody any good. Rather than let the reader judge the stories, she keeps telling us how good they are. (No analysis is provided.) She makes the absurd claim that this volume is as good as the first volume, which contained much-anthologized classic works by Aldiss, Ellison and Zelazny.

Willis mourns her inability to include all the nominees while including nine (!) gushy pages on Poul Anderson and about one apiece on each story. The volume concludes with a totally unnecessary (and, except for a piece by Kim Stanley Robinson, facile) collection of pieces about 1997. But who cares about 1997 in the middle of 1999? It includes about 10 pages ripped out from the award winning novel. (Why do this? The novel will probably have greater circulation than this collection.) Maybe K.D. Wentworth wouldn't have the ignominy of being the only short-story nominee left out had all this unnecessary material been tossed.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Always Entertaining, Often Mind Blowing, December 31, 2003

By	A. Wolverton (Crofton, MD United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

It really doesn't matter which volume of the Nebula Awards you pick up, you know that you're going to discover some great SF stories. That is certainly true of NEBULA AWARDS 33. Sure, you might find one or two that you don't care for, but those stories are probably the exception to the rule. Out of the works selected for inclusion in this volume, I found six of them to be outstanding, with a couple of them blowing me away.
The SF stories that I enjoy the most teach me about myself and the world around me. These stories did that and more.

James Patrick Kelly's "Itsy Bitsy Spider" is a touching, thought-provoking look at our relationships with our children and our parents. "The Flowers of Aulit Prison" by Nancy Kress is immediately readable, enjoyable, and yet full of depth. With a title like "Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream," you know you're NOT in store for a boring read! A masterful look at the battle between science and religion. Michael Swanwick's "The Dead" is a wonderfully disturbing look at the corporate world. And what can you say about Karen Joy Fowler's "The Elizabeth Complex," except that it's brilliant? (Man, this woman can write!)

To end the volume, Willis hits a home run by picking Grand Master Poul Anderson's "The Martyr," a story that I just can't stop thinking about.

270 pages

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, only a nodding acquaintance to SF, December 23, 1999

By	Elli Ron "elliron" (Kirkland, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Nebula Awards 33 (v. 33) (Paperback)

A marked disappointment, considering the traditions of the Nebula books. It is possible that they are good stories but a large majority is not SF (in my book). The stories do (in general) improve as the reader progresses through the book,however even the best is only mediocre. The long introductions are just a waste of space (:-), and to add insult to injury,it contains an excerpt from a novel, and a whole spiel (some 10 pages) about a Nebula man of the year (or similar). Buy it if you must, my copy is going to be binned.