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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Year the Nebula Awards for Novels Take a Turn to the Mundane and Worse, November 22, 2005
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 stigmatized by the term `science fiction' or worse `sci-fi' and are branching out as broadly as possible to gain what they feel is respect from what would be called mainstream writers. Horror had already been in SF by 1979 by George R.R. Martin's award winning "Sandkings" and mystery is now being used here. Eventually this process continues, almost malignantly, to almost anything any SF (here now meaning Speculative) writer can think of (Feminism, fantasy, auras, amulets, feelings, guesstimates). You would like to say `the sky's the limit' but you can't, it's more like `the entire dirt lot is available'. Anything that stretches the boundary of what could be called speculative, and then stretched some more. In the two stories above, the non-science fiction elements (mystery) add to embellish the science fiction, but now the continuing trend starting here is to strip off the science fiction and just leave the other non-science-fiction elements. At least in this anthology, that process has been completed yet.
The remaining Nebula winner, the novelette "Rachel in Love" by Pat Murphy is SF dejure but really Feminism defacto. In the Nebula Award Winners year after year there are essays on "What is Science Fiction?", etc, etc. Finally they come across possibly the most telling statement, you know it when you read it. But they agonize, and pick apart, and categorize all the elements and if it's over such and such a percent then it's sci-fi if not, it isn't. Except, haha, when that's not true. It's ironic, the Speculative Fiction Writers of America, eschew science fiction because it's too factual, etc, and yet they try to use facts to try to say that hey, see, we really are science fiction. In Nebula Awards 25, two years after this anthology, there's a graph of the sci-fi categories of the stories in this anthology, #23, and Pat Murphy's novelette comes up with a whopping five out of a total of seven science fiction elements, the most of any story in the book. And yet this is a Feminist story though and through. Sure, the science fiction elements are in the story and they sure are interesting too, but the Feminism just oozes, permeates throughout the book and the science fiction is just secondary. Some Feminist could write a book set on a space station, with intergalactic war, multiple alien species, and still find a way to make it completely uninteresting, chock full of Feminism, auras, amulets, Mayan spirits, lesbians etc (heck, maybe one of them have already written that book, I'm sure it's won a Nebula then). Actually Damon Knight, who founded the SFWA in 1965, wrote the essay and credit to him for trying, it's just that the process was flawed, but the essay is well worth reading (and ironically [of which there's no shortage of in referring to the SFWA] he even wrote that: "(t)he Nebula was never intended to be and should not be an award for fantasy." However if you look forward to reading Hugo award works and used-to to Nebula award works then you're open to different styles. Cyberpunk is the fad now, sure read that, horror and mystery elements are the fad, sure read that, and now Feminism, OK, read some of that. But the Feminism goes on and on and on, year after year after decade. OK, you GOT it. Even women I know that read science fiction don't want to read it. But they continue to award it. If you desire to read Feminism that *might* have science fiction in it (but hopefully not) then read any Nebula winning novel and short story. However, if you want to read just "some" Feminist stories to understand what the fad is about then I would recommend these stories: "Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler, the 1984 Nebula winning novelette; "Even The Queen" by Connie Willis, the 1992 Nebula winning short story (found in "The New Hugo Winners IV"; and this story "Rachel in Love", the 1987 Nebula winning novelette. "Rachel in Love" is about the soul of a scientist father's child that's transferred into a chimp to save it as the child's body dies. Unfortunately no one knows the chimp has a human soul within it and eventually gets treated like, well, a chimpanzee. However, she finds temporary solace with a janitor, falls for him and tries to woo him. However, the janitor is not interested in a inter-species relationship and spurns her. Oh, but the story is supposed to be an allegory feminists say, that the janitor was more interested in pornography than the chimp. Well, what if the janitor wasn't looking at pornography? does anyone think it not unusual if the janitor was then erotically interested in a chimp presenting its shiny red buttocks because it might contain the soul of a blond girl. Anybody? Oh, but the story is more of an allegory than that. Well make sure then that you extend the allegory to all the characters and not just the chimp and janitor. So if you read the three short fiction stories mentioned above, you get to read some OK stories with interesting science fiction elements and get to open yourself up to Feminism. Now, you're ready to move on. So you really don't need to read any of the other Feminist stories, or worse, novels. They'll be stripped almost entirely of science fiction and the Feminism will be worse. You're instead ready to move on to new and fresh ideas, then do that, and move on to new and fresh ideas.
"Flowers of Edo" by Bruce Sterling (an original cyberpunk advocate) would really be classified as fantasy, but is very well written, and is an interesting look at turn-of-the-20th-century Japan. Although the story is not cyberpunk, the characters feel like they could have been lifted from it. The flowers of Edo refer to fires (flowers) that would quickly spread through Edo (a section of Tokyo?) through the wooden structures of the time until they were subdued. Within the story is a Spirit of the new technology of the time. Is it an evil spirit? At first that's unclear, but eventually, oh yes. (Subtle point that might be lost with the passage of time: the last sentence, the black ink poured over ashes, is a reference to Black Rain, which was the color of the rain after the nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II when the rain was black as it brought down ashes released from the explosions.)
"Schwartzchild Radius" by Connie Willis, like "Flowers of Edo" is also a Nebula award novelette finalist (out of six.) It's about Schwartzchild himself becoming a black hole of sorts in the trenches of World War I and pulls in everything and everyone around him unless they can escape in time until the Schwartzchild radius is reached and no further communication can be transmitted in or out.
Walter Jon William's story, "Witness", is about the McCarthy trials, a bleak period of American history. There's a bit of 20th century American history given throughout the novella that makes it worthwhile to read on it's own, but...
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by Michael Bishop
