2010 anthology edited by Bill Fawcett
Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 is an anthology of award-winning science fiction short works edited by Bill Fawcett. It was first published in trade paperback by Roc/New American Library in April 2010 .[1]
Summary
The book collects pieces that won the 2009 Nebula Award for novel, novella, novelette, short story and script, the 2009 Andre Norton Award for 2009, a profile of 2009 Grand Master winner Harry Harrison and a representative early story by him, representative early stories by Author Emeritus M. J. Engh and Solstice Award winner Kate Wilhelm, and the three Rhysling and Dwarf Stars Award-winning poems for 2008, together with various other nonfiction pieces and bibliographical material related to the awards and an introduction by the editor. Atypically for the series, none of the nonwinning nominees for the various awards are included.
Contents
Reception
Reviewer James Wallace Harris criticizes the anthology for omitting the stories nominated for Nebulas which did not win. "WTF? You’d think an anthology with Nebula Awards in the title would be filled with all the award winners and as many of the nominees as they had room to cram in. Not this one. It has the winners for each category, ... but all the runner-ups get the hook." He finds "[e]verything else in these 420 pages ... padding, and there’s lots of it." He rates the non-fiction part of the book "really disappointing," "slight in actual information, with some essays showing no more work than blog level nattering, that I’d rather trade them all for fiction from the non-winning nominees." Expecting from the titles "a history of science fiction in the 20th century decade-by-decade" that "would be surveys of the best fiction from each of the decades covered," he finds them instead about "the business of SF/F," which "appears ... more interesting to the SFWA writers. ... How can you write an essay about SF in the 1960s and not mention the New Wave? And, not mention work by Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny, ... the decade’s brightest stars? Delany won 4 Nebula awards in the five years they were given in the 1960s." In summation, he writes "[i]f the Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 had just included all the winners and nominees from the non-novel categories I would have been very happy with the collection. It would have been a keeper, instead I’m going to leave it on the free table at work."[2]
The anthology was also reviewed by Larisa Mikhaylova in SFRA Review no. 292, 2010.[1]
Notes
