Nebula Awards Showcase 2014

This delectable anthology fittingly honors the most recent Nebula Award recipients. While some of the stories, poems, and novel excerpts are a bit derivative, readers will still find a large measure of enjoyment in them. An excerpt from Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 includes a detailed manual on terraforming asteroids. Nancy Kress’s “After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall” is a tautly plotted and perfectly terrifying ecological dystopia for our times. Andy Duncan’s sweetly nostalgic “Close Encounters” is about an aging, forgotten survivor of a close encounter whose faith in his own experience is beginning to wane. The Nebulas aren’t the only awards heralded here. “Christmas Inn” by Gene Wolfe, who received the coveted Damon Knight Grand Master Award, is a Yule-infused fantasy full of the life-changing wonder found in the speculative genres, and in the holiday itself. The teenage protagonist of E.C. Myers’s Norton Award–winning Fair Coin would be perfectly at home in a Twilight Zone script. The 2011 Rhysling Award–winning poems are two riffs on the art of bookmaking. Fans, honorees, and readers new to speculative fiction will greatly appreciate these works. (May)