Neubla Awards 31 Swfa's Choices for the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

For her third and final Nebula Award anthology, covering the 1995 awards, Sargent (who won the 1992 Nebula for Best Novelette) offers both less and more than the title implies. The Best Novel winner isn't here, understandably, but neither are all the finalists in the shorter-form categories, not even the short-story finalists. Among the 16 entries are, however, three winners, assorted finalists and, importantly, several astute pieces bearing on the state of SF. Notable non-nominated short fiction includes ""The Lincoln Train,"" a story by Maureen F. McHugh in which an alternate Earth's American Civil War finds Southerners relocated to frontier concentration camps; the novella ""Think Like a Dinosaur,"" in which James Patrick Kelly imagines intelligent dinosaurs; and a reprint of newly named Grand Master A.E. van Vogt's classic tale, ""Enchanted Village,"" about an astronaut changed, literally and figuratively, by the Martian ruins he discovers. Also superb is Ursula K. Le Guin's award-winning novelette ""Solitude,"" set in the universe of the Hainish. But it is in her choice of essays that Sargent best displays her excellent critical eye and literary passion. The volume's opening symposium, reflecting on trends within SF during 1995, includes writers such as Paul DiFilippo, Ian Watson and Robert Silverberg, who contends that the burgeoning glut of SF novels derived from other media threatens to crush the field's best original writing. Later on, Ian Watson, eulogizing the recently deceased John Brunner, notes that due to bottom-line economics, nearly all of Brunner's novel-length work (including the Hugo-winning Stand on Zanzibar) ""is lost in the wilderness known as Out of Print."" For serious SF fans, and those interested in where the genre is heading, this volume is a must. (Apr.)