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This new "Showcase" format is a welcome improvement over some of the soggy, dull Nebula anthols of the 80's and 90's. Check 'em out, starting (appropriately enough), with the 2000 volume: sfwa[dot]org[slash]pubs
The 2002 volume is an unusually good one. The leadoff story, "Daddy's World" by Walter Jon Williams, takes a killer look at cybernetic family values. He narrowly lost the Nebula to Gardner Dozois, below, in a thematically related story.
macs, by Terry Bisson, the Nebula short-story winner, is Bisson's take on the OKC bombings. I didn't much care for it, but that's a minority opinion, I think.
Stellar Harvest, a new story in the "Lydia Duluth" series by Eleanor Arnason, is fast-paced and fun, a fine entry to her neat new series.
Linda Nagata's Nebula-winning "Goddesses" is a profoundly hopeful near-future love-story -- that technology can improve poor peoples' lives, and enrich the rich helpers' lives in the process. Nagata writes with assurance and grace, touching on wealth & poverty, women & men, love, charity, religion and how we'll live a few years from now -- all without being preachy or dull. One of the year's best. Not to be missed. You can read the story online at scifi[dot]com.
The wrapup story is Gardner Dozois' great "A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows", my favorite Dozois story ever. Dozois writes, in the Nebula anthology intro, {quote} [This] is my take on two of the major areas of debate of science fiction in the 90's, the posthuman condition and the idea of living into a Vingean singularity...[end quote]
"From the first heraldic image to the last, this is Dozois at his most
intense, personal, and skillful." --Kim Stanley Robinson, in his introduction.
All this plus the usual insightful commentary, by such luminaries as Gwyneth Jones, Andy Duncan, Damon Knight, Gene Wolfe, Ken MacLeod, and many more. So it's one of the better Nebula volumes in many years. Check it out.
Happy reading--
Pete Tillman
[in case you wonder, this [quote] business is because Amazon has lately been bouncing "quoted material" over 20 words(!) long. Bah]
