I'm reading this to see whether Manny's bright 16 year old's eye or Paul Bryant's jaundiced 20 year old's was right.

Blow by blow as I plough through it, so more to come....

1) Ballard: Paul 1 Manny 0

Paul is so right. A dreary story and I fail to see what is sf about it. I hope it is true that this does not represent Ballard as his finest.

2) Ellison: Paul .5 Manny .25

I'm afraid the only reason this one perked me up was because it came after 1). Much better written, but unfortunately that is no great compliment.

3) Wilson: Paul 1 Manny -.25 (for conveniently ignoring this in his review.)

What the fuck. The printer got something wrong here. A section of Sports Illustrated smack bang in the middle of a sf book. At least that issue of SI was improved by whatever SF story was accidentally included.

Manny's in trouble so far. Will he recover??? Stay tuned.

Over a year later I pick this up again.

4) Delany: Paul .25 Manny .75

I think Paul's a bit negative on this one, I quite liked it.

5) Leiber: Paul -.50 Manny 1

I don't understand why Paul missed this one. It's a odd gambling story, stylishly written.

6) Moorcock: Paul 1 Manny 2

This deserves more enthusiasm Paul! Probably the pick of the bunch, a completely impossible story is made utterly convincing. I think I prefer it to Pullman's quite nice account of Jesus.

7) McCaffrey: Paul 2 Manny 1.5

I'm completely with Paul on this. It's fantasy getting a gig in science fiction because what? It's set on another planet? I only had to look at 3 pages to see it has all the things I hate about fantasy. Medieval period complete with dragons, scullery maids, cheese-making, castles, a map of course. Ballads - short lines and stanzas. Records. High Reaches. Bronze Rider. The Hold has a lord. Apostrophes in weird places in names like F'lar and F'nor. Groan.

On the other hand, apparently this is the first appearance of a series that went on and one and on, so I guess Manny has to get some marks for appreciating that, even though he was altogether too polite about it.

Somewhat bleary-eyed I've just done the math. A draw?! I make it 5.25 point each and I promise you this is a complete accident.

Still, overall I'm with Paul, the book has not added sufficiently to my life's reading to have made it worth while. Sorry, Manny! If only you'd given it to me about the time you read it and I was going through my Heinlein period...



( )

At this point, I am just reading the Nebula- (or Hugo-) Award-Winning Stories. I will make notes on them as I read them.

Aye, and Gomorrah... by Samuel R. Delany ~ Nebula Award for best short story
A short story that on the surface deals with one possible way of getting around (one of) the dangers of space. It also has some sexual and societal implications that are still relevant today. I like it in that it makes me think, though I have no real interest in learning more about the characters presented. The characters seem to be there solely for the purpose of presenting the situation. Definitely a plot-driven story, not a character-driven one. (This was by far my favorite story of the three I read.)

Gonna Roll the Bones by Fritz Leiber ~ Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novelette
I'm not a fan. Maybe because I don't know the flow of a craps table, maybe because I didn't connect with the characters, but this one was a struggle to get through. In a sense it's a morality tale, and has a bit of "religion saves the day" feel, but I didn't particularly care if the main character redeemed himself or not.

Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock ~ Nebula Award for best novella
Interesting idea, though I didn't really enjoy the story. It was crafted well, and the idea behind it is a fun thought-experiment, but I didn't connect with any of the characters or the motivation.

Weyr Search by Anne McCaffrey ~ Hugo Award for best novella
I've read this before, and decided not to re-read it this time. It's enjoyable, but in many ways is a product of its era. I've mostly decided that I'm going to leave a lot of McCaffrey's work as pleasant memories with no need to revisit them. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/265528.html

The cover image on my edition seems to show a reclining female figure behind a much smaller spectral cyclist, above whose head an equally spectral top hat appears to be levitating. The artist's name is unknown.

It ties into my fascination with Roger Zelazny, who had won two of five Nebula awards the previous year, and was only thirty; and as Zelazny himself writes in one of the introductions here, "Consider the fact that everything a man writes is really only a part of one big story, to be ended by the end of his writing life. Consider that, as so many have said, everything a man writes is, basically, autobiographical... I tell you these things because every writer who has ever lived is unique."

Zelazny seems to have taken the job of editing this collection seriously, and though his introductions are as mere postscripts to those of Harlan Ellison in the near-contemporaneous Dangerous Visions, they do give evidence of his commitment to the project, including lengthy quotations from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Czesław Miłosz, and invokes Anne McCaffrey as an aspect of Goethe's Ewigweibliche.

While he had to include the three Nebula winners, his choice of the other four stories is pretty idiosyncratic: two of them, "Weyr Search" by Anne McCaffrey and "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" by Harlan Ellison were at least nominated for the Nebula, but the other two are probably not what the readers of 1968 expected to find in the anthology. At least "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D" by J.G. Ballard turned out to be a good call, one of the better known stories of an author who has become very well known indeed, but little is known of Gary Wright, author of "Mirror of Ice" - which is barely even an sf story. I can see why Zelazny liked it, as the style is not so very different from his own; I don't really believe the theory that Wright was Samuel R Delany; Harry Harrison also anthologised it four times; but it was last reprinted in an original anthology in 1976!

Well, it cost me very little to buy, and I'd have paid the price five times over. Three of the other stories - "Aye, and Gomorrah..." by Samuel R. Delany, "Weyr Search" by Anne McCaffrey, and "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock - are generally recognised as classics in very different ways. ( )