The Last Ghost by Stephen Goldin.
Having talked about the girl stories in Nebula 7 now it's the boys' turn.
The girl stories were mostly names I'd not really heard of or read before - four of the boy stories are by names I recognise. So of the total eleven stories I'd heard of five of the writers (and I will admit I'm more aware of Joanna Russ as the writer of How to Supress Women's Writing). Part of my personal name recognition is, perhaps, because I live in the UK and until the age of the internet could only shop in local bookshops (or on the occasional trip to London) . Mac, who was in charge of adult SF department ordering at WHSmith, did order in women writers - but I didn't buy that many mixed short story collections (because mixed collections are more likely to have total - personal - duds) so I would only have become aware of a writer if they wrote novels and were 'important' enough to be published in the UK (or have their books imported). Mac might not have been sexist (and also used to have little chats with the teenage me to discover which authors I wanted more of) but he was limited to what was available for order -- but even if further up the line there was a belief that women didn't write SF... there were women on the bookshelf for me to buy. And, I think, back in the seventies, more women available than there are now (with ever more limited and centralised ordering in all the chain shops).
Anyhow, first up in the volume is Queen of Air and Darkness by Poul Anderson . It won the novelette category of the nebulas (and was the winning novela in the Hugos... where Kathrine Maclean didn't make the short list). It's lead character is a Holmesian private detective and there's a mildly Shakespearean tone to the faerie characters. The detective's client is a woman who won't be put in her place and the ubervillain is the queen of the title (who may or may not actually be female). It's an excellent story about colonisation and literary archetypes. In the seventies the choice at the end would probably have been equal opportunity optimism, but today I'm more likely to think the colonists will choose the darker path.
Sky by R A Lafferty. Is a drug story. While the drug itself could be considered SF, perhaps, it is pretty much a fantasy story that ends where you think it will with just a little oddness along the way. It's a pretty enough read but there've been a lot of drugs stories over the years.
Mount Charity by Edgar Pangborn is well enough written but doesn't really hit any high notes for me. It also has the heavy late sixties/early seventies certainty that the younger generation would be better people than their parents. From four decades on that is either wryly amusing or heart-breaking. The story is also told at great distance with the characters trying to explain themselves in what is almost a framing story but without the picture in the middle. It's a set of ideas loosely knitted into a narrative which amounts to 'we'd like you to help us in our great work but... oops' (And the only female character was killed six hundred years earlier). And yes, it is one of those where you think it could be good and are disappointed.
Good News From The Vatican by Robert Silverberg is a story that shouldn't be past its sell-by date but is. It's built round the idea of a robot being elected to the Papacy and... well that's the entire story, a small cast of characters waiting for the announcement with some opposed and some for and... maybe because we have a black president of the US and maybe because challenging Catholisism is less of a potential hot-button issue, it doesn't really feel like a nebula winning story should, indeed the end feels a lot like a cop out.
Horse of Air by Gardner Doizis plays with tense a little... and starts out feeling as though it will go somewhere, but as I read on either I lost the plot or the plot lost itself. I am not, in general, fond of stories which throw in any form of 'it was all a dream' into the last paragraph... In many ways it struck me as a set of circumstances that the writer tugged into a middle but couldn't find an acceptably entertaining ending for. The patches that were added would work as social comment back then but don't have the supporting chords to strike now. And I don't think I'm sad about that :P
Heathen God by George Zebrowski is another very period piece... (think of movies like Silent Running and you get an idea of what I mean by period although this isn't an ecological story). We're back with religious comment and big wide questions about what happens when man kills god. It has an idea. It has a barely there female character who carries a briefcase for the POV character. As with pretty much all of the preceeding stories the characterisation is given less weight than the circumstances. This one is pretty much how you think it will go and hope it won't and does feel a lot like it is built round a single idea... one that doesn't seem like enough to carry the wordcount these days but may well have way back when.
As before I've used the title of my favourite story as the subject for the post. In this case, however, it wasn't a winner. The Last Ghost is a post-singularity story and it made me really feel for the main character. There are only two characters, one of indeterminant gender (a ghost that has forgotten almost all of itself) and a woman who has been part of the machine world for thousands of years and, due to an impossible glitch, has died. It is, even for a non-singularity fan/believer like myself... a heart-breaking story of human need. If you can find it and read it do so...
The girl stories were mostly names I'd not really heard of or read before - four of the boy stories are by names I recognise. So of the total eleven stories I'd heard of five of the writers (and I will admit I'm more aware of Joanna Russ as the writer of How to Supress Women's Writing). Part of my personal name recognition is, perhaps, because I live in the UK and until the age of the internet could only shop in local bookshops (or on the occasional trip to London) . Mac, who was in charge of adult SF department ordering at WHSmith, did order in women writers - but I didn't buy that many mixed short story collections (because mixed collections are more likely to have total - personal - duds) so I would only have become aware of a writer if they wrote novels and were 'important' enough to be published in the UK (or have their books imported). Mac might not have been sexist (and also used to have little chats with the teenage me to discover which authors I wanted more of) but he was limited to what was available for order -- but even if further up the line there was a belief that women didn't write SF... there were women on the bookshelf for me to buy. And, I think, back in the seventies, more women available than there are now (with ever more limited and centralised ordering in all the chain shops).
Anyhow, first up in the volume is Queen of Air and Darkness by Poul Anderson . It won the novelette category of the nebulas (and was the winning novela in the Hugos... where Kathrine Maclean didn't make the short list). It's lead character is a Holmesian private detective and there's a mildly Shakespearean tone to the faerie characters. The detective's client is a woman who won't be put in her place and the ubervillain is the queen of the title (who may or may not actually be female). It's an excellent story about colonisation and literary archetypes. In the seventies the choice at the end would probably have been equal opportunity optimism, but today I'm more likely to think the colonists will choose the darker path.
Sky by R A Lafferty. Is a drug story. While the drug itself could be considered SF, perhaps, it is pretty much a fantasy story that ends where you think it will with just a little oddness along the way. It's a pretty enough read but there've been a lot of drugs stories over the years.
Mount Charity by Edgar Pangborn is well enough written but doesn't really hit any high notes for me. It also has the heavy late sixties/early seventies certainty that the younger generation would be better people than their parents. From four decades on that is either wryly amusing or heart-breaking. The story is also told at great distance with the characters trying to explain themselves in what is almost a framing story but without the picture in the middle. It's a set of ideas loosely knitted into a narrative which amounts to 'we'd like you to help us in our great work but... oops' (And the only female character was killed six hundred years earlier). And yes, it is one of those where you think it could be good and are disappointed.
Good News From The Vatican by Robert Silverberg is a story that shouldn't be past its sell-by date but is. It's built round the idea of a robot being elected to the Papacy and... well that's the entire story, a small cast of characters waiting for the announcement with some opposed and some for and... maybe because we have a black president of the US and maybe because challenging Catholisism is less of a potential hot-button issue, it doesn't really feel like a nebula winning story should, indeed the end feels a lot like a cop out.
Horse of Air by Gardner Doizis plays with tense a little... and starts out feeling as though it will go somewhere, but as I read on either I lost the plot or the plot lost itself. I am not, in general, fond of stories which throw in any form of 'it was all a dream' into the last paragraph... In many ways it struck me as a set of circumstances that the writer tugged into a middle but couldn't find an acceptably entertaining ending for. The patches that were added would work as social comment back then but don't have the supporting chords to strike now. And I don't think I'm sad about that :P
Heathen God by George Zebrowski is another very period piece... (think of movies like Silent Running and you get an idea of what I mean by period although this isn't an ecological story). We're back with religious comment and big wide questions about what happens when man kills god. It has an idea. It has a barely there female character who carries a briefcase for the POV character. As with pretty much all of the preceeding stories the characterisation is given less weight than the circumstances. This one is pretty much how you think it will go and hope it won't and does feel a lot like it is built round a single idea... one that doesn't seem like enough to carry the wordcount these days but may well have way back when.
As before I've used the title of my favourite story as the subject for the post. In this case, however, it wasn't a winner. The Last Ghost is a post-singularity story and it made me really feel for the main character. There are only two characters, one of indeterminant gender (a ghost that has forgotten almost all of itself) and a woman who has been part of the machine world for thousands of years and, due to an impossible glitch, has died. It is, even for a non-singularity fan/believer like myself... a heart-breaking story of human need. If you can find it and read it do so...