Star Wars won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1978, and a special Nebula for Best Dramatic Presentation as well - the category had been discontinued, and was not revived until 2000. The other Hugo finalists were Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Ralph Bakshi animated film Wizards, the TV animated adaptation of The Hobbit, and a two ( Read more... )

It seems kind of timely to go back to 1977 and review the two works of written fiction that won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards that year, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”, by James Tiptree, Jr. and “The Bicentennial Man”, by Isaac Asimov. Somehow I'm in the mood for looking at moments when there was a clash of visions of what science fiction ( Read more... )

Young Frankenstein won the 1975 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation and the 1975 Nebula for Best Dramatic Script (the latter awarded in 1976, but with eligibility covering December 1974 when the film was released). The other Hugo finalists were Flesh Gordon, Phantom of the Paradise, The Questor Tapes and Zardoz; the other films on the Nebula ( Read more... )

Sleeper was the first film to win both Hugo and Nebula for Best Dramatic Presentation, for 1974 in both cases. (I am informed that the eligibility period for the 1974 Nebula was December 1973 to November 1974.) The Hugo finalists were Genesis II, which has a similar plot to Sleeper, Soylent Green, which had already won the 1973 Nebula, Westworld ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.
When I last read this in 2003, I wrote (WARNING ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third section:“Yes?”
This is the next in sequence of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula Award as I re-read them. It was the cover story for the November 1975 issue of Analog, and won the Hugo and Nebula for Best Novella.

( Read more... )

This won the 1976 Hugo and 1975 Nebula Awards for Best Short Story. Third paragraph of the main section of the story (there is also a short introduction):And then my gaze clambered higher still, up the 222-foot sturdy tower, to the top of which was moored the nose of the vast, breathtakingly beautiful, streamlined, silvery shape which was making ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:The bed, a massive bed on four legs, with a mattress far softer than that of the bunk on the Mindful, and complex bedclothes, some silky and some warm and thick, and a lot of pillows like cumulus clouds, had a room all to itself. The floor was covered with springy carpeting; there was a chest of drawers of ( Read more... )

Third paragraph:Elsewhere the ridges around me are wooded, alive with scarlets and brasses and bronzes. The sky is huge, the westering sun wanbright. The valley is filling with a deeper blue, a haze whose slight smokiness touches my nostrils. This is Indian summer, the funeral pyre of the year.
I wrote about this story back in 2004:
"Goat Song" is at ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third section:Thus voyages from sun to sun will always be few. Colonists will be those who have extremely special reasons for going. They will take along germ plasm for exogenetic cultivation of domestic plants and animals-and of human infants, in order that population can grow fast enough to escape death through genetic drift. ( Read more... )