Nebula award stories Book

You would expect a "best of the year" anthology to have some very good fiction and this book does. The Nebula Award anthologies don't say "best of the year," but they don't need to. Nebula Awards are chosen by the Science Fiction Writers of America. They represent the writers' choices in four categories: novel, novella, novelette, and short story. The anthologies usually reprint the winners in each category except "best novel," as well as some of the other nominated stories. The editor for Nebula Award Stories Eleven was the very fine author Ursula K. LeGuin.

In the back of the book all the nominees for the year 1975 are listed. The winners were:

Best Novel:
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Best Novella:
"Home Is the Hangman" by Roger Zelazny
Originally published in Analog

Best Novelette:
"San Diego Lightfoot Sue" by Tom Reamy
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Best Short Story:
"Catch That Zeppelin!" by Fritz Leiber
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

The other stories included in this book are three of the short story nominees: "Child of All Ages" by P. J. Plauger; "Shatterday" by Harlan Ellison; and "Time Deer" by Craig Strete. There is also a long excerpt from the Best Novel winner, The Forever War. There are two articles written especially for this book and Ursula LeGuin's Introduction as well.

Of the six stories included, my favorite is "San Diego Lightfoot Sue," an excellent fantasy story by Tom Reamy. In the early 1960's, a fifteen year old boy from Kansas moves to Los Angeles after his mother's death. He believes his older brother lives somewhere in California. He is taken in by a very thoughtful gay male couple, and meets their neighbor, a talented artist named Sue.

There is magic performed in this story, and the story itself is close to magical. Reamy was a relatively new writer at the time. The introduction to the story says this was the second story Reamy had ever written. He should have had a wonderful career. Tom Reamy died of a heart attack in 1977, two years after publishing "San Diego Lightfoot Sue." In addition to the Nebula he won for this story, Reamy was nominated for two other Nebulas and two Hugo Awards. He was forty-two when he died.

"Home Is the Hangman" was one of three stories by Roger Zelazny featuring the same main character, a man who, in an increasingly computer-dependent future, has managed to stay off the "World Data Bank" and consequently, to most of the world, does not exist. In this story he is trying to track down and stop the Hangman, a telefactor made to explore other planets. A telefactor is "a slave machine operated by remote control." The Hangman had stopped responding to orders and had returned to Earth. It is possible that the Hangman may have returned with the purpose of killing his three creators. (Zelazny also died young at the age of fifty-eight.)

Fritz Leiber was a superb writer and one of the most important twentieth century authors of science fiction and fantasy. "Catch That Zeppelin!" is a complex fantasy. An aging man, an American of German extraction, is walking in New York City. He seamlessly and without surprise becomes another person, a German who has come to the Empire State Building to get on a zeppelin moored there to return to Germany. But first he meets his son for lunch. They discuss his son's theory of historical cusps by which small changes in history could have resulted in huge changes later.

It was always nice to see Leiber win awards but this is not one of my favorite stories of his. I think that there were better choices for the Nebula.

The three other Nebula nominated short stories in this book are all quite good. P. J. Plauger has had a relatively sparse career as a writer of fiction. According to the science fiction and fantasy website ISFDb, he published several stories in the 1970's and then one story in each of the following three decades. "Child of All Ages" concerns a girl who appears to be in her early teens but is really over twenty-four hundred years old.

In Harlan Ellison's "Shatterday," a man absent-mindedly dials his own phone number. His own voice answers. There are now two of him.

Craig Strete's "Time Deer" is about an elderly Native American traveling into the past in his mind. But there may be more traveling to follow.

Ursula LeGuin wrote the introduction to the book and I believe she also wrote the individual introductions for each entry. Whoever did write those gave Tom Reamy credit for an extra Nebula. His story "Twilla" did get a Nebula nomination but did not win.

Vonda N. McIntire and Peter Nicholls each have an essay in the book, "Potential and Actuality in Science Fiction" by McIntire and "1975: The Year in Science Fiction, or Let's Hear It for the Decline and Fall of the Science Fiction Empire!" by Peter Nicholls.