Nebula Awards Showcase 2008

T
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Y
EAR’S
B
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SF
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Selected by the Science Fiction and
Fantasy Writers of America
^©

ROC
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Copyright © Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 2008
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ISBN: 1-4362-0179-9

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I’
ve had a love affair with science fiction since I first learned to read. In fact, one of my incentives for learning to read was
Action Comics
, featuring Superman.

I can still see that dazzling illustration showing a rocket ship fleeing from the exploding planet Krypton. Talk about “sense of wonder”! It knocked me on my five-year-old butt. And started a lifelong fascination with astronomy, rocketry, and (of course) science fiction.

That one image taught me an important lesson: The universe changes, sometimes abruptly, dramatically, catastrophically. And the literature of change is the aforementioned genre of science fiction.

It was a ghetto literature then. Respectable people disdained science fiction, branding it as trashy pulp fiction, not worthy of serious consideration.

But I loved it. From swashbuckling John Carter on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom to Isaac Asimov’s “The Ugly Little Boy,” I saw much more in science fiction than in most of the contemporary literature being published then. I devoured the pages of
Astounding Science Fiction
and, later,
Galaxy
and
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Yet even by the time I began working on the first American artificial satellite program, Vanguard, I found that even professional rocket engineers still hid their copies of
Astounding Science Fiction
magazine in the bottom drawer of their desks.

Then came SFWA. Originally called Science Fiction Writers of America, the organization broadened its scope eventually to become Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (although it officially retained the acronym SFWA), in recognition of the true breadth of the field.

SFWA began in the fertile mind of Damon Knight. He and his wife, Kate Wilhelm, hosted the annual Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference in their Pennsylvania home each summer. One year, Damon proposed that we create a professional organization, by, of, and for the writers in our field.

The rest, as they say, is history. It may be coincidence, but as SFWA began to establish the professional integrity of science fiction and fantasy, universities began taking the field seriously and teaching courses in it. And book publishers started to realize that science fiction and fantasy appeals to a very wide audience, thanks in no small measure to publishers and editors such as Ian Ballantine and Judy-Lynn del Rey.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that TV’s
Star Trek
and Hollywood blockbusters such as
2001: A Space Odyssey
and
Star Wars
opened the eyes of hundreds of millions of viewers to the same “sense of wonder” that smacked me when I first saw the planet Krypton explode.

Today science fiction and fantasy have infiltrated (
conquered
, I’m tempted to say) just about every facet of popular culture, from romance novels to Broadway musicals, from television series to university studies of “alternate futures.”

Science fiction and fantasy have matured. And so has SFWA. The organization is thriving, and has been a strong advocate for writers in their never-ending struggles with publishers and producers who would like to take the fruit of a writer’s genius and labor without paying fairly for it.

Since 1966 the members of SFWA have given Nebula Awards to the stories and screenplays they consider the best of the year. This is the most coveted award in the field, bestowed on writers by their fellow writers.

Each year the Nebula Award winners are showcased in an anthology. You hold in your hands the
Nebula Showcase 2008
, which features the award winners of 2006. Within the covers of this book you can see what SFWA’s members considered the best work of that year: the award winners in each category, the Grand Masters and Authors Emeriti, plus a trio of essays discussing the past, present, and future of the science fiction and fantasy field.

You will see the Rhysling Award–winning poems, essays on the Best Script Nebula and the André Norton Award for young adult fiction, as well as a broad variety of story types, themes, and treatments. Which is only natural, since the field of science fiction and fantasy encompasses all of time, all of space, all of the universe within the human soul—and then some.

Have an exciting journey!

 

Ben Bova
Naples, Florida
June 2007