Nebula Winners: 15 (Nebula Awards Showcase)

This collection of the 1979 non-novel Nebula Award winners stands at the pinnacle of the greatest recipients of this award at any time. As you may know, the premier Nebula awards are given to 4 written pieces, the novel which is a stand alone work, and in decreasing order of length, the novella, the novelette, and the short story. Because of the shortness of their length and the variety of publications they may have originally appeared in, the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) collect the winners, plus some other stories, and offer them in one bound volume. The SFWA list the category of the works by how many words they contain, which I guess is good if someone is writing. However, I don't have a feel off-hand for how many pages 19,499 to 39,999 words for this or that category. In general the shorter works follow the 15/30/60 rule more or less: Short Stories about 15 pages Novelettes about 30 pages Novellas about 60 pages These works can easily vary by plus or minus 10 pages so it's a general rule of thumb. Now because these shorter non-novel works are complete stories they have a beginning, middle and end, and their pacing varies and give them their own uniqueness. In a 10 page short story, a writer has to get to the point quickly and wrap things up. For this particular year, 1979, this system is wonderfully noticeable for these written gems. The novella winner, Enemy Mine by Barry Longyear, stands as the best novella I've ever personally read. Don't bother watching the movie by the same name, it somewhat follows the plot, but misses the spirit of this well written piece. It's about two soldiers on opposing sides, and different species, that abhor each other, but end up on a desolate planet alone, and have to rely on each other to survive. In the course of this, they learn and get to respect each others culture. Written in the same decade as the American pullout of Vietnam, it served, I thought, as a great decade ending consolidation as a allegory to the Vietnam War. In some ways it's almost too bad this was only a novella, because there is definitely enough here to lengthen to a novel, and novels tend to bring more recognition to a written work. The novelette award winner, Sandkings by George R.R. Martin, has strong horror genre undertones, but is another incredibly well written, creative and imaginative work. It's about four races of a sentient and mildly telepathic crablike species, that can be seen to have complex alliances and wars. However, as is not uncommon in science fiction, it takes this scenario to the extreme. The short story winner, giANTS by Edward Bryant, takes its theme from the 1950's movie, Them!, about giant house sized ants. Them! probably isn't shown that much on TV any more. It was one of the better 1950's horror/science fiction movies that came out. For the story though, you only need to know that, well, it was about giant ants and had as main characters an older profession, his 20ish or so d