Nebula Award Stories Two


Nebula Award Stories Two is an anthology of science fiction short stories edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison. It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in September 1967, with a Science Fiction Book Club edition following in November 1969. The first British edition was published by Gollancz Ltd|Gollancz] in 1967, under the variant title Nebula Award Stories 1967. Paperback editions followed from Pocket Books in the U.S. in September 1968, and Panther in the U.K. in 1970. The Panther edition bore the variant title Nebula Award Stories 2. The book was more recently reissued by Stealth Press in hardcover in September 2001. It has also been published in German.

Summary

The book collects pieces published in 1966 that won, were nominated for or made the first ballot of the Nebula Awards for novella, novelette and short story for the year 1967, together with an introduction and afterword by the editors. Not all non-winning pieces nominated for the awards were included.

Contents

in Galaxy Science Fiction assesses the book as "self-conscious, saddled with primerous blurbs and introductory matter,... so sophisticated, so scrupulous in crediting even the supplier who manufactures the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award tokens, that it resembles some kind of grotesque attempt to literatize a corporate statement. Fortunately, it is filled with good stories, or it would have been the most unctuous eulogy in years." He calls the Vance novella "excellent" and the Dickson novelette "good," but does not think much of the short story winner, McKenna's posthumously published "The Secret Place," saying "there is usually a reason why the unpublished stories found in dead men's desks were unpublished, and that reason is very rarely one which justifies this kind of over-reaction. Especially by professionals." He calls the runners-ups by Pohl, Shaw and Dorman "very good," noting that "any one of is technically and conceptually a better and more original story, more economically told." He also calls the stories by Lafferty, Dick, Smith, and Aldiss "good," but Scott's "strikingly plonky," without "the virtue of clear thought." Summing up, Budrys deems the book's contents "not a bad crop, and certainly worth having," but sees "little more logic and reasoned judgment reflected in this selection... than there is in, for instance, the Hugo popularity poll. For years, we writers sat around vowing that when we had our award, by God, it would be impeccable. It ain't."
The volume was also reviewed in Speculation no. 16, 1967, by Tony Sudbery in Vector 49, 1968, and by Don D'Ammassa in Science Fiction Chronicle no. 214, July 2001.