THE HUGO WINNERS

Hugo awards are selected by popular vote at the annual World SF Convention; this mammoth tome, comprising 13 yarns and 561 pages, presents the shorter fiction winners for 1976-9—and they're a solid, nicely varied, enjoyable bunch, all more or less famous. Among the most familiar entries: Roger Zelazny's tense avenging-robot story, "Home is the Hangman"; Fritz Leiber's delightful alternate-universe notion, "Catch that Zeppelin!"—with Hitler as an airship salesman; Asimov's tale of a robot that becomes human, "The Bicentennial Man"; James Tiptree, Jr.'s biting picture of an all-female human future, "Houston, Houston, Do you Read?"; and Spider and Jeanne Robinson's ballet in zero gravity, "Stardance"—which later became a novel. The other writers on display here include Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Joe Haldeman, John Varley, and Poul Anderson—all with strong, characteristic work. So this is a surefire acquisition wherever the sf collections are thin—while many libraries and individual readers will have the best of these stories already on hand.