paper 0-15-600552-2 The 1996 awards, as voted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Esther M. Friesner (“A Birthday”) carried off the Best Short Story Award for the second year running; Bruce Holland Rogers captured the Best Novella Award with “Lifeboat on a Burning Sea”; and editor Dann’s “Da Vinci Rising,” a spinoff from his alternate-world novel The Memory Cathedral (1995), claimed Best Novelette. Best Novel winner Nicola Griffith (Slow River) is represented by her 1995 novella finalist, “Yaguara.” Finalists Harry Turtledove, Dean Wesley Smith, Paul Levinson, and Jonathan Lethem also appear, as do Rhysling Award (poetry) winners Marge Simon and Bruce Boston. “The Men Return” represents Grand Master winner Jack Vance, while Robert Silverberg and Terry Dowling sing his praises. Bill Warren heroically watched all the year’s movies. Also, nonfictionally, Lucius Shepard gloomily records the death of literary science fiction; Norman Spinrad gets hissy about authors who rent out their creations (“evil stuff”); and Elizabeth Hand growls that fiction itself has become “a barrio of the entertainment industry.” Keith Ferrell tracks sf via the Web; Robert Frazier recites sf poetry; Ian Watson keeps a stiff British upper lip; and cobbers Terry Dowling and Sean McMullan do Australia. Read. Enjoy. Just don’t mention “franchising” if Norman Spinrad’s within earshot.
Pub Date: April 17, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-100306-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
Grand Conspiracy ($26.00; Jan.; 640 pp.; 0-06-105219-1). Addition to Wurts’s fantasy Wars of Light and Shadow series (Curse of the Mistwraith, 1994, and others not seen). Half-brothers Lysaer, the Lord of Light (he must seek justice whatever the cost) and Arithon, Master of Shadows (he requires forgiveness) slug it out yet again. For non-fans, the main attraction here is Wurts’s gnarled and often unconsciously hilarious prose (“Caught breathless by the speed of the wrestler’s jab that hooked the hinge of his knee and wrenched in a practiced move to fell him, the duke’s brother struck back with locked fists”). Even that, however, palls after a few paragraphs.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-105219-1
Page Count: 640
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
paper 0-15-600601-4 Nebula’s 1997 award-winners and ballot finalists are presented by Willis, who takes over from last year’s editor, Jack Dann. Representing Best Novel, there’s an excerpt from Vonda N. McIntyre’s splendid historical fantasy, The Moon and the Stars, while Jerry Oltion’s ghostly Apollo capsule, “Abandon in Place,” wins Best Novella, and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” Nancy Kress’s investigation of crime, society, and reality, has captured Best Novelette. The Best Short Story Award goes to “Sister Emily’s Lightship” from Jane Yolen. Also on show are impressive finalist yarns from James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick, Gregory Feely, James Alan Gardner, and Karen Joy Fowler. The Rhysling Award Winners (for poetry) are W. Gregory Stewart and Terry A. Garey. Nelson Bond, represented by his story “The Bookshop,” has accepted Author Emeritus status (you’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of him). And Poul Anderson, virtuoso of short- and mid-length fiction—his typically brilliant “The Martyr” appears here—thoroughly deserves his Grand Master Award. Nonfiction enthusiasts, however, are in for a thumping disappointment. Maybe somebody decided that last year’s opinionated and thoroughly refreshing growls and hisses Simply Wouldn’t Do. But for whatever reason, 1997’s nonfiction is just anodyne scraps (the redoubtable Kim Stanley Robinson honorably excepted). No obituaries appear, despite the passing of Jerome Bixby (author of several all-time great short stories, plus a couple of the finest Star Trek scripts), of innovative editor/writer Judith Merrill, and of Australia’s greatest (and vastly underrated) SF novelist, George Turner. Even Bill Warren’s eagerly anticipated dissection of the year’s movies has been ditched. Terrific fiction, a Bronx cheer for the nonfiction.
Pub Date: April 29, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-100372-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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