THE NEBULA AWARDS

There are two sets of annual awards in the science-fiction and fantasy field. The "Hugo" awards, named for Hugo Gernsback, are made by readers—members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention, held over the Labor Day week-end. (This year it will be in Boston: see the March issue for details.) The "Nebula" awards, on the other hand, are made every March by the Science Fiction Writers of America. (There may be a third set for non English-language stories, when the European conventions get started.)

For the 1970 Nebula Award winners I am indebted to Charles and Dena Brown, editors and publishers of a usually-biweekly-but-frequently-weekly newsletter called Locus, which Charlie Brown has kept going for four years. It is handsomely mimeographed; it brings you news of magazines, writers, artists, conventions, books, fanzines—you name it!—while it is news, and you pay $3.00 for twelve issues or $6.00 for twenty-six, if you live in North America. If you are interested, the Browns are at 2078 Anthony Avenue, Bronx, N.Y. 10457.

For the first time, the Science Fiction Writers voted "No Award" in the short-story category. I haven't read any of the seven stories that got into the finals, so I'll say nothing more about them. I have read the winning novelette, Theodore Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture," which was in Galaxy in February, 1970 and will be in a new collection of Sturgeon stories out soon. Though it has a certain amount of gadgetry, this is basically a story about people and what makes them tick. In passing, it deals with a subject on which John Campbell has editorialized—if there is no possible way out of your dilemma (in this case, as in his editorial, cancer), it is intelligent to try the impossible. Again, I haven't read the runners-up.

Best novella of the year was a sword-and-sorcery fantasy, "Ill Met in Lankhmar," by Fritz Leiber. This is one of his Grey Mouser series, which hold up as consistently the best in this increasingly popular field. At a time when the intellectual "ins" have no use for anything but antiheroes, heroics are making a comeback among the bourgeoisie.

The novels, though, I have read. Winner, as best SF novel of 1970, is Larry Niven's rather old-fashioned "Ringworld," a Ballantine original paperback for 95 cents. Niven won a Hugo for "Neutron Star," a "hard science" short story on a subject that is tying the astronomers and astrophysicists into knots. Both stories are part of a series set in a complex galactic future of many worlds and races, in which our galaxy is exploding. The world of the title is an extraordinary system whose planets have been combined into one colossal ribbon, a million miles wide, set in orbit around its star, with fields and forests, lakes and mountains, men and cities on_, its lighted inner surface. This is a variant on the so-called Dyson Sphere, proposed a few years ago as the ultimate creation of a tremendously old, tremendously powerful race that must capture and use all the energy of its sun. The ancient Builders of the Ringworld have not gone so far as to enclose their star in a sphere, but they have given themselves a vastly extended future—then disappeared. An oddly assorted crew of men and non-men is sent to investigate.

In a sense, Ace Books is a special winner-without-award, for four of the other five novels in the finals are

Ace Science Fiction Specials, and any one of them could be a justifiable winner. Joanna Russ's "And Chaos Died" was tied for second place with the lone hardback original in the finals, Robert Silverberg's "Tower of Glass." Wilson Tucker's "Year of the Quiet Sun" came next, followed by R. A. Lafferty's "Fourth Mansions" and D. G. Compton's "The Steel Crocodile." "And Chaos Died" would have been my own choice of the six . . . an extraordinary conceptualization of a "lost" colony which has developed a convincing—and fascinating—psionic society. Tucker has made his return to science fiction with a grim time-travel story that projects our present relentlessly into the near future, Lafferty has a surrealistic yarn in his own inimitable manner about men and supermen. Compton's book is on the man-versus-computer theme. Silverberg's is a complex story about a society of men, near-men and androids in which tortured interrelationships have developed during the building of the gigantic tower which gives his book its name.

The same April 4th issue of Locus lists the Hugo nominees, on which members of the Boston convention will be voting as you read this. Analog has two candidates. Hal Clement's sequel to "Mission of Gravity," "Star Light," is a candidate for Best Novel, against the tough competition of "Ringworld," "Tower of Glass," "Year of the Quiet Sun," and Poul Anderson's novel about light- speed spaceflight, "Tau Zero." And "Brillo," by Ben Bova and Harlan Ellison, here last August, is one of five candidates for best short story. It's running against Nebula-winning "Slow Sculpture," which was rated a novelette in the Nebula voting.

Other Hugo candidates—you may be able to vote if you join the convention soon—are Dean Koontz's "Beastchild," Fritz Leiber's winning "Ill Met in Lankhmar," Harlan Ellison's "The Region Between," Clifford Simak's "The Thing in the Stone," and Bob Silverberg's "The World Outside," in the novella class, and Lafferty's "Continued on Next Rock," Keith Laumer's "In the Queue," Gordon Dickson's "Jean Dupres," and Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture" as short stories. No predictions: the Sturgeon and Leiber stories are the only ones I've read yet.

In the Best Magazine category, Analog will be competing against Amazing Stories, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, and the discontinued English magazine, Vision of Tomorrow, which few of the voting.fans will have seen.

Charlie Brown ran a poll of his own, and announced the results in the same Locus with the Nebula winners and Hugo nominees. His readers made "Ringworld" a runaway winner, but they also made "Tower of Glass," "Year of the Quiet Sun," and "And Chaos Died" the runners-up, then matched "Fourth Mansions" with another Silverberg novel,

"Downward to the Earth," for fifth place and added Anderson's "Tau Zero." Gordon Dickson's Analog serial, "Tactics of Mistake," rated a few points above "Starlight." "Brillo" stood eighth in the short fiction, and Analog took second place—to F&SF—among the magazines. As with the SFWA, Locus readers scattered their short fiction votes, but they did give a first to Ellison's "Region Between."

MACROSCOPE

By Piers Anthony • Avon Books, New York. • No. W-166. • 480 pp. • $1.25

Years ago the Saturday Evening Post had an article on making a country-style stew. You put a pot on the back of the stove, and threw into it anything edible that came your way. It was indescribable, it was unanalyzable—and it was delicious. So is "Macroscope."

Piers Anthony has put into his massive story large dollops of every kind of science fiction you can think of. He invents a new category of fundamental particles—the macrons—that can carry images across intergalactic distances with higher resolution than short-distance light. He adds a program of cosmic education—at least, information dissemination—with a mind-killing boobytrap embedded in it. He provides a "hero" who is the Mongoloid-Negroid-Caucasoid product of an experiment in mixed genetics and education, which has also spun off a superman whom everyone is trying to find, and who is setting traps for his hunters out of sheer malice. He adds an anti-heroine who is likely to drive the reader to strong drink before he is done with her. He outdoes anything "Doc" Smith, or Ed Hamilton, or John Campbell, ever tried in their most uninhibited days by converting the planet Neptune into an impossible faster-than-light self-propelled spaceship to circumnavigate the universe, or nearly. And he weaves astrology so tightly into the whole thing that you won't be able to pull the nonsense out of the sense without having everything fall apart.

You may have trouble getting into the thing, but once you're in, you'll find it just as tough to get out. So you'll sit there, reading and muttering, until they come and carry you away. They just let me out again.

MECHASM

By John T. Sladek • Ace Books, New York. • Special No. 71435. • 222 pp. • 75¢

From time to time—not often enough, in my book—some of the smaller theaters around town run a bill made up of glued-together bits from the old, old film comedies that our parents called "trashy." It does me a great deal of good to find that people—young people—still laugh at them. Critics assure me that they laugh for all the wrong reasons—reasons they should be ashamed of. Because the old comedies built, and built, and built until the whole thing blew up. They were logical when they were the most ridiculous. The audience could see the traps being set, the calamities taking shape, though the victims couldn't. In their—our—safe omniscience and infinite superiority, we watched the poor fools walk unaware into mayhem.

This doesn't happen in modern comedy; it isn't supposed to. The point of modern comedy is that there is no point—no logic in the world. We know that it is wrong to feel superior to some innocent idiot. We know that we are simply reinforcing our sadism and undoing all our analysts have spent months to do, when we laugh at such things.

"Mechasm"—called "The Reproductive System" in England, where it appeared two or three years ago, and where they thought it was hilarious (but you know English humor!)—is hopelessly old-fashioned. There's this company with the ridiculous name of Wompler Toy Company in a small-3,810 and shrinking—town somewhere in Utah. It's going broke, so it decides to get some of that government money that it keeping Utah, and Nevada, and everything west of the Atlantic coastline strong, healthy and productive. Its modus operandi is a machine to make more machines, including more like itself . . . and before you can say "Sorcerer's Apprentice" the world is waist deep in little gray boxes that make more little gray boxes that . . .

Camp. Corn. Classic.