It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading this book. I bought it in May 2008 at Goodwill because I couldn’t resist a book that had science fiction from some of my favourite sf writers like Arthur C. Clarke, John Varley, Connie Willis and Robert Silverberg. It took all this time though for it to percolate to the top of my reading pile. I never considered getting rid of it in those intervening years because I knew there was treasure waiting in these pages.
This book contains 10 novellas that won the Nebula Award (which is an award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association) from 1970 to 1989. The Nebulas, unlike the Hugos, are voted on by only other writers so these are stories that other writers think were the best in the year they were written. Mind you, six of these novellas also won the Hugo in the same year so sf fans also thought they were great. Some of them are a little dated now but they are all excellently written.
I think my favourite, or at least the one that will stay with me the longest, is Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg. It is set in the far, far future when Earth’s population is diminished to four and a half million people. Those people live a life of ease and prosperity. There are only five cities on Earth at any one time and the cities can be from any time period from Earth’s past or even myth. The story starts out in Alexandria at the time of the Ptolemy dynasty. Charles Phillips, the protagonist, however is a man who lived in New York in the 20th century. He is what is termed a visitor; most of the other people on earth are homogenous looking and don’t age. They flit from city to city looking for new diversions and wanting for nothing. When in Chang-an in China, Phillips discovers that his lover, Gioia, is a short-termer and that she does age. Gioia is so traumatized by finding some grey hair that she abandons Phillips because she cannot bear for him to see her change. Phillips realizes that he loves her and wants to spend the rest of whatever life span she has with her. Eventually he finds her in Alexandria again and convinces her that they need to stay together. They set sail for Constantinople with Phillips reciting the Yeats poem “Sailing to Byzantium”.
I realized when I was reading these stories that I had previously read two of them: Home is the Hangman by Roger Zelazny and The Last of the Winnebagos by Connie Willis. This was no problem because I enjoyed reading them again, especially the Willis work, although it was perhaps the most dated of them all. It just goes to show that good writing remains relevant even if the subject matter has been superseded. ( )