9) The Einstein Intersection, by Samuel R. Delany

Nebula winner from way back. I quite liked this at first, with the re-telling of the Orpheus and other myths very reminiscent of Zelazny's This Immortal and of Anderson's "Goat Song" which must have been writen at almost the same time. But it got a bit rambling and disjointed at the end. Also any author who inserts bits of his own writing journal into the text is just showing off. I'm rather surprised that this beat both Zelazny's Lord of Light amd Silverberg's Thorns, but then I have often been surprised by Nebula winners. (The other two nominees were Chthon by Piers Anthony, which I haven't read, and The Eskimo Invasion by Hayden Howard, who I haven't even heard of.)

OK, six Nebula winners left to read.

3) The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, by Samuel R. Delany

This is a collection of a dozen pieces about sf, written between 1966 and 1976. They vary greatly in both length and quality; the longest, an article called "Shadows", is 80 pages, split into 60 sections which really appear just thrown together at random. I found some of this book stimulating but other bits overblown - for instance, Delany's apparently serious argument that there is no difference in average height between men and women, it's just that tall women and short men are oppressed by society and are in hiding as a result. I really bought the book for his essay on Thomas Disch (who I haven't read) and Roger Zelazny (who I have) and I thought that was well worth the cost (I've promised greengolux my thoughts on this at greater length but have probably missed her deadline by now). His longer piece on The Dispossessed had some sensible points in it but attacked the book for being insufficiently feminist and open-minded about sex, a view which will doubtless surprise many of its readers. So there we are; all interesting, but some bits much more interesting and worthwhile than others.

7) Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany

I've read only one Delany novel before, one of his minor ones (either The Towers of Toron or The Fall of the Towers, not sure which) and wasn't wildly impressed. This is miles better, and helps me understand why he developed the early reputation that he did. I had been expecting something like a half-way point between Zelazny and Dick; in fact, Delany comes across as more disciplined than either. A lot of Babel-17 is about sensing the universe in a different way - Delany's spaceships require three navigators, an Eye, an Ear and a Nose, who experience space by visual, auditory and olfactory means; and the language Babel-17 itself, the centre of the whole mystery, is also about a new way of understanding the universe. Where a Dick novel would leave you wondering if it all made sense, Delany leaves you in no doubt that there is a real universe out there and it's just a matter of how you choose to interact with it. As for the Zelazny comparison, Zelazny would sometimes let his joy of writing get in the way of having a sensible plot; but Delany's plot is actually rather simple, and as it turns out almost cliched. There's also an aspect all Delany's own, which is the polyamory of several key characters - indeed, one former lover of our heroine is the rather transparently anagrammatic writer Muels Aranlyde.

OK, only 8 more Nebula winners to go...

( What I got in Glasgow )

I have a very tolerant wife.

6) Nebula Award Stories Number Three, ed. Roger Zelazny

This collection has been recently (2001) reprinted, and shsilver reviewed it, as did Peter Tillman. There's not a lot I can add to their two reviews (which, contrasted with each other, amusingly demonstrate how one's Mileage May Vary), except to note that the cover image to the left, from the edition I myself have (the 1970 Pocket Book edition), is gacked from the website of Jeffrey S. Timmons and seems to show a reclining female figure behind a much smaller spectral cyclist, above whose head an equally spectral top hat appears to be levitating. The artist's name is unknown.

I bought this as the last step in preparation for my planned piece on Fritz Leiber's story "Gonna Roll The Bones" which is one of the seven included here, but it also ties into my fascination with Roger Zelazny, who had won two of five Nebula awards the previous year, and was only thirty; and as Zelazny himself writes in one of the introductions here, "Consider the fact that everything a man writes is really only a part of one big story, to be ended by the end of his writing life. Consider that, as so many have said, everything a man writes is, basically, autobiographical... I tell you these things because every writer who has ever lived is unique."

Zelazny seems to have taken the job of editing this collection seriously, and though his introductions are as mere postscripts to those of Harlan Ellison in the near-contemporaneous Dangerous Visions, they do give evidence of his commitment to the project, including lengthy quotations from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Czesław Miłosz, and invokes Anne McCaffrey as an aspect of Goethe's Ewigweibliche.

While he had to include the three Nebula winners, his choice of the other four stories (as shsilver points out) is pretty idiosyncratic: two of them, "Weyr Search" by Anne McCaffrey and "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" by Harlan Ellison were at least nominated for the Nebula, but the other two are probably not what the readers of 1968 expected to find in the anthology. At least "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D" by J.G. Ballard turned out to be a good call, one of the better known stories of an author who has become very well known indeed, but little is known of Gary Wright, author of "Mirror of Ice" - which is barely even an sf story. I can see why Zelazny liked it, as the style is not so very different from his own; I don't really believe the theory that Wright was Samuel R Delany; Harry Harrison also anthologised it four times; but it was last reprinted in an original anthology in 1976!

Well, it cost me very little to buy, and I'd have paid the price five times over. Three of the other stories - "Aye, and Gomorrah..." by Samuel R. Delany, "Weyr Search" by Anne McCaffrey, and "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock - are generally recognised as classics in very different ways. I'll write more when I do my long-planned piece on the Leiber story.