NEBULA AWARDS 22

The Science Fiction Writers of America's annual collection of award-winners and some runners-up. Lucius Shepard's fine, unsettling look at a near-future Central American War, ""R & R,"" heads the list, along with Kate Wilhelm's strange, magnetic ghost/time travel yarn, ""The Girl Who Fell into the Sky,"" and Greg Bear's ""Tangents,"" wherein an Alan Turing-like researcher discovers other dimensions, both literally and figuratively. There are also some spiffy runners-up: Suzie McKie Charnas' ""Listening to Brahms""; Judith Moffett's ""Surviving""; Gregory Benford's ""Newton Sleep""; and Orson Scott Card's ""Salvage."" To round out the package, Bill Warren expertly scrutinizes 1986's movies; Susan Palwick and Andrew Joron offer science-fiction poems; critic Algis Budrys drones on about nothing in particular; and Isaac Asimov indulgently celebrates his elevation to Grand Master. Novels aside, then, 1986 was an excellent vintage for fiction, satisfying and stimulating for cognoscenti and browsers alike.