NEBULA WINNERS TWELVE

Last year's Sci-Fi Writers of America Award winners in the short-story, novella, and novelette categories, along with several runners-up and a couple of perspectives on the state of the art. Isaac Asimov, often a bridesmaid at Nebula ceremonies, has finally done it: ""Bicentennial Man,"" his novelette of a faithful family robot pursuing intimations of mortality, must be the finest accomplishment in the long and distinguished history of his ""robotics"" series. The first runner-up, John Varley's ""In the Bowl,"" plays charmingly and ingeniously with the notion of ""medicanical"" prosthetics for extraterrestrial survival. James Tiptree, Jr.'s novella ""Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"" is a trenchant, slightly ragged account of three male astronauts stranded in an all-female future. In the short-story category, only Joe Haldeman's tale of an unorthodox space probe (first runner-up) is written with any real pizazz; both Thomas J. Monteleone and Charles L. Grant (the winner for ""A Crowd of Shadows"") belabor liberal pieties with earnest obviousness. A. J. Budrys contributes a fitfully penetrating, oddly ill-focused essay on the current commercial fortunes of sci-fi, James Gunn a singularly pedestrian discussion of its academic fortunes. Collections of award-winners tend to add up to erratic anthologies, and this one is no exception.