NEBULA AWARDS STORIES SEVENTEEN

The 1981 awards, as voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America: three winners, six runners-up, two non-fiction items, and poems by Ken Duffin and Tom Disch. The winners: an excerpt from Gene Wolfe's award-winning novel The Claw of the Conciliator (the bit where Agia tricks Severian into entering a mine full of vicious ape-men); Poul Anderson's ""The Saturn Game"" (best novella), a masterly, razor-sharp yarn of explorers who meet disaster on Iapetus when they entrap themselves in their role-playing fantasy game; and Michael Bishop's ""The Quickening"" (best novelette), where the world's population is suddenly redistributed utterly at random. (Lisa Tuttle's short-story-winner ""The Bone Flute"" does not appear--a protest over the votesoliciting tactics of certain nominees.) Best of the runners-up: John Variey's splendid ""The Pusher,"" in which a spaceman inveigles young girls at a playground--in order to have someone to talk to when he returns from his voyage, years hence; Gardner Dozois' ""Disciples"" (""The Messiah has come. His name is Murray Kupferberg. He was born in Pittsburgh."") And, in the non-fiction, Algis Budrys examines the year's novels, concluding that it's more difficult to write a good short story, while Baird Searles laments the absence of real sf movies amid a welter of screen comic-books. Anderson and Varley sparkle, then, but this Nebula offers an unusually solid and diverse fictional selection overall.