Nebula Awards 25

David E. Jones in the Chicago Tribune writes "for those who would rather nibble gourmet hors d'oeuvres than plunge into [the] full meal" of a novel, Nebula Awards 25 is "chock full of tasty tidbits," with the pieces by Landis, Resnick and Willis "[o]f particular note."^[2]

Glenn Grant in the Gazette calls the anthology a "itself a winner," a "beautifully designed collection of fiction, with the added bonus of lively critical debates." He also perceives some flaws; "[a]ll the fiction in the book has merit, as one would expect, but I have to wonder at some of the choices made by the SFWA members," noting that Willis's piece, while "humorous enough, ... fails as satire because the author has no idea what physicists really talk about," and that Bujold's piece is a "drab future whodunnit" whose award for best novella is "hard to explain" other than on grounds of "internal politics and personal popularity." He observes, however, that "editor Michael Bishop chooses well from the runners- up, collecting works that clearly should have won the awards," such as those by John Crowley ("it alone is worth the price of the book"), Michael Bishop and Paul DiFilippo. Of the non-fiction, he pans the essay by Damon Knight that "asks the question, 'What is science fiction?' [and] tests his definition against a list of famous stories and novels to see if his theory works. It doesn't, and neither does his essay." He finds the pieces by Card and Richard Grant "[m]ost provocative, though, ... fascinating [in] that, while they seem to come from opposite ends of a spectrum, they both ... agree that the reader's subjective experience is paramount - the opinions of literature professors be damned."^[3]

The anthology was also reviewed by Russell Letson in Locus no. 365, June 1991, John C. Bunnell in Amazing Stories, July 1991, Tom Easton in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 1991, and Charles E. Gannon in The New York Review of Science Fiction, May 1992 .^[1]

The book placed seventeenth in the 1992 Locus Poll Award for Best Anthology.^[1]