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A review by chloekg
Nebula Award Stories 3 by Roger Zelazny
4.0
The average of ideas in this collection I'd rate at three-stars. Ballard's sculptors are no more substantial than their clouds. Wright's cold adrenaline masculinity is something of a future's Jack London sports report. Moorcock's Christ is exhausting, a wandering through my own forty days of desert. Delaney's Nebula-crowned short story, "Aye... and Gomorrah," wins at revealing something, but I would need someone else's analysis to really get it and it might churn my stomach.
Where this book earns its four stars is the prose. Zelazny's introductions elevate these works from a collection to a community and a commentary. What a time and place to have personally known each author and spoken from a literary heart to the excellence of their works. His introduction to Harlan Ellison I found especially pointed, the rawness of autobiography is inescapable in the hard living Las Vegas of "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes." Calling out the lyric blues of Fritz Leiber, "Gonna Roll the Bones" plays out an apocalyptic-neon, desperate-glory night. Again, the ideas are "just fine" as far as sci-fi goes. It is their putting the words together that lingers, lingers.
Where this book earns its four stars is the prose. Zelazny's introductions elevate these works from a collection to a community and a commentary. What a time and place to have personally known each author and spoken from a literary heart to the excellence of their works. His introduction to Harlan Ellison I found especially pointed, the rawness of autobiography is inescapable in the hard living Las Vegas of "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes." Calling out the lyric blues of Fritz Leiber, "Gonna Roll the Bones" plays out an apocalyptic-neon, desperate-glory night. Again, the ideas are "just fine" as far as sci-fi goes. It is their putting the words together that lingers, lingers.