Cover art by Tiffany Dae

The Nebula Awards Showcase is one of the most prestigious and honored anthologies in Science Fiction. It has appeared every year since 1966, and been published by Pyr since 2012. Pyr’s once considerable output has slowed in the last year, and I was very pleased to see the 2019 Showcase volume picked up by one of the best of the new small press publishers, Parvus Press. It’s a significant coup for them, and I hope it’s a sign of even greater things to come.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s introduction is one of the most powerful non-fiction pieces I’ve read in a Nebula anthology in a long time, both a celebration of the increasing diversity in our field, and a bald statement about why it’s so vitally important.

When I first harnessed the courage to start sending my stories out in 2006, it truly was a frightening prospect. I had never seen a Latina writer in any of the fantasy and science fiction magazines I read, nor at a bookstore… The science fiction and fantasy section was virtually devoid of people like me…

It’s easy to declare that diversity is a done deal, or even worse, that diversity is a trend, a fad, which has run its course. It is easy to churn lists that purport to contain the 10 Best Science Fiction Novels of all time and find out that the only woman who made the list was Mary Shelley. Or to find threads with people saying that women can’t write Lovecraftian fiction because women are able to give birth and therefore cannot understand cosmic horror (I am not making this comment up)…

What is hard is to build a better, more inclusive publishing community. It’s hard to read widely, to read beyond the things that you are used to, to organize events which feature a broad variety of guests, to write lists which go beyond the usual suspects. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible… We call speculative fiction the literature of the imagination, so why not imagine a future in which a young writer can find plenty of authors to emulate? A future in which that author is not silent and scared and feeling like she has no stories to tell, as I was 13 years ago when I began my writing journey.

This year’s volume contains some magnificent material, including “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience(TM)” by Rebecca Roanhorse, “A Human Stain” by Kelly Robson, and the complete text of Martha Wells’ Hugo and Nebula Award winning novella, All Systems Red, the first Murderbot tale. Here’s the complete tale of contents.

Introduction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The 2018 Nebula Award Finalists
“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience(TM)” by Rebecca Roanhorse
“A Series of Steaks” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
“Weaponized Math” by Jonathan P. Brazee
“Utopia, Lol?” by Jamie Wahls
“Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
“Wind Will Rove” by Sarah Pinsker
“Dirty Old Town” by Richard Bowes
“The Last Novelist (or a Dead Lizard in the Yard)” by Matthew Kressel
“Carnival Nine” by Caroline M. Yoachim
“Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time” by K.M. Szpara
“Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand” by Fran Wilde
“A Human Stain” by Kelly Robson

Our previous coverage of Nebula anthologies includes:

Nebula Awards One and Two
Nebula Award Stories 3, edited by Roger Zelazny, reviewed by William I. Lengeman III
Nebula Winners Fourteen, edited by Frederik Pohl
Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, edited by Kij Johnson
Nebula Awards Showcase 2015, edited by Greg Bear
Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, edited by Mercedes Lackey
Nebula Awards Showcase 2017, edited by Julie E. Czerneda
Nebula Awards Showcase 2018, edited by Jane Yolen

We’re closing out the 2019 Years Best volumes, but there are a couple more in the pipeline, including books from Paula Guran, and Ellen Datlow. The ones that have appeared so far include:

The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volume Thirteen, edited by Jonathan Strahan
The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four, edited by Neil Clarke
The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019, edited by Rich Horton
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019, edited by Carmen Maria Machado and John Joseph Adams

Nebula Awards Showcase 2019 will be published by Parvus Press on October 1, 2019. It is 414 pages, priced at $19.99 in trade paperback. The cover is by Tiffany Dae. Learn more at Parvus Press.

See all our recent coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy and SF here.