6) Nebula Award Stories Number Three, ed. Roger Zelazny

This collection has been recently (2001) reprinted, and reviewed it, as did Peter Tillman. There's not a lot I can add to their two reviews (which, contrasted with each other, amusingly demonstrate how one's Mileage May Vary), except to note that the cover image to the left, from the edition I myself have (the 1970 Pocket Book edition), seems to show a reclining female figure behind a much smaller spectral cyclist, above whose head an equally spectral top hat appears to be levitating. The artist's name is unknown.

I bought this as the last step in preparation for my planned piece on Fritz Leiber's story "Gonna Roll The Bones" which is one of the seven included here, but it also ties into my fascination with Roger Zelazny, who had won two of five Nebula awards the previous year, and was only thirty; and as Zelazny himself writes in one of the introductions here, "Consider the fact that everything a man writes is really only a part of one big story, to be ended by the end of his writing life. Consider that, as so many have said, everything a man writes is, basically, autobiographical… I tell you these things because every writer who has ever lived is unique."

Zelazny seems to have taken the job of editing this collection seriously, and though his introductions are as mere postscripts to those of Harlan Ellison in the near-contemporaneous Dangerous Visions, they do give evidence of his commitment to the project, including lengthy quotations from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Czesław Miłosz, and invokes Anne McCaffrey as an aspect of Goethe's Ewigweibliche.

While he had to include the three Nebula winners, his choice of the other four stories (as points out) is pretty idiosyncratic: two of them, "Weyr Search" by Anne McCaffrey and "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" by Harlan Ellison were at least nominated for the Nebula, but the other two are probably not what the readers of 1968 expected to find in the anthology. At least "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D" by J.G. Ballard turned out to be a good call, one of the better known stories of an author who has become very well known indeed, but little is known of Gary Wright, author of "Mirror of Ice" – which is barely even an sf story. I can see why Zelazny liked it, as the style is not so very different from his own; I don't really believe the theory that Wright was Samuel R Delanyfour times1976!

Well, it cost me very little to buy, and I'd have paid the price five times over. Three of the other stories – "Aye, and Gomorrah…" by Samuel R. Delany, "Weyr Search" by Anne McCaffrey, and "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock – are generally recognised as classics in very different ways. I'll write more when I do my long-planned piece on the Leiber story.