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Nebula Awards Showcase 59
The year's best science fiction and fantasy as selected by The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association
This latest installment of the prestigious Nebula Awards Showcase anthology series—published annually since 1966—reprints winning and nominated works from the 59th Annual Nebula Awards, as voted on by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA).
Nebula Awards Showcase 59 features stories and excerpts by this year’s Nebula Award winners and finalists, including Ai Jiang, Wole Talabi, Naomi Kritzer, John Wiswell, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Thomas Ha, P. A. Cornell, Angela Liu … AND MANY MORE!
This latest installment of the prestigious Nebula Awards Showcase anthology series—published annually since 1966—reprints winning and nominated works from the 59th Annual Nebula Awards, as voted on by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA).
Nebula Awards Showcase 59 features stories and excerpts by this year’s Nebula Award winners and finalists, including Ai Jiang, Wole Talabi, Naomi Kritzer, John Wiswell, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Thomas Ha, P. A. Cornell, Angela Liu … AND MANY MORE!
228 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 25, 2025
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June 15, 2025
This is the most recent entry in the long Nebula Awards series. The series has been annual, going since 1966. Recently it stopped being published every year, but last March the last three years were all published almost simultaneously. The editor of them all is Stephen Kotowych, a name I've never heard in any capacity, unusual for this series. The editors in the past were top SF writers of the field. The book is certainly affordable, just $4.99 as an eBook, triple that for those who wish to have trees killed.
Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 by R.S.A. Garcia (2023) ★★★★★
Tantie Merle is getting up there in years and needs a little help around the farm. Her thoughtful daughter sends her a gift of an AI farmhand to help Tantie Merle out, only nothing quite goes as planned.
What a delightful surprise! This story is a masterpiece. I seldom seek out comic fantasy or comic science fiction. It's never funny to me. What other people find comic, be it Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, doesn't make me laugh usually because it tries too hard. I love it when there's a good story to tell that in the telling can make me laugh so hard because its situation is so funny. This is one of those magic stories.
Bad Doors by John Wiswell (2023) ★★★1/2
This might be the scariest story of a stalking door ever told. The protagonist, a Gen Z young man without much to recommend him named Kosmo, refuses to be in a horror story. Scary stuff going down? He figures it's time to leave. That just means scary stuff goes on around him, which is bad enough.
I thoroughly enjoyed this strange story that never quite resolved due to protagonist cowardice. It's unique and relatable for sure. I've never heard of this author before either, but it's not his first Nebula winner. The only thing that got me down a bit about the story was how it took me back to the days of the Covid pandemic. I'm trying to erase my memories of that time, not relive them.
Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont (2023) ★★★1/2
Upon my first reading of this story I was very disappointed; it made so little sense. I gave it another read though, and I am glad I did because it made more sense to me on the second read. You don't have to pay to read it, incidentally; it's freely available on the internet here: https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/octobe.... I rate this story the third best in the anthology.
The Oakmont is a New York hotel that is not anchored in time and has occupants from different times, mostly Americans from the 20th and 21st centuries. The hotel has rules, such as occupants can visit rooms of people from the past, but not the future. Occupants should not inform other residents of future events, etc.
The story has a few obvious problems and plot holes. For example, there is no explanation for why the Oakmont is not in a time, or where it came from. How do people wander in and out without affecting the time stream? Etc.
But if you can put those issues aside, what's left is a neat little romance that takes place over the span of about a century. The story is told from the point of view of its protagonist, Sara, a resident from about our time who falls in love with another resident who volunteers to serve in World War II. The impediments to their romance are unique to say the least.
Recommended for readers who pay close attention when reading and who let authors have room to play with their logic.
Both of the next two stories were published in a 2023 issue of Clarkesworld first.
Window Boy (2023) by Thomas Ha ★★★1/2
Thomas Ha has no listing in the GoodReads database, but he has published 30 short stories, all from 2020 through 2025, no novels. This is one of the six short story finalists for a Nebula from last year's voting.
It's a really good story, highly dystopic and unsettling. We get a glimpse into a very dark world where things are dangerous and have clearly gone very wrong in the near future. We get everything from a child's point of view, one that has been given limited knowledge, no doubt to protect him against grim realities. But these realities keep leaking through as the story progresses. Every sentence builds this disturbing atmosphere Ha so masterfully sustains.
I would have rated the story higher, but we never get much more than this sliver of a glimpse. We don't know exactly what's wrong or how it came to be so grim. There's simply so much missing. Nevertheless, I really like this story because of its point that underinforming our children in order to protect their childhoods or innocence can be a grave disservice to them.
I'm going to keep an eye out for another Thomas Ha work. He has a very fluid writing style. One sentence builds on the last and flows into the next so well. I hope not all his work is quite so dark.
Better Living Through Algorithms (2023) by Naomi Kritzer ★★★★1/2
The protagonist, Linnea, is encouraged by friends and finally her boss to download a wellness app. The wellness app simply offers users good advice that helps improve their lives if taken. At first, Linnea wonders what the agenda behind it is? Who benefits? Who's making money? Soon, she finds out, no one is. The app really does what it purports to do: it simply makes users' lives better through good advice.
This is a wonderful concept for an app and for a story. It's very realistically told, and the examples of life improvement advice is very convincing. It makes me wonder why apps like this don't already exist in real life. Or do they?
The story goes on a bit long and ends on a slight rabbit hole tangent, but the ideas here are so well-considered I can't help but really like this story. It's the second-best story in the anthology.
We are now 31% of the way through the anthology. Up to here I have been a happy reader, glad I purchased this book. Unfortunately, this is the last of the good stories. The last 69% of this book doesn't need to exist. I wasted time with these lemons of stories I'll never get back.
The Sound of Children Screaming (2023) by Rachael K. Jones ★
This was an anti-second amendment polemic thinly disguised as a fairy tale of some sort. The author is anti-guns, but to just write about how horrible guns are wouldn't fly. So she used school shootings to justify her position. As if we her readers can't or haven't read about this in a a newspaper, seen a broadcast, and reached our own conclusion. This author felt the need to insult her audience by telling them how it should feel about this political issue, the same as her of course.
She wrote the story in a clever and artful way, so that people who feel the same way as her politically could use that as cover for commending the story. I do feel similarly on the issue, but her trick didn't work for me. I read speculative fiction for purposes other than to have simplistic political positions rammed down my throat.
------------------------------------
The first part of the book contained the six short stories to be considered for the Nebula Award for the year. I suspect they were arranged in order of story that got the most votes to the story that got the least. The next section is the six novelettes.
------------------------------------
The Year Without Sunshine (2023) by Naomi Kritzer ★★★
This is a long short story (novelette) about people organizing survival at a community level after a devastating holocaust. It won the top award for novelette. Frankly, I don't understand how. The story was okay and well told. It's just that it wasn't much of a story, but read more like a factual account of how one woman dealt well with the aftermath. I'm not sure what was missing that was needed to take this to the next level, maybe information about anyone else in this woman's household, her history, something about how the world reached this state. It needed something more than a plot that basically says, "I did clever organizational things and survived a nuclear winter." It just doesn't seem enough of a story to have earned such high regard.
Saturday's Song (2023) by Wole Talabi ★1/2
This is a confusing novelette about seven siblings outside the bounds of space and time that tell stories. The siblings are named days of the week. These days each have characteristics that individualize them from each other. But we never learn of their real nature, what they are in other words, or why they're telling us random aspects of a love story between two characters names Saura and Mobola who meet at a financial management conference in Abuja just before the cold harmatan of 2005, whatever that means. We're never informed. Nothing in this Nigerian story clicked for me. I suspect the story is in this collection for DEI reasons.
I Am AI (2023) by Ai Jiang ★★
This story is told in a monotonous first-person voice by an Artificial Intelligence that is apparently a cyborg. Almost half the sentences start with "I" plus verb. "I just have to hold on...", "I dismiss it and scramble...", "I don't notice...", and on and on. The AI's power is low and keeps running down until it doesn't is the key suspense element of this story. The author gives the reader no real reason to care. It's as interesting as monitoring the power level of your smart phone daily and making journal entries about it.
A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair (2023) by Renan Bernardo ★★
The title is pretty much all there is to this story. Some interpersonal drama of a rather pedestrian nature happens around the chair and the chair tells us readers about it. There is no real overarching theme or goal for our conscious chair. It just observes. Its creator said someone would love it and the chair wants to find out who, but that's all the chair wants to accomplish. This story takes a long time to tell for little reward.
Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down the Moon (2023) by Angela Liu ★★
Prostitutes try to get by in a near-future dystopia. There are no compelling characters, no situation interesting enough to remember.
Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge (2023) by Eugenia Triantfyllou ★1/2
Random facts given about confusing characters living near a tunnel under a bridge being confronted by someone called Devil.
Let me provide a paragraph: "Olga was trying to work up the courage to visit the tunnel for the third time." Good so far, right? There's a scary tunnel and we're about to find out what frightens Olga about it. The paragraph continues: "She speared some spaghetti drenched in a sauce that people in her house called Bolognese. It wasn't the authentic recipe; Olga had looked it up on the Internet once out of boredom. This was more like the Greek Mom version of Bolognese. Each household had one and swore by it while scoffing at the other inferior but equally inaccurate versions. Olga was thankful for that pasta in ways she couldn't really express with words."
That was the entire paragraph. The first sentence was the topic sentence about the tunnel. The rest of the paragraph could have been supporting details, but instead we get a digression about Greek spaghetti. Writers might put that in when free flowing in the first draft. It should be edited out at a glance in the first revision. Irrelevant. But it's not. Neither by the writer or the editor. It just stands, and in the story goes to be a Nebula Award nominee, and the entire thing is written just this awfully. Almost all the novelette stories in this section had writing this awful. It simply blows my mind how this kind of stuff gets published let alone nominated for anything!
------------------------------------
The last section of this book (7%) is about other speculative fiction gems like these we readers can consider for purchase. It starts off with an excerpt from Al Jiang's Nebula Award winner of the novella category titled "Linghun." This story might be decent. It's hard to tell from the small, poorly selected smidgen we are given here. A family is in a neighborhood and their neighbors make them nervous and linger within sight of the house. That's it. My hopes aren't high. The story is written in present tense, always a good indication of amateur hour.
A one-paragraph synopsis of all the other stories and categories' works are provided. I would have been more interested if I had any faith left at this point in their likely quality.
Conclusion: If the last two thirds of the anthology had been anywhere near as good as the first I would be wondering why no one reads these anymore. I wonder no longer. What surprises me most is that these stories are supposed to represent truly great writing. Only two of the short stories were truly top of the field. There are surely good stories being published today, but where?
My hypothesis is that the bulk of the good stories being published today are in anthologies by editors that are being published as eBooks only or by publishing houses. I don't think these are being considered adequately by the nominating committees. They're mostly looking at magazines. Maybe once these periodicals published the best material being written in the field. But that is clearly no longer the case. No wonder they're having difficulty selling enough copies to remain economically viable!
Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 by R.S.A. Garcia (2023) ★★★★★
Tantie Merle is getting up there in years and needs a little help around the farm. Her thoughtful daughter sends her a gift of an AI farmhand to help Tantie Merle out, only nothing quite goes as planned.
What a delightful surprise! This story is a masterpiece. I seldom seek out comic fantasy or comic science fiction. It's never funny to me. What other people find comic, be it Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, doesn't make me laugh usually because it tries too hard. I love it when there's a good story to tell that in the telling can make me laugh so hard because its situation is so funny. This is one of those magic stories.
Bad Doors by John Wiswell (2023) ★★★1/2
This might be the scariest story of a stalking door ever told. The protagonist, a Gen Z young man without much to recommend him named Kosmo, refuses to be in a horror story. Scary stuff going down? He figures it's time to leave. That just means scary stuff goes on around him, which is bad enough.
I thoroughly enjoyed this strange story that never quite resolved due to protagonist cowardice. It's unique and relatable for sure. I've never heard of this author before either, but it's not his first Nebula winner. The only thing that got me down a bit about the story was how it took me back to the days of the Covid pandemic. I'm trying to erase my memories of that time, not relive them.
Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont (2023) ★★★1/2
Upon my first reading of this story I was very disappointed; it made so little sense. I gave it another read though, and I am glad I did because it made more sense to me on the second read. You don't have to pay to read it, incidentally; it's freely available on the internet here: https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/octobe.... I rate this story the third best in the anthology.
The Oakmont is a New York hotel that is not anchored in time and has occupants from different times, mostly Americans from the 20th and 21st centuries. The hotel has rules, such as occupants can visit rooms of people from the past, but not the future. Occupants should not inform other residents of future events, etc.
The story has a few obvious problems and plot holes. For example, there is no explanation for why the Oakmont is not in a time, or where it came from. How do people wander in and out without affecting the time stream? Etc.
But if you can put those issues aside, what's left is a neat little romance that takes place over the span of about a century. The story is told from the point of view of its protagonist, Sara, a resident from about our time who falls in love with another resident who volunteers to serve in World War II. The impediments to their romance are unique to say the least.
Recommended for readers who pay close attention when reading and who let authors have room to play with their logic.
Both of the next two stories were published in a 2023 issue of Clarkesworld first.
Window Boy (2023) by Thomas Ha ★★★1/2
Thomas Ha has no listing in the GoodReads database, but he has published 30 short stories, all from 2020 through 2025, no novels. This is one of the six short story finalists for a Nebula from last year's voting.
It's a really good story, highly dystopic and unsettling. We get a glimpse into a very dark world where things are dangerous and have clearly gone very wrong in the near future. We get everything from a child's point of view, one that has been given limited knowledge, no doubt to protect him against grim realities. But these realities keep leaking through as the story progresses. Every sentence builds this disturbing atmosphere Ha so masterfully sustains.
I would have rated the story higher, but we never get much more than this sliver of a glimpse. We don't know exactly what's wrong or how it came to be so grim. There's simply so much missing. Nevertheless, I really like this story because of its point that underinforming our children in order to protect their childhoods or innocence can be a grave disservice to them.
I'm going to keep an eye out for another Thomas Ha work. He has a very fluid writing style. One sentence builds on the last and flows into the next so well. I hope not all his work is quite so dark.
Better Living Through Algorithms (2023) by Naomi Kritzer ★★★★1/2
The protagonist, Linnea, is encouraged by friends and finally her boss to download a wellness app. The wellness app simply offers users good advice that helps improve their lives if taken. At first, Linnea wonders what the agenda behind it is? Who benefits? Who's making money? Soon, she finds out, no one is. The app really does what it purports to do: it simply makes users' lives better through good advice.
This is a wonderful concept for an app and for a story. It's very realistically told, and the examples of life improvement advice is very convincing. It makes me wonder why apps like this don't already exist in real life. Or do they?
The story goes on a bit long and ends on a slight rabbit hole tangent, but the ideas here are so well-considered I can't help but really like this story. It's the second-best story in the anthology.
We are now 31% of the way through the anthology. Up to here I have been a happy reader, glad I purchased this book. Unfortunately, this is the last of the good stories. The last 69% of this book doesn't need to exist. I wasted time with these lemons of stories I'll never get back.
The Sound of Children Screaming (2023) by Rachael K. Jones ★
This was an anti-second amendment polemic thinly disguised as a fairy tale of some sort. The author is anti-guns, but to just write about how horrible guns are wouldn't fly. So she used school shootings to justify her position. As if we her readers can't or haven't read about this in a a newspaper, seen a broadcast, and reached our own conclusion. This author felt the need to insult her audience by telling them how it should feel about this political issue, the same as her of course.
She wrote the story in a clever and artful way, so that people who feel the same way as her politically could use that as cover for commending the story. I do feel similarly on the issue, but her trick didn't work for me. I read speculative fiction for purposes other than to have simplistic political positions rammed down my throat.
------------------------------------
The first part of the book contained the six short stories to be considered for the Nebula Award for the year. I suspect they were arranged in order of story that got the most votes to the story that got the least. The next section is the six novelettes.
------------------------------------
The Year Without Sunshine (2023) by Naomi Kritzer ★★★
This is a long short story (novelette) about people organizing survival at a community level after a devastating holocaust. It won the top award for novelette. Frankly, I don't understand how. The story was okay and well told. It's just that it wasn't much of a story, but read more like a factual account of how one woman dealt well with the aftermath. I'm not sure what was missing that was needed to take this to the next level, maybe information about anyone else in this woman's household, her history, something about how the world reached this state. It needed something more than a plot that basically says, "I did clever organizational things and survived a nuclear winter." It just doesn't seem enough of a story to have earned such high regard.
Saturday's Song (2023) by Wole Talabi ★1/2
This is a confusing novelette about seven siblings outside the bounds of space and time that tell stories. The siblings are named days of the week. These days each have characteristics that individualize them from each other. But we never learn of their real nature, what they are in other words, or why they're telling us random aspects of a love story between two characters names Saura and Mobola who meet at a financial management conference in Abuja just before the cold harmatan of 2005, whatever that means. We're never informed. Nothing in this Nigerian story clicked for me. I suspect the story is in this collection for DEI reasons.
I Am AI (2023) by Ai Jiang ★★
This story is told in a monotonous first-person voice by an Artificial Intelligence that is apparently a cyborg. Almost half the sentences start with "I" plus verb. "I just have to hold on...", "I dismiss it and scramble...", "I don't notice...", and on and on. The AI's power is low and keeps running down until it doesn't is the key suspense element of this story. The author gives the reader no real reason to care. It's as interesting as monitoring the power level of your smart phone daily and making journal entries about it.
A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair (2023) by Renan Bernardo ★★
The title is pretty much all there is to this story. Some interpersonal drama of a rather pedestrian nature happens around the chair and the chair tells us readers about it. There is no real overarching theme or goal for our conscious chair. It just observes. Its creator said someone would love it and the chair wants to find out who, but that's all the chair wants to accomplish. This story takes a long time to tell for little reward.
Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down the Moon (2023) by Angela Liu ★★
Prostitutes try to get by in a near-future dystopia. There are no compelling characters, no situation interesting enough to remember.
Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge (2023) by Eugenia Triantfyllou ★1/2
Random facts given about confusing characters living near a tunnel under a bridge being confronted by someone called Devil.
Let me provide a paragraph: "Olga was trying to work up the courage to visit the tunnel for the third time." Good so far, right? There's a scary tunnel and we're about to find out what frightens Olga about it. The paragraph continues: "She speared some spaghetti drenched in a sauce that people in her house called Bolognese. It wasn't the authentic recipe; Olga had looked it up on the Internet once out of boredom. This was more like the Greek Mom version of Bolognese. Each household had one and swore by it while scoffing at the other inferior but equally inaccurate versions. Olga was thankful for that pasta in ways she couldn't really express with words."
That was the entire paragraph. The first sentence was the topic sentence about the tunnel. The rest of the paragraph could have been supporting details, but instead we get a digression about Greek spaghetti. Writers might put that in when free flowing in the first draft. It should be edited out at a glance in the first revision. Irrelevant. But it's not. Neither by the writer or the editor. It just stands, and in the story goes to be a Nebula Award nominee, and the entire thing is written just this awfully. Almost all the novelette stories in this section had writing this awful. It simply blows my mind how this kind of stuff gets published let alone nominated for anything!
------------------------------------
The last section of this book (7%) is about other speculative fiction gems like these we readers can consider for purchase. It starts off with an excerpt from Al Jiang's Nebula Award winner of the novella category titled "Linghun." This story might be decent. It's hard to tell from the small, poorly selected smidgen we are given here. A family is in a neighborhood and their neighbors make them nervous and linger within sight of the house. That's it. My hopes aren't high. The story is written in present tense, always a good indication of amateur hour.
A one-paragraph synopsis of all the other stories and categories' works are provided. I would have been more interested if I had any faith left at this point in their likely quality.
Conclusion: If the last two thirds of the anthology had been anywhere near as good as the first I would be wondering why no one reads these anymore. I wonder no longer. What surprises me most is that these stories are supposed to represent truly great writing. Only two of the short stories were truly top of the field. There are surely good stories being published today, but where?
My hypothesis is that the bulk of the good stories being published today are in anthologies by editors that are being published as eBooks only or by publishing houses. I don't think these are being considered adequately by the nominating committees. They're mostly looking at magazines. Maybe once these periodicals published the best material being written in the field. But that is clearly no longer the case. No wonder they're having difficulty selling enough copies to remain economically viable!
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