Each year the World Science Fiction Convention travels through a galaxy of science fiction novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories in search of the genre’s brightest stars—THE HUGO WINNERS. As coveted as Hollywood’s Oscars, the Hugo Awards honor the ingenious, the unparalleled, the outstanding in science fiction writing. Here in Volume 4 are thirteen award-winning works by the 1976–1979 Hugo Award-winning authors, each introduced by the undisputed, and irrepresible, master, Isaac Asimov.
This provocative collection of short stories, novellas, and novelettes covers a territory as broad as the human mind, as distant as the farthest quasar. Here are questions about the ever enchroaching future: When man creates artificial intelligence, what is he responsible for…or guilty of? Probes into the ever present past: If things had happened just a little differently, could the Holocaust have been avoided? And clashes of past, present, and future: Can one simply step out of the march of time?
Volume 4 is an absorbing, absolutely essential anthology for science fiction enthusiasts. For it represents, as its esteemed editor says, “the entire field of science fiction from Asimov to Zelazny!”
At last! At last! At last!
After years and years of patiently waiting (during some of which—to be perfectly frank—Asimov was writing his best short fiction), the Good Doctor was finally awarded a Hugo award for ”The Bicentennial Man,” and with that story gets to include himself in one of the Hugo winner volumes.
There are some other really fantastic stories here, too. Particularly worth mention is James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and John Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision.” The other stories here may not be quite as world-shattering, but they‘re certainly good enough.
One can, nonetheless, sense Doubleday’s waning interest in the series. The Hugo Winners, Volume Three never made it into paperback, and not only was this true of volume four, as well, but volume four is actually missing the list of Hugo winners which graces all the other volumes.
Contents
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“The Bicentennial Man” |