ISAAC ASIMOV PRESENTS

Greg Bear records how the next step in evolution began to take over the world…

Spider Robinson ponders the question of just how far can merely finite human creativity go…

Joanna Russ shows how unwise the marauding band of Norsemen were to threaten the Abbess—who turned out to be something more than human…

John Varley tells how the world’s leading computer expert committed suicide—except that it turned out that he didn’t really exist…and was it suicide…?

Connie Willis reveals the dangers of going back in time to save the treasures of the past…

Timothy Zahn shows what happened when the starship arrived at a newly colonized planet—and found the colonists had disappeared…

And more…

Isaac Asimov, Grand Master of science fiction, and himself a four-time Hugo recipient, introduces the newest winners of the coveted Hugo award for the finest in science fiction.

After the publication of The Hugo Winners, Volume Five, the series collapsed. The last few volumes had done poorly and Doubleday didn’t want to do a sixth. Martin Greenberg, however, didn’t want the series to end, and so he made an arrangement with a new publisher (Baen Books). He would handle the mechanics of the anthology—permissions and whatnot—Asimov would do what he did before (write the headnotes and introduction), and Baen would put it out in softcover so that the book would have wider circulation.

The result is The New Hugo Winners, and it did well enough for three more volumes to come out: The New Hugo Winners, Volume 2, The New Hugo Winners, Volume 3 (edited by Connie Willis), and The New Hugo Winners, Volume 4 (edited by Gregory Benford).

There is basically nothing of Asimov here beyond the headnotes. There are, however, nine stories: the winners in each of three short fiction categories for 1983 through 1985. They‘re all excellent stories, so enumerating them seems pointless.

This is definitely an anthology worth getting for any science fiction buff, although it has really very little relevance for the Asimov fan.