The Other Half of the Sky Nabs a Nebula
Sunday, May 18th, 2014
The Other Half of the Sky has had an unprecedented four of its sixteen stories chosen for inclusion in two “Best of” annual compilations and was included in the coveted Locus recommended list.
It comes as an unalloyed pleasure that the anthology just won yet another accolade: one of the stories in The Other Half of the Sky received the Nebula Award for best novelette. The story is Aliette de Bodard’s “The Waiting Stars” (part of her Xuya universe), a haunting symphony of kinship, loss and healing.
Additionally, the anthology garnered two more outstanding reviews in a long and ever-lengthening roster:
Analog Magazine
Manic Pixie Dream Worlds
The concluding paragraph of the latter review is worth quoting:
“As a result we have a batch of stories here that don’t just feature women as protagonists, often characters of color and those with LGBT identities, but in which the societies within create wholly new ways of living: sociologically, technologically, ecologically. The social structures and worlds that these authors wrote are so unique and inventive that I kept forgetting that I was reading a book with a mission, that I was promised female protagonists, and thinking: Ah, yes. This is what science fiction should be.
Welcome to the future.“