Just to get on the NEBULA ballot, a story's writing must be superb. Very high quality and novelty of the ideas, or at least novelty of treatment or setting, is also assumed.
- "The Mask of the Rex" by Richard Bowes: Fantasy, as pure as it gets. A family's generations of interaction with the gods of mythology, via a mysterious series of priests.
- "The Last of the O-forms" by James Van Pelt: SF, future dystopia. Mammals have begun to mutate and hybridize at incredible rates. What's a traveling zoo to do when its weirdest creatures aren't weird enough any more?
- "Grandma" by Carol Emshwiller: Borderline. Do superheroes have offspring...do they get old...do they die?
- "Sundance" by Robert Silverberg: SF, with a psychological twist. Aliens so mysterious, is making way for human colonists extermination or genocide...and how can the humans know they are still human?
- "Lambing Season" by Molly Gloss: SF, of a very old species. An alien contact story that makes a difference to one person (and to one alien), no others.
- "0wnz0red" by Cory Doctorow. SF, on the borderline of the maybe possible. Those are zeroes in the title. I guess I don't know postmodern cyberpunk hacker slang as well as I thought...unless the author made some of it up on the fly. The implications of cracking the "compiler" for one's own DNA, or something like that. Also introduces a smash hit of an idea: "Honorable Computing." Supposedly the ultimate solution to piracy of entertainment media. I'll rant on this later.
- "Knapsack Poems" by Eleanor Arnason. SF, of a favorite sort--to me. No humans appear. The protagonist and all players are of a species in which all the "singular" pronouns refer to a collective entity with a few to a dozen or so bodies.
- "Coraline (Excerpt)" by Neil Galman. "Hidden Doorway" fantasy. The first three chapters of a novella published as a novel elsewhere.
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