Annal:1973 Nebula Award for Novel

Rendezvous with Rama

Arthur C. Clarke

• 1974 Campbell 1st
• 1974 Hugo-Novel winner
• 1973 Nebula winner
• Score: 30.24

At first, only a few things are known about the celestial object that astronomers dub Rama. It is huge, weighing more than ten trillion tons. And it is hurtling through the solar system at inconceivable speed. Then a space probe confirms the unthinkable: Rama is no natural object. It is, incredible, an interstellar spacecraft. Space explorers and planet-bound scientists alike prepare for mankind’s first encounter with alien intelligence. It will kindle their wildest dreams…and fan their darkest fears. For no one knows who the Ramans are or why they have come. And now the moment of rendezvous awaits—just behind a Raman airlock door.

Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon

• 1974 NBA–Fiction winner
• 1973 Nebula nominee
• Score: 16.24

Tyrone Slothrop is an archetypal innocent abroad, but in the worst possible circumstances: he’s an American on a mission to locate V-2 rocket-launching sites in war-torn Europe. On a larger level, the novel illustrates the struggle between those who perceive and rebel against the war, seeing it as an overt movement toward the obliteration of the individual, and those who suppress individual identity to serve the war machine controlled by “Them.” Which side Slothrop is on remains highly ambiguous. An encyclopedic work much like Joyce’s Ulysses, this is perhaps one of the two or three most critically acclaimed and pondered novels of the 20th century.

Gravity’s Rainbow is dedicated to Richard Farina, a young writer Pynchon met at Cornell whose promising literary career was cut short by a fatal motorcycle accident. In 1974, the Pulitzer Prize Committee recommended this novel unanimously, but the Pulitzer Prize Board rejected it as “obscene” and “unreadable.” As a result, there was no prize awarded that year.

The Man Who Folded Himself

David Gerrold

• 1974 Hugo-Novel nominee
• 1973 Nebula nominee
• Score: 12.24

This classic work of science fiction is widely considered to be the ultimate time-travel novel. When Daniel Eakins inherits a time machine, he soon realizes that he has enormous power to shape the course of history. He can foil terrorists, prevent assassinations, or just make some fast money at the racetrack. And if he doesn’t like the results of the change, he can simply go back in time and talk himself out of making it! But Dan soon finds that there are limits to his powers and forces beyond his control.

People of the Wind

Poul Anderson

• 1974 Hugo-Novel nominee
• 1973 Nebula nominee
• Score: 12.24

 

Time Enough for Love

Robert A. Heinlein

• 1974 Hugo-Novel nominee
• 1973 Nebula nominee
• Score: 12.24

The capstone and crowning achievement of Heinlein’s famous Future History, Time Enough For Love follows Lazarus Long through a vast and magnificent timescape of centuries and worlds. Heinlein’s longest and most ambitious work, it is the story of a man so in love with Life that he refused to stop living it; and so in love with Time that he became his own ancestor.