The book collects pieces that won or were nominated for the Nebula Awards for novel, novella, novelette and short story for the year 1983, together with an introduction by the editor and list of past winners. Not all nominees for the various awards are included.
Barbara A. Bannon in Publishers Weekly rated the award-winning pieces collected in the anthology highly, and noted that "[a]s good as those works are, perhaps equally impressive is the quality of the nominees that didn't win." She complimented Russ's, Malzberg's and Sterling's pieces individually, citing the last as "one of the best stories ever about living with aliens," as well as calling those by Silverberg and Gibson "[f]ine stories" that "complete the volume at the same high level."[2]
The book was also reviewed by Paul O. Williams in Fantasy Review, August 1984 and Sue Thomason in Paperback Inferno no. 52, 1985.[1]
