Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

by Catherine Asaro

  —Daphne du Maurier, The Birds & Other Stories

  In “The Migratory Pattern of Dancers,” Katherine Sparrow writes about men who are genetically engineered with the DNA of birds, which have become extinct. Although the men remain essentially human, twice a year they are driven to travel the routes that birds once flew during their migrations. As part of their journey, the men make periodic stops to perform dances in places such as Yellowstone National Park, choreographing works that draw on the traits of those vanished birds—and that also make millions of dollars for the avaricious backers who sponsor their shows. The performances evoke the avian multitudes that once soared through our skies in the freedom of flight, yet that very evocation of freedom becomes a form of prison for the dancers.

  Audiences come to the shows to be entertained, amused, and, yes, to see what fate might befall those dancers who dare to seek the closest that humans can come to unaided flight. As such, the story explores the ramifications of the human fascination with death as entertainment. Sparrow hints at an insidious end to humanity; will we become so inured to the loss of life through our entertainment that we participate in our own demise? Rather than a dramatic apocalypse, the story suggests that human extinction may come from within, prodded by the same instincts that led the characters in the story to reduce the once-great species of birds that flew our skies to an echo found only in human dances.

  Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

  —Thomas Huxley, Science and Culture: And Other Essays, volume 3

  Jo Walton turns around the idea of combining science and the arts in her metafictional novel Among Others. Here the art is writing; the book is told through the narrator’s love of literature, in particular, science fiction. As such, the novel invokes many of our great speculative writers, specifically those from the science fiction canon of several decades ago. Literature plays a role in Walton’s novel similar to the role played by art, music, or dance for other works in this anthology. But the art that Walton uses to frame her story is our art, the literature of the fantastic, as illustrated, for example, by this anthology. The Nebula Aweards Showcase 2013 doesn’t dance, sing, paint, strum, or drum—but it becomes a recursive loop, one constructed out of its stories, which use other arts to frame the literary works so that the anthology becomes the art that frames itself.

  Metafiction is a story that refers to literature and its conventions as part of the story. In other words, the tale is self-referential. The idea is that it exposes the illusions created by a work of fiction, blurring the line between the “real” world of the reader and the imagined world of the story. Walton employs this technique to good effect in her novel, using speculative fiction to frame a story of fantasy, even prodding the reader to ask if the magical aspects to the story are “real” within the context of the narrator’s tale or a fiction within a fiction masquerading as reality for the fictional characters.

  In analogy with the self-referential loop that arises from the description of this anthology as an art that frames itself, it could be said that Walton’s book leaves out one important novel in the works she referenced—Among Others, by Jo Walton. What a satisfying creation of fractal metafiction that would be; the book refers to the book that refers to the book that refers to . . . well, you get the idea. It could be a recursive triumph worthy of Mandelbrot, the mathematician who created the gorgeous fractal known as the Mandelbrot set, which repeats itself the mesmerizing structure of its images at ever-finer and finer detail. For me, Among Others felt close to a literary version of the online video that shows the Mandelbrot fractal at greater and greater magnification, offering a musical glimpse into the ultimate representation of self-referential art.2

  But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze . . .

  —Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

  The Club Story has a long tradition in science fiction. Such a tale consists of two parts: a frame that describes a club or other place where the narrator is relating his story within a story, and the tale itself, which the narrator often claims involved him. In the words of John Clute, “A club story is a tale told by one person to others in a place where the story can be related safely, either a collection featuring one teller with many tales or several storytellers taking turns.” Clute, one of our two Solstice Award winners this year, offers here an essay on the Club Story adapted from his article in the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Not only does it form a compelling entry in the discussion of fiction as art form, but the essay itself is a form of art in its construction for an online audience, illustrating how the electronic age is changing the way we present literature. For the paper copy of this anthology, we can’t give the hyperlinks that allow readers to click on words and phrases from the essay to find connected entries in the encyclopedia, creating a hypertext document. However, you can enjoy the essay in its original electronic form in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction at www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/club_story.

  I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog; therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking: in the meantime let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.

  —Don John, in William Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing

  Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

  —George Bernard Shaw, “Literary Censorship in England,” Current Opinion

  In her all-too-short story “Ado,” Connie Willis uses the art of literature in a satire that, beneath its lighthearted comedy, gives a satisfying smack to censorship. The “world” she creates lies in the not-so-distant future where the constraints on what teachers may teach is stringently limited for fear of offending someone. Anyone. For all that it is amusing, the story also offers a sobering look at what could happen to our children and their futures if we allow censors to eviscerate the literature they read. In the world of “Ado,” I’ve already written too much—

  Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot. Others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

  —widely attributed to Pablo Picasso

  Another theme that struck me about the stories on this year’s ballot is the diversity in the portrayal of both real cultures on Earth and those formed in the imaginations of the writers. At its best, speculative fiction can evoke astonishing universes. We paint prose pictures of other places, other worlds, other suns. Ironically, in earlier days of science fiction, the “alien” worlds depicted in many of our works were sometimes less alien than other cultures on our own planet. The current ballot illustrates the maturing of the genre. It is a cornucopia of world building, not only for imagined places, but also in exploring the people, ways of life, and ideas on our own planet that come from other cultures besides the West.

  Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.

  —Carl Sagan, Cosmos

  When I was a child, about age eight or nine, I remember being at my grandparents' Spanish-style home in Escondido, California, not the endless metropolis that area has become now, but back in the days when it was a sleepy little town among the avocado farms. With nothing to do on a day baking beneath a relentless summer sun, I wandered down to the local library and sat in the air-conditioned reading room absorbed in a book about bees. I don’t remember the title or the author, but I will never forget how much I loved its tale of great bee adventure.

  I remembered that book when I read E. Lily Yu’s story “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees.” Yu extrapolates the behavior of bees and wasps as known to modern science into a tale set in the village of Yiwei, which in Mandarin Chinese roughly translates as “to suppose.” It is an apt name for the opening locale of a story that concer
ns map-making wasps and their conflicts with bees both revolutionary and not. The societies of these remarkable insects are portrayed with depth and a gentle humor. Their cultures serve as a foil for the other culture in the story, that of the humans. The tale offers an unusual twist on science fiction stories of first contact and a salient commentary on human political systems of Earth.

  Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

  —Simonides of Ceos, in “On the Glory of the Athenians,”

  by Plutarch, in The Moralia, Book 4

  Amal El-Mohtar’s poem “Peach-Creamed Honey” gives bees a very different look. They are among the many images she invokes with her sensual poem that won the 2011 Rhysling Award in the short form category. The sheer beauty of the writing is a pleasure to read, like a song. As I write this, it inspires my mind to compose melodies, edgily sweet, a haunting fusion of Western and Near Eastern music with a mesmerizing drumbeat, all conjured by these lines from the poem:

  “And I know she’ll let me tell her how the peaches lost their way

  how they fell out of a wagon on a sweaty summer’s day,

  how the buzz got all around that there was sugar to be had,

  and the bees came singing, and the bees came glad.”

  C. S. E. Cooney, the 2011 Rhysling Award winner in the long form category, also treats the reader to gratifyingly evocative language in “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her lyrical word pictures evoke a fantastic land in the deep sea. At turns graceful and irreverent, the poem is a sequel to the traditional Scandinavian ballad “Agnete and the Merman.” Cooney offers the ill-behaved merman a second chance for happiness, though at first he refuses to notice. The clever contrasts between the conventions of traditional folktales and the sensibility of a modern woman make for a delicious mix in this poem.

  Pouring forth its seas everywhere, then, the ocean envelops the earth and fills its deeper chasms.

  —Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

  Brad R. Torgersen offers a science fiction take on the deep sea in his story “Ray of Light.” Although the world he evokes with such careful detail is here on Earth, it is as alien to most of us as another planet. “Ray of Light” centers on the confinement of Earth’s last humans in undersea settlements after the surface has become unlivable. Torgersen uses the milieu to frame a teenager’s alienation, not only her rebellion against her father, but also against her environment. The setting exerts a literary pressure on the characters analogous to the pressure of the deep sea that dominates their lives. It didn’t surprise me that the means by which the young people came together in secret to plan was through a music club. Although music played a relatively small part compared to the arts in other stories in this anthology, I found it a satisfying accent for the tale of a father’s struggles to accept his child’s transition into adulthood.

  Sauerkraut is tolerant, for it seems to be a well of contradictions. Not that it would preach a gastronomic neutrality that would endure all heresies. It rejects dogmatism and approves of individual tastes.

  —Julien Freund, director of the Institute of Sociology in Strasbourg,

  Les Saisons d’Alsace

  Ferrett Steinmetz sweeps us off to another sort of world in his novelette “Sauerkraut Station.” The story is set on a space habitat that offers medical aid and refits ships with supplies. Those supplies include their specialty, sauerkraut, which most of their visitors hold in far too low esteem, at least in the view of Lizzie, the narrator. The setting is brought alive by the author’s careful detail and serves as a foil for the political background of the universe Steinmetz builds. The tale is both stark and reaffirming, the story of a remarkable young woman.

  When I first read “Sauerkraut Station,” I assumed it had appeared in Analog. It has that feel for me in part because of the well described life in a space station, including what happens if we lose amenities we take for granted, such as light and gravity. I was intrigued to learn that it came from the online zine GigaNotoSaurus. In fact, two works in this book first appeared in GigaNotoSaurus, the other being “The Migratory Patterns of Dancers.” They offer telling examples of the sea changes in publishing we’ve experienced over the last decade. In the past, when the outlets for short fiction were limited to hardcopy markets, the expense of producing and distributing such publications drastically constrained the number of markets, which meant many good stories went unpublished or appeared in hard-to-find places. Now, with the advent of so many online markets, more top-notch stories than ever are seeing print. This is the first I’ve seen of GigaNotoSaurus, but I will definitely be looking up more of their issues.

  You can’t remake the world

  Without remaking yourself.

  —Ben Okri, Mental Fight

  Geoff Ryman’s carefully rendered novelette “What We Found” takes place in Nigeria. On one level, it centers on the attempts of Terhemba, a Nigerian scientist, to reconcile his research with the ravages suffered by his family; the two converge when he discovers evidence that parents can pass the effects of traumas they have endured to their children. The narrator writes, “What we found is that 1966 can reach into your head and into your balls and stain your children red. You pass war on. . . . We live our grandfathers’ lives.” In telling Terhemba’s story, Ryman writes vividly of a Nigeria that is in turns severe and beautiful.

  On another level, “What We Found” draws on a phenomenon observed by psychologists, in particular John Schooler, that their research showed a “decline effect,” where attempts to duplicate a well-documented result become less and less successful over time even if many scientists initially replicate the work. The decline may derive from psychological effects, that the experimenters expect the result and so are subconsciously predisposed toward work that verifies their expectation. The decline is then the reassertion of the scientific method over time. However, even that theory doesn’t seem to fully account for the effect. In “What We Found,” Ryman extrapolates the idea to a fascinatingly eerie extreme. What if all scientific results disappeared over time?

  To motivate the idea, Ryman draws on quantum theory, specifically the result that the act of observing a system changes that system, collapsing it from a mixture of possible states to the one observed. As a physicist, I’ve calculated linear superpositions of quantum states to describe the behavior of atoms and molecules. Mathematically, it simply means that more than one state exists for the particles in a collection, and we don’t know which applies to a particular particle until we look at it. In popular culture, it has become famous as the “Schrödinger’s cat” paradox, which essentially says, “The cat in the box is neither dead nor alive, but is a mixture of those states—until we look.”

  Ryman takes the idea a wonderfully fanciful step further. Suppose the act of observation changed everything scientists observed, including on a macroscopic level, so that the more they attempted to replicate previous results, the less they succeeded? All our scientific laws, including those we’ve known for centuries, even millennia, would eventually cease to be true. Ryman uses the idea to frame one man’s attempt to understand himself, his family, and his future.

  The golden age of science fiction is twelve.

  —Peter Graham, Void

  The two novels excerpted in this anthology both have vivid resonances for me. As with many science fiction readers, I related to the protagonist in the book Among Others. Like her, I was an outcast during my elementary school years, and I too found a refuge in science fiction, practically inhaling every book I could lay hands on. But my world had another aspect: ballet. I began training as a small child and never stopped regardless of the obstacles, including a body shape better suited to jazz than classical dance. When I hit puberty, the unexpected happened. Those many years of dance classes after school and on weekends, those mornings I got up early and went running in the park to let my feet pound away my frustrations—they paid off in a manner I had no idea would happen. Until then, I
had known only that when I danced, I could let free a part of myself that had no other outlet. I never realized all that training was also turning me from the proverbial ugly duckling into if not a swan, then at least a graceful duck.

  By the time I hit middle school, I was deep within the cognitive dissonance of going from the least popular kid in school to being liked and accepted as a dancer, knowing all the time that inside, I was the same person my peers had bullied only two years before. To me, nothing had changed except my exterior. It was a sobering wake-up call to the effects of bias and stereotype. For many, twelve is the “golden age” of science fiction, that age when they find the genre and community that speaks to them. For me, twelve was the end of my (first) science fiction age. Struggling with the confusion of a puberty that hit me like an express train slamming into a brick wall, I could no longer ignore the sexism in the science fiction stories I had devoured for so many years, nor the fact that those stories were targeted at my male peers. The books were about their dreams, their confusion, and their adventures, and I didn’t fit in anywhere.

  I went to John F. Kennedy High School in Richmond, California, which was known at that time for its innovative academic programs. In those days, the Richmond Voluntary Integration Plan was at its height, bringing in students from all over the region. As a result, I attended a school noted for its diversity, a student body that was about one-half African American and the rest a mix of other races, mostly Caucasian, also Asian and Hispanic. That had a marked effect on my new preferences in literature, though I didn’t realize it until years later. I read what my friends and classmates were reading, authors like Martin Luther King Jr. and discussions about the music of Miles Davis. At that point in my life, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, the story of a young black man dealing with the invisibility conferred by racism, spoke to me far more than H. G. Wells’s science fiction novella “The Invisible Man.”