THE NEBULA AWARDS #18
Edited by Robert Silverberg
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Acknowledgments
“Souls,” by Joanna Russ. Copyright © 1981 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“No Enemy But Time,” (chapter one), by Michael Bishop. Copyright © 1982 by Michael Bishop. Reprinted by permission of Timescape Books, a Pocket Book division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
“The Pope of the Chimps,” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1982 by Agberg, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Agberg, Ltd.
“Burning Chrome,” by William Gibson. Copyright © 1982 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Fire Watch,” by Connie Willis. Copyright © 1982 by Davis Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Corridors,” by Barry N. Malzberg. Copyright © 1982 by Barry N. Malzberg. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Another Orphan,” by John Kessler. Copyright © 1982 by Mercury Press, Inc.
“A Letter from the Clearys,” by Connie Willis. Copyright © 1982 by Davis Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Swarm,” by Bruce Sterling. Copyright © 1982 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Introduction
The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA)—the first organization of professional science fiction writers that lasted much longer than the cocktail party at which it was proposed— was founded in 1965 at the instigation of the well-known editor and writer Damon Knight, then of Milford, Pennsylvania. A small circle of other writers provided the initial support— such people as Lloyd Biggie of Michigan, who was the first secretary-treasurer, James Blish, Harlan Ellison, Terry Carr, Alan E. Nourse and—yes, Robert Silverberg. But primarily it was a one-man show at the beginning: Damon drew up the bylaws, Damon solicited memberships, Damon published the organizations magazine, Damon harassed publishers who were treating writers unfairly, and so on and so on. Gradually he drew others into more active participation—myself included. I well remember the night in Milford when he talked me into taking over for him as SFWA’s second president, and I also remember well my relief at handing the job on in 1968 to my successor, Alan Nourse.
One of SFWA’s earliest projects was the inauguration of an awards program. Not that the science fiction world really needed a new set of awards, because the Hugos—for better or for worse—had been instituted in 1953 and had since 1955 been an annual event. But SFWA had no income (the dues, originally, were $3 a year, I think) and Secretary-Treasurer Biggie proposed raising money by establishing some sort of annual SFWA anthology, a slice of the earnings of which the organization could keep. That suggestion led inevitably to the notion of filling the anthology by polling the membership on the year’s best science fiction stories—the theory being that the Hugo winners are chosen by vote of the sf readership, while the Nebulas, as the new awards were dubbed, would represent the considered choice of professionals. It turned out to be an interesting experiment: over the years there have been some striking differences between the stories that have won Hugos and those that have won Nebulas in the same year, although there has also been, of course, considerable overlap between the two awards.
The first Nebulas were designed by Judith Ann Lawrence, then James Blish’s wife, from a sketch by Kate Wilhelm (Mrs. Damon Knight). With some modifications they are essentially the same today: a spiral nebula made of metallic glitter and a specimen of rock crystal, both embedded in a block of clear Lucite. They are strikingly handsome objects, and quite expensive to produce—costing rather more, in fact, than the organization has ever been able to recover out of its shares of the proceeds of the annual anthology.
On March 11, 1966, the initial Nebula awards ceremony was held simultaneously at the Overseas Press Club in New York and at a restaurant in Los Angeles called McHenry’s Tail O’the Cock. Of the first four award winners, Frank Herbert and Harlan Ellison attended the Los Angeles ceremony, Roger Zelazny and Brian Aldiss (who made the trip from England for the occasion) were present in New York. The following year, President Knight proposed holding the event in a small restaurant in Matamoras, Pennsylvania, which happened to be just up the road from his home. This led to the railroading through of a hasty bylaw requiring the organization to hold its awards ceremony in New York City, and that has been the site of most of them since, ,although for the past decade it has been held in alternate years in California—generally San Francisco or Los Angeles—because such a preponderance of science fiction writers live on the West Coast.
The Nebula winners over the years have included just about every important practitioner of science fiction, though there are a few conspicuous and startling omissions, chiefly writers whose ill luck it was to do most of their best work before the Nebulas were established—Bradbury and Hein-lein, for example—or to have run into extraordinary competition in the years of their best work. There have also been some occasions when the award has gone to a virtually unknown writer—this year being a good example of that, since such
people as Connie Willis and John Kessel are not yet household names in the science fiction world, and even Michael Bishop, widely respected though he is, does not have at the moment the sort of name-recognition value of, say, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin or Frank Herbert. And on a few occasions—the law of averages being what it is— certain of the winning stories have, to experienced observers, seemed to be absolutely off-the-wall choices, explicable only by stochastic analysis. By and large, though, the record is a commendable one, as a glance at the list of previous winners at the end of this volume indicates.
The Nebula awards anthologies have had four publishers over the years—shifting for various reasons from Doubleday, the original one, to Harper & Row, then to Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and now, beginning with this year’s volume, number eighteen, to Arbor House. Traditionally there are two criteria for choosing the editor of each year’s volume: he or she should have worked on SFWA’s behalf over the years, and should also be a writer of some prominence and accomplishment. Past editors have included such folk as Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Jerry Pournelle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Frederik Pohl, Clifford D. Simak and founding fathers Knight and Biggie.
Now it is my turn, since I am a past president and have held various other offices over the years. I think it is a pleasant coincidence that I should have been asked to edit the first volume in the Arbor House series of Nebula anthologies, since Arbor House is my very own well-cherished publisher.
I am involved in a second coincidence of this year’s volume. The stories included in a Nebula anthology are, of course, the winners in the three short-fiction categories—short story, novelette, novella—plus an extract from the award-winning novel and a selection of outstanding runners-up; it happened this year that a story of my own was among the runners-up. Mindful of the propriety of the situation—no previous editor, so far as I have been able to determine, has been faced with having to choose whether or not to publish one of his own stories—I asked various of the Secret Masters of SFWA what they thought I ought to do about the conflict of interest. When I co-edited a book called The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces and one of my own stories turned up on the contents page, I could at least turn to the fact that it was my co-editors doing, and he in fact signed his initials to the introductory note for that story. But I have no co-editors to hide behind here, and it worried me. The Secret Masters gave heartening counsel. “Heck,” said they with one accord, “go ahead and run the story. Its a good one, isn’t it?” Faced with such unanimity of opinion, I yielded as gracefully as possible. In a field whose members are famed for their modesty and humility (cf. Messrs. Asimov, Clarke, Ellison) I have been studying at the feet of masters for decades: and I have included my “The Pope of the Chimps” in the book. Not an apology, just an explanation.
—Robert Silverberg
Souls - by Joanna Russ
Joanna Russ has been in the forefront of modern American science fiction since the late 1960s, when she established a firm following with the vigorously feminist sword-and-sorcery novel Picnic on Paradise and the haunting and astonishingly vivid novel of extrasensory powers And Chaos Died. Her short story, “When It Changed,” was a Nebula winner for 1972.
The brilliant novella reprinted here, which may at first seem to be historical fiction but which gradually reveals its emphatic science fiction content, first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Deprived of other Banquet I entertained myself-—
—Emily Dickinson
This is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde and what happened when the Norsemen came. I tell it not as it was told to me but as I saw it, for I was a child then and the Abbess had made a pet and errand boy of me, although the stern old Wardress, Cunigunt, who had outlived the previous Abbess, said I was more in the Abbey than out of it and a scandal. But the Abbess would only say mildly, “Dear Cunigunt, a scandal at the age of seven?” which was turning it off with a joke, for she knew how harsh and disliking my new stepmother was to me and my
father did not care and I with no sisters or brothers. You must understand that joking and calling people “dear” and “my dear” was only her manner; she was in every way an unusual woman. The previous Abbess, Herrade, had found that Radegunde, who had been given to her to be fostered, had great gifts and so sent the child south to be taught, and that has never happened here before. The story has it that the Abbess Herrade found Radegunde seeming to read the great illuminated book in the Abbess’s study; the child had somehow pulled it off its stand and was sitting on the floor with the volume in her lap, sucking her thumb, and turning the pages with her other hand just as if she were reading.
“Little two-years,” said the Abbess Herrade, who was a kind woman, “what are you doing?” She thought it amusing, I suppose, that Radegunde should pretend to read this great book, the largest and finest in the Abbey, which had many, many books more than any other nunnery or monastery I have ever heard of: a full forty then, as I remember. And then little Radegunde was doing the book no harm.
“Reading, Mother,” said the little girl.
“Oh, reading?” said the Abbess, smiling. “Then tell me what you are reading,” and she pointed to the page.
“This,” said Radegunde, “is a great D with flowers and other beautiful things about it, which is to show that Dominus, our Lord God, is the greatest thing and the most beautiful and makes everything to grow and be beautiful, and then it goes on to say Domine nobis pacem, which means Give peace to us, O Lord.”
Then the Abbess began to be frightened but she said only, “Who showed you this?” thinking that Radegunde had heard someone read and tell the words or had been pestering the nuns on the sly.
“No one,” said the child. “Shall I go on?” and she read page after page of the Latin, in each case telling what the words meant.
There is more to the story; but I will say only that after many prayers the Abbess Herrade sent her foster daughter far southwards, even to Poitiers, where Saint Radegunde had ruled an Abbey before, and some say even to Rome, and in these places Radegunde was taught all learning, for all learning there is in the world remains in these places. Radegunde came back a grown woman and nursed the Abbess through her last illness and then became Abbess in her turn. They say that the great folk of the Church down there in the south wanted to keep her because she was such a prodigy of female piety and learning, there where life is safe and comfortable and less rude than it is here, but she said that the gray skies and flooding winters of her birthplace called to her very soul. She often told me the story when I was a child: how headstrong she had been and how defiant', and how she had sickened so desperately for her native land that they had sent her back, deciding that a rude life in the mud of a northern village would be a good cure for such a rebellious soul as hers.
“And so it was,” she would say, patting my cheek or tweaking my ear. “See how humble I am now?” for you understand, all this about her rebellious girlhood, twenty years back, was a kind of joke between us. “Don’t you do it,” she would tell me and we would laugh together, I so heartily at the very idea of my being a pious monk full of learning that I would hold my sides and be unable to speak.
She was kind to everyone. She knew all the languages, not only ours, but the Irish too and the tongues folk speak to the north and south, and Latin and Greek also, and all the other languages in the world, both to read and write. She knew how to cure sickness, both the old womens way with herbs or leeches and out of books also. And never was there a more pious woman! Some speak ill of her now she’s gone and say she was too merry to be a good Abbess, but she would say, “Merriment is God’s flowers,” and when the winter wind blew her headdress awry and showed the gray hair—which happened once; I was there and saw the shocked faces of the Sisters with her—she merely tapped the band back into place, smiling and saying, “Impudent wind! Thou showest thou hast power which is more than our silly human power, for it is from God”—and this quite satisfied the girls with her.
No one ever saw her angry. She was impatient sometimes, but in a kindly way, as if her mind were elsewhere. It was in Heaven, I used to think, for I have seen her pray for hours or sink to her knees—right in the marsh!-—to see the wild duck fly south, her hands clasped and a kind of wild joy on her face, only to rise a moment later, looking at the mud on her habit and crying half-ruefully, half m laughter, “Oh, what will Sister Laundress say to me? I am hopeless! Dear child, tell no one; I will say I fell,” and then she would clap her hand to her mouth, turning red and laughing even harder, saying, “I am hopeless, telling lies!”
The town thought her a saint, of course. We were all happy then, or so it seems to me now, and all lucky and well, with this happiness of having her amongst us burning and blooming in our midst like a great fire around which we could all warm ourselves, even those who didn’t know why life seemed so good. There was less illness; the food was better; the very weather stayed mild; and people did not quarrel as they had before her time and do again now. Nor do I think, considering what happened at the end, that all this was nothing but the fancy of a boy who’s found his mother, for that’s what she was to me; I b
rought her all the gossip and ran errands when I could, and she called me Boy News in Latin; I was happier than I have ever been.
And then one day those terrible, beaked prows appeared in our river.
I was with her when the warning came, in the main room of the Abbey tower just after the first fire of the year had been lit in the great hearth; we thought ourselves safe, for they had never been seen so far south and it was too late in the year for any sensible shipman to be in our waters. The Abbey was host to three Irish priests who turned pale when young Sister Sibihd burst in with the news, crying and wringing her hands; one of the brothers exclaimed a thing in Latin which means “God protect us!” for they had been telling us stories of the terrible sack of the monastery of Saint Columbanus and how everyone had run away with the precious manuscripts or had hidden in the woods, and that was how Father Cairbre and the two others had decided to go “walk the world,” for this (the Abbess had been telling it all to me, for I had no Latin) is what the Irish say when they leave their native land to travel elsewhere.
“God protects our souls, not our bodies,” said the Abbess Radegunde briskly. She had been talking with the priests in their own language or in the Latin, but this she said in ours so even the women workers from the village would understand. Then she said, “Father Cairbre, take your friends and the younger Sisters to the underground passage; Sister Diemud, open the gates to the villagers; half of them will be trying to get behind the Abbey walls and the others will be fleeing to the marsh. You, Boy News, down to the cellars with the girls. ” But
I did not go and she never saw it; she was up and looking out one of the window slits instantly. So was I. I had always thought the Norsemens big ships came right up on land—on legs, I supposed—and was disappointed to see that after they came up our river they stayed in the water like other ships and the men were coming ashore in little boats, which they were busy pulling up on shore through the sand and mud. Then the Abbess repeated her order—“Quickly! Quickly!”—and before anyone knew what had happened, she was gone from the room. I watched from the tower window; in the turmoil nobody bothered about me. Below, the Abbey grounds and gardens were packed with folk, all stepping on the herb plots and the Abbess’s paestum roses, and great logs were being dragged to bar the door set in the stone walls round the Abbey, not high walls, to tell truth, and Radegunde was going quickly through the crowd, crying: Do this! Do that! Stay, thou! Go, thou! and like things.
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