Nebula Awards Showcase 2006

by Gardner Dozois

  THEN AND NOW

  FREDERIK POHL

  Back in the days when I made my first professional sale to a science fiction magazine, which was in . . .

  Well, let’s think about that date for a moment. What I sold was a poem. I wrote it in 1935. It was accepted by T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., the editor of Amazing Stories, in 1936. It was published in 1937 (in their October issue) . . . and paid for—in the amount of two dollars—in early 1938. So at some time over that period, however minimally, I made my first professional sale and thus became eligible to join in the wonderful world of the science fiction pro.

  That world, of course, was most wonderful only in the eyes of the yearning unpublished. There was certainly nothing wondrous about its financial aspects, because those in fact were pretty sad. In the mid-thirties there were three science fiction magazines. One was the monthly Astounding, the class of the field, which paid a lordly penny a word on acceptance for all it bought. The other two, Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories, were bimonthlies that paid only half as much a word, and didn’t pay at all until the work was actually published. Occasionally not even then.

  I once did the arithmetic on these financial matters, and it came out pretty discouraging. The three magazines together generated something around ten thousand dollars a year to pour into the collective coffers of the period’s SF writers. If you add in the income from such subsidiary rights as book publication, foreign-language translations, and motion-picture sales, you come up with a yearly total of . . . well, still ten thousand dollars, because the American SF writers of the 1930s never saw any of that kind of money. With negligible exceptions, the only science fiction published in book form in America in the 1930s was by English authors, and the other kinds of subsidiary-rights income didn’t exist at all.

  Even so (you may think) ten thousand dollars, especially ten thousand of the dollars of the 1930s, worth so much more apiece than our own inflated twenty-first-century play money, was not a contemptible sum. Indeed it was not. If any single writer had gotten it all he could have lived a kingly existence, perhaps with a staff of servants to take care of all the nonpleasurable parts of his daily life, conceivably with a pied-à-terre in Paris as well and maybe a winter place in the Florida keys. (Well, maybe not all of that, but pretty kingly all the same.)

  Unfortunately that ten grand didn’t go to a single writer; it was divided among sixty or seventy impecunious individuals. The average income for a 1930s science fiction writer was somewhere between three and four dollars a week. A few of the most prolific of the pulpsters—Arthur J. Burks, L. Ron Hubbard, and hardly anybody else—did better, but not out of science fiction alone. Most of what they wrote went to the magazines of the more popular pulp categories (detective, Western, sports, even love stories) as well as to the SF ones . . . and were the result of long daily hours pounding those old typewriter keys. In the lap of luxury no American science fiction writer resided in the 1930s.

  That’s the bad part. There was a good part, though, and that was that science fiction was catching on.

  Not in book publishing, of course—that didn’t happen until after World War II—and certainly not in any other of the subrights. But there was a sudden and wholly unexpected florescence of more of the same. New pulp SF magazines began popping up all over the place, until by the end of the decade there were some twenty of the things.

  This did not mean great enrichment for the writers. The new magazines were almost all bimonthlies, if that; few of them lasted more than a handful of issues; their payment rates were uniformly at the low end of the already low publishing scale (Don Wollheim’s two magazines, in fact, budgeted no payment at all for writers) . . . and the number of new writers entering the field was increasing as rapidly as the number of magazines, so that, instead of enriching the existing pros, the new outlets were pretty much just spreading the poverty around.

  The spirit of change was not limited to the new magazine pop-ups, either. By the end of the decade all three of the canonical magazines—Amazing, Astounding, Wonder—were still around, but all three of them were under new, and significantly different, management.

  T. O’Conor Sloane had been an editor, then the editor, of Amazing almost since its inception. He was eighty-six years old when he bought that pivotal bit of poetry from me—beard long and white, fingers trembling, and mind pretty firmly locked into the late nineteenth century. (He was convinced that spaceflight was a physical impossibility.) Mailing me that tiny check may have been one of the last things he did as Amazing’s editor, because early in 1938 the magazine was sold to the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company of Chicago, and Sloane was out of a job.

  His replacement was Raymond A. Palmer, who may or may not have believed in space travel but definitely did believe (or came to believe) that the stories by Richard S. Shaver that he published, dealing with great swarms of deranged robots that lived under the surface of the Earth and had malevolent plans for the human race, weren’t fiction at all. Although Palmer also published straight SF stories by old-timers like Eando Binder and newcomers like the teenage Isaac Asimov, it is the “Shaver mysteries” that define his tenure.

  Wonder Stories throughout most of the period was owned by Hugo Gernsback and, under his watchful eye, edited by the fairly undistinguished Charles D. Hornig. Like Amazing, it had seen better days, but then, when it was sold to the Thrilling Group in mid-decade, its fortunes changed. Its new editor was Leo Margulies, and its title was, of course, changed to Thrilling Wonder Stories. Thrilling Wonder wasn’t the only magazine Margulies edited; the company owned forty-five others, and Margulies was listed as the editor of all forty-six of them. (With, it is true, a large stable of assistants—including at one time or another H. L. Gold, Mort Weisinger, Samuel Mines, and half a dozen others.) But Margulies’s was the guiding intelligence. He had no particular interest in science fiction, but he knew what he wanted from its writers. It was the same thing he demanded from his Western and mystery and air-war authors, and it could be summed up in one word:

  Action.

  Margulies had no objection to stories with a social message (as, for instance, Heinlein’s “Jerry Is a Man”) or to interesting new kinds of planets and alien creatures (like John Campbell’s tour of the solar system in his “Penton and Blake” series or Stanley Weinbaum’s superintelligent Venusian plants). All he insisted on was that, if the writer was determined to have his characters debate alien customs, they should do so while having a ray-gun battle with the aliens. It was his conviction that his pulp readership, whatever the genre, was composed principally of eleven-year-olds, thus such childishness as his “Sergeant Saturn” letter columns.

  But there was one editor who considered his readers to be capable of adult thought (even though not of being exposed to matters of adult sexuality). That was John Campbell. Astounding was lucky in having had the great good fortune of being picked up by the high-end pulp chain of Street & Smith when Clayton, its original publisher, went belly-up, luckier still when, in 1938, it was given over to John W. Campbell, Jr., to edit. Campbell is generally considered the greatest editor science fiction has ever seen, and perhaps his willingness to consider his readers grown-ups is why. Campbell’s editoral policy, he himself said, was to publish stories that could be read as contemporary fiction, but in a magazine of the twenty-fifth century. And he came pretty close.

  That was then. Now it’s the twenty-first century and much has changed almost unrecognizably. Money, for instance. Even when inflation is discounted, now there is much, much more of it to spread around, and it comes not only from the handful of surviving specialist magazines but from book publishers, television and movie producers, and even such grace notes as lecture fees and corporate consultancies. Respectability: Even the most elevated of literatures will now sometimes admire certain science fiction stories, provided only that they are permitted to deny that those stories are SF at all. Accessibility: In the 1930s a beginning writer who had not yet persuaded any of the paying magazines
to take on any of his stories—the young Ray Bradbury, say—had only one recourse, which was to publish them, free, in a (typically mimeographed) fan magazine, where they would be read by perhaps a couple of dozen human beings. Now the World Wide Web has provided countless e-publishers. Often the payment is the same—that’s to say, somewhere around zero—but the readership may now be in the thousands.

  So in that way and in most others it is now a considerably better world for the average SF writer. Easy, no . . . but then if it were really easy everybody would be doing it, and what would be the fun of that?

  CHRISTOPHER ROWE

  New writer Christopher Rowe was born in Kentucky and lives there still. With Gwenda Bond, he operates a small press and edits the critically acclaimed magazine Say. His stories have appeared in SCI FICTION, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, Idomancer, Swan Sister, Trampoline, The Infinite Matrix, The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, and elsewhere, and have recently been collected in Bittersweet Creek.

  About “The Voluntary State,” he says:

  “ ‘The Voluntary State’ was written as a submission piece for the 2003 Sycamore Hill Writers Conference, where all of the attendees gave me insightful and useful advice.

  “Specifically, Jonathan Lethem and Jeffrey Ford both identified a lot of places for improvement to the, yes, pretty messy manuscript I turned in, as did my fellow nominee Andy Duncan and workshop corunner John Kessel. I owe all those guys a lot.

  “Even more, I owe thanks to these three incomparable people: Richard Burner, Kelly Link, and Karen Joy Fowler. There’s more critical acumen in that one sentence than I could begin to describe to you. Not to mention character, grace, talent, generosity, and kindness.

  “After the first round of post Syc Hill rewrites, I sent the story to Ellen Datlow, who agreed to publish it with the proviso that I clarify some things. Over the last few years, I’ve started making more and more demands of the people who read my fiction, and Ellen pointed out places where clarity had been sacrificed to my own bullheaded notions of art.

  “So I sent the story to Ted Chiang, one of the smartest writers. (I started to put some kind of clause on the end of that sentence like ‘. . . in the field’ or ‘. . . I’ve ever met,’ but I think I should probably let it stand.) See, I was trying a runaround. I was going to prove, to myself at least, that the story could be “got” as it was. Ted expressed confusion over some passages. Friends, when Ted Chiang doesn’t get something you’ve written, it’s not because your readers aren’t as clever as you are.

  “It went back to Ellen and it came back to me and it went back to Ellen and it came back to me. Ellen kept pushing me to get it closer and closer to what she thought it could be, and eventually I realized that what Ellen thought it could be is pretty much what it should be. Thanks, Ellen.

  “All of those people did all of that work for me and that story, and I thank them for it.

  “But of course, none of them did a damned thing compared to the person who essentially started the story in the first place, the person who said, in response to my whining that I didn’t have anything to write about, ‘There’s a car on top of a hill. The door’s open. There’s nobody in it. Now shut up.’

  “So most of all, thanks to my wife, Gwenda Bond. This is where the ‘without whom’ goes, but I can’t think of anything to put afterward, because I can’t think of anything I’d do or be without her.”

  THE VOLUNTARY STATE

  CHRISTOPHER ROWE

  Soma had parked his car in the trailhead lot above Governor’s Beach. A safe place, usually, checked regularly by the Tennessee Highway Patrol and surrounded on three sides by the limestone cliffs that plunged down into the Gulf of Mexico.

  But today, after his struggle up the trail from the beach, he saw that his car had been attacked. The driver’s side window had been kicked in.

  Soma dropped his pack and rushed to his car’s side. The car shied away from him, backed to the limit of its tether before it recognized him and turned, let out a low, pitiful moan.

  “Oh, car,” said Soma, stroking the roof and opening the passenger door. “Oh, car, you’re hurt.” Then Soma was rummaging through the emergency kit, tossing aside flares and bandages, finally, finally finding the glass salve. Only after he’d spread the ointment over the shattered window and brushed the glass shards out onto the gravel, only after he’d sprayed the whole door down with analgesic aero, only then did he close his eyes, access call signs, drop shields. He opened his head and used it to call the police.

  In the scant minutes before he saw the cadre of blue and white bicycles angling in from sunward, their bubblewings pumping furiously, he gazed down the beach at Nashville. The cranes the Governor had ordered grown to dredge the harbor would go dormant for the winter soon—already their acres-broad leaves were tinged with orange and gold.

  “Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley,” said voices from above. Soma turned to watch the policemen land. They all spoke simultaneously in the sing-song chant of law enforcement. “Your car will be healed at taxpayers’ expense.” Then the ritual words, “And the wicked will be brought to justice.”

  Efficiency and order took over the afternoon as the threatened rain began to fall. One of the 144 Detectives manifested, Soma and the policemen all looking about as they felt the weight of the Governor’s servant inside their heads. It brushed aside the thoughts of one of the Highway Patrolmen and rode him, the man’s movements becoming slightly less fluid as he was mounted and steered. The Detective filmed Soma’s statement.

  “I came to sketch the children in the surf,” said Soma. He opened his daypack for the soapbubble lens, laid out the charcoal and pencils, the sketchbook of boughten paper bound between the rusting metal plates he’d scavenged along the middenmouth of the Cumberland River.

  “Show us, show us,” sang the Detective.

  Soma flipped through the sketches. In black and gray, he’d drawn the floating lures that crowded the shallows this time of year. Tiny, naked babies most of them, but also some little girls in one-piece bathing suits and even one fat prepubescent boy clinging desperately to a deflating beach ball and turning horrified, pleading eyes on the viewer.

  “Tssk, tssk,” sang the Detective, percussive. “Draw filaments on those babies, Soma Painter. Show the lines at their heels.”

  Soma was tempted to show the Detective the artistic licenses tattooed around his wrists in delicate salmon inks, to remind the intelligence which authorities had purview over which aspects of civic life, but bit his tongue, fearful of a For-the-Safety-of-the-Public proscription. As if there were a living soul in all of Tennessee who didn’t know that the children who splashed in the surf were nothing but extremities, nothing but lures growing from the snouts of alligators crouching on the sandy bottoms.

  The Detective summarized. “You were here at your work, you parked legally, you paid the appropriate fee to the meter, you saw nothing, you informed the authorities in a timely fashion. Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley, the Tennessee Highway Patrol applauds your citizenship.”

  The policemen had spread around the parking lot, casting cluenets and staring back through time. But they all heard their cue, stopped what they were doing, and broke into a raucous cheer for Soma. He accepted their adulation graciously.

  Then the Detective popped the soapbubble camera and plucked the film from the air before it could fall. It rolled up the film, chewed it up thoughtfully, then dismounted the policeman, who shuddered and fell against Soma. So Soma did not at first hear what the others had begun to chant, didn’t decipher it until he saw what they were encircling. Something was caught on the wispy thorns of a nodding thistle growing at the edge of the lot.

  “Crow’s feather,” the policemen chanted. “Crow’s feather Crow’s feather Crow’s feather.”

  And even Soma, licensed for art instead of justice, knew what the fluttering bit of black signified. His car had been assaulted by Kentuckians.

  Soma had never
, so far as he recalled, painted a self-portrait. But his disposition was melancholy, so he might have taken a few visual notes of his trudge back to Nashville if he’d thought he could have shielded the paper from the rain.

  Soma Between the Sea and the City, he could call a painting like that. Or, if he’d decided to choose that one clear moment when the sun had shone through the towering slate clouds, Soma Between Storms.

  Either image would have shown a tall young man in a broad-brimmed hat, black pants cut off at the calf, yellow jersey unsealed to show a thin chest. A young man, sure, but not a young man used to long walks. No helping that; his car would stay in the trailhead lot for at least three days.

  The mechanic had arrived as the policemen were leaving, galloping up the gravel road on a white mare marked with red crosses. She’d swung from the saddle and made sympathetic clucking noises at the car even before she greeted Soma, endearing herself to auto and owner simultaneously.

  Scratching the car at the base of its aerial, sussing out the very spot the car best liked attention, she’d introduced herself. “I am Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails,” she’d said, but didn’t seem to be worried about it because she ran her free hand through unfashionably short cropped blond hair as she spoke.

  She’d whistled for her horse and began unpacking the saddlebags.

  “I have to build a larger garage than normal for your car, Soma Painter, for it must house me and my horse during the convalescence. But don’t worry, my licenses are in good order. I’m bonded by the city and the state. This is all at taxpayers’ expense.”