All in all, rather a pallid year. Most of the buzz in the air at the moment is directed toward some of the keenly anticipated movies that are theoretically going to be out sometime in 2001: The new film version of The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter movie, Spielberg’s version of Kubrick’s A.I., the new Matrix movie, perhaps Star Wars: Episode Two, maybe even a new Star Trek movie (hey, it could happen!). Next year at this time, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fans will be locked in pitched battle about whether the filmed versions did justice to (or were faithful enough to) the books, but, for the moment, anticipation is high, and the implicit agreement among genre movie fans seems to be to just write off the year 2000 and forget about it. Not a bad idea, really.
It was also a lackluster year for SF and fantasy on television. Shows such as The X-Files, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Star Trek: Voyager dragged out their messy death agonies throughout the year, but already there’s a sense that these shows are yesterday’s news, fading into the past and into nostalgic memory even before they’ve actually left the airwaves. So far, it doesn’t look to me as if any of the “new” series are really a good prospect to fill the power vacuum that’ll be left behind once former Big Shows like The X-Files are finally gone. Farscape is still a pretty good show, as TV Space Opera goes, but although it certainly has its fans, it so far doesn’t seem to me to have created the kind of fanatical, fantastically dedicated fan base that former Cult Favorites such as Babylon 5 once enjoyed. There are few other shows that are even in the running for that crown; Gene Roddenbery’s Andromeda may be a distant prospect, or Stargate, but so far neither seems to have generated even as much buzz as Farscape has. Cleopatra 2525, mercifully, seems to have died, and I think that Lexx might have as well. Roswell, the prime-time soap opera featuring the adventures of the part-human, young, attractive, blow-dried descendants of UFO aliens, almost died, too, but was given a last-minute reprieve. Futurama is still on, and still occasionally funny, but it must say something—although I’m not sure what—that the two best SF shows on TV are a cartoon and one featuring Muppets (clearly recognizable as Muppets) as aliens. From here on down, most of the shows are comedies, and the rationale for considering them to be SF shows, rather than shows with comic surreal elements that occasionally borrow SF tropes, grows increasingly thin: The Simpsons and Third Rock From the Sun keep on keeping on, as they do year after year, and South Park is still with us, too, although its ratings are dropping, and it may be beginning to lose its audience.
The fantasy end of the spectrum seems to be in better shape than the science fiction end at the moment, commercially at least, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel firmly established as huge hits, and shows such as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Charmed also doing well, to say nothing (which would be my preference) of a number of Angels-Among-Us shows.
All in all, not much to write home about on The Tube, either.
Two special presentations deserve mention, though: Toward the end of the year, the Sci-Fi Channel unveiled a six-hour miniseries version of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which immediately launched Internet flamewars as to whether it was better or worse than David Lynch’s feature film version from some years back, and inspired dozens of letters in Science Fiction Weekly and elsewhere nitpicking that this scene or character from the book had been left out, or weren’t portrayed the way they were in the book, or in the Lynch film. (All of which prompts me to warn the producers of the upcoming Lord of the Rings movie to brace themselves for a similar storm of criticism—no matter how well the movie is done, there’s always going to be somebody who’s incensed because their favorite line was left out, or a character doesn’t look the way they pictured them in their minds while reading the book.) Although there were certainly things to criticize about the new miniseries version of Dune, and nits galore waiting to be picked, I thought that on the whole they did a reasonable job with it, trading compromises in plotting and effects for do-ability and good storytelling techniques. I certainly preferred it to the Lynch, which, while it had some good stuff in it (the scene where they bring the Third-Stage Guild Navigator out in what looks like a steaming railroad freight car, for instance, was spooky and wonderful, and effectively delivered a sense of pure alienness unmatched by anything in the miniseries), was overall a mess, and didn’t work anywhere near as well as a coherent aesthetic whole. If nothing else, the straightforward storytelling technique of the new Dune was a relief after the solemn, slow pretentiousness of the Lynch version; it doesn’t aim as high, but it doesn’t fail as grandly either. The other program which would probably interest most SF fans was Walking With Dinosaurs, which used some extremely good computer animation (along with some very poor puppet-head work) to deliver a show that depicted the lifeways of various kinds of dinosaurs with the immediacy and verisimilitude of a Nature Documentary about wildebeests or giraffes, as though they’d sent time-travelling naturalists and camera crews back to actually observe and film the big beasts in action. Walking With Dinosaurs was intensely controversial among paleontologists, many of whom fiercely criticized it for depicting highly speculative dinosaur behavior as if it was unquestioned fact, but it was good television—unlike most of the stuff on this year.
The 58th World Science Fiction Convention, ChiCon 2000, was held in Chicago, Illinois, August 31-September 4, 2000, and drew an estimated attendance of 6,473. The 2000 Hugo Awards, presented at ChiCon 2000, were: Best Novel, A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge; Best Novella, “The Winds of Marble Arch,” by Connie Willis; Best Novelette, “1016 to 1,” by James Patrick Kelly; Best Short Story, “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” by Michael Swanwick; Best Related Book, Science Fiction of the twentieth century, by Frank Robinson; Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Professional Artist, Michael Whelan; Best Dramatic Presentation, Galaxy Quest; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, File 770, edited by Mike Glyer; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Joe Mayhew; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Cory Doctorow.
The 1999 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in New York City on May 20, 2000, were: Best Novel, Parable of the Talents, by Octavia E. Butler; Best Novella, “Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang; Best Novelette, “Mars Is No Place for Children,” by Mary A. Turzillo; Best Short Story, “The Cost of Doing Business,” by Leslie What; Best Script, The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan; plus an Author Emeritus award to Daniel Keyes, and the Grand Master Award to Brian W. Aldiss.
The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twenty-sixth Annual World Fantasy Convention in Corpus Christi, Texas, October 26-29, 2000, were: Best Novel, Thraxas, by Martin Scott; Best Novella, “The Transformation of Martin Lake,” by Jeff VanderMeer and “Sky Eyes,” by Laurel Winter (tie); Best Short Fiction, “The Chop Girl,” by Ian R. MacLeod; Best Collection, Moonlight and Vines, by Charles de Lint and Reave the Just and Other Tales, by Stephen R. Donaldson (tie); Best Anthology, Silver Birch, Blood Moon, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; Best Artist, Jason Van Hollander; Special Award (Professional), to Gordon Van Gelder, for editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and at St. Martin’s Press; Special Award (Non-Professional), to The British Fantasy Society; plus the Life Achievement Award to Michael Moorcock and Marion Zimmer Bradley.
The 2000 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the Adams Mark Hotel in Denver, Colorado, on May 13, 2000, were: Best Novel, Mr. X, by Peter Straub; Best First Novel, Wither, by J. G. Passarella; Best Collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, by Douglas Clegg; Best Long Fiction, “Five Days in April,” by Brian A. Hopkins and “Mad Dog Summer,” by Joe R. Lansdale (tie); Best Short Story, “After Shock,” by F. Paul Wilson; Non-Fiction, DarkEcho Newsletter (all 1999 issues), edited by Paula Guran; Best Anthology, 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, edited by A1 Sarrantonio; Best Screenplay, The Sixth Sense, by M. Night Shyamalan; Best Work for Young Readers, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by J. K.
Rowling; Best Illustrated Narrative, The Sandman: The Dream Hunter, by Neil Gaiman; Best Other Media (audio), “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” by Harlan Ellison; a Specialty Press Award to Christopher and Barbara Roden for Ash-Tree Press; plus the Lifetime Achievement Award to Edward Gorey and Charles L. Grant.
The 1999 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge.
The 1999 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by “The Wedding Album,” by David Marusek.
The 1999 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to Vacuum Diagrams, by Stephen Baxter.
The 1999 Arthur C. Clarke Award was won by Distraction, by Bruce Sterling.
The 1999 James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award was won by The Conqueror’s Child, by Suzy McKee Charnas.
Dead in 2000 or early 2001 were: L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP, 92, writer, critic, and anthologist, one of the most famous of the “Golden Age” giants, winner of the Hugo Award, the International Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Convention’s Life Achievement Award, author of such famous SF novels as Lest Darkness Fall (which practically invented the Alternate History subgenre), The Glory That Was, Rogue Queen, and The Hand of Zei, the seminal fantasy The Complete Enchanter (with Fletcher Pratt), and distinguished historical novels such as The Bronze God of Rhodes and An Elephant for Aristotle, as well as many nonfiction books, anthologies, and critical works, including the definitive history of H. P. Lovecraft; GORDON R. DICKSON, 78, Hugo and Nebula-winner, best known for his long-running “Dorsai” sequence of novels and stories, which included Soldier, Ask Not, The Genetic General, Necromancer, The Far Call, and The Final Encyclopedia, and others, as well as many other unrelated books such as Special Delivery, The Way of the Pilgrim, and The Dragon and the George; KEITH ROBERTS, 65, author, artist, and editor, one of the most important British SF writers of the ‘60s and ’70s, author of the famous novel Pavane, one of the best Alternate World novels ever written, as well as The Chalk Giants, Kiteworld, The Furies, the upcoming Drek Yarman, and a large body of brilliant work at shorter lengths; JOHN SLADEK, 62, writer and satirist, author of The Reproductive System, The Muller-Fokker Effect, Roderick, or The Education of a Young Machine; Roderick at Random, or Further Education of a Young Machine, Tik-Tok, and Bugs, as well as much mordant short work; DAVID R. BUNCH, 74, author of a large body of eccentric, fiercely iconoclastic short stories over a long career, most of which were assembled in the collections Moderan and Bunch!; CURT SIODMAK, 98, novelist, screenwriter, director, author of Donovan’s Brain and the screenplay for the famous monster movie, The Wolf Man; EMIL PETAJA, 85, veteran writer, winner of SFWA’s Author Emeritus award, author of The Stolen Sun and Saga of Lost Earths, among many others; REX VINSON, 64, who, as VINCENT KING, wrote such SF novels as Another End, Candy Man, and Light a Last Candle; RICK SHELLEY, 54, frequent contributor to Analog, author of many novels, such as Lieutenant Colonel, The Buchanan Campaign, Jump Pay, and the Varayan Memoir series; JOSEPH H. DELANEY, 67, author and attorney, frequent contributor of legal-themed SF stories to Analog for almost twenty years, author of In the Face of My Enemy, and other novels; SHERWOOD SPRINGER, 88, veteran writer of short fiction and a longtime SF fan; DAVID DUNCAN, 86, novelist, author of Occam’s Razor and Beyond Eden; RICHARD LAYMON, 54, horror writer, serving a term as president of the Horror Writers of America at the time of his death, author of After Midnight, Blood Games, and The Travelling Vampire Show; ROBERT E. CORMIER, 75, author of Young Adult novels such as the well-known The Chocolate War, and also of the fantasy novel Fade; OLIVER E. SAARI, 81, veteran pulp author; MARY BROWN, 70, British fantasy writer, author of The Unlikely Ones; CLAUDE VAUZIERE, 72, French SF writer; DON WILCOX, 94, veteran pulp author; STURE LONNERSTAND, 80, Swedish SF writer and longtime fan; LAURENCE JAMES, 56, British author and editor; MICHAEL McDOWELL, 49, author of The Amulet and Cold Moon Over Babylon; KEITH SCOTT, 79, Canadian author; Dr. ALEX COMFORT, 80, best known for the bestseller The Joy of Sex, who also wrote such SF novels as Cities of the Plain and The Philosopher; STEVE ALLEN, 78, author, composer, and television personality, pioneering host of The Tonight Show (which practically invented the late-night talk-show format), who created the Alternate History-like TV program, Meeting of Minds, where famous people from across history were brought together for dinner and conversation, and who also wrote (in addition to a recent string of mystery novels) a few fairly well received science fiction stories, the best known of which is probably “The Public Hating”; JEAN SHEPHERD, writer and radio personality, whose funny, nostalgic work occasionally had mild fantastic elements (or at least moments of surreal exaggeration), best known for the collections In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories, and A Fistful of Fig Newtons; EDWARD GOREY, 75, artist and author, winner of two two World Fantasy Awards, probably the best-known artist of the satirically macabre and risibly ghoulish since Charles Addams, author of illustrated books such as The Doubtful Guest, The D. Awdrey-Core Legacy, The Unstrung Harp, The Gashlycrumb Times, The Evil Garden, and many others; CARL BANKS, 99, comics artist and author, creator of Scrooge McDuck, many of whose adventures featured strong and rigorously worked-out fantastic elements that were influential on a whole generation of SF writers, and whose portraits of Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, and others have become highly collectable (and extremely expensive) fine art; KAREL THOLE, 86, artist, considered by many to be one of the most distinguished of all European artists to work in the genre SF market; CHARLES M. SCHULZ, cartoonist, creator of the long-running Peanuts strip, one of the most famous comic strips of all time, which often featured minor fantastic elements; DON MARTIN, 68, cartoonist, known mostly for his semisurreal work for Mad Magazine; JOE MAYHEW, 57, Hugo-winning fan artist, one of the best fannish cartoonists ever, as well as a writer, a carver of beautifully crafted walking sticks, a longtime fan, and a dedicated and tireless convention organizer; CHARLES D. HORNIG, 83, veteran editor of pulp magazines such as Wonder Stories, Science Fiction, and Future Fiction; JEAN KARL, 72, longtime editor of the Atheneum imprint, author of The Turning Place; ADELE LEONE, 48, agent and editor, SF editor of Pocket Books in the ’70s; JAMES ALLEN, 48, President of the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency; MICHAEL GILBERT, 53, artist, writer, publishing professional, husband of Sheila Gilbert, the copublisher of DAW Books; JENNA A. FELICE, 25, Tor editor, associate editor of the magazine Century, longtime partner of Century editor Robert K. J. Killheffer, and a personal friend; LINDA GRAY, 54, former President and Publisher of Bantam Books and Ballantine; SIR ALEC GUINESS, 86, distinguished stage and film actor, best known to audiences today—something which did not entirely please him—as the Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi in the movie Star Wars and its sequels; JOHN NEWLAND, 82, host of the pioneering supernatural anthology TV show, Alcoa Presents One Step Beyond, which did some very creepy and effective episodes in the ’50s and early ’60s; STANLEY KRAMER, veteran film director, best known to genre audiences as the director of the After-the-Bomb movie On the Beach; WALTER A. WILLIS, prominent Irish fan and fan writer; BILL DONAHO, 74, longtime fan and fanzine publisher; BILL DANNER, 93, longtime fan and fanzine editor; ROBERT SALKS, 49, longtime fan and convention organizer; CATHERINE CROOK DE CAMP, 92, wife of SF writer L. Sprague de Camp, his longtime business manager, and his collaborator on many novels and nonfiction projects; NANCY TUCKER SHAW, 71, widow of SF writer Bob Shaw, and the longtime head of the Science Fiction Oral History Society; FRANCES WELLMAN, the widow of SF/fantasy writer Manly Wade Wellman; PEGGY CAVE, 86, wife of SF/fantasy writer Hugh B. Cave; CHARLOTTE R. HENSLEY, 71, wife of SF and mystery writer Joe C. Hensley; DEDE WEIL, 56, wife of SF critic Gary K. Wolfe; ANNE SHERLIN ASHER, 94, mother of SF Book Club editor Ellen Asher; ALICE ALTSCHULER SHERMAN, mother of SF writer Josepha Sherman; JULIUS SCHULMAN, 84, father of SF writer J. Neil Schulman, and a renowned classical violinist; CHARLES BENJAMIN CARD, 16, son of SF writer Orson Scott Card; MARCH LAUMER, 76, brother of SF writer Keith Laumer, author of The Wooden Soldiers of Oz and other children’s books.
The
Juniper Tree
JOHN KESSEL
Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975. His first solo novel, Good News from Outer Space, was released in 1988 to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories, many of which were assembled in his collection Meeting in Infinity. He won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his superlative novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has been released as an individual book. His story “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1991. His other books include the novel Freedom Beach, written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, and an anthology of stories from the famous Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop (which he also helps to run), called Intersections, coedited by Mark L. Van Name and Richard Butner. His most recent books are a major novel, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and a collection, The Pure Product.
Here he takes us to a colonized Moon, humanity’s newest habitation, for a taut encounter with some passions that are very old indeed … .
THE JUNIPER TREE
One of the most successful transplants to the colony established by the Society of Cousins on the far side of the Moon was the juniper tree. Soon after Jack Baldwin and his daughter Rosalind emigrated in 2085, a project under Baldwin’s direction planted junipers on the inside slopes of the domed crater, where they prospered in the low-moisture environment. Visitors to the Society today may be excused if, strolling the woods above the agricultural lands of the crater floor, the fragrance of the foliage, beneath the projected blue sky of the dome, makes them think for a moment that they are in some low-gravity dream of New Mexico.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection Page 7