Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  This makes me think of the great number of people who take a kind of perverse pride in declaring their dislike of California, not because they’ve actually been there, or because of anything they’ve read in the travel books, but because of, well, bad press, of which California too has had more than its share. I’ve known some Californians who, in certain situations, denied they were from California, and science fiction writers who believed that the only way to get literary respectability was to deny the science fiction label. But one of the things I know about Ursula is that she writes science fiction, although not only science fiction, and never has seen a reason to apologize for it. And she is (though long an Oregonian) originally from California, and never has been shy about saying so.

  Here is something else I know about Ursula. Not only does she try to make her own judgments on the basis of considerate, careful reading of the texts and travel books, but sometimes she embraces the very thing receiving bad press. She has been, for instance, and is even now a flaming liberal, an outspoken feminist, an abortion rights activist, a civil libertarian, a loud and unswerving opponent of censorship, an environmentalist, and an enemy of the OCA, which is Oregon’s local pack of ultra-right wing antigay paranoiacs.

  I’m guessing these are not the reasons she was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, though they very well could be.

  So here are a few more things I know about Ursula. She is a staunch supporter of the greater community of writers, and strongly values her memberships in the National Writers Union, the Writers Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN. She is especially proud to have been a charter member of SFWA.

  She has been, in one way or another, at one time or another, a Taoist, a Utopian, and a pacifist anarchist. She is a teacher, one of our best—a teacher who doesn’t pontificate or indoctrinate or evangelize, though there’s no denying she’s a woman of strong opinions. She’s funny, she laughs easily, she can be a wiseacre. She’s a reluctant flyer—she favors low-tech traveling, by train. She was slow to boot up, slow to forsake her old fossil of an Underwood, though by now she’s racing along pretty low and fast on her iMac. She’s a housewife poet. She was a graduate-school-dropout-stay-at-home-mother. And she is sane—an increasingly rare thing in our world.

  And she has brought all of this—her whole consciousness, her beliefs and experiences, as well as her matchless imagination—to her work as a writer of science fiction.

  One of the pleasures of reading Le Guin is to discover the many kinds of writing she has done well. But if, as Barry Lopez has said, each writer engages with just a handful of important questions, then it’s interesting to note how often Ursula’s characters seem to be groping toward the understanding that you must sometimes stand up and be counted, if silence is not to collude with injustice; how often in her novels and stories she seems to be defining what it means to inhabit—or reinhabit—a place; and how often the places she writes about are sad, proud, absurd, peculiar, and peopled by eccentrics and exiles. In her novels and stories there are often communities that have survived tragedies and have reshaped themselves around the losses, and also communities in the painful throes of learning beneficence toward their members and the place where they live. What you will not find in her work is sentimentality. These are communities in Emerson’s sense of the word—places where the complexities, and the suffering, and the hard work of belonging, are fully faced and acknowledged.

  The literary world can and does affect the world we live in. A novel, a story, can conjure a landscape, call it into imagination, make the unfamiliar familiar; and if a writer has brought her whole self to that literary world, then readers are swept along to the place inside that story. And as they participate in it, live in it, allow their lives to be merged with the lives of the people there, they learn from the story, they are changed by it.

  One of the things I know about Ursula is that she brings her whole self to her writing. When we read her novels, stories, poetry, we are changed by them and we begin to see ways we can inhabit, or reinhabit, our world. I am grateful to Ursula for many personal reasons to do with friendship and generosity, advice, encouragement; but I admire her for the simple reason that her life is an example to me, and that her books have become for me, as for many others, polestars, compasses—Michelin guides—not to California, but to the farthest borders of consciousness, where, in the embrace of words, we understand something that transcends words.

  The community of science fiction writers and readers is enriched by her very presence among us.

  URSULA K. LE GUIN SAYS . . .

  Ursula has been a member of SFWA since before the Punic Wars, lives in Portland (left coast), has recently published a book of stories, Changing Planes (Harcourt), and a translation of selected poems of Gabriela Mistral (University of New Mexico Press) and is looking forward to a collection of talks and essays, The Wave in the Mind (Shambhala Publications).

  Her Web site is at http://www.ursulakleguin.com/.

  FROM CHANGING PLANES

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  SITA DULIP’S METHOD

  The range of the airplane—a few thousand miles, the other side of the world, coconut palms, glaciers, the poles, the Poles, a lama, a llama, etc.—is pitifully limited compared to the vast extent and variety of experience provided, to those who know how to use it, by the airport.

  Airplanes are cramped, jammed, hectic, noisy, germy, alarming, and boring, serving unusually nasty food at utterly unreasonable intervals. Airports, though larger, share the crowding, vile air, noise, and relentless tension, while their food is often even nastier, consisting entirely of fried lumps of something; and the places one has to eat it in are suicidally depressing. On the airplane, everyone is locked into a seat with a belt and can move only during very short periods when they are allowed to stand in line waiting to empty their bladders until, just before they reach the toilet cubicle, a nagging loudspeaker harries them back to belted immobility. In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. These rushing people are watched by people who sit in plastic seats bolted to the floor and who might just as well be bolted to the seats. So far, then, the airport and the airplane are equal, in the way that the bottom of a septic tank is pretty much equal, all in all, to the bottom of the next septic tank.

  If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there’s five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you’ve missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?

  In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can’t go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.

  It was Sita Dulip of Cincinnati who first realized this, and so discovered the interplanar technique most of us now use.

  Her connecting flight from Chicago to Denver had been delayed by some unspeakable, or at any rate untold, malfunction of the airplane. It was listed as departing at 1:10, two hours late. At 1:55, it was listed as departing at 3:00. It was then taken off the departures list. There w
as no one at the gate to answer questions. The lines at the desks were eight miles long, only slightly shorter than the lines at the toilets. Sita Dulip had eaten a nasty lunch standing up at a dirty plastic counter, since the few tables were all occupied by wretched, whimpering children with savagely punitive parents, or by huge, hairy youths wearing shorts, tank tops, and rubber thongs. She had long ago read the editorials in the local newspaper, which advocated using the education budget to build more prisons and applauded the recent tax break for citizens whose income surpassed that of Rumania. The airport bookstores did not sell books, only best-sellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction. She had been sitting for over an hour on a blue plastic chair with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor in a row of people sitting in blue plastic chairs with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor facing a row of people sitting in blue plastic chairs with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor, when (as she later said), “It came to me.”

  She had discovered that, by a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere—be anywhere—because she was already between planes.

  She found herself in Strupsirts, that easily accessible and picturesque though somewhat three-dimensional region of waterspouts and volcanos, still a favorite with beginning interplanary travelers. In her inexperience she was nervous about missing her flight and stayed only an hour or two before returning to the airport. She saw at once that, on this plane, her absence had taken practically no time at all.

  Delighted, she slipped off again and found herself in Djeyo. She spent two nights at a small hotel run by the Interplanary Agency, with a balcony overlooking the amber Sea of Somue. She went for long walks on the beach, swam in the chill, buoyant, golden water—“like swimming in brandy and soda,” she said—and got acquainted with some pleasant visitors from other planes. The small and inoffensive natives of Djeyo, who take no interest in anyone else and never come down to the ground, squatted up in the vast crowns of the alm-palms, bargaining, gossiping, and singing soft, quick love songs to one another. When she reluctantly returned to the airport to check up, nine or ten minutes had passed. Her flight was soon called.

  She flew to Denver to her younger sister’s wedding. On the flight home she missed her connection at Chicago and spent a week on Choom, where she has often returned since. Her job with an advertising agency involves a good deal of air travel, and by now she speaks Choomwot like a native.

  Sita taught several friends, of whom I am happy to be one, how to change planes. And so the technique, the method, has gradually spread out from Cincinnati. Others on our plane may well have discovered it for themselves, since it appears that a good many people now practice it, not always intentionally. One meets them here and there.

  While staying with the Asonu I met a man from the Candensian plane, which is very much like ours, only more of it consists of Toronto. He told me that in order to change planes all a Candensian has to do is eat two dill pickles, tighten his belt, sit upright in a hard chair with his back not touching the back, and breathe ten times a minute for about ten minutes. This is enviably easy, compared to our technique. We (I mean people from the plane I occupy when not traveling) seem unable to change planes except at airports.

  The Interplanary Agency long ago established that a specific combination of tense misery, indigestion, and boredom is the essential facilitator of interplanary travel; but most people, from most planes, don’t have to suffer the way we do.

  The following reports and descriptions of other planes, given me by friends or written from notes I made on my own excursions and in libraries of various kinds, may induce the reader to try interplanary travel; or if not, they might at least help to pass an hour in an airport.

  PORRIDGE ON ISLAC

  It must be admitted that the method invented by Sita Dulip is not entirely reliable. You sometimes find yourself on a plane that wasn’t the one you meant to go to. If whenever you travel you carry with you a copy of Rornan’s Handy Planary Guide, you can read up on wherever it is you get to when you get there, though Rornan is not always reliable either. But the Encyclopedia Planaria, in forty-four volumes, is not portable, and after all, what is entirely reliable unless it’s dead?

  I arrived on Islac unintentionally, when I was inexperienced, before I had learned to tuck Rornan into my suitcase. The Interplanary Hotel there did have a set of the Encyclopedia, but it was at the bindery, because, they said, the bears had eaten the glue in the bindings and the books had all come to pieces. I thought they must have rather odd bears on Islac, but did not like to ask about them. I looked around the halls and my room carefully in case any bears were lurking. It was a beautiful hotel and the hosts were pleasant, so I decided to take my luck as it came and spend a day or two on Islac. I got to looking over the books in the bookcase in my room and trying out the built-in legemat, and had quite forgotten about bears, when something scuttled behind a bookend.

  I moved the bookend and glimpsed the scuttler. It was dark and furry but had a long, thin tail of some kind, almost like wire. It was six or eight inches long not counting the tail. I didn’t much like sharing my room with it, but I hate complaining to strangers—you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well—so I moved the heavy bookend over the hole in the wall the creature had disappeared into, and went down to dinner.

  The hotel served family style, all the guests at one long table. They were a friendly lot from several different planes. We were able to converse in pairs using our translatomats, though general conversation overloaded the circuits. My left-hand neighbor, a rosy lady from a plane she called Ahyes, said she and her husband came to Islac quite often. I asked her if she knew anything about the bears here.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling and nodding. “They’re quite harmless. But what little pests they are! Spoiling books, and licking envelopes, and snuggling in the bed!”

  “Snuggling in the bed?”

  “Yes, yes. They were pets, you see.”

  Her husband leaned forward to talk to me around her. He was a rosy gentleman. “Teddy bears,” he said in English, smiling. “Yes.”

  “Teddy bears?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, and then had to resort to his own language—“teddy bears are little animal pets for children, isn’t that right?”

  “But they’re not live animals.”

  He looked dismayed. “Dead animals?”

  “No—stuffed animals—toys—”

  “Yes, yes. Toys, pets,” he said, smiling and nodding.

  He wanted to talk about his visit to my plane; he had been to San Francisco and liked it very much, and we talked about earthquakes instead of teddy bears. He had found a 5.6 earthquake “a very charming experience, very enjoyable,” and he and his wife and I laughed a great deal as he told about it. They were certainly a nice couple, with a positive outlook.

  When I went back to my room I shoved my suitcase up against the bookend that blocked the hole in the wall, and lay in bed hoping that the teddy bears did not have a back door.

  Nothing snuggled into the bed with me that night. I woke very early, being jet-lagged by flying from London to Chicago, where my westbound flight had been delayed, allowing me this vacation. It was a lovely warm morning, the sun just rising. I got up and went out to take the air and see the city of Slas on the Islac plane.

  It might have been a big city on my plane, nothing exotic to my eye, except the buildings were more mixed in style and in size than ours. That is, we put the big imposing buildings at the center and on the nice streets, and the small humble ones in the neighborhoods or barrios or slums or shantytowns. In this residential quarter of Slas, big houses were all jumbled up together with tiny cottages, some of them hardly bigger than hutches. When I went the other direction, downtown, I found the same wild variation of scale in the office buildings. A massive old four-story granite block towered over a ten-story building ten feet wide, with floors only five or six fee
t apart—a doll’s skyscraper. By then, however, enough Islai were out and about that the buildings didn’t puzzle me as much as the people did.

  They were amazingly various in size, in color, in shape. A woman who must have been eight feet tall swept past me, literally: she was a street sweeper, busily and gracefully clearing the sidewalk of dust. She had what I took to be a spare broom or duster, a great spray of feathers, tucked into her waistband in back like an ostrich’s tail. Next came a businessman striding along, hooked up to the computer network via a plug in his ear, a mouthpiece, and the left frame of his spectacles, talking away as he studied the market report. He came up about to my waist. Four young men passed on the other side of the street; there was nothing odd about them except that they all looked exactly alike. Then came a child trotting to school with his little backpack. He trotted on all fours, neatly, his hands in leather mitts or boots that protected them from the pavement; he was pale, with small eyes, and a snout, but he was adorable.

  A sidewalk café had just opened up beside a park downtown. Though ignorant of what the Islai ate for breakfast I was ravenous, ready to dare anything edible. I held out my translatomat to the waitress, a worn-looking woman of forty or so with nothing unusual about her, to my eye, but the beauty of her thick, yellow, fancifully braided hair. “Please tell me what a foreigner eats for breakfast,” I said.

  She laughed, then smiled a beautiful, kind smile, and said, via the translatomat, “Well, you have to tell me that. We eat cledif, or fruit with cledif.”