Nebula Awards Showcase 2008

by Ben Bova

  “Stop it! This is cruel.” Memsen yanked his hand down. “We have to go right now.”

  “Why?” said the High Gregory plaintively. “He’s not going to remember any of this.”

  “Vic was saved?” Even though he was still safe in the wheelchair, he felt as if he were falling.

  “All the pukpuk martyrs were.” The High Gregory tried to shake his hand loose from Memsen, but she wouldn’t let him go. “That was why they agreed to sacrifice themselves.”

  “Enough.” Memsen started to drag him from the cabin. “We’re sorry, Spur. You’re a decent man. Go back to your cottage and your apples and forget about us.”

  “Goodbye, Spur,” called the High Gregory as they popped through the bulkhead. “Good luck.”

  As the bulkhead shivered with their passing, he felt a fierce and troubling desire burn his soul. Some part of him did want to go with them, to be with Comfort and Vic on the upside and see the wonders that Chairman Winter had forbidden the citizens of the Transcendent State. He could do it; he knew he could. After all, everyone in Littleton seemed to think he was leaving.

  But then who would help Cape bring in the harvest?

  Spur wasn’t sure how long he sat alone in the wheelchair with a thousand thoughts buzzing in his head. The upsiders had just blown up his world and he was trying desperately to piece it back together. Except what was the point? In a little while he wasn’t going to be worrying anymore about Comfort and Vic and shells and being saved. Maybe that was for the best; it was all too complicated. Just like the Chairman had said. Spur thought he’d be happier thinking about apples and baseball and maybe kissing Melody Velez. He was ready to forget.

  He realized that the hover had gone completely still. There was no vibration from the hull skimming through the air, no muffled laughter from the L’ung. He watched the hospital equipment melt into the deck. Then all the bulkheads popped and he could see the entire bay of the hover. It was empty except for his wheelchair, a gurney with Comfort’s shroud-covered body and the docbot, which rolled up to him.

  “So you’re going to make me forget all this?” said Spur bitterly. “All the secrets of the upside?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  Spur shivered. “I have a choice?”

  “I’m just the doctor, son. I can offer treatment but you have to accept it. For example, you chose not to tell me how you got burned that first time.” The docbot rolled behind the wheelchair. “That pretty much wrecked everything I was trying to accomplish with the conciliation sim.”

  Spur turned around to look at it. “You knew all along?”

  The docbot locked into the back of the wheelchair. “I wouldn’t be much of a doctor if I couldn’t tell when patients were lying to me.” It started pushing Spur toward the hatch.

  “But you work for the Chairman.” Spur didn’t know if he wanted the responsibility for making this decision.

  “I take Jack Winter’s money,” said the docbot. “I don’t take his advice when it comes to medical or spiritual practice.”

  “But what if I tell people that Comfort and Vic are saved and that upsiders get to go on after they die?”

  “Then they’ll know.”

  Spur tried to imagine keeping the upsiders’ immortality a secret for the rest of his days. He tried to imagine what would happen to the Transcendent State if he told what he knew. His mouth went as dry as flour. He was just a farmer, he told himself; he didn’t have that good an imagination. “You’re saying that I don’t have to have my memory of all this erased?”

  “Goodness, no. Unless you’d rather forget about me.”

  As they passed Comfort’s body, Spur said, “Stop a minute.”

  He reached out and touched the shroud. He expected it to be some strange upsider fabric but it was just a simple cotton sheet. “They knew that I could choose to remember, didn’t they? Memsen and the High Gregory were playing me to the very end.”

  “Son,” said Dr. Niss, “the High Gregory is just a boy and nobody in the Thousand Worlds knows what the Allworthy knows.”

  But Spur had stopped listening. He rubbed the shroud between his thumb and forefinger, thinking about how he and the Joerlys used to make up adventures in the ruins along Mercy’s Creek when they were children. Often as not one of them would achieve some glorious death as part of the game. The explorer would boldly drink from the poisoned cup to free her comrades, the pirate captain would be run through defending his treasure, the queen of skantlings would throw down her heartstone rather than betray the castle. And then he or Vic or Comfort would stumble dramatically to the forest floor and sprawl there, cheek pressed against leaf litter, as still as scattered stones. The others would pause briefly over the body and then dash into the woods, so that the fallen hero could be reincarnated and the game could go on.

  “I want to go home,” he said, at last.

  ALL OUR YESTERDAYS…

  As a distinct genre, science fiction began with Hugo Gernsbach’s Amazing Stories in 1926, soon followed by other magazines such as Astounding Stories of Super Science (1930), still being published as Analog Science Fiction—Science Fact.

  But for more than half a century, anthologies have reached a wider audience, especially in the format of mass-market paperback books. Starting as collections of previously published stories, anthologies of new tales, written specifically (and usually by invitation) for the individual project, became the cutting edge of the market for short fiction.

  In this essay, Bud Webster takes a look back at the anthologies produced by SFWA, the Hall of Fame series. Consisting of stories published before the Nebula Awards came into being, the HoF anthologies showcase the best short fiction of the genre’s earlier years.

  Whenever a newcomer to the field of science fiction and fantasy asks for a definitive anthology, the Hall of Fame anthologies are the place to start. And then, of course, the annual Nebula Awards volumes.

  Bud Webster is an amateur science fiction historian, a prize-winning epic poet, and a bibliophile who frequently commits fiction, notably the Bubba Pritchert stories for Analog magazine. He lives in central Virginia with a more than understanding Significant Other and three damn cats.

  ANTHOPOLOGY 101: THE BOOKS THAT SAVED SFWA

  BUD WEBSTER

  As I sit here and look at the shelves in my office, I’m struck by two thoughts: a) that I have assembled a significant collection of anthologies, both hardcover and paperback, representing a span of more than a half century; and b) it ain’t enough.

  Oh, I have almost all of the can’t-do-withouts, and I believe I have put together representative, if not complete, selections of all the key anthologists, and I have more than a few rarities that I see selling online for far more than I paid for my copies. Plus, inevitably, there are the duplicates that I may eventually get around to selling online myself, assuming I can stand to part with them.

  That all makes me feel warm inside, but there is still the frustration that no matter how many anthologies I own, I still don’t own them all. Doesn’t that just suck?

  But I could still assemble a pretty fair lending library of classic SF and fantasy from the books I currently own, and I’m adding to it all the time as finances (and the vagaries of eBay and local used booksellers) permit. At hand, I can count an even dozen titles that I would consider sine qua non for the serious reader, with very little duplication in stories.

  Were I to be asked by someone unfamiliar with the genre to recommend books that would give them a good overview of the field’s best prior to 1970 (as I have been), or were I to be asked by a university to suggest an appropriate text for a history of SF class (as I have been as well), there are perhaps three titles I would mention without hesitation:

  Adventures in Time and Space by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, The Best of Science Fiction by Groff Conklin, and The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vols. I and IIA and IIB, edited by Robert Silverberg and Ben Bova, respectively. I’ve written about the first two (
call them Goliath and Leviathan) elsewhere and elsewhen, so let’s turn our attention to Behemoth, shall we?

  Silverberg, whose project this was from day one, refers to The Science Fiction Hall of Fame as “the book that saved SFWA from bankruptcy.” A bold statement, indeed, but is it accurate? If so, just how did these three volumes rescue a financially moribund organization of professional SF writers?

  A little history first, just so we’re all on the same page. In 1956, Damon Knight, Judith Merril, and James Blish founded a series of conferences in Milford, Pennsylvania. Not at all like fan-oriented conventions, the Milford Conferences were pro only, with both established writers and newer ones. Those present represented a significant fraction of the working SF/fantasy fields at the time, arguably the cream of the stfnal (scientifictional) crop: the three principals, of course, and Katherine McLean, Algis Budrys, Arthur Clarke, Anthony Boucher, Cyril Kornbluth, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Lester and Evelyn del Rey, Robert Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison all attending in the early days, exchanging ideas and criticizing each other’s work. Kate Wilhelm, not yet then married to Knight, describes it as being “a meeting of peers, no chiefs [or] Indians, just writers critiquing one another’s stories. It never changed that format. Critiques early in the day, dinner, then discussions on set topics in the late hours.”

  In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that, whereas the process of elevating SF (aka the “New Wave”) to a supposed level of capital-L “literature” may have been primarily a UK phenomenon, it was clearly anticipated—and its path in the United States blazed—by that eclectic and loosely linked group of American writers that became known as the Milford Mafia.

  One possible subject of those late-hour discussions (and certainly a topic of much conversation among the Mafiosi) was the need for a professional SF/fantasy writers’ organization. Several attempts had been made to create one, but had failed; Knight blamed this on the inevitable competition of writerly egos and, rejecting the committee approach out of hand, decided that the only way to make it work was as a benevolent dictatorship, with himself as the BD. Wilhelm recalls:

  “His starting invitation to join said little more than this is what I’m doing. If you want to join the effort, send five dollars, and writers responded. He wrote the original bylaws, and from the beginning he intended to keep it strictly for active writers and not let it go the way MWA [Mystery Writers of America] had gone, with more fans and others than working writers as members. He drafted Lloyd Biggle to become treasurer, and that was that.”

  And what a “that” it was, too. And still is, for that matter.

  The Nebula Award was Biggle’s idea, and was seen not only as a way to show peer respect for the best work of the past year, but as a potential source of revenue through the publication of an annual anthology of the Nebula winners and runners-up. The first such was edited by then-president Damon Knight, and was published in 1966.

  So much for ancient history. We come now to editor Silverberg’s statement about the reason these books were assembled.

  In July of 1967, Robert Silverberg stepped not only into Damon Knight’s presidential footwear, but into an unfortunate circumstance as well: SFWA was in financial trouble. Only two years old, and with only about a hundred and fifty members at three dollars or so a year each in dues, SFWA’s expenses in producing its two periodicals, Forum and the Bulletin, had eaten away at what little cushion there was.

  Nor was nonpublication much of an option if the young organization was to continue to grow in membership and importance; aside from conventions, there really wasn’t much opportunity for the membership (almost as far-flung then as now) to gather and exchange ideas. The magazines were necessary adjuncts, very much a selling point for membership. Silverberg recalls:

  “Our two magazines, Forum and Bulletin, were the central activities of the organization, far more important in the scheme of things than they are now—Forum was a kind of proto-chat room in those pre-Internet days, the chief means of communication among SF writers, and a very lively thing it was indeed, while Bulletin concentrated on providing writers with information essential to the conduct of their careers, stuff about taxes, agents, publishing scams, etc. They were expensive to put out. We were living from one dime to the next.”

  The Nebula anthologies had been a financial disappointment, not so much because of a lack of appeal to the readers as because as of July 1967 there had only been two of them, and two just weren’t enough to generate the wads of cash that SFWA needed in order to survive. What were the options? Face it, bake sales are fine in their place, but being a writer and editor himself, Silverberg came up with an even better idea—another anthology:

  “I proposed SF Hall of Fame [to Larry Ashmead at Doubleday, publisher of the Nebula books as well as Silverberg’s editor] as a book of stories chosen by membership vote to cover everything of note right up to the inception of the Nebulas in 1965—the Nebula prequel book, so to speak. The first book would be short stories, and if it sold well, a novelette/novella volume would follow.”

  As indeed it did, as we shall see. The advance Doubleday paid was a whopping three thousand dollars; remember, these were 1968 dollars, so in terms of purchasing power it was more like ten times that much. The payout was the same as that for the Nebula books—half would go to the authors (or their estates), a quarter to the editor, and the other quarter to SFWA’s coffers. Silverberg signed on the spot, Ashmead ponied up the bucks, and SFWA got more than enough money to dig itself out of the hole it was in.

  Then President Silverberg put on his Editor suit and polled the membership for their nominations. Subsequently, he says:

  “The ballot I put together asked the members to pick their fifteen favorite stories out of the forty or fifty that had been nominated. I tallied the results and the fifteen top ones were mandatory for the book…. Then I selected another twenty or so stories from the second list, arranging them for editorial balance (we didn’t want four Bradbury stories, for instance, or two segments of [Clifford Simak’s] City) and keeping an eye on the ultimate length that Doubleday and I had in mind, which was probably 150,000 words or so.”

  The process, Silverberg states in his introduction, took a while: “Nominations remained open for more than a year, during which time a significant proportion of the membership suggested favorite stories.” After some editorial tweaking to ensure a fair balance, he turned in the book, Doubleday issued the completion money, and within the first reporting period (the book came out in 1970), it had earned out. Six months or so later, the book club and paperback advances were paid, and the book generated income regularly until it went out of print.

  All that being said—and as if it weren’t already impressive enough—here’s what those early-day SFWAns chose, the fifteen most popular first:

  Vol. I

  1 “Nightfall” • Isaac Asimov

  2 “A Martian Odyssey” • Stanley G. Weinbaum

  3 “Flowers for Algernon” • Daniel Keyes

  4 “Microcosmic God” • Theodore Sturgeon (tie)

  4 “First Contact” • Murray Leinster (tie)

  6 “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” • Roger Zelazny

  7 “The Roads Must Roll” • Robert A. Heinlein (tie)

  7 “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” • Lewis Padgett (tie)

  7 “Coming Attraction” • Fritz Leiber (tie)

  7 “The Cold Equations” • Tom Godwin (tie)

  11 “The Nine Billion Names of God” • Arthur C. Clarke

  12 “Surface Tension” • James Blish

  13 “The Weapon Shop” • A. E. van Vogt (tie)

  13 “Twilight” • John W. Campbell Jr. (tie)

  15 “Arena” • Fredric Brown

  “Helen O’Loy” • Lester del Rey

  “Huddling Place” • Clifford D. Simak

  “That Only a Mother” • Judith Merril

  “Scanners Live in Vain” • Cordwainer Smith

  “Mars Is Heaven!” • Ra
y Bradbury

  “The Little Black Bag” • C. M. Kornbluth

  “Born of Man and Woman” • Richard Matheson

  “The Quest for Saint Aquin” • Anthony Boucher

  “It’s a Good Life” • Jerome Bixby

  “Fondly Fahrenheit” • Alfred Bester

  “The Country of the Kind” • Damon Knight

  Zero percent body fat there, folks. No filler, no artificial ingredients, no aspartame, just a pound and a half of the Stfnal Best. Twenty-six stories that represent three decades, from 1934’s gleefully wonderful “A Martian Odyssey” to 1963’s brilliant and evocative “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.”

  It’s a table of contents that leaves you speechless, isn’t it? I’m not going to wax rhapsodic about how many of these stories are classics as I normally would; that’s why they’re there, aren’t they? Nor am I going to do my usual riff about how many times they’ve been anthologized before or since. The point—or at least, one of the points—is that they’re gathered together here in one place where they can be read, enjoyed, and admired.

  I will point out that fully half of them, and nine of the top fifteen, sprang full-blown from John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine. This means something, folks. Of late, it’s become somewhat trendy to bash Campbell, however gently, but the above shows you that the man was doing something right. Forget for the moment his fascination with pseudoscience, leave aside his politics for now, and just pretend that that pretentious little cigarette holder never existed. He knew a good story when he saw it, and he bought a whole lot of them. He also wrote more than one classic himself: “Twilight” here, published originally under the name Don A. Stuart, and another which we shall get to in good time.

  Of the remaining thirteen, five came from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (four from the Boucher/McComas period, the most recent from Avram Davidson’s editorship), a pair came from H. L. Gold’s Galaxy, and one each came from Wonder Stories, Fantasy Book, and Planet Stories. It’s important to note, however, that three of them (the Boucher, Clarke, and Bixby) were originally published in original anthologies.