Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 (2 page)

Origami, like music, permits both composition and performance as expressions of the art.

—Robert J. Lang, origami artist and physicist,
www.langorigami.com

I wished to fold the laws of nature, the dignity of life, and the expression of affection into my work.

—Akira Yoshizawa, origami grandmaster,
Inochi Yutaka na Origami
(
Origami Full of Life
),
quote translated by Kondo Kanato

Describe, with proof, what fractions p/q can be obtained as areas of squares folded from a single unit square
 
.
 
.
 
.

—2006 American Regional Mathematics League,
The Power of Origami

Origami is the art of paper folding, where the artist uses an intricate series of folds to transform a flat sheet of paper into a sculpture. Not only is it a visually exquisite art form, it has also defined an entire branch of mathematics and appears in questions on internationally renowned programs such as the American Regional Mathematics League.

In his story, “The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu explores the complex relationship between a young man of mixed heritage born in the United States and his mother, who was a mail-order bride from China, through the medium of her origami creations, which, in his childhood, she magically brought to life for him. The duality of origami—a pursuit that deeply embodies both artistic and analytic properties—becomes an inspired frame for Liu's tale. The geometrical nature of origami is never described in the story, but for me as a reader, the complexity and multilayered tension felt by the son toward his mother is aptly symbolized by the tension that so many people perceive between art and the math therein, especially the three-dimensional complexity embodied by origami. That both of those aspects simultaneously exist in the same work despite their apparent contradictory nature offers an apt paradigm for love and its denial in this heartbreaking relationship between a son and his mother.

Dance is the hidden language of the soul.

—Martha Graham,
New York Times
, 1985

In her story, titled “Movement,” Nancy Fulda writes about an autistic prodigy who excels at ballet. Autism is a neural disorder that impacts how the brain interprets information, making it difficult for those affected to communicate with others. A small percentage of autistics are savants, particularly with music, memory, math, and, in this case, dance. Fulda uses the protagonist's relationship with ballet to explore the ramifications behind a potential treatment for her autism.

As a former dancer in both ballet and jazz, I was struck by how well Fulda brought to life that sense of timelessness—meditation, even—that comes when you immerse yourself in the movement. It is a fitting device for the story, which centers on a narrator who experiences time differently than most people; it can take her hours, days, or even longer to answer a question. But that answer—when it finally comes—is a brilliantly choreographed piece of writing.

A work of art is a world in itself, reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

—Hans Hoffman,
Search for the Real and Other Essays

As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.

—Plato,
Laws
, Book 10, translated by Benjamin Jowett

Plato's words could apply equally well to the construction of a building, a bridge—or a science fiction novella. In “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Kij Johnson uses the creation of a bridge to construct the story of the man who raises that remarkable span. The bridge becomes a metaphor for his life and his world.

We often think of a bridge as an engineering feat, a triumph of physics and math, but the relationship of architects to their creations is much like that of artists to their art. As so aptly described by Plato, every piece of that bridge, whether the largest stone or the smallest cube, is necessary to its creation. It is fitting that Plato's quote comes from his work
Laws
, in that laws—whether they are created by our judicial systems or are natural laws that we have discovered—are highly analytical yet achieve results that tangle intricately with the emotional well-being (or lack thereof) of those who live by them.

“The Man Who Bridged the Mist” reminds me of the lithograph “Hand with a Reflecting Sphere” by M. C. Escher. Just as Escher's creation is an image of himself holding a sphere that reflects both his image and world, so the process of building a bridge across the mist reflects the architect in the story and his remarkable world. Escher evokes the scene in his lithograph with careful detail, using simple objects to tell us about himself; so the details of how the builder constructs his bridge tell us about his hopes, his history, and the people who impact his life.

Escher's image achieves a dramatic effect with no explosion of color and action; it is done in gray and white and is all the more powerful for that choice. Johnson is similarly subtle with “The Man Who Bridged the Mist.” It is a story in colors of fog and stone. We learn of “fish” living within the mist, shadowy creatures considered small at six feet in length. The legendary “Big Ones” hidden in the depths are an ever-present threat. Johnson could have taken the easy path and thrown in an action-adventure scene, where such monsters explode from the gorge and go about canonical havoc-wreaking activities. She chooses a far more nuanced approach that, in the context of her story, is eminently more effective, providing a metaphor for the half-hidden events that shape and so subtly shatter the lives of the characters. She leaves the reader with a question: Are the submerged “Big Ones” hidden beneath our emotional landscape as great as we fear? It is a fascinating novella with new layers that emerge every time I reread the story.

Art is a staple of mankind
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sign of life when every other aspect of civilization fails.

—Jamake Highwater,
The Language of Vision:
Meditations on Myth and Metaphor

In “The Ice Owl,” Carolyn Ives Gilman tells the story of Thorn, a bright and edgy young woman. She centers the story on the girl's interactions with her tutor, an elderly collector who repatriates artwork stolen during a war that took place more than a hundred forty years prior. The loss and return of such works offers an effective allegory in the novella for the price exacted by wars on the people who survive them.

Throughout the novella, Gilman makes explicit connections between art and math or science and, in doing so, creates allegorical gems for the reader. A central aspect of the story derives from an ingenious blending of art and math used by certain artists. If they apply a certain algorithm to their media, each artist can create a work of art that looks dramatically different depending on how a person views the image. It is a clever play on holographic images in our real world that are visible only at certain angles, such as those that appear on many driver's licenses. That artwork is a fitting theme for Thorn, who must learn to face the ways that “truth” can change depending on how she views her world. In another instance, Gilman uses the aromatic chemistry of benzene-based compounds to define a combination lock formed from the ornamentation on a box, itself a piece of art, which may or may not contain yet more secrets. The layering of puzzles on puzzles is an effective metaphor for the layered design of this inspired novella.

Gilman uses the word
Holocide
to describe a war that—like a holograph—encompassed every dimension of its world and was viewed from all sides by an interstellar civilization. Its similarity to the word
Holocaust
is telling. During World War II, the Nazis confiscated hundreds of thousands of artworks, and to this day the repatriation of those stolen pieces continues. In Gilman's able hands, repatriation becomes a symbol of the impact war has on our humanity. The theme had a particular resonance for me in that I was writing this introduction when I read that Anton Dobrolski, the oldest known survivor of Auschwitz, had died at age 108. As the last survivors from the concentration camps of World War II pass away, their oral histories fade into a few sentences in history texts. If we forget, will that allow the atrocities to happen again? In Gilman's novella, where relativistic spaceflight allows people to jump into the future every time they travel, the memories of the survivors stretch out for centuries and spread across the stars.

Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.

—Daphne du Maurier,
The Birds & Other Stories

In “The Migratory Pattern of Dancers,” Katherine Sparrow writes about men who are genetically engineered with the DNA of birds, which have become extinct. Although the men remain essentially human, twice a year they are driven to travel the routes that birds once flew during their migrations. As part of their journey, the men make periodic stops to perform dances in places such as Yellowstone National Park, choreographing works that draw on the traits of those vanished birds—and that also make millions of dollars for the avaricious backers who sponsor their shows. The performances evoke the avian multitudes that once soared through our skies in the freedom of flight, yet that very evocation of freedom becomes a form of prison for the dancers.

Audiences come to the shows to be entertained, amused, and, yes, to see what fate might befall those dancers who dare to seek the closest that humans can come to unaided flight. As such, the story explores the ramifications of the human fascination with death as entertainment. Sparrow hints at an insidious end to humanity; will we become so inured to the loss of life through our entertainment that we participate in our own demise? Rather than a dramatic apocalypse, the story suggests that human extinction may come from within, prodded by the same instincts that led the characters in the story to reduce the once-great species of birds that flew our skies to an echo found only in human dances.

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

—Thomas Huxley,
Science and Culture: And Other Essays
, volume 3

Jo Walton turns around the idea of combining science and the arts in her metafictional novel
Among Others
. Here the art is writing; the book is told through the narrator's love of literature, in particular, science fiction. As such, the novel invokes many of our great speculative writers, specifically those from the science fiction canon of several decades ago. Literature plays a role in Walton's novel similar to the role played by art, music, or dance for other works in this anthology. But the art that Walton uses to frame her story is
our
art, the literature of the fantastic, as illustrated, for example, by this anthology. The
Nebula Aweards Showcase 2013
doesn't dance, sing, paint, strum, or drum—but it becomes a recursive loop, one constructed out of its stories, which use other arts to frame the literary works so that the anthology becomes the art that frames itself.

Metafiction is a story that refers to literature and its conventions as part of the story. In other words, the tale is self-referential. The idea is that it exposes the illusions created by a work of fiction, blurring the line between the “real” world of the reader and the imagined world of the story. Walton employs this technique to good effect in her novel, using speculative fiction to frame a story of fantasy, even prodding the reader to ask if the magical aspects to the story are “real” within the context of the narrator's tale or a fiction within a fiction masquerading as reality for the fictional characters.

In analogy with the self-referential loop that arises from the description of this anthology as an art that frames itself, it could be said that Walton's book leaves out one important novel in the works she referenced—
Among Others
, by Jo Walton. What a satisfying creation of fractal metafiction that would be; the book refers to the book that refers to the book that refers to . . . well, you get the idea. It could be a recursive triumph worthy of Mandelbrot, the mathematician who created the gorgeous fractal known as the Mandelbrot set, which repeats itself the mesmerizing structure of its images at ever-finer and finer detail. For me,
Among Others
felt close to a literary version of the online video that shows the Mandelbrot fractal at greater and greater magnification, offering a musical glimpse into the ultimate representation of self-referential art.
2

But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze
 
.
 
.
 
.

—Joseph Conrad,
The Heart of Darkness

The Club Story has a long tradition in science fiction. Such a tale consists of two parts: a frame that describes a club or other place where the narrator is relating his story within a story, and the tale itself, which the narrator often claims involved him. In the words of John Clute, “A club story is a tale told by one person to others in a place where the story can be related safely, either a collection featuring one teller with many tales or several storytellers taking turns.” Clute, one of our two Solstice Award winners this year, offers here an essay on the Club Story adapted from his article in the online
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
. Not only does it form a compelling entry in the discussion of fiction as art form, but the essay itself is a form of art in its construction for an online audience, illustrating how the electronic age is changing the way we present literature. For the paper copy of this anthology, we can't give the hyperlinks that allow readers to click on words and phrases from the essay to find connected entries in the encyclopedia, creating a hypertext document. However, you can enjoy the essay in its original electronic form in the
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
at
www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/club_story
.