Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 (3 page)

I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog; therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking: in the meantime let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.

—Don John, in William Shakespeare's
Much Ado about Nothing

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

—George Bernard Shaw, “Literary Censorship in England,”
Current Opinion

In her all-too-short story “Ado,” Connie Willis uses the art of literature in a satire that, beneath its lighthearted comedy, gives a satisfying smack to censorship. The “world” she creates lies in the not-so-distant future where the constraints on what teachers may teach is stringently limited for fear of offending someone.
Anyone.
For all that it is amusing, the story also offers a sobering look at what could happen to our children and their futures if we allow censors to eviscerate the literature they read. In the world of “Ado,” I've already written too much—

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot. Others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

—widely attributed to Pablo Picasso

Another theme that struck me about the stories on this year's ballot is the diversity in the portrayal of both real cultures on Earth and those formed in the imaginations of the writers. At its best, speculative fiction can evoke astonishing universes. We paint prose pictures of other places, other worlds, other suns. Ironically, in earlier days of science fiction, the “alien” worlds depicted in many of our works were sometimes less alien than other cultures on our own planet. The current ballot illustrates the maturing of the genre. It is a cornucopia of world building, not only for imagined places, but also in exploring the people, ways of life, and ideas on our own planet that come from other cultures besides the West.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.

—Carl Sagan,
Cosmos

When I was a child, about age eight or nine, I remember being at my grandparents' Spanish-style home in Escondido, California, not the endless metropolis that area has become now, but back in the days when it was a sleepy little town among the avocado farms. With nothing to do on a day baking beneath a relentless summer sun, I wandered down to the local library and sat in the air-conditioned reading room absorbed in a book about bees. I don't remember the title or the author, but I will never forget how much I loved its tale of great bee adventure.

I remembered that book when I read E. Lily Yu's story “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees.” Yu extrapolates the behavior of bees and wasps as known to modern science into a tale set in the village of Yiwei, which in Mandarin Chinese roughly translates as “to suppose.” It is an apt name for the opening locale of a story that concerns map-making wasps and their conflicts with bees both revolutionary and not. The societies of these remarkable insects are portrayed with depth and a gentle humor. Their cultures serve as a foil for the other culture in the story, that of the humans. The tale offers an unusual twist on science fiction stories of first contact and a salient commentary on human political systems of Earth.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

—Simonides of Ceos, in “On the Glory of the Athenians,”
by Plutarch, in
The Moralia
, Book 4

Amal El-Mohtar's poem “Peach-Creamed Honey” gives bees a very different look. They are among the many images she invokes with her sensual poem that won the 2011 Rhysling Award in the short form category. The sheer beauty of the writing is a pleasure to read, like a song. As I write this, it inspires my mind to compose melodies, edgily sweet, a haunting fusion of Western and Near Eastern music with a mesmerizing drumbeat, all conjured by these lines from the poem:

“And I know she'll let me tell her how the peaches lost their way

how they fell out of a wagon on a sweaty summer's day,

how the buzz got all around that there was sugar to be had,

and the bees came singing, and the bees came glad.”

C. S. E. Cooney, the 2011 Rhysling Award winner in the long form category, also treats the reader to gratifyingly evocative language in “The Sea King's Second Bride.” Her lyrical word pictures evoke a fantastic land in the deep sea. At turns graceful and irreverent, the poem is a sequel to the traditional Scandinavian ballad “Agnete and the Merman.” Cooney offers the ill-behaved merman a second chance for happiness, though at first he refuses to notice. The clever contrasts between the conventions of traditional folktales and the sensibility of a modern woman make for a delicious mix in this poem.

Pouring forth its seas everywhere, then, the ocean envelops the earth and fills its deeper chasms.

—Nicolaus Copernicus,
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

Brad R. Torgersen offers a science fiction take on the deep sea in his story “Ray of Light.” Although the world he evokes with such careful detail is here on Earth, it is as alien to most of us as another planet. “Ray of Light” centers on the confinement of Earth's last humans in undersea settlements after the surface has become unlivable. Torgersen uses the milieu to frame a teenager's alienation, not only her rebellion against her father, but also against her environment. The setting exerts a literary pressure on the characters analogous to the pressure of the deep sea that dominates their lives. It didn't surprise me that the means by which the young people came together in secret to plan was through a music club. Although music played a relatively small part compared to the arts in other stories in this anthology, I found it a satisfying accent for the tale of a father's struggles to accept his child's transition into adulthood.

Sauerkraut is tolerant, for it seems to be a well of contradictions. Not that it would preach a gastronomic neutrality that would endure all heresies. It rejects dogmatism and approves of individual tastes.

—Julien Freund, director of the Institute of Sociology in Strasbourg,
Les Saisons d'Alsace

Ferrett Steinmetz sweeps us off to another sort of world in his novelette “Sauerkraut Station.” The story is set on a space habitat that offers medical aid and refits ships with supplies. Those supplies include their specialty, sauerkraut, which most of their visitors hold in far too low esteem, at least in the view of Lizzie, the narrator. The setting is brought alive by the author's careful detail and serves as a foil for the political background of the universe Steinmetz builds. The tale is both stark and reaffirming, the story of a remarkable young woman.

When I first read “Sauerkraut Station,” I assumed it had appeared in
Analog
. It has that feel for me in part because of the well described life in a space station, including what happens if we lose amenities we take for granted, such as light and gravity. I was intrigued to learn that it came from the online zine
GigaNotoSaurus
. In fact, two works in this book first appeared in
GigaNotoSaurus
, the other being “The Migratory Patterns of Dancers.” They offer telling examples of the sea changes in publishing we've experienced over the last decade. In the past, when the outlets for short fiction were limited to hardcopy markets, the expense of producing and distributing such publications drastically constrained the number of markets, which meant many good stories went unpublished or appeared in hard-to-find places. Now, with the advent of so many online markets, more top-notch stories than ever are seeing print. This is the first I've seen of
GigaNotoSaurus
, but I will definitely be looking up more of their issues.

You can't remake the world
Without remaking yourself.

—Ben Okri,
Mental Fight

Geoff Ryman's carefully rendered novelette “What We Found” takes place in Nigeria. On one level, it centers on the attempts of Terhemba, a Nigerian scientist, to reconcile his research with the ravages suffered by his family; the two converge when he discovers evidence that parents can pass the effects of traumas they have endured to their children. The narrator writes, “What we found is that 1966 can reach into your head and into your balls and stain your children red. You pass war on. . . . We live our grandfathers' lives.” In telling Terhemba's story, Ryman writes vividly of a Nigeria that is in turns severe and beautiful.

On another level, “What We Found” draws on a phenomenon observed by psychologists, in particular John Schooler, that their research showed a “decline effect,” where attempts to duplicate a well-documented result become less and less successful over time even if many scientists initially replicate the work. The decline may derive from psychological effects, that the experimenters expect the result and so are subconsciously predisposed toward work that verifies their expectation. The decline is then the reassertion of the scientific method over time. However, even that theory doesn't seem to fully account for the effect. In “What We Found,” Ryman extrapolates the idea to a fascinatingly eerie extreme. What if
all
scientific results disappeared over time?

To motivate the idea, Ryman draws on quantum theory, specifically the result that the act of observing a system changes that system, collapsing it from a mixture of possible states to the one observed. As a physicist, I've calculated linear superpositions of quantum states to describe the behavior of atoms and molecules. Mathematically, it simply means that more than one state exists for the particles in a collection, and we don't know which applies to a particular particle until we look at it. In popular culture, it has become famous as the “Schrödinger's cat” paradox, which essentially says, “The cat in the box is neither dead nor alive, but is a mixture of those states—until we look.”

Ryman takes the idea a wonderfully fanciful step further. Suppose the act of observation changed
everything
scientists observed, including on a macroscopic level, so that the more they attempted to replicate previous results, the less they succeeded? All our scientific laws, including those we've known for centuries, even millennia, would eventually cease to be true. Ryman uses the idea to frame one man's attempt to understand himself, his family, and his future.

The golden age of science fiction is twelve.

—Peter Graham,
Void

The two novels excerpted in this anthology both have vivid resonances for me. As with many science fiction readers, I related to the protagonist in the book
Among Others
. Like her, I was an outcast during my elementary school years, and I too found a refuge in science fiction, practically inhaling every book I could lay hands on. But my world had another aspect: ballet. I began training as a small child and never stopped regardless of the obstacles, including a body shape better suited to jazz than classical dance. When I hit puberty, the unexpected happened. Those many years of dance classes after school and on weekends, those mornings I got up early and went running in the park to let my feet pound away my frustrations—they paid off in a manner I had no idea would happen. Until then, I had known only that when I danced, I could let free a part of myself that had no other outlet. I never realized all that training was also turning me from the proverbial ugly duckling into if not a swan, then at least a graceful duck.

By the time I hit middle school, I was deep within the cognitive dissonance of going from the least popular kid in school to being liked and accepted as a dancer, knowing all the time that inside, I was the same person my peers had bullied only two years before. To me, nothing had changed except my exterior. It was a sobering wake-up call to the effects of bias and stereotype. For many, twelve is the “golden age” of science fiction, that age when they find the genre and community that speaks to them. For me, twelve was the end of my (first) science fiction age. Struggling with the confusion of a puberty that hit me like an express train slamming into a brick wall, I could no longer ignore the sexism in the science fiction stories I had devoured for so many years, nor the fact that those stories were targeted at my male peers. The books were about their dreams, their confusion, and their adventures, and I didn't fit in anywhere.

I went to John F. Kennedy High School in Richmond, California, which was known at that time for its innovative academic programs. In those days, the Richmond Voluntary Integration Plan was at its height, bringing in students from all over the region. As a result, I attended a school noted for its diversity, a student body that was about one-half African American and the rest a mix of other races, mostly Caucasian, also Asian and Hispanic. That had a marked effect on my new preferences in literature, though I didn't realize it until years later. I read what my friends and classmates were reading, authors like Martin Luther King Jr. and discussions about the music of Miles Davis. At that point in my life, Ralph Ellison's
The Invisible Man
, the story of a young black man dealing with the invisibility conferred by racism, spoke to me far more than H. G. Wells's science fiction novella “The Invisible Man.”

Rest at pale evening
 
.
 
.
 
.
A tall slim tree
 
.
 
.
 
.
Night coming tenderly
Black like me

—Langston Hughes, “Dream Variations”

Another work that stands out in my mind from that time is a book by John Howard Griffin, an American journalist who wrote about racial inequality. In 1959, Griffin darkened his light skin and traveled through the American Deep South as an African American. He took the title of his book about his experiences,
Black Like Me
, from the poem “Dream Variations” by Langston Hughes. The narrative of a white man experiencing the full force of racism against black Americans left an indelible impression on my young mind.