Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (24 page)

He stood up and put his hat back on. “But like I say, I’ll never prove it. I thought maybe Raymond might have seen or heard something, but I should have known that was too much to hope for.”

He chuckled down deep in his throat. “You know the funny part? He had all that work and risk for nothing. Those two scientists already pulled out.”

“They’re gone?” I said, louder than I meant to.

“Yep,” Sheriff Cowan said. “Drove right through town, late yesterday afternoon, pulling that trailer. So they must have found out there wasn’t anything important there after all. Probably just some old animal bones or something.”

“Probably,” Daddy said. “Bunch of foolishness.”

And that’s about all there is to tell. David and Maddy never came back, and nobody else ever tried to find that cave again. Not that it would have done them any good. I went up into Moonshine Hollow once, a long time later, and the whole place was smashed up so bad you couldn’t even tell where you were.

Mr. Donovan left too, that summer. He went back into the Marines and I heard he got killed in Korea, but I don’t really know.

Wendell’s daddy got caught with a stolen truck, later on that year, and got sent off to the penitentiary, where everybody said he belonged. Sheriff Cowan never did charge him with blowing up the cave, but he didn’t make any secret of believing he did it.

And maybe he was right, but I wasn’t so sure. My cousin Larry was working the evening shift at the Texaco station when David and Maddy stopped for gas on their way out of town, and he said Maddy was crying and it looked like she’d been roughed up some. And Aunt Ethel mentioned to Mama that David had been in the store on Saturday buying an alarm clock. But I never said anything to anybody.

People talked, for a while there, about that strange business in Moonshine Hollow. But it didn’t last long. Everybody’s mind was on the news from Korea, which was mostly bad, and then by next year all anybody wanted to talk about was the election. I guess by now I’m the only one who even remembers.

And sometimes I sure wish I didn’t.

F
or the last several years, it’s been customary for the editors of the Nebula Award anthologies to assemble a bunch of hot young Turks to have a symposium about the state of SF at the moment and its future, and that was my first thought as well when I was tapped to edit this year’s volume. But then I remembered all the Nebula banquets I’d been to where I’d suffered through speeches by numbingly inappropriate or irrelevant guest speakers, and I remembered that on each of those occasions, I’d looked around the room and seen writers like Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl sitting there looking politely bored as well, and that each time I’d thought: Why aren’t we listening to
them,
instead of to this guy? With writers in the room who had been present at the very beginnings of science fiction as an individual genre, writers who knew what it was like to sell stories to Gernsback or Campbell or H. L. Gold, writers who had survived in a turbulent and changing market for almost the entire length of the twentieth century, why would an organization of professional writers want to listen to Hugh Downs instead?

So this year, I’ve decided to do something different with the symposium feature. Instead of tapping a group of hot young Turks, I decided to get some historical perspective by going to the Grand Masters instead, to see what they had to say about where the field has been, what it was like, what it’s like now, what ground has been gained or lost in the process—and yes, where the genre may be going tomorrow.

So, then, following are a series of essays by a selection of the living Grand Masters: Jack Williamson, Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brian W. Aldiss, and Frederik Pohl. Between them, they have 289 years of experience in writing and selling science fiction! Which ought to be enough to earn them a few moments of our attention, eh?

Jack Williamson’s career has stretched over an incredible seventy-seven years, from his first sale in 1928 to the present day. No science fiction writer has ever had a career arc that spanned a greater percentage of science fiction history (when Williamson was making his first sales, John W. Campbell’s famous “Golden Age” at
Astounding,
now more than sixty years in the past, was still more than a decade in the future!), from the very start of the field’s beginnings as a separate genre all the way through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. During that career, Williamson has produced a steady stream of dozens of novels and hundreds of stories, and has been always in the forefront of the field as one of the genre’s most acclaimed authors. His sequence of novels about the Legion of Space were among the highlights of the “superscience” era of the twenties and thirties just as his story “With Folded Hands” was one of the most famous stories of the Campbellian “Golden Age” mentioned above. His novels include
The Humanoids
(an expansion of “With Folded Hands”),
The Humanoid Touch, Darker Than You Think
(almost as important to the evolution of fantasy as
The Humanoids
was to SF),
The Legion of Space,The Legion of Time, The Queen of the Legion, The Black Sun, Demon Moon, The Trial of Terra, Firechild, Seetee Ship, Manseed, Beachhead,
and many others, including a long series of collaborative novels written with Frederik Pohl. His short fiction has been collected in
The Best of Jack Williamson, People Machines, The Early Williamson, The Pandora Effect, Dreadful Sleep, The Metal Man and Others: The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson,Volume One,Wolves of Darkness:The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Two, Wizard’s Isle: The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Three,
and
Wizard’s Isle:The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson,Volume Four.
He won the Hugo Award in 1985 for his autobiography,
Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction,
and both Hugo and Nebula awards for his novella
The Ultimate Earth
in 2001. His most recent book is a massive retrospective collection
Seventy-Five: The Diamond Anniversary of a Science Fiction Pioneer,
and coming up is a new novel,
The Stonehenge Gate.
He was named SFFWA Grand Master in 1976.

Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. As both writer and editor, Silverberg continues to be at the forefront of the field to this very day, having won a total of five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards. His novels include the acclaimed
Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle,The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth,Tower of Glass, Son of Man, Nightwings, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrack in the Furnace, Thorns, Up the Line, The Man in the Maze, Tom O’ Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Morning, The Alien Years, Lord Prestimion,
and
Mountains of Majipoor.
His collections include
Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles,The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone,
and
The Secret Sharers.
His most recent books are the novel
The Long Way Home,
the mosaic novel
Roma Eterna,
and a massive retrospective collection,
Phases of the Moon: Stories from Six Decades.
He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California. He was named SFFWA Grand Master in 2004.

Ursula K. Le Guin is probably one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel
The Left Hand of Darkness
may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre. (Her 1968 fantasy novel,
A Wizard of Earthsea,
would be almost as influential on future generations of high fantasy and young adult writers.)
The Left Hand of Darkness
won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel
The Dispossessed
a few years later. Her novel
Tehanu
won her another Nebula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for Children’s Literature for her novel
The Farthest Shore,
part of her Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include
Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World,The Beginning Place, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, Searoad, Always Coming Home,
and
The Telling.
She has had eight collections:
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Four Ways to Forgiveness, Tales of Earthsea,
and
The Birthday of the World.
Her most recent books are a collection of her critical essays,
The Wave in the Mind: Tales and Essays on the Reader, and the Imagination,
and a YA novel,
Gifts.
She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon. She was named SFFWA Grand Master in 2003.

Brian W. Aldiss is one of the true giants of the field, someone who has been publishing science fiction for more than a quarter of a century, and has more than two dozen books to his credit.
The Long Afternoon of Earth
won a Hugo Award in 1962. “The Saliva Tree” won a Nebula Award in 1965, and Aldiss’s novel
Starship
won the Prix Jules Verne in 1977. He took another Hugo Award in 1987 for his critical study of science fiction,
Trillion Year Spree,
written with David Wingrove. His other books include
An Island Called Moreau, Gray-beard, Enemies of the System, A Rude Awakening, Life in the West, Forgotten Life, Dracula Unbound,
and
Remembrance Day,
and a memoir,
Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s,
and an autobiography,
The Twinkling of an Eye, or, My Life as an Englishman.
His short fiction has been collected in
Space, Time, and Nathaniel, Who Can Replace a Man?, New Arrivals, Old Encounters, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, Seasons in Flight,
and
Common Clay,
and he’s published a collection of poems,
Home Life with Cats.
His many anthologies include
The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus,
and, with Harry Harrison,
Decade: the 1940s, Decade: the 1950s,
and
Decade: the 1960s.
His latest books are two new novels,
Affairs at Hampden Ferrers
and
Jocasta.
Coming up are a new collection,
Cultural Breaks,
and a new novel,
Sanity and the Lady.
He lives in Oxford. He was named SFFWA Grand Master in 2000.

Frederik Pohl is a seminal figure whose career spans almost the entire development of modern SF, having been one of the genre’s major shaping forces—as writer, editor, agent, and anthologist—for more than fifty years. He was the founder of the Star series, SF’s first continuing anthology series, and was the editor of the
Galaxy
group of magazines from 1960 to 1969, during which time
Galaxy
’s sister magazine,
Worlds of If,
won three consecutive Best Professional Magazine Hugos. As a writer, he won both Hugo and Nebula awards for his novel
Gateway,
has also won the Hugo for his stories “The Meeting” (a collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth) and “Fermi and Frost,” and won an additional Nebula for his novel
Man Plus
; he has also won the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His many books include several written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth—including
The Space Merchants,Wolfbane,
and
Gladiator-at-Law
—and many solo novels, including the award-winning
Gateway
and
Man Plus, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon,The Coming of the Quantum Cats, Mining the Oort, O Pioneer!,The Siege of Eternity,
and
The Far Shore of Time.
Among his many collections are
The Gold at the Star-bow’s End, In the Problem Pit,
and
The Best of Frederik Pohl.
His most recent books are the novel
The Boy Who Would Live Forever,
and a massive retrospective collection,
Platinum Pohl.
He lives in Palatine, Illinois, with his wife, writer Elizabeth Ann Hull. He was named SFFWA Grand Master in 1993.