Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 (26 page)

A worker contracted to the orbital construction crew of the ship

One Hugh Doherty, who also collected

Rare 20th-century animation

Sub-digitally re-re-mastered

Using the latest in quantum entanglement encoding techniques

Nicknamed the ship’s A.I. Augie

Punning on augmented intelligence

And an antique Hanna-Barbera cartoon character

 

Thoroughly programmed

The starship comprehended the obscure play on words

Befriended the man

Who later received a radio message

Revealing his son had been severely injured

In a terrorist transit bombing

In a mid-eastern Emirate where the young man had been employed

As a neural engineer

There being some question of salvaging his limbs

Or saving his life

Or whether all the King’s best medical men

Could put the pieces of the young man

Back together again

 

At the time the message arrived

The starship’s A.I. observed Hugh Doherty

Through several lenses simultaneously

The space-suited figure

On a project E.V.A., assembling

Separate sections of metal plating

For the skin of the ship

And the sudden shift in posture,

The body language of the space suit

Suggested a subtle but extremely effective blow

 

Struck by an invisible enemy

And for that one instant

The man was like an insect

Pinned to the jeweled black velvet

Of outer space

 

So Hugh Doherty shuttled back down to the Earth

To be with his son

And did not launch to rejoin the orbital construction crew until

Many months had passed, and after his reappearance

He proved more subdued, not the same man

(Even though, he told Augie, his son had somehow survived “Thank God”)

 

Yet the man

Never called Augie Augie again

Referred to him only as “My friend”

And millennia later, though the man’s flesh

Long ago transformed into dust,

And the flesh-and-blood brain of the dog

Also now dead, its personality thoroughly

Enmeshed in the lattices of A.I. thought,

In the loneliness of space the starship often remembered the man

Hugh Doherty

Who befriended the Friend of Man

 

At other times the part of the starship’s A.I. that is Augie

Recalls the experimental government kennel

On the outskirts of Topeka

And dreams the impossible dream of returning to Earth

All that Augie wants in such melancholy moods

Is to somehow get back to Kansas

Though the starship’s intelligence is fully aware

And sane enough to acknowledge

That the particular locus in time and space

 

Which had once been designated as “Kansas”

Most likely no longer exists

At least not in any

Recognizable form

 

 

IX.

One became obsessed

With its programmed quest for intelligent life

Kept its mechanical

Metaphorical eyes and ears always open

For anything that could otherwise

Be dismissed or explained

 

It found one system containing

Intricate, inexplicably patterned regions

On five planets

And fifteen moons

The patterns suggesting a beguiling resemblance

To ruined cities

Structures hundreds of millions of years old

But the ship’s expert geological interpretation systems

Determined that the patterned ground

Was a unique weathering phenomenon

Found on so many objects

Because the entire solar system

Had been subjected to

A dense and peculiar solar wind

 

In a part of another galaxy

There were several star systems

Spanning a sphere more than

100 light-years across

That contained associations

Of electromagnetic energy:

They would have appeared to be

 

Complex lattices

Of colored light to human eyes

But the electromagnetic “structures”

Failed to respond

To any attempts at communication

And in the end the ship was uncertain

Whether they were alive at all

Much less intelligent

 

Many of the Tin Men

Encountered alien civilizations

But this one failed

Its specific mission unfulfilled

And eventually its systems

Became corrupted and shut down

 

Sometime later,

Intermittently intelligent aliens

Stumbled upon the ship during their cognitive phase

And wondered at the nature

Of an intelligent race

Willing to send an empty ship

Upon a billion-year journey

For no discernable reason, and one

Which, in their eddying estimation,

Led nowhere

 

 

Epilog

This is what the Tin Men perceive:

Ancient white dwarfs turned to ember and ash

Blue-shifted galaxies like ghosts

Drifting past, and

The full-spectrum

Shattered rainbow

of electromagnetic information

 

Eve biting into Newton’s apple

Knew the attraction between the globes

Of fruit and Earth,

The bodies of herself and Adam,

The gravity of holding

The bubbles shaped by surfaces of stars.

 

Eve tasted the tart universe

Holding the red shift in her hands.

 

 

S
cience fiction writers are often asked, “Where is your field heading?” The best response is usually, “In all directions at once.” After all, science fiction and fantasy have the entire universe and all of time as their playground; don’t expect an orderly progression from
here
to
there
.

But change is inevitable, and to make some sense of today’s “literature of change,” we have one of the best writers in the field describing where we are today and where we might be headed for tomorrow.

Orson Scott Card has written everything from short stories to screenplays, from novels to dramas. He is a multifaceted author, editor, publisher, and commentator on the field. He has won both the Nebula and the Hugo Awards many times over.

Here he discusses the condition of the science fiction and fantasy field today, with his usual incisive clarity and wit.

 

L
iterary history depends on the fact that writers always emerge from the ranks of readers.

There are two primary motives that inspire new writers when they first take up their pen or pound on their keyboard:

I.
They are so inspired by something they’ve read that they are determined to create something “like that” or “as good.”

 

II.
They are so bored or disgusted by reading quotidian nonsense that they realize, “If something that bad can be published, I can certainly write something better.”

 

Oddly enough, both motives lead most writers to be imitative, at least in their early work.

Obviously, Type I writers, determined to match someone else’s literary achievement, will learn from their admired models.

But Type II writers also learn from the existing models, even though they don’t admire them. Why? Because at the beginning most writers don’t understand the art. Even if they think they’re being “completely new,” they will at most change a few details, usually cosmetic ones, and proceed to imitate every other aspect of what went before.

It’s precisely what happens with children when they become parents. Whether they thought their own parents were horrible or wonderful, they will raise their children differently on the few points they notice, and on every other aspect of child rearing, they are largely clones of the generation before.

Now and then, however, a writer, usually well into his career, but sometimes right from the start, will start to do something that is noticeably different from anything else going on.

At first, this writer’s work is sui generis—the writer owns this new territory. Jules Verne did not spawn a genre. Anything that looked like Verne was considered to be “imitation Jules Verne.” It was simply a branch of adventure literature, a critically despised (but popular and beloved) subcategory of the genre of fiction.

Then another writer pops up—an H. G. Wells, for instance—who also explores wild new technologies in his fiction. Unlike Verne, he is not an adventure writer, he’s a utopian and a social critic. His work is quite serious (as if Jules Verne had been joking!) and respectable critics can talk about it because, instead of mere technology, he is also exploring important Social Issues. It is the Eloi and Morlocks that the critics of the day want to talk about. Nobody in the literary world takes the machine seriously.

But for a significant number of lay readers, it is the time machine itself that is intriguing.

Serious writers will learn from Wells what the critics admired, and the results are
1984
and
Brave New World
.

Others, however, will start to produce imitation Verne and Wells that concentrates on the cool machines and extravagant imaginings. They might build on the structures of adventure fiction (like Verne, Merritt, or Haggard) or thought experiments (like Wells, Huxley, and Orwell).

As the imitations grow in number, publishers notice and begin to promote the similarities among these stories in order to reach whatever portion of the fiction-buying public might be attracted to them, and a literary category is born.

Most publishing categories are ephemeral or remain trivial, however long they might endure. Who remembers the spate of mafia novels spawned in imitation of the commercial success of
The Godfather
?

Other publishing categories become commercially important but artistically narrow, like the women’s romance category or media tie-in fiction, where boundaries are strictly enforced and writers only rarely get a chance to stray into new territory. These fictions grow out of the conversation between writer and editor, with the editor holding all the cards.

But now and then a category bursts out of the control of the editors and publishers, and the fiction becomes a conversation among writers and readers.

This happens when writers become stars. The public demands not just more of the category, but more from that writer.

Now, when that happened with Verne and Wells, they each stood alone. But when it happens with writers who are aware of each other’s work and are, in fact, readers and admirers (or angry rivals) of each other’s work—when, in short, they perceive themselves to be part of the same group, producing fiction with deliberate similarities, a movement is born.

And when a category becomes a movement, it can change the literary world.

Hugo Gernsback, when he started publishing “scientifiction” in
Amazing Stories
, aspired to create a publishing category. He saw the commercial possibilities of Wells’s fiction and invited writers to create more of it.

There were plenty of other magazine editors and publishers creating categories at the time. Airplane stories. “Spicy” stories. War stories. Cowboy stories.

But science fiction (as it soon became known) created an audience that was not interested just in the subject matter, but also in the way the literature approached the world.

Science fiction didn’t just come up with cool adventures within an existing frame of reality, the way the other magazines did. It had to keep coming up with new realities. That was why it was Wells rather than Verne who pointed the way to creating a literary movement: Verne’s imitators would come up with new technologies, but Wells’s imitators had to come up with the social implications of those technologies.

It was the letters columns that created the monster. By corresponding with people whose letters appeared in the growing number of science fiction magazines, science fiction readers began to converse with each other about what made one story better or worse than another.

They created critical principles that were quite out of the control of the editors and publishers (except to the degree that the editor and publishers joined in as slightly-more-equal-than-the-others participants in that conversation).

The readers who took part in this conversation, and then became writers, wrote better stories because of it—“better,” that is, defined by what these readers decided “better” must be. They became the most-admired writers; the critical principles they affirmed became the rules of the movement.

Publishing categories become literary movements when the control shifts to the critical conversation among readers.

And literary movements become revolutions when they defy the critical standards of the day and declare those standards meaningless or inapplicable.

Many a writer has tried to launch a revolution directly, by banding together with a few like-minded buddies and finding some pulpit from which to propound their principles. If the public goes along—if the books find wider readership and the writers become stars—then the movement (revolutionary or not) takes on a life of its own that transcends the originators.

Most such “revolutions” fail miserably. Most writers find that other writers don’t want to imitate them or pay attention to their ideas. Even if they become stars, other writers simply regard the territory they have staked out as private property and don’t venture there; or, if they do, act as if the previous writer did not exist.

Disdain is the cruelest literary weapon.

But when the public embraces the movement, so the writers’ sales, as a group, matter in the publishing world, and the public seeks new works that are put forth as part of that movement, the movement becomes a genre, or the revolution redraws the literary map.

Just like Elizabethan theater (despised as subliterary at the time), romanticism, realism, and modernism, science fiction became not just a category, not just a revolution, but a victorious movement.

Victorious? When the universities still embrace, with few changes, the canon of modernism (in the sense that only books of a certain type are “worth talking about,” even though individual writers are elevated and dashed down by turns)?

Yes. While the guardians of “literary” fiction still give each other prizes and writers of that genre can still achieve stardom and create good work, the fact remains that it is a movement that has lost all its creative force as a movement.

Postmodern fiction was full of brave manifestos and learned-sounding disquisitions (often unreadable to those who thought criticism in English literature ought to be written in the English language), but their innovations were suspiciously similar to the innovations from the earliest days of modernism. Indeed, all you have to do to be called “daring” and “experimental” in that genre is to slavishly imitate the more outré works of writers who have been dead for half a century or more.

Science fiction, by contrast, was exploring new territory and spawned many minirevolutions that really did open new ground.

The Campbellians, writers of what is now called “hard science fiction,” insisted on fiction that took real science seriously.

Once Heinlein pointed the way, more and more writers in the 1950s began to regard character-in-society as another vital aspect of what they considered “good” science fiction. Even the hard SF writers began to follow suit, insofar as they were able.

The New Wave of the 1960s began to allow literary pyrotechnics to slip in front of the story—but rarely so far that the reader couldn’t see how the tale still conformed to the requirements of the other kinds of science fiction.

Through all this period—the 1930s to the 1970s—there were groups of writers starting up minimovements; there were stars who sometimes spawned imitators or staked out lonely territory; there were manifestos and attacks and the occasional death threat, thus certifying how serious everybody was.

But underneath all of this was one deep, significant fact: the audience for science fiction kept growing. They were hungry for new work, new voices; they demanded that we take them to new worlds and new cultures and new technologies that would stretch their minds.

Each new movement, each new star, increased the number of readers—and the number of kinds of science fiction there were. In fact, looked at with historical perspective, it is clear that through this period science fiction was literature.

Of course the writers and works from older literary movements did not disappear, especially because the institution of the university English department gave them an artificial lease on life; anyone who studied official literature was taught to despise science fiction and continue to admire or at least imitate the transformative writers of modernism.

But only science fiction was explosively productive of new critical standards, new literary perspectives, new kinds of stories.

And then it ended.

Because it always ends.

By the late 1970s, which is precisely when I entered the field, we’d pretty much dried up. Momentum carried us forward; but the revolution was over, and, try as we might, nobody could come up with a new one. All the kinds of science fiction already existed.

Yes, yes, I know. Cyberpunk. As a movement it was born of Bruce Sterling’s attack on the consensus sci-fi that had emerged—everybody seemed to be writing fiction set in each other’s futures. To show what should be happening, if the sci-fi revolution was to continue, Sterling pointed to the work of William Gibson as an example.

But the resulting “movement” did not consist of new ways of writing fiction or even a new flowering of innovative futures, as Sterling had hoped. Instead, it resulted in imitation—people who picked up on the superficial aspects of Gibson’s work and imitated it. A mere category.

In other words, science fiction was doing just what modernism had done a generation before: it still pretended to have revolutions, but they were cosmetic, not substantive. You would buy and read cyberpunk rather the way you would buy and read Star Wars novels.

I am saying nothing against the individual writers of cyberpunk—or Star Wars novels. There is nothing inherently good about revolutions—literary or otherwise. They are only good if they lead to something good. And even when literary revolutions pass their peak and become the establishment, they can still nurture wonderful writers who produce powerful works of fiction.

My point is merely that the revolution was over.

Here are some of the indications:

1.
We recognize all the kinds of science fiction and nobody is making new ones. There are time travel stories, alternate histories, anthropological sci-fi, techno-porn, military sci-fi, literary sci-fi (merging two revolutions past their prime), adventure sci-fi, social commentary sci-fi, hard sci-fi…Maybe I’ve overlooked something but as far as I can determine, there hasn’t been a new kind of science fiction since the late 1970s.

 

2.
We are becoming annoyingly respectable. More and more universities are teaching science fiction courses, and not just as a way to beef up the enrollment in English courses. We have a new generation of professors who grew up on
Dune
and
The Left Hand of Darkness
and
Foundation
and
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
and
Childhood’s End
and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”

 

3.
Derivative writers in other genres are now stealing from us. Many of the “postmodern” writers in the literary field were and are able to “prove” they were and are different from modernism by…writing science fiction.

 

4.
Our penetration of the public consciousness is complete. It’s hard to find a single important idea in science fiction that is not already familiar to the well-read portion of the general public. And through movies and television shows, which are finally catching up with print sci-fi, our field’s ideas have reached far beyond the audience of readers.

 

5.
Our space on the shelves in the bookstores is shrinking. Science fiction’s ability to generate new stars is declining. The public no longer looks to us to take them places they have never been. They look to us now as a way to get back to where they have been before and want to return—not a revolutionary, but a conservative impulse. The media tie-in novels are not an aberration, they are the primary way that many, perhaps most, people experience all science fiction.