Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (9 page)

I would have thought the trial would be just Mother’s cup of tea, even without me on the witness stand, so I was surprised not to hear from her. It made me stop and think back, try to remember when her last letter had come. Could have been five years, could have been ten. Could have been twenty, could have been two. I figured she must be dead, which was bound to happen sooner or later, though I did think she was young to go, but that might only have been because I’d lost track of how old she was. I never heard from her again so I think I had it right. I wonder if it was the cigarettes. She always said that smoking killed germs.

Not one of the immortals left Always during the trial. Partly we were in shock and huddled up as a result. Partly there was so much to be done, so much money to be made.

The arcade crawled with tourists and reporters, too. Looking for a story, but also, as always, trying to make one. “Now that Brother Porter is dead,” they would ask, exact wording to change, but point always the same, “don’t you have some doubts? And if you have some doubts, well, then, isn’t the game already over?” They were tiresome, but they paid for their Hawaiian Punch just like everyone else and we all knew Brother Porter wouldn’t have wanted them kept away.

Frankie was let off by reason of insanity. Exactly two days later Harry Capps walked into breakfast just when Winnifred Allington was telling us how badly she’d slept the night before on account of her arthritis. By the time he ran out of bullets, four more immortals were dead.

Harry’s defense was no defense. “Not one of them ever got a good night’s sleep,” he said. “Someone had to show them what a good night’s sleep was.”

The politicians blamed the overly lenient Frankie Frye verdict for the four new deaths and swore the same mistake would not be made twice. Harry got life.

 

Why I’m Still Here:

Everyone else either died or left and now I’m the whole of it. The last of the immortals; City of Always, population one. I moved up to the big house and I’m the postmistress now, along with anything else I care to keep going. I get a salary from the government with benefits and a pension they’ll regret if I live forever. They have a powerful faith I won’t.

The arcade is closed except for the peep shows, which cost a quarter now and don’t need me to do anything to run them but collect the coins after. People don’t come through so much since they built the 17, but I still get customers from time to time. They buy a postcard and they want the Always postmark on it.

Wilt came to fetch me after the noise died down. “I brought you here,” he said. “Seems like I should take you away.” He never did understand why I wouldn’t leave. He hadn’t lived here long enough to understand it.

I tried the easy answer first. I got shot by Harry Capps, I said. Right through the heart. Was supposed to die. Didn’t.

But then I tried again, because that wasn’t the real answer and if I’d ever loved anyone, I’d loved Wilt. Who’ll take care of the redwoods if I go? I asked him. Who’ll take care of the mountains? He still didn’t get it, though he said he did. I wouldn’t have known how to leave even if I’d wanted to. What I was and what he was—they weren’t the same thing at all anymore. There was no way back to what I’d been. The actual living forever part? That was always, always the least of it.

Which is the last thing I’m going to say on the subject. There is no question you can ask I haven’t already answered and answered and answered again. Time without end.

T
hirty years ago, Brian Stableford theorized that it was all over for science fiction. It was a literature for a transitional period, the transition between the technological and post-technological eras, which in the West could be placed roughly in the period 1900-1980, when the machines and all of the devices of mass communication went wild and society, however unwillingly, had to adjust to these enormous changes. The automobile, radio, television, mass marketing, national publications, mass advertising, the airplane, the telephone, the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, radar, the bombsight, the typewriter, the computer. Enormous changes all seemingly at the last minute.

Science fiction, a literature showing the integration of technology into the culture, on Earth or off, was evolved as a kind of protocol. It indicated means—multiple, often conflicting means—of adjustment. Wasn’t it Gernsback the Founder (science fiction as a distinct genre is commonly dated as originating with the April 1926 issue of
Amazing Stories
) who proposed that this new literature of science would encourage young boys to pursue careers in science? Sure, there were crazy extrapolations to the stars, monsters prowling the spacecraft, radio cabinets on rubbery legs lighting cigarettes for their owners . . . still, that originating purpose was present in every Campbell editorial, every
Case of Conscience
, every curse of Gully Foyle . . . science fiction would enable us to imagine and then practice ways to live in a world that technology had overtaken and utterly changed.

That era of adjustment, Stableford wrote in 1978, was ending. We had adjusted more or less, had adjusted as best we could anyway. Science fiction had served its purpose; now in a time when technology was becoming fully integrated, it was only an appendix, a vestigial form attached only through inheritance. Decadence—form prevailing over function—would prevail and then the withering into eventual uselessness. Or as John Clute suggested early in the New Millennium, “Science fiction was a 20th century thing, the way that the symphony is essentially a 19th century thing. For a few years it seemed to be riding the saddle on the steed taking us to the future . . . but that is gone now.”

Is this true? There are at least ten ways of looking at a black-bird; certainly this is one of them. These annual Nebula anthologies—of which this is the forty-third—have in their own way tracked the latter course of a genre that was approximately half its present age when the series began, and in many ways Clute and Stableford’s assessment can be seen refracted through the books. Much of the fiction in the most recent volumes isn’t science fiction at all, it is fantasy, and the science fiction content has become blurred in its tilt away from the rigor to which the genre had aspired in its halcyon ’50s. You’ll find the anthologies in the years of this vested third millennium to be suspiciously replete with zombies, voodoo, strange doings in basements, vampires, space travel accomplished through psychic means, alternate histories blurring into or around the known present. This is not your grandfather’s or father’s science fiction and much of it is not science fiction at all. The moving finger having writ and so on. One could well conclude that science fiction, having served its essential, originating purpose as a commercial format, was now, like Marx’s idealized State, in the process of withering away.

This is of course simplistic argument. It avoids—as perhaps Clute and Stableford have also—any real complexity and also the real sociological fact of culture lag: organized society is in a perpetual state of catch-up, its mores and processes and accepted ethics significantly behind the actual pace of change. The culture is still trying to deal with the birth control pill or stem cell research within a Calvinistic frame of denial that was relevant centuries ago but is now inevitably intrusive or irrelevant.

And that might be descriptive of science fiction itself—“inevitably intrusive or irrelevant” in an era when technology and the culture have essentially interfaced, when everything has moved on except, perhaps, First Fandom and the persistent squabblers of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Still, here is the forty-third annual volume in an unbroken run and like its forty-two predecessors it contains some good stories as well as some stories that comprise a statement of other issues, and who knows if a consensus could be reached? These annuals are testimony, a series of friezes that are snapshots of the period, and their very inconclusiveness embraces the point.

“I want forward-looking, affirmative commentary,” the editor of this anthology said to me and then after a long pause, “Except, I guess, from you.” Granted this dispensation I have not looked backward any more than necessary and I refuse to look forward. The present is about all I can handle. But whether science fiction is a finished thing or not, what a glorious instrument it was! The symphony may be a finished thing but, oh, the roar of Brahms and Mahler and even, at its effective end, Franz Schmidt. Oh, the madder music, the wild darkness of the ’50s! Our future may have been snatched away but the past is ours always and, ah: such sweet thunder.

New Jersey, 2008

 

I
n 1959, C. P. Snow gave his famous Two Cultures lecture at Cambridge, in which he spoke of a separation between the culture of science and that of “literary intellectuals.” He said that academe and society in general were separating into scientists and humanists, and that any common language or viewpoint was fast vanishing.

He was right.

Most of the great scientific discoveries of our era—those of Darwin, Einstein, Curie—were made by those who knew how to wield the pen. The great literary harbingers of the modern age, which was ushered in by these new insights into the natural world, were Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and others who used the energy of consciousness to look directly at their own minds. They used literature in ways that reflected the social shocks and indeterminacy revealed by the theory of evolution and the theory of relativity, as well as the perceived fragmentation of time and lives brought about by industrialization.

Sometime in the early sixties, I was sorted into a group defined by “good with words.” I’m not blaming anyone—I was—and yet, I was therefore not given any formal overview of science or mathematics because someone assumed it would be a waste of time. Instead, I was told to solve problems. Achieving the correct answer—learning how to think—was not the point. One was to memorize one particular process with which to achieve the correct answer. But now, I suspect that the teachers didn’t really understand what they were doing and so could not evaluate alternative processes. My good-with-words track had to learn the periodic table, which I did, and dissect a frog, which I did not. Never was it breathed to me why such information might lead to future fascination or might eventually spark my imagination, as words had been doing for quite some time. I read biographies of scientific pioneers with great interest, yet never considered that I might become one, or at least eventually understand what had led to the polio vaccine, which changed my life (I could, thereafter, swim in public pools), sulfa drugs (which saved my life when I got peritonitis), or the atomic bomb (which elicited a Wednesday noon air-raid-signal test for the first fifteen years of my life, although we never, in history or science class, got around to why). I knew about “evolution” because I read the encyclopedia, but I didn’t understand its paradigm-shattering implications. And, by the way, my school system, Fairfax County, Virginia, was then and is now one of the “best” in the country.