TV movies with genre elements this year included an Alternate History piece called Fatherland, about the Nazis having won World War II, an eight-hour miniseries version of Stephen King’s The Stand, a two-hour reprise of the old series Alien Nation, and Witch Hunt, an extremely disappointing sequel to Cast a Deadly Spell, a TV movie from a few years back that had considerably more wit and style than the follow-up did.
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The 52nd World Science Fiction Convention, ConAdian, was held in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, from September 1 to September 5, 1994, and drew an estimated attendance of 3,500, making it the smallest North American worldcon in years. The 1994 Hugo Awards, presented at ConAdian, were: Best Novel, Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson; Best Novella, “Down in the Bottomlands,” by Harry Turtledove; Best Novelette, “Georgia on My Mind,” by Charles Sheffield; Best Short Story, “Death on the Nile,” by Connie Willis; Best Nonfiction, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls; Best Professional Editor, Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Best Professional Artist, Bob Eggleton; Best Original Artwork, Space Fantasy Commemorative Stamp Booklet, by Stephen Hickman; Best Dramatic Presentation, Jurassic Park; Best Semiprozine, Science Fiction Chronicle; Best Fanzine, Mimosa, edited by Dick and Nicki Lynch; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Brad W. Foster; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Amy Thomson.
The 1993 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the River Valley Inn in Eugene, Oregon, on April 23, 1994, were: Best Novel, Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson; Best Novella, “The Night We Buried Road Dog,” by Jack Cady; Best Novelette, “Georgia on My Mind,” by Charles Sheffield; Best Short Story, “Graves,” by Joe Haldeman.
The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twentieth Annual World Fantasy Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 30, 1994, were: Best Novel, Glimpses, by Lewis Shiner; Best Novella, “Under the Crust,” by Terry Lamsley; Best Short Fiction, The Lodger, Fred Chappell; Best Collection, Alone with the Horrors, by Ramsey Campbell; Best Anthology, Full Spectrum 4, edited by Lou Aronica, Amy Stout, and Betsy Mitchell; Best Artist (tie), Alan Clarke and J. K. Potter; Special Award (Professional), to Underwood-Miller; Special Award (Nonprofessional), Marc Michaud, for Necronomicon Press; plus a Life Achievement Award to Jack Williamson.
The 1994 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a meeting June 3 to June 5 in Las Vegas, Nevada, were: Best Novel, The Throat, by Peter Straub; Best First Novel, The Thread That Binds the Bones, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; Best Collection, Alone with the Horrors, by Ramsey Campbell; Best Novella, “The Night We Buried Road Dog,” by Jack Cady; Best Novelette, “Death in Bangkok,” Dan Simmons; Best Short Story, “I Hear the Mermaids Singing,” by Nancy Holder; Best Nonfiction, Once Around the Bloch, by Robert Bloch; plus a Life Achievement Award to Joyce Carol Oates.
There was no winner of the 1993 John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the first time in the history of this award that a winner has not been declared.
The 1993 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by “Fox Magic,” by Kij Johnson.
The 1993 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award (tie) went to Growing Up Weightless, by John M. Ford and Elvissey, by Jack Womack.
The 1993 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by Vurt, by Jeff Noon.
The 1993 James Tiptree, Jr. Award was won by Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith.
The 1994 James Tiptree, Jr. Award (tie) was won by Larque on the Wing, by Nancy Springer and “The Matter of Seggri,” by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The 1993 Compton Crook Award was won by The Drylands, by Mary Rosenblum.
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Dead in 1994 were: Famous horror, fantasy, and suspense writer Robert Bloch, 77, author of the classic novel Psycho and the classic story “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” as well as dozens of other novels and collections, and many screenplays, winner of the Hugo, the Edgar Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Convention’s Lifetime Achievement Award, one of the best loved figures in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres; well-known horror writer and editor Karl Edward Wagner, 48, World Fantasy Award-winner, author of the “Kane” series, and, for the last fifteen years, the editor of the prestigious and highly influential anthology series The Year’s Best Horror Stories, a friend; Raymond Z. Gallun, 83, one of the few remaining stars from the “Super-science” era of the 1930s, a prolific writer for the SF pulps of that day, and author of People Minus X and The Eden Cycle; Raymond F. Jones, veteran author, best known for his work in Astounding in the 1940s and 1950s, author of the novel This Island Earth, which inspired the well-known film; Robert Shea, 61, writer and editor, best known as coauthor of the Illuminatus trilogy; Rick Raphael, 74, SF writer, author of Code Three; Pierre Boulle, 81, French author, best known for his novels Planet of the Apes and The Bridge on the River Kwai; James Clavell, 69, author of Shōgun and King Rat; Gerd Prokop, 61, German SF writer; Lydia Langstaff, fan and beginning SF writer; Donald Swann, 70, composer and pianist who composed music for the J. R. R. Tolkien song-cycle The Road Goes Ever On and who wrote an opera version of C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra; Sean Spacher, 51, prominent fan artist and sculptor; Walter Lantz, 93, cartoonist, creator of Woody Woodpecker; Don Thompson, 58, well-known comics fan, coeditor of The Comic Buyer’s Guide, as well as coeditor of All in Color for a Dime and The Comic-Book Book; Ella Parker, 75, well-known British fan legendary for her kindness and hospitality, one of the many beneficiaries of which was an unknown fan at his first convention, who later became the editor of this anthology series; Bill Benthake, 76, longtime SF fan; Morris Scott Dollens, 74, fan and fan artist; Harry C. Bigglestone, 47, fan and convention organizer; Burt Lancaster, 80, famous film actor, best known to genre audiences for his roles in The Island of Dr. Moreau and Seven Days in May; John Candy, 43, comic and film actor, best known to genre audiences for his roles in Splash and the soap-opera fantasy Delirious; Peter Cushing, 81, film actor, best known to genre audiences for his role in Star Wars, as well as for dozens of horror movies such as The Mummy and The Curse of Frankenstein; Jessica Tandy, 85, best known to genre audiences for her roles in The Birds and Cocoon; Raul Julia, 54, film actor, best known for his roles in The Addams Family and Addams Family Values; Cesar Romero, 86, best known to genre audiences for his role as The Joker in television’s original Batman series; William Conrad, 73, television and radio actor, perhaps best known to genre audiences as the voice of the narrator on The Bullwinkle Show; Terence Young, 79, director, among other films, of two of the best James Bond movies, Dr. No and From Russia With Love; Noah Berry Jr., film and television actor, perhaps best known for his role on TV’s “The Rockford Files,” as well as his role in the early SF film Rocketship X-M; Annette Pelz McComas, 83, widow of SF editor J. Francis McComas, as well as editor of The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1949-1954; Pat Killough, 49, husband of SF writer Lee Killough; Felicity Brunner, 82, mother of SF writer John Brunner; Bette Fast, wife of writer Howard Fast and mother of writer Jonathan Fast; Thelma D. Hamm, 89, widow of SF figure E. Everett Evans; and Verna Smith Trestrail, 73, daughter of SF writer E. E. Smith.
FORGIVENESS DAY
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin is 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—even ignoring the rest of Le Guin’s work, the impact of this one novel alone on future SF and future SF writers would be incalculably strong. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on future generations of High Fantasy writers.) The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1970 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 acclaimed 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, and the controversial multimedia novel (it sold with a tape cassette of music, and included drawings and recipes) Always Coming Home. She has published four story collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, and Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. Her most recent books are the novel Searoad, and a new collection, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. Her stories have appeared in our Second, Fifth, and Eighth Annual Collections.
Here she returns to the star-spanning, Hainish-settled interstellar community known as the Ekumen, the same fictional universe as her famous novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, for a thoughtful and passionate story of clashing cultural values, politics, violence, religion, and terror—and of the star-crossed relationship of a man and a woman who are literally worlds apart …
Solly had been a space brat, a Mobile’s child, living on this ship and that, this world and that; she’d traveled five hundred lightyears by the time she was ten. At twenty-five she had been through a revolution on Alterra, learned aiji on Terra and farthinking from an old hilfer on Rokanan, breezed through the Schools on Hain, and survived an assignment as Observer in murderous, dying Kheakh, skipping another half-millennium at near lightspeed in the process. She was young, but she’d been around.
She got bored with the Embassy people in Voe Deo telling her to watch out for this, remember that; she was a Mobile herself now, after all. Werel had its quirks—what world didn’t? She’d done her homework, she knew when to curtsey and when not to belch, and vice versa. It was a relief to get on her own at last, in this gorgeous little city, on this gorgeous little continent, the first and only Envoy of the Ekumen to the Divine Kingdom of Gatay.
She was high for days on the altitude, the tiny, brilliant sun pouring vertical light into the noisy streets, the peaks soaring up incredibly behind every building, the dark-blue sky where great near stars burned all day, the dazzling nights under six or seven lolloping bits of moon, the tall black people with their black eyes, narrow heads, long, narrow hands and feet, gorgeous people, her people! She loved them all. Even if she saw a little too much of them.
The last time she had had completely to herself was a few hours in the passenger cabin of the airskimmer sent by Gatay to bring her across the ocean from Voe Deo. On the airstrip she was met by a delegation of priests and officials from the King and the Council, magnificent in scarlet and brown and turquoise, and swept off to the Palace, where there was a lot of curtseying and no belching, of course, for hours—an introduction to his little shrunken old majesty, introductions to High Muckamucks and Lord Hooziwhats, speeches, a banquet—all completely predictable, no problems at all, not even the impenetrable giant fried flower on her plate at the banquet. But with her, from that first moment on the airstrip and at every moment thereafter, discreetly behind or beside or very near her, were two men: her Guide and her Guard.
The Guide, whose name was San Ubattat, was provided by her hosts in Gatay; of course he was reporting on her to the government, but he was a most obliging spy, endlessly smoothing the way for her, showing her with a bare hint what was expected or what would be a gaffe, and an excellent linguist, ready with a translation when she needed one. San was all right. But the Guard was something else.
He had been attached to her by the Ekumen’s hosts on this world, the dominant power on Werel, the big nation of Voe Deo. She had promptly protested to the Embassy back in Voe Deo that she didn’t need or want a bodyguard. Nobody in Gatay was out to get her and even if they were she preferred to look after herself. The Embassy sighed. Sorry, they said. You’re stuck with him. Voe Deo has a military presence in Gatay, which after all is a client state, economically dependent. It’s in Voe Deo’s interest to protect the legitimate government of Gatay against the native terrorist factions, and you get protected as one of their interests. We can’t argue with that.
She knew better than to argue with the Embassy, but she could not resign herself to the Major. His military title, rega, she translated by the archaic word “Major,” from a skit she’d seen on Terra. That Major had been a stuffed uniform, covered with medals and insignia. It puffed and strutted and commanded, and finally blew up into bits of stuffing. If only this Major would blow up! Not that he strutted, exactly, or even commanded, directly. He was stonily polite, woodenly silent, stiff and cold as rigor mortis. She soon gave up any effort to talk to him; whatever she said, he replied Yessum or Nomum with the prompt stupidity of a man who does not and will not actually listen, an officer officially incapable of humanity. And he was with her in every public situation, day and night, on the street, shopping, meeting with businessmen and officials, sightseeing, at court, in the balloon ascent above the mountains—with her everywhere, everywhere but bed.
Even in bed she wasn’t quite as alone as she would often have liked; for the Guide and the Guard went home at night, but in the anteroom of her bedroom slept the Maid—a gift from His Majesty, her own private asset.
She remembered her incredulity when she first learned that word, years ago, in a text about slavery. “On Werel, members of the dominant caste are called owners; members of the serving class are called assets. Only owners are referred to as men and women; assets are called bondsmen, bondswomen.”
So here she was, the owner of an asset. You don’t turn down a king’s gift. Her asset’s name was Rewe. Rewe was probably a spy too, but it was hard to believe. She was a dignified, handsome woman some years older than Solly and about the same intensity of skin-color, though Solly was pinkish-brown and Rewe was bluish-brown. The palms of her hands were a delicate azure. Rewe’s manners were exquisite and she had tact, astuteness, an infallible sense of when she was wanted and when not. Solly of course treated her as an equal, stating right out at the beginning that she believed no human being had a right to dominate, much less own, another, that she would give Rewe no orders, and that she hoped they might become friends. Rewe accepted this, unfortunately, as a new set of orders. She smiled and said yes. She was infinitely yielding. Whatever Solly said or did sank into that acceptance and was lost, leaving Rewe unchanged: an attentive, obliging, gentle physical presence, just out of reach. She smiled, and said yes, and was untouchable.
And Solly began to think, after the first fizz of the first days in Gatay, that she needed Rewe, really needed her as a woman to talk with. There was no way to meet Owner women, who lived hidden away, “at home,” they called it. All bondswomen but Rewe were somebody else’s property, not hers to talk to. All she ever met was men. And eunuchs.
That had been another thing hard to believe, that a man would voluntarily trade his virility for a little social standing; but she met such men all the time in King Hotat’s court. Born assets, they were freed from slavery by becoming eunuchs, and as such often rose to positions of considerable power and trust among their owners. The eunuch Tayandan, majordomo of the palace, ruled the king, who didn’t rule, but figureheaded for the Council. The Council was made up of various kinds of lord but only one kind of priest, Tualites. Only assets worshipped Kamye, and the original religion of Gatay had been suppressed when the monarchy became Tualite a century or so ago. If there was one thing she really disliked about Werel, aside from slavery and genderdominance, it was the religions. The songs about Lady Tual were beautiful, and the statues of her and the great temples in Voe Deo were wonderful, and the Arkamye seemed to be a good story though longwinded; but the deadly self-righteousness, the intolerance, the stupidity of the priests, the hideous doctrines that justified every cruelty in the name of the faith! As a matter of fact, Solly said to herself, was there anything she did like about Werel?
And answered herself instantly: I love it, I love it. I love this weird little bright sun and all the broken bits of moons and the mountains going up like ice wall
s and the people—the people with their black eyes without whites like animals’ eyes, eyes like dark glass, like dark water, mysterious—I want to love them, I want to know them, I want to reach them!
But she had to admit that the pissants at the Embassy had been right about one thing: being a woman was tough on Werel. She fit nowhere. She went about alone, she had a public position, and so was a contradiction in terms: proper women stayed at home, invisible. Only bondswomen went out in the streets, or met strangers, or worked at any public job. She behaved like an asset, not like an owner. Yet she was something very grand, an envoy of the Ekumen, and Gatay very much wanted to join the Ekumen and not to offend its envoys. So the officials and courtiers and businessmen she talked to on the business of the Ekumen did the best they could: they treated her as if she were a man.
The pretense was never complete and often broke right down. The poor old king groped her industriously, under the vague impression that she was one of his bedwarmers. When she contradicted Lord Gatuyo in a discussion, he stared with the blank disbelief of a man who has been talked back to by his shoe. He had been thinking of her as a woman. But in general the disgenderment worked, allowing her to work with them; and she began to fit herself into the game, enlisting Rewe’s help in making clothes that resembled what male owners wore in Gatay, avoiding anything that to them would be specifically feminine. Rewe was a quick, intelligent seamstress. The bright, heavy, close-fitted trousers were practical and becoming, the embroidered jackets were splendidly warm. She liked wearing them. But she felt unsexed by these men who could not accept her for what she was. She needed to talk to a woman.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 7
