Nebula Awards Showcase 2003

by Nancy Kress

  The artists, aesthetes, and angst-ridden adolescents who compellingly people Elizabeth Hand’s Black Light and Last Summer at Mars Hill are as fabulous as gryphons and as timely as the tabloids. John Crowley, who tempts even the hardheaded to retrieve the word genius from the dustbin, wrote Little, Big and then, instead of resting on the seventh day, just kept going, into the majestic series that includes, most recently, Daemonomania. Tim Powers’s Declare reads like an Indiana Jones vehicle written by John Le Carré or, in other words, like nothing else in this world, but it also manages to be an epic Zhivago-style love story chockablock with jaw-dropping notions, my favorite being the revelation of a sinister second Ark that shadowed Noah’s. How’s that for High Concept?

  Peter Straub is the best horror writer since Herman Melville. “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” the highlight of his collection Magic Terror, demonstrates anew that fantasy need not include a single supernatural element. Don’t ask me; ask him. Caitlín R. Kiernan, author of Tales of Pain and Wonder, is a mesmerizing stylist with an unerring sense of place;Anne Rice’s New Orleans has nothing on Kiernan’s Birmingham, Alabama. Kiernan is also a Goth queen and a mosasaur expert. How cool is that? Another prose magician is Jeffrey Ford, who managed to get his collection The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories and his novel The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque published at the same time, the show-off.

  See what I mean? I’m running out of space, and I haven’t even mentioned Graham Joyce, Nalo Hopkinson, Ray Vukcevich, Glen David Gold, Philip Pullman, China Miéville, Ted Chiang, Alan Moore, Louise Erdrich, Steven Millhauser, Lisa Goldstein . . .

  (many more names go here)

  . . . or J. K. Rowling, whose multivolume Harry Potter saga, when complete, will make all the grumblers, potshotters, and naysayers look even sillier than they look now.

  Whence this explosion of cutting-edge contemporary fantasy, this embarrassment of riches? Well. Tolkien famously argued that a chief function of “fairy-stories” was Escape, which he both lauded as a heroic act and capitalized, as he did “its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt.” Most of us don’t share Tolkien’s Disgust at the modern world; he went on, in the next paragraph of that famous essay, to Condemn electric streetlamps. But as I write this in summer 2002, I can think of any number of things we writers and readers might justifiably be Escaping from these days—into the pastoral long ago and far away, no doubt, but also into more contemporary realms: our world, straight up, with a twist. The long-term benefits of this literary and psychological trend, if it continues, are interesting to contemplate, but it’s late, and I’m sleepy. After a good night’s rest and a great many dreams, informed by all those writers named above, I will rise and mow the lawn, and then come inside and do my part: I will write a fantasy story.

  TRADITIONAL FANTASY

  Mindy L. Klasky

  Relative newcomer Mindy L. Klasky has been making a splash in fantasy with her Glasswright series.

  “Traditional fantasy”: Readers outside of the speculative fiction crowd often regard the phrase with suspicion, their reactions ranging from polite confusion (from people who have no idea what is included in the genre) to knowing leers (from people who assume that “fantasies” are hidden in plain brown wrappers, available only behind the sales counter). Nevertheless, the past few years have introduced millions of people to traditional fantasy through the cinematic blockbusters of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. As if in reaction to those media visions (and, in some cases, the traditional novels on which they were based), written traditional fantasy has pushed new boundaries, exploring intimate relationships between characters and focusing on sexual identity and power as major tools of storytelling.

  The juggernaut of traditional fantasy rolls onward, continuing to appeal to children (both chronological youngsters and nostalgic adults). The first four books in the Harry Potter series proved so popular that the New York Times Bestseller list created a new category of “Children’s Literature” to open up slots for some other—any other—novels. The Lord of the Rings and its prequel, The Hobbit, have occupied four of the top ten slots on Locus magazine’s mass market paperback bestseller list for the majority of the past few years. People who have never dreamed of reading in the speculative fiction ghetto have proudly boasted of their literary excursions into cinematic “novelizations”—novels that have, in some cases, been available for more than half a century.

  The public seems to embrace these media fantasies for the archetypes they present—the struggles of good against evil, the stories of growth from childhood to adulthood, the hope of magic in our daily affairs. And yet many adults have a desire to push beyond those childhood dreams, to edge past the old struggles. There is a movement in print fantasy to confront new challenges, to address more complex problems, to create new solutions. Many of these novels address the uniquely adult world of complex sexuality to explore their new parameters.

  Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels Trilogy exemplifies the new, adult aspect of traditional fantasy. The dominant race of her world, the Blood, are virile vampires, humanlike creatures whose sexuality is central to their means of communication. Women often control men, holding them as sexual slaves and forcing them to serve as unpaid gigolos. Men can be controlled by magical rings—channels that convey great pain—placed directly on their genitals. Witches—the strongest and most dangerous of women—can be destroyed if they are deflowered by brutal or careless men. Throughout the novels, sexuality is the currency of power, a driving force that sweeps up characters, the plot, and the author’s themes.

  Similarly, in Lynn Flewelling’s The Bone Doll’s Twin sexuality is twined about the core of power. In that well-received novel, a prophesied princess is hidden from her murderous royal uncle, disguised as a boy. The disguise, however, goes far beyond the traditional fairy-tale vision of a girl wearing pants and clipping her hair. Flewelling’s princess is physically transformed into a male child; in a blood rite, her body is manipulated through magic. The resulting tale traces the confused princess’s friendships and feudal relationships, yielding a complex and fascinating examination of gender politics, all wrapped up in an ostensibly traditional fantasy story of succession, usurpation, and feudal loyalty.

  Even fiction that is generally marketed to children in the United States has been shaped by the examination of sexual roles and mores. Phillip Pullman’s acclaimed trilogy, which began with The Golden Compass and continued with The Subtle Knife, concluded with The Amber Spyglass. In that novel, an alien race is dying because it has lost the secret of its reproduction. Two human children are enlisted in a battle between good and evil that spans several worlds. Their innocent discovery of their own sexual natures is crucial to the resolution of the novel’s intertwined plots.

  In each of the examples cited above, sexuality is a major element of the story, woven into the plot, the characters, and even the physical setting. It is not a fillip added to a tale to otherwise attract adult readers. It is not a lurid sidelight, designed to bring in a few prurient purchasers. Rather, it is a crucial element, vital and essential to the storytelling.

  As in the past, traditional fantasy provides readers a chance to explore the meaning of their worlds through very different societies. Some aspects of the genre remain stable: the vast majority of novels are published in series. The vast majority of fantasy works contain magic, with strict rules about its application and usefulness. The vast majority of traditional fantasy explores essential conflicts between forces of good and forces of evil.

  And yet the field is expanding, growing, defining itself to exist in a field separate from the media, separate from the exuberant—if occasionally simplistic—youthful audience attracted by cinema. Traditional fantasy is growing up, shaping itself for grown-up readers with grown-up concerns.

  DARK FANTASY

  Ellen Datlow

  Venerable SF editor Ellen Datlow currently edits the online magazine SCI FICTION.

  I’ve been interested in dark
literature all my life. As a child I read everything around the house from Bulfinch’s Mythology to Guy de Maupassant’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short fiction. I watched the original Twilight Zone television series as soon as my parents would let me stay up late. Later, I read The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural with stories by Ray Russell, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Gahan Wilson, and a host of other names familiar to horror readers, and Richard Matheson’s Shock collections. Those are the books that hooked me on horror.

  I still read a lot of dark fiction—horror/dark fantasy—as my reading for the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, of course, but also because I love this subgenre of fantastic literature. Just as in science fiction, there are arguments as to what constitutes “ horror”—is it only supernatural fiction, or does it encompass psychological horror? And what about terror fiction, crime fiction? I and other aficionados of the dark literary tradition embrace a dictum comparable to Damon Knight’s: “If I as an editor point to it, it’s SF.” My personal rule of thumb is, if it’s dark enough—if I as a horror reader and editor read a piece of fiction that gives me a certain frisson, promotes a specific unease or feeling of dread while reading it—I’ll call it horror. Horror is the only literature that is defined by its effect on the reader rather than on its subject matter. Which is why great science fiction classics such as Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, and great psychological horror works by Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson (both of whom also have published supernatural fiction) fit comfortably into the horror field.

  Horror has gone through growing pains similar to SF’s, although unlike SF it originally began as part of the mainstream, and in the 1980s, as a result of Stephen King’s popularity, it was made into a marketing category. And because many publishers decided they needed a horror line with a set number of slots to fill, a lot of bad horror was written and published, saturating a market that really wanted more Stephen King but not necessarily more horror. The horror lines crashed and burned relatively quickly, and soon few commercial publishers would touch horror—overtly—although a flurry and then an avalanche of literary/crime/psychological horror novels were published throughout the nineties.

  But unlike SF, horror has never really had more than one or two professional magazines. Weird Tales, although publishing dark fantasy for many years, does not publish what I consider horror. The difference? A matter of degree. Twilight Zone Magazine and its sister Night Cry existed for relatively short periods of time. Some of the SF magazines have published and continue to publish a bit of horror. But out of this vacuum the small press grew.

  The proliferation of desktop publishing and the Internet have made it possible for anyone to self-publish or publish their friends on a shoestring budget. This innovation has produced some quality magazines and webzines and a lot of dreck. The worst problem facing the horror field today is being able to distinguish between quality and junk. I don’t mean entertaining junk. I mean stuff like hairballs caught in a cat’s throat. A lot of small-press horror magazines are just abominable, though I know the editors must believe in what they’re doing. But not everyone can or should be an editor. Editing is a calling—not something you just dabble in—if you want to produce anything of consistent quality. I think that the young and clueless are too caught up in the gore of it.

  Here we come to the negative side of today’s horror field. Although horror should elicit emotion from the reader, what’s forgotten by the purveyors of a tiny subgenre that’s been screaming for attention—gross out/extreme horror—is that they’re taking the easy way out. Eliciting disgust and repelling readers might be a charge in the short run but in the long run it’s self-defeating, a stylistic choice more than a thematic one—and a dead end. They’ve left behind the idea that the gore needs to be integrated into a story in which you care about what’s happening. They’ve forgotten that gore for gore’s sake becomes numbing. This sort of horror has a limited audience within the horror community and an even tinier audience outside the horror community. I believe that most of the writers writing it now will tire of it and move on—or stop writing. And if they don’t move on? That just means they have nothing to say.

  But whenever I feel discouraged by the shouting, I know I can cleanse my literary palate by reading the work of newer writers who excite me—voices of the dark short story such as Glen Hirshberg, Kelly Link, Tia V. Travis, Marion Arnott, Tim Lebbon, and Gemma Files—and by reading the dark stories and novellas by some of my favorite writers, such as Elizabeth Hand, Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem, Kathe Koja, Terry Dowling, Tanith Lee, Paul McAuley, Lucius Shepard, P. D. Cacek, Kim Newman, Terry Lamsley, Peter Straub, Gene Wolfe, and a host of others who are creating chilling dark fiction with verve, a graceful use of language, and imagination. And over the years, while reading for the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series, I’ve read brilliant horror novels by Stewart O’Nan (A Prayer for the Dying), Jack O’Connell (Word Made Flesh), China Miéville (King Rat and Perdido Street Station), Janette Turner Hospital (Oyster and The Last Magician), and everything by Jonathan Carroll.

  Whenever you have so many writers (and others who I didn’t mention for reasons of space) producing and publishing their best work, you’ve got a healthy field.

  ALTERNATE HISTORY

  Harry Turtledove

  Harry Turtledove has set his award-winning novels in many alternate times and places.

  A friend of mine once claimed that alternate history was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. I don’t know that I’d go that far—and I do suspect I could get my face slapped for experimenting—but the subgenre certainly does have its attractions.

  First, of course, are the pleasures any good story offers: evocative writing, interesting characters, and a well-made plot. Right behind those is the peculiar fillip you get only from science fiction: seeing if the author’s extrapolation from the change he or she has made to the so-called real world is plausible and persuasive. Though alternate history changes the past rather than the present or the future, it usually plays by the same sort of rules as the rest of science fiction once the change is made.

  But alternate history also has a special kick all its own. It looks at the world in a funhouse mirror no other form of fiction can match. In it, we can look at not only fictional characters but real characters in fictional settings, bouncing what we already know about them off the paddles of a new pinball machine. If the Spanish Armada had won, what would have happened to Shakespeare’s career? If the Union had lost, what would have happened to Abraham Lincoln’s? If Muhammad hadn’t founded Islam, what might he have done? And what would the world look like then?

  Most science fiction projects onto a blank screen. You know only what the author tells you about the world and its inhabitants. Like mainstream historical fiction, alternate history assumes you know more; some of the people and situations involved will be familiar to you ahead of time. But, where historical fiction deals with pieces of the world as it was, alternate history demands more of its readers: it asks them to look into that funhouse mirror and see things as they might have been.

  And it can do more than that. It can turn whole societies upside down. If a plague completely destroyed Western Europe at the end of the fourteenth century, what would the world have looked like afterwards? Could there have been an industrial revolution? If blacks had enslaved whites in North America rather than the other way around, how might they have treated them? (Reversing roles and looking at consequences is one of the things science fiction does particularly well.) If fascism or communism had triumphed during the turbulent century just past, how might things look?

  From a writer’s point of view, there’s one other joy to doing alternate history: the research. If you aren’t into digging up weird things for the fun of digging them up, this probably isn’t the subgenre for you. If you are, though, you can transpose Newton and Galileo into Central Asia, make obscure references that ninety-nine out of a hundred of y
our readers will never notice but that will horrify or crack up the hundredth, or make all your readers feel as if they’re looking at a trompe l’oeil painting. Perhaps the finest compliment I ever got was from a reviewer who said a novel of mine made him think he was reading an accurate portrayal of a world that in fact never existed.

  Jeremiads? What goes wrong in alternate history is the flip side of what goes right. Bad writing and inept characterization can and too often do afflict any fiction. But the subgenre’s besetting sins are failure of research and failure of extrapolation. A few years back, there was a novel (marketed as mainstream fiction rather than SF) that had to do with Jefferson Davis’s reelection bid after a Southern victory in the Civil War. Lovely—except that the Confederate Constitution limited the president of the CSA to a single six-year term. There’s another book about a world where the Romans conquered Germany and the Empire survived into the twentieth century. Unfortunately, it’s also a world where Roman society never changed even though the Empire had an industrial revolution . . . and a world where, despite the immense changes a successful conquest and assimilation of Germany would have caused, Constantine still gets born three centuries after the breakpoint and still plays a role recognizably similar to the one he had in real history.

  Suspension of disbelief is probably harder to pull off in alternate history than in most other forms of fiction, not least because you’re playing in part with what your readers already know. If they think She’d never act that way, not even under those changed circumstances, because she did thus-and-so in the real world or Even if they had invented Silly Putty then, that doesn’t mean we’d all be going around with hula hoops twenty years later, you’ve lost them. Once disbelief comes crashing down, a steroid-laced weightlifter can’t pick it up again.