Nebula Awards Showcase 2010

by Bill Fawcett

  It was no longer difficult to get funding, or stars, or star directors, for science fiction movies. CGI has made it possible to put anything you can imagine on the screen, which we all thought would be a boon to the cinema . . . but I have come to the conclusion that it may be the very worst thing to happen to science fiction movies, because they can now throw so many mind-blowing images at you that more and more often the images are taking the place of plot and characterization.

  This is not to say the audiences weren’t pleased, and weren’t willing to shell out multiples of $100 million at the box office. 1990’s Jurassic Park took in a billion dollars by the time the DVDs were through selling. (It also asked you to believe that a hungry T. rex cannot spot you from six inches away if you don’t move.) The sequel, The Lost World, another megahit, suggests that a tyrannosaur can catch an elevated train, but cannot catch a bunch of panicky tourists fleeing on foot in a straight line. Armageddon, which became Disney’s top live-action grosser until Johnny Depp visited the Caribbean, asked you to believe that some not-very-bright wildcatters could become astronauts easier than highly-trained physically-fit astronauts could be taught to find and extract oil. Starship Troopers poured money into the production, but would have been better titled “Ken and Barbie Go to War.” The long-awaited fourth Star Wars movie (or first, if you’re into fictional chronology) was in profit before a single foot of film was shot, which was all for the best. Terminator 2 and The Matrix had their moments, and the latter sported a stunning cyberpunk look, but I think at decade’s end the two most artistically successful science fiction films were two of the least demanding and ambitious (which may well explain why): Men in Black and Galaxy Quest, a pair of delightful comedies.

  (I have been discussing theatrical releases here. Actually, the best fantastic film of the decade was The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, scripted by Ray Bradbury from his own story. It had charm, grace, poignancy, and beauty in abundance—so of course it was released directly to video.)

  I gave up on television in the early 1980s, and have not watched a single network series since then, so I asked a number of fans from my Listserv to suggest the best of the 1990s television shows, and it is their consensus that the following were the best of the lot: Babylon 5, The X-Files, Highlander, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lois and Clark, Sliders, Xena, Third Rock from the Sun, and Stargate SG1.

  As the decade drew to a close, no one was quite sure what was coming next. But with the advantage of hindsight, it’s not too difficult to see that there were two major innovations between the end of the New Wave as a movement, and the beginning of the new millennium: William Gibson became the creator and the finest exemplar of cyberpunk; and Anne Rice decided that vampires, which had hitherto been unclean dead things that sucked away your lifeblood, were sexy.

  The critics loved cyberpunk and snickered at vampire romances. Which is one more reason why we don’t pay much attention to the critics. I doubt that there are three cyberpunk novels a year these days; I also doubt that there are fewer than ten vampire romances a week, and a lot of them live on the bestseller list. It’s a billion-dollar industry, and more and more science fiction publishers are starting to yield to the pressure.

  I don’t think anybody in the 1990s saw it coming. So much for science fiction’s vaunted talent for prognostication.

  THE RHYSLING AND DWARF STAR AWARD-WINNING POETRY

  Since 1978, when Suzette Haden Elgin founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, its members have recognized achievement in the field of speculative poetry by presenting the Rhysling Awards, named after the blind bard protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth.”

  Every year, each SFPA member is allowed to nominate two poems from the previous year for the Rhysling Awards: one in the “long” category (50+ lines) and one in the “short” category (1-49 lines). Because it’s practically impossible for each member to have read every nominated poem in the various publications where they originally appeared, the nominees are all collected into one volume, called The Rhysling Anthology. Past winners have included Michael Bishop, Bruce Boston, Tom Disch, Joe Haldeman, Alan P. Lightman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Palwick, Lucius Shepard, Jeff VanderMeer, Gene Wolfe and Jane Yolen.

  In 2006, the SFPA created a new award, the Dwarf Star Award, to honor poems of 10 lines or fewer.

  PLACE MAT BY MOEBIUS

  GREG BEATTY

  Greg Beatty lives with his wife in Bellingham, Washington, where he tries, unsuccessfully, to stay dry. He writes everything from children’s books to essays about his cooking debacles. Greg won the 2005 Rhysling Award (short-poem category) and recently published his first poetry chapbook, Phrases of the Moon. Here is his Dwarf Star winner:Place mat by Moebius;

  wine bottled by Klein. You sigh.

  This dinner never ends.

  EATING LIGHT

  F. J. BERGMANN

  F. J. Bergmann frequents Wisconsin and fibitz.com. She has no academic literary qualifications, but hangs out a lot with people who do. Publications where her work has appeared include Asimov’s, Doorways, Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and a bunch of regular literary journals that should have known better. She attended Viable Paradise in 2008 and is the author of three chapbooks: Constellation of the Dragonfly (Plan B Press, 2008), Aqua Regia (Parallel Press, 2007), and Sauce Robert (Pavement Saw Press, 2003).

  It all started when I was sent to bed

  without supper. I was playing with my flashlight

  under the covers and tried shining it in my mouth.

  Light flooded my throat like golden syrup.

  Soon I was tasting light everywhere,

  the icy bitterness of fluorescents, a burst

  of intensely spiced flavors from an arc welder,

  the dripping red meat of sunsets.

  Natural light was most easily digestible,

  but at night I was limited to the sparse glow

  of fireflies and phosphorescent rotting logs,

  and inevitably succumbed to the artificial flavors

  of a strip mall’s jittering neon rainbow.

  Sodium lamps always had a nasty, putrid aftertaste,

  like rotting oranges, which is why I so frequently

  vomited in nighttime parking garages,

  but mercury-vapor emissions foamed on my tongue,

  aromatic, green. Have you ever had key lime mousse,

  or lemon-mint custard? It’s nothing like that at all.

  Each Hallowe’en I followed trick-or-treaters

  from door to door, gorging myself

  on jack-o’-lanterns’ sweet candlelight.

  Autumn bonfires burnt my lips

  with the pungent heat of five-alarm chili,

  smoky with the ghost of molé sauce. I hid

  strings of holiday lights in my underwear drawer,

  in case of a sudden craving.

  On a high school field trip to a nuclear facility,

  I was finally overcome with an insatiable hunger

  for the indigo twilight of a reactor pool, glowing

  with the underwater gradient of Cherenkov radiation,

  a blue light luscious as chocolate, hypnotic as a liqueur,

  decadent as dissolved gemstones.

  I am no terrorist—merely an addict.

  THE SEVEN DEVILS OF CENTRAL CALIFORNIA

  CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

  Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of Palimpsest and the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and five books of poetry. She is a winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, short-listed for the Spectrum Award and was a World Fantasy Award finalist in 2007. She currently lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner and two dogs.

  I. THE DEVIL OF DIVERTED RIVERS


  Put out your tongue:

  I taste of salt. Salt and sage

  and silt—

  dry am I, dry as delving.

  My fingers come up

  through the dead sacrament-dirt;

  my spine humps along the San Joaquin—

  remember me here, where water was

  before Los Angeles scowled through,

  hills blasted black

  by the electric hairs of my forearms.

  Pull the skin from my back and there is gold there,

  a second skeleton,

  carapace smeared to glitter in the skull-white sun.

  There is a girl sitting there,

  between the nugget-vertebrae,

  who came all the way from Boston

  when her daddy hollered Archimedes’ old refrain—

  Eureka, baby, eureka, little lamb,

  I’ll have you a golden horse

  and a golden brother

  and golden ribbons for your golden hair,

  just you pack up your mama and come on over Colorado,

  not so far, not so.

  They flooded out her daddy’s valley

  when she was seventeen

  and skinny as a fork.

  Crouched down she was,

  rooting potatoes out of the ground,

  brushing beetles from her apron,

  and the wind sounded like an old Boston train.

  I am waiting for you to stop in your thrum,

  for you to pause and look towards Nevada:

  I am holding back the waters

  with the blue muscles of my calves,

  waiting for you.

  All the way down to the sea,

  one of these mornings bright as windows,

  I’ll come running like a girl

  chasing golden apples.

  I deny you, says the city below.

  I deny you, says the dry riverbed, full of bones.

  I deny you, say the mute, fed fields far off from the sea.

  II. THE DEVIL OF IMPORTED BRIDES

  Look here: my fingernails show through

  the lace and dried orange blossoms of a dress

  I never wore.

  You can see them up on the ridgeline like a fence

  severed by earthquake:

  yellow and ridged, screw-spiraled, broken,

  brown moons muddy and dim.

  The roots of the Sierras are blue and white:

  the colors of stamped letters, posted,

  flapping over the desert like rag-winged vultures,

  gluey nose pointed east. All around the peaks

  the clack of telegraphs echo

  like woodpeckers:

  Would like a blonde, but not particular.

  Must be Norwegian or Swede, no Germans.

  Intact Irish wanted,

  must cook better than the ranch-hands.

  Don’t care if she’s ugly enough

  to scare the chickens

  out of their feathers,

  but if she ain’t brood-ready,

  she goes right back to Connecticut

  or the second circle of hell

  or wherever it is

  spit her out.

  Look here: my horns spike up sulfurous through

  a veil like mist on the fence-posts. My tail rips the lace;

  thumps black on the floor of an empty silver mine.

  Never was a canary in the dark

  with a yellow like my eyes. Sitting

  in the cat-slit pupil with her bill of sale

  stuffed in her mouth—

  Why, hullo, Molly! Doesn’t your hair look nice!

  If you glisten it up enough

  he’ll be sure to love you real and true,

  not for the silver nuggets you pull out of the rock

  like balls from the Christmas box,

  not for the crease-eyed boys he pulls from you

  like silver nuggets, but for the mole on your little calf,

  and the last lingering tilt to your voice,

  that remembers Galway.

  It was the seventh babe killed her,

  and I sat up in her bloody bed,

  orange blossoms dead on the pillow,

  the clacking of brass-knockered codes

  so loud in my ears

  I flew down to the mine,

  deeper than delving,

  just for silence.

  It is cold down here,

  what silver is left

  gnarls and jangles.

  I put my hands up through the mountains

  like old gloves with their fingers torn,

  and wait.

  I deny you, says the father of seven, bundled against the stove.

  I deny you, says the silver, hanging in the earth

  like a great chandelier.

  I deny you, say the mountain towns, minding their own.

  III. THE DEVIL OF FRUIT PICKERS

  Strawberries and nickels

  and the sun high as God’s hat.

  My old callused feet stamp down

  the green vines and leaves of Fresno,

  my throat of bone whistling still

  for water.

  My wings are tangled in grapevine

  and orange-bark,

  pearwood and raw almonds,

  green skin prickles my shoulder blades,

  lime-flesh and rice-reeds,

  soybean pods and oh,

  the dead-leaved corn. I can hardly fly

  these days.

  But I burrow, and stamp,

  and how the radishes go up in my path.

  Between the wings rides Maria,

  born in Guadalajara with strong flat feet,

  fishy little mouth scooped clean

  by her father with fingers like St. Stephen.

  This was before the war, of course.

  Her black hair flies coarse as broom-bramble,

  bags of oranges belted at her waist,

  singing while I dance, riding me like her own

  sweat-flanked horse.

  She saved her nickels, and picked her berries,

  bent over,

  bent over,

  bent over in the fields till her back was bowed

  into the shape of an apple-sack,

  and nothing in her but white seeds and sunburn.

  She curled up into me,

  dry as an old peapod,

  and how we ride now,

  biding our time,

  over the dust and cows,

  over all her nickels in a neat bank-row.

  Watch our furrows, how we draw them,

  careful as surveyors,

  careful as corn-rows.

  I deny you, say the strawberries, tucked tight into green.

  I deny you, say the irrigation ditches, glimmering gold.

  I deny you, say the nickels, spent into air.

  IV. THE DEVIL OF GOLD FLAKE

  My hair runs underneath the rivers,

  gold peeling from my scalp. I remember

  the taste of a thousand rusted pans

  pulling out ore like fingernails at the quick.

  I lie everywhere;

  I point at the sea.

  All along my torso are broken mines,

  like buttons on a dress. The state built

  a highway through them,

  a gray rod to straighten my back. The driller-shacks

  shudder dusty and brown,

  slung with wind-axes and bone-bowls:

  my stomach dreams of the ghosts of gold.

  They suck at my skin,

  hoping for a last gurgle of metal,

  tipping in for the final bracelet and brick—

  there must be something left in me,

  there must be something—why do I not give it to them

  selfish creature, wretched mossy beast?

  Underneath the deepest drill

  hunches Annabella, the miner’s wife,

  who sifted more gold

  t
han her coarse-coated man,

  so deft and delicate were her fingers

  round that old, beaten pan. He brought her

  from St. Louis, already pregnant—and manners

  make no comment there—already heavy with gold.

  She smelled of the Mississippi

  and steam-fat oatmeal cakes,

  even after the oxen died, and with blood in her hair,

  she crossed half of Wyoming on foot.

  But the boulders loved her,

  watched her every day from a high blue perch.

  They wriggled at her, her yellow dress

  gone brown with creek-silt, her bustle

  and wire hoops collapsed on the grass.

  While she knelt with gold in her knuckles,

  they snapped to attention,

  slid laughing to the creek-bed—she doesn’t blame

  the poor things, even now.

  Her babies left cabbages and peppermints

  at the creek for years after.

  I felt the highway roll smooth and hot

  over my ox-drenched head,

  and the only gold I allowed to ooze up from my scalp

  were the broken dashes marking lanes

  like borders on an old map