Nebula Awards Showcase 2014

by Kij Johnson

  He began with a toe. Pain surged through her as he broke it off. If she had been able to move, she would have screamed. As it was, all she could do was let it shine in her eyes. What sort of mistake was this? An accident, surely.

  But then he began to detach the joints in her knee. He intended to take her foot. Anger and pain and agony surged through her and she fell unconscious, carrying with her the vision of him sitting on the side of the bed, examining the foot in his lap with an expression she’d never seen before on his face.

  Tikka had never seen him again. She had never been able to guess if the moment had been there in his head all along or if the desire had seized him somewhere along the way, perhaps when she showed him the Dedicatorium.

  In time, she did learn that the perversion was not new. In some channels, the severed limbs sold very well, particularly those unmarred in any other way.

  She padded the stump with soft plastics, a cap that fit over the protrusion, the jagged bits of joint that had not fallen away. She limped, but not much, grown accustomed to the way she moved.

  She paused to watch the sky. Clusters of limentia, like jellyfish floating on the wind, translucent tendrils tinting the light. They filled the air with their mating dance, drifted around her till she stood in the center of a candy-colored cloud. Love surrounded her in a web of tendrils, unthinking action and reaction that drove life, all life, even hers.

  She made a mental note of their presence, of the way they shone in the sunlight, of the acrid smell of their lovemaking, filing details away with clinical precision.

  They were only another sign of spring on Planet Porcelain.

  In addition to giving the Nebula Awards each year, SFWA also may present the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award to a living author for a lifetime of achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy. In accordance with SFWA’s bylaws, the president shall have the power, at his or her discretion, to call for the presentation of the Grand Master Award. Nominations for the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award are solicited from the officers, with the advice of participating past presidents, who vote with the officers to determine the recipient.

  There have been twenty-nine Grand Masters since the award was founded in 1975. Gene Wolfe is the most recent.

  1975 Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988)

  1976 Jack Williamson (1908–2006)

  1977 Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988)

  1979 L. Sprague de Camp (1907–2000)

  1981 Fritz Leiber (1910–1992)

  1984 Andre Norton (1912–2005)

  1986 Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008)

  1987 Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)

  1988 Alfred Bester (1913–1987)

  1989 Ray Bradbury (1920–2012)

  1991 Lester del Rey (1915–1993)

  1993 Frederik Pohl (1919–2013)

  1995 Damon Knight (1922–2002)

  1996 A. E. van Vogt (1912–2000)

  1997 Jack Vance (1916–2013)

  1998 Poul Anderson (1926–2001)

  1999 Hal Clement (Harry Stubbs) (1922–2003)

  2000 Brian W. Aldiss (1925–)

  2001 Philip José Farmer (1918–2009)

  2003 Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–)

  2004 Robert Silverberg (1935–)

  2005 Anne McCaffrey (1926–2011)

  2006 Harlan Ellison (1934–)

  2007 James Gunn (1923–)

  2008 Michael Moorcock (1939–)

  2009 Harry Harrison (1925–2012)

  2010 Joe Haldeman (1943–)

  2011 Connie Willis (1945–)

  2012 Gene Wolfe (1931–)

  Many years ago, around 1980, I began to hear about an extraordinary writer named Gene Wolfe. I was then working as an editor at The Washington Post Book World, responsible for the literary side of things, and had just recently inaugurated a monthly science fiction and fantasy column. When the proofs of The Shadow of the Torturer landed on my desk, I sent it out for review to James Gunn, who was doing that month’s round-up. A year or so later Thomas M. Disch wrote about The Claw of the Conciliator, followed by Peter Nicholls on The Sword of the Lictor. Both these were standalone reviews. When Wolfe reached the conclusion to The Book of the New Sun I persuaded my colleagues that John Clute’s essay-review of The Citadel of the Autarch should be given the front page.

  What’s more, I decided that we needed a short interview with the author to accompany the jump of Clute’s piece. So one morning I spent an hour or so talking to Wolfe on the phone, then produced the following profile. It’s certainly dated now, but readers might enjoy this glimpse of Gene Wolfe when he was still a part-time writer and not yet, to use the Japanese term, a Living National Treasure.

  Every morning between 5 and 5:30 Gene Wolfe sits down at one of his two IBM typewriters. Before he goes to bed that day he will have written five pages. “Usually it takes between an hour and a half and three hours,” he explains over the phone, but sometimes he’s still working at midnight.

  In itself this may sound like a lot of work—even before you realize that Wolfe also puts in a full day as a senior editor at Plant Engineering magazine in Barrington, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. There he edits, buys some 25 freelanced articles a year, and writes a major cover story every few months. “The latest,” he says, “is the first in a series on industrial robots.”

  Such disciplined energy recalls that of the great but often slapdash Victorian novelists or of many writers of pulp science fiction. In fact, Wolfe is nothing if not an artist, a perfectionist. Every one of his carefully wrought stories and novels undergoes at least three drafts, occasionally as many as ten. “I write to please myself. I try to write what I myself think a good book, one that satisfies me. Until I mail a manuscript out I’m never sure that I’m through with it.”

  In The Book of the New Sun Wolfe has certainly written a book that many people will be satisfied with. “It’s gotten a greater readership than I anticipated. And I’m happy about that.” Wolfe is as modest as he is painstaking, for his four-part novel about the adventures of the torturer Severian on far-future Urth has been called “one of the two or three best-written books in the field of science fiction ever” and “a major landmark of contemporary American literature.”

  Born in 1931, Gene Wolfe grew up in Texas, where his father was a restaurateur and small businessman. After attending Texas A&M and dropping out because of poor grades, Wolfe found himself drafted into the Korean War. He served as a private, earning the Combat Infantry Badge. After the service, Wolfe returned to Texas A&M on the GI Bill, received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, and soon married a childhood friend. While working in research and development for Procter & Gamble in Ohio, the young engineer thought he might write some stories.

  “If you have a wife and four children, as I do, you tend to be scraping around for ways to make a bit of additional income. I started trying to write in late 1956 or early 1957, hoping to earn enough to buy some furniture—but it was about 1963 before I got anything published. Most of those early stories were pretty bad. I just hadn’t learned how to write fiction. I had to start by trying to figure out which end of the fiddle you stick under your chin. And eventually how to play it.” In 1967 Damon Knight—a mentor to many contemporary science fiction writers—published Wolfe’s third story and the engineer realized with a sense of epiphany that he’d become a writer. “That’s what I meant when I dedicated The Fifth Head of Cerberus to Damon in memory of when he grew me from a bean.” Since then, Wolfe says quietly, “I’ve sold about a hundred stories.” They range from technological science fiction to complex psychological studies, and include the comic, sentimental, and macabre.

  “You don’t in my experience have an idea for a story. You have several different ideas you are nurturing or trying to shove out of your consciousness. Eventually out of the crowd of a dozen or so perhaps three or four seem as though they might work together in one book. That’s the way it was with The Book of the New Sun. I wanted to do the grave-robbi
ng scene that kicks off The Shadow of the Torturer, that scene in the cemetery with the people pulling the corpse up out of the ground. I also wanted to do a book about a torturer, the kind who is running the dungeon in all those old cartoons, to put myself in his shoes. I enjoy writing about people who are generally considered bad guys. That is, I take heroes who are villains and try to show things from their standpoint.” (One of Wolfe’s best-known tales, included in his collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, carries the title “The Hero as Werewolf.”)

  As for the tetralogy’s setting—a future earth, spinning beneath a red sun, mingling science, mystery, and the medieval—Wolfe says forthrightly, “I don’t think there’s any question that I’ve been influenced by Jack Vance.” At the beginning of a collection of essays, The Castle of the Otter, Wolfe recalls that at one period in his life Vance’s elegiac, marvel- filled novel The Dying Earth was for him “the finest book in the world.”

  Still, there are other influences. “A friend of mine told me that the tone of The Book of the New Sun reminded him of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius the God, and immediately I saw that he was right.” Severian’s voice—measured, serene, precise—contrasts with his story’s complex twistings back and forth through memory and with the ornate, not quite familiar words of his society: cacogen, psychopomp, fricatrice, fuligin. None of these is made up.

  “A lot of them I’d come across here or there, just noticed them. I went through lexicons, dictionaries, and whatnot, and traced down leads when I thought I needed an odd word. When I started the book I remembered Jim Blish”—one of science fiction’s best writers and critics—“having said that on too many planets you find a rabbit and it’s called a smeat. And it’s obvious that the author is thinking of a rabbit—just as Lorne Greene on Battlestar Galactica used to think of a space ship as an aircraft carrier. You could tell. Anyway it occurred to me that earth really had enough odd words to describe odd things and I didn’t have to make up any. As for the names, I largely looked for real names with sounds that seemed appropriate to a character I had in mind. Severian suggests both sever and severe.”

  Surprisingly, the now-pervasive religious theme developed later in the book’s seven years’ writing. “Sometimes you start with a small idea and it grows,” remembers Wolfe. “I put religion into The Book of the New Sun because I tried to put it in just about everything I thought important in human life. You know the story about Leo Tolstoy the night after he sent the manuscript of War and Peace to his publisher? He is supposed to have sat up in bed, slapped himself on the forehead and said: ‘My God, I forgot the yacht race.’ I don’t have a yacht race in The Book of the New Sun, but I tried to talk about children, war, love and death, God, heaven and hell and all these things that are really pivotal to the human condition. I would like to have put in a lot more that I couldn’t manage. Music for instance.”

  The Book of the New Sun may not have music or a yacht race, but it seems to contain everything else: myths, folktales, poems, a miracle play, marching songs. Severian encounters figures from every class of society, including various partly human characters. At one time he journeys, unsuspectingly, with a robot, a giant, a bionic woman, a homunuculus, and a revived corpse—all of whom readers come to care about deeply.

  Such exuberant invention explains why Wolfe admits “my favorite author is Dickens. I also like Kipling. Moby-Dick. And Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales—no pun intended. Once Damon Knight asked about writers or books that had influenced me and I said J. R. R. Tolkien, the much neglected G. K. Chesterton, and the standard handbook of mechanical engineering.” Engineering? “I think engineers have a better feel than most writers for the difficulty of developing new machines, new devices, and for the rate of speed at which such technological advances occur.”

  Wolfe’s attention to style, his employment of demanding formal structures—“I love obliquity”—and his psychological acumen also link him to some of the contemporary science fiction writers he most admires: Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch, R.A. Lafferty. All of them shuffle uneasily under the science fiction rubric.

  “I don’t hold much with categories, really,” says Wolfe. “They’re for publishers and booksellers. I simply try to write the best story I can. People who condemn a particular genre, whether science fiction or mysteries, really can’t know what they’re talking about. It’s as though I were to say all movies are bad. . . . I know that science fiction is dismissed by a lot of people, but I don’t believe its dismissed by very many readers.”

  At the moment Wolfe is hard at work as usual. “After I finished the first draft of The Urth of the New Sun, a kind of coda to Severian’s story, it seemed a good time to work on a couple short stories that I’d promised people. That was what I was doing this morning. In fact, I was working on both of them.”

  Will there be any more novels about Severian’s world after The Urth of the New Sun? “I don’t know,” answers Gene Wolfe, “but I suspect that will be it. I don’t like to repeat myself.”

  That little profile/appreciation ran more than thirty years ago, and Wolfe has gone on to write about Long Suns and Short Suns, as well as amnesiac soldiers and wizard-knights and much else. There are scores of short stories as well, featuring dream detectives and toy theaters and automatons and fairy tales, including some, like “The Map” and “The Cat,” set on Severian’s Urth.

  When I reviewed The Knight back in 2004 I stressed that Gene Wolfe “should enjoy the same rapt attention we afford to Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy.” After all, he possesses comparable range, ambition and achievement, and his best books will last. That’s not too shabby for a former engineer who—for good or ill—helped invent the machine that manufactures those utterly addictive Pringles potato chips.

  I wrote this in 2002, for the World Horror Convention, when Gene and I were guests of honor. The numbers have changed—you can add ten years to every date I mention in it—but my affection for, respect for, and love of Gene Wolfe, the man and his work, has only grown in that time. And the reading advice I give is as pertinent now as it was then. We in the strange half-worlds of science fiction and fantasy and horror and whatever the hell else it is that we do have always known how good Gene was and is. It is peculiarly satisfying to see it acknowledged by the wider world as well.

  —Neil Gaiman, January 2012.

  Look at Gene: a genial smile (the one they named for him), pixie-twinkle in his eyes, a reassuring moustache. Listen to that chuckle. Do not be lulled. He holds all the cards: he has five aces in his hand, and several more up his sleeve.

  I once read him an account of a baffling murder, committed ninety years ago. “Oh,” he said, “well, that’s obvious,” and proceeded off-handedly to offer a simple and likely explanation for both the murder and the clues the police were at a loss to explain. He has an engineer’s mind that takes things apart to see how they work and then puts them back together.

  I have known Gene for almost twenty years. (I was, I just realized, with a certain amount of alarm, only 22 when I first met Gene and Rosemary in Birmingham, England; I am 41 now.) Knowing Gene Wolfe has made the last twenty years better and richer and more interesting than they would have been otherwise.

  Before I knew him, I thought of Gene Wolfe as a ferocious intellect, vast and cool and serious, who created books and stories that were of genre but never limited by it. An explorer, who set out for uncharted territory and brought back maps, and if he said Here There Be Dragons, by God, you knew that was where the dragons were.

  And that is all true, of course. It may be more true than the embodied Wolfe I met twenty years ago, and have come to know, with enormous pleasure ever since: a man of politeness and kindness and knowledge; a lover of fine conversation, erudite and informative, blessed with a puckish sense of humor and an infectious chuckle.

  I cannot tell you how to meet Gene Wolfe. I can, however, suggest a few ways to read his work. These are useful tips, like
suggesting you take a blanket, a flashlight and some candy when planning to drive a long way in the cold, and should not be taken lightly. I hope they are of some use to you. There are nine of them. Nine is a very good number.

  HOW TO READ GENE WOLFE

  (1) Trust the text implicitly. The answers are in there.

  (2) Do not trust the text farther than you can throw it, if that far. It’s tricky and desperate stuff, and it may go off in your hand at any time.

  (3) Reread. It’s better the second time. It will be even better the third time. And anyway, the books will subtly reshape themselves while you are away from them. Peace really was a gentle Midwestern memoir the first time I read it. It only became a horror novel on the second or the third reading.

  (4) There are wolves in there, prowling behind the words. Sometimes they come out in the pages. Sometimes they wait until you close the book. The musky wolf-smell can sometimes be masked by the aromatic scent of rosemary. Understand, these are not today-wolves, slinking greyly in packs through deserted places. These are the dire-wolves of old, huge and solitary wolves that could stand their ground against grizzlies.

  (5) Reading Gene Wolfe is dangerous work. It’s a knife-throwing act, and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes, earlobes or eyes in the process. Gene doesn’t mind. Gene is throwing the knives.

  (6) Make yourself comfortable. Pour a pot of tea. Hang up a Do Not Disturb sign. Start at Page One.

  (7) There are two kinds of clever writer. The ones that point out how clever they are, and the ones who see no need to point out how clever they are. Gene Wolfe is of the second kind, and the intelligence is less important than the tale. He is not smart to make you feel stupid. He is smart to make you smart, as well.

  (8) He was there. He saw it happen. He knows whose reflection they saw in the mirror that night.

  (9) Be willing to learn.

  Gene Wolfe has won four World Fantasy Awards, a British Science Fiction Association Award, a British Fantasy Award, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and two Nebulas. In 2007, he was inducted into the World Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He selected “Christmas Inn” to represent his work in this anthology. The novelette was first published as a stand-alone book by PS Publishing in 2006.