Nebula Awards Showcase 2008

by Ben Bova

They were sitting in a café in Berkeley—Heidi and Fred and John and Amy. It was a clear sunny day and the view over the bay was spectacular.

  “Does your mother have a tattoo like that?” John asked her.

  “I don’t remember any,” Heidi said. Her mother had died when Heidi was eight. Heidi’s father later remarried but was killed in a foggy car crash on California Route 101 when Heidi was fourteen. She was brought up by her stepmother, with whom she became quite close, but when Heidi was seventeen her stepmother married again and Heidi ran off to a life on the beach, surfing. That’s when she got the tattoo. “In Santa Clara,” she added.

  “I learn something new about her every day,” Fred said, smiling. He was wearing a silk jersey and a large expensive wristwatch and had his arm on the back of her chair.

  “So it’s just a tattoo of Neptune’s trident,” said Amy. “That’s all?”

  “And a good luck charm,” Heidi told her. “It was engraved on a silver pendent that my grandmother gave me, my mother’s mother, but I lost it.”

  “It won’t get lost now,” Fred said, patting her shoulder.

  The grandmother had come from Ireland to spend a year with Heidi and her father right after Heidi’s mother died. “And before she went back she gave me the pendent, her mother’s, I think,” Heidi said. “She’s buried someplace in Ireland. I don’t know where.”

  Amy Bellacqua and John Artopoulos married on September 18, 2004. Amy has been able to cut down on her waitressing and now works almost full time on her mosaics, and John works as a postdoc. The probabilities suggest they’re living somewhere near Fermi Lab, around Batavia, Illinois. Or maybe they’re living in Cambridge and he’s working with Arkani-Hamed at Harvard. But Amy and John are together, that’s certain.

  GRAND MASTER AWARD

  In addition to giving Nebula Awards each year, SFWA also presents the Damon Knight 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 incumbent president nominates a candidate, normally after consulting with previous presidents and the board of directors. The nomination is then voted upon by the SFWA’s officers.

  Previous Grand Masters are Robert A. Heinlein (1974), Jack Williamson (1975), Clifford D. Simak (1976), L. Sprague de Camp (1978), Fritz Leiber (1980), André Norton (1983), Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1985), Isaac Asimov (1986), Alfred Bester (1987), Ray Bradbury (1988), Lester del Rey (1990), Frederik Pohl (1992), Damon Knight (1994), A. E. van Vogt (1995), Jack Vance (1996), Poul Anderson (1997), Hal Clement (Harry Stubbs) (1998), Brian W. Aldiss (1999), Philip José Farmer (2000), Ursula K. LeGuin (2002), Robert Silverberg (2003), Anne McCaffrey (2004), and Harlan Ellison (2005).

  The 2006 Grand Master went to James Gunn, who is not only one of the premier writers in the field but a pioneer in teaching science fiction at the university level and bringing the field to acceptance by the academic community.

  John Kessel, himself one of the field’s best writers, gives well-deserved tribute to James Gunn.

  JAMES GUNN, GRAND MASTER

  JOHN KESSEL

  In the history of science fiction, only one person has served as president of both SFWA, the international organization of professional science fiction and fantasy writers, and SFRA (Science Fiction Research Association), the organization of professional scholars and critics of science fiction. That person is James Gunn.

  I first met James Gunn when I showed up in his office at the University of Kansas in August 1972, a newly minted graduate student fresh from an eleven-hundred-mile drive from upstate New York. On that first afternoon I foisted off on him my quite awful undergraduate honors thesis on Samuel Delany. He was gracious and patient. I was to come into his office a lot of times over the next nine years as I, at a glacial pace, pursued both a Ph.D. in English and a career as an SF writer. He was always gracious and patient.

  I had driven that eleven hundred miles because of James Gunn. I wanted to write science fiction, and study literature. At that time, aside from Jack Williamson, he was just about the only working SF writer who also was a working teacher and scholar in a major university. He taught one of the few US university courses on the genre: his class Science Fiction and the Popular Media drew huge numbers of students, sometimes more than one hundred a semester. Much of the structure of the class shows up in Gunn’s Pilgrim Award–winning history of the field, Alternate Worlds. Eventually I became Gunn’s graduate assistant in that course.

  It was only over the time I was at KU that I came to realize how his career represented, in some ways, the main thread of the development of science fiction. As a boy, he shook hands with H. G. Wells. In the late 1940s he sold fiction to John W. Campbell and throughout the 1950s he was a regular in Horace Gold’s Galaxy, becoming a mainstay of the movement toward “sociological science fiction.” He was one of the first people ever to study science fiction in the academy, writing a master’s thesis on SF, portions of which were published in Dynamic Science Fiction in 1953. His first novel was a collaboration with Jack Williamson that the New York Times said read “like a collaboration between Asimov and Heinlein.”

  Over the last sixty years he has published over one hundred short stories and twenty-six books, among them The Joy Makers, The Immortals, The Listeners, and Kampus. The Immortals was adapted into a movie and served as the basis of a TV series. In his fiction Gunn brings a literary sensibility to traditional SF materials. The Listeners parallels a search for extraterrestrial intelligence with the difficulty of communication between human beings, realized movingly in the breaking relationship between a scientist in charge of a project listening for messages from space, and his wife, waiting at home for some contact with a husband who is so caught up in the pressures of his work, and his desire for contact with aliens who may or may not exist, that he is unable to touch her, or let her touch him.

  In his career as historian, editor, and scholar, Jim Gunn has worked tirelessly for the acceptance of science fiction as a legitimate academic field of study. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he filmed interviews with and lectures by Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, John Brunner, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, Gordon Dickson, and Harry Harrison. In 1983 he received the Hugo Award for his nonfiction book Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. In 1992 he received the Eaton Award for lifetime achievement as a science fiction scholar and critic. At Kansas in the 1970s he started and ran the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction. This grew into the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which annually administers and awards the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for short fiction and the John W. Campbell Award for best SF novel.

  His five-volume anthology The Road to Science Fiction is the best historical anthology of SF ever put together. His instructional book The Science of Science Fiction Writing is the result of a career’s worth of experience in the classroom and in the practical world of publishing. It is a significant addition to the small shelf of works about SF writing from the inside, and Gunn’s knowledge and craftmanship shine in every page.

  It is as a writing teacher and a mentor that Jim Gunn means the most to me. No one knows more about how science fiction is and has been done. Writers as notable as Pat Cadigan and Bradley Denton have been his students, and I count it as one of my great honors to have sat in his classrooms at the University of Kansas back in the 1970s. I don’t write a word today that is not influenced by his teaching.

  While I worked for and with him he brought many writers to campus, giving me the opportunity to meet Ben and Barbara Bova, Gordon Dickson, Brian Aldiss, Samuel Delany, John Brunner, Fred Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon, and, more than once, Harlan Ellison. He directed my M.A. thesis, a collection of SF short stories. He served on the committee for my Ph.D. dissertation, another collection of SF stories.

  Ours was not always an easy relationship. Jim pushed me to think more and emote less. He told me that stories are not written, they are rewritten. Coming out of the 1960s a
nd the New Wave, I wanted to reduce the differences between SF and mainstream writing. Jim insisted that the differences were vital, that to give them up was to sell out SF’s birthright. Strangely, I was to hear the same arguments, almost word for word, from Bruce Sterling in 1985, and I have come to understand and appreciate them—though I’m afraid, Jim, we are never going to come to a meeting of the minds over the virtues of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations.”

  His office door was always open. When I came by, I would often interrupt him writing on his red IBM Selectric typewriter. He would turn around and give me, patiently, whatever time I needed, then calmly go back to work. We would argue about the nature of plotting, about character identification, about the triumphant Campbellian vision of the future of the human race. Looking back on it, I cringe to think of how much trivia I brought to him, when he had so much work to do. I know today how hard it is to get writing done and be a full-time academic. He did it, seemingly effortlessly.

  Through all this, he never blew his own horn. He became, and is still, my role model. I wanted his job, and in some ways, I got it. I only hope that I treat the students who come into my office at North Carolina State with the respect that he gave me, long before anyone could ever have known that I might earn it.

  On a number of occasions he invited me into his home, on the west side of Lawrence, at that time very much the edge of town. Outside his back door was a prairie with horses wandering around it. Sometimes they would come to the wire fence and stick their heads over into his backyard.

  I imagine those horses are long gone.

  Lots of things are gone. Barry Malzberg once commented on a photo that appears on page 193 of Gunn’s Alternate Worlds, of a banquet table at the 1955 Worldcon in Cleveland. Seated at the table are Mildred Clingerman, Mark Clifton, Judith Merril, Frank Riley and family, and Jim Gunn, looking as young, dapper, and handsome as Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  All gone now, but Jim. His has been a life devoted to science fiction. He may not tell you what it has meant to him, but I just needed to tell you what he has meant to me.

  Congratulations, Jim, and thanks.

  THE LISTENERS

  JAMES GUNN

  As representative of the fiction that won him the 2007 Grand Master Award, James Gunn has selected his novelette “The Listeners.” This work served as the opening chapter in his later novel of the same name, a book that was praised by Paul Shuck, president of the SETI League thusly: “The Listeners has done more for SETI [the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] than anything else ever published.”

  Jim Gunn explains the genesis of “The Listeners”:

  After a decade when there never had been a day when I wasn’t working on some story or novel, I accepted a position as the first administrative assistant to the chancellor for university relations at the University of Kansas. Those were the turbulent 1960s, and between learning my job and trying to explain student unrest to the various university publics, I had no time for writing. The Joy Makers, The Immortals, and Future Imperfect were published between 1961 and 1964, but they had been written in the 1950s.

  By the middle of the 1960s I was feeling serious withdrawal symptoms, and I resolved to take the month’s paid vacation that I was due. I prepared for that month—August after the end of the summer session and before the beginning of the fall semester—for months ahead so that when the time came I wouldn’t have to think or do research; I could sit down and write. Beginning in 1966, I wrote the second and third novellas that completed The Burning (and published them in If and Galaxy), the second chapter of what later became Kampus, and the novelette I called “The Listeners.”

  “The Listeners” was inspired by Walter Sullivan’s We Are Not Alone. Sullivan was the long-time science editor of the New York Times. He had attended a seminal conference of scientists in Washington, DC, along with many of the people who were being attracted to the idea of listening for messages from the stars—what now is called SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—including Frank Drake and Carl Sagan. His book described the fascination people have displayed over the centuries about the possibility of life on other worlds, and various proposals for communicating with aliens. The availability of radio telescopes had led to recent discussions among such scientists as Guiseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison about the possibility of picking up signals from space, and Cocconi had written a letter to Sir Bernard Lovell proposing that some time on the Jodrell Bank radio telescope be devoted to a search for signals from space.

  Sullivan’s book was fascinating, and included a good deal of material that later found its way into my novel, but what stimulated my writer’s instinct was the concept of a project that might have to be pursued for a century without results. What kind of need would produce that kind of dedication, I pondered, and what kind of people would it enlist—and have to enlist if it were to continue? I wrote “The Listeners,” which in the novel is the chapter called “Robert MacDonald.” My then literary agent thought it was overwritten for its audience, had too many foreign-language quotations, and anyway, he wrote, I should make my hero a young man fighting against the tyranny of tired old men. Another agent didn’t care for it enough to take me on as a client, but when Galaxy announced that it was going back to monthly publication (and, I realized, would need more material) I sent it to Fred Pohl and he wrote back saying that he’d be happy to publish it if I’d include translations of the foreign-language quotes. The following year Donald Wollheim included it in his World’s Best Science Fiction anthology.

  In the next few years (I was working on other projects as well), I wrote five more chapters and saw all but the final chapter published in Fantasy & Science Fiction and Galaxy. Meanwhile Charles Scribner’s Sons had decided to develop a science fiction line under editor Norbert Slepyan, and one of the novels he signed up was The Listeners. He asked me once if I was going to add anything to the six chapters and I said I was planning on broadening the perspective to include some of the materials that were being gathered by the computer to aid in its recognition (and translation) of alien communications, as well as the beginnings of artificial intelligence (observant readers may watch it happen).

  The novel was published in hardcover in 1972 as “a novel” (not a science fiction novel). The same year it became a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club. The following year it was published by Signet Books and a decade later it was reprinted by Del Rey Books. It has been translated into Italian, German, Polish, Japanese, and Chinese. Three decades have passed since the novel was published, and more than a fourth of the century-long project. SETI projects on both coasts are still hard at work, trying to pick up messages from the stars, and they continue—without positive results. If the novel has any claims to vision, its insight may be found in its evaluation of human desire and persistence in the face of continuing discouragement. But we are approaching the period when the novel begins, and maybe the signal we all have been awaiting—that we are not alone—will soon be received.

  If it is, if our search is rewarded, maybe The Listeners will have played a part in it, and the book that started in 1966 in a hot August sleeping porch, in a college town in eastern Kansas, will have made a difference. After all, one of the SETI project directors told me recently that The Listeners had done more to turn people on to the search than any other book. My thanks go to Walter Sullivan’s We Are Not Alone. I hope the title is right.

  THE LISTENERS

  JAMES GUNN

  The voices babbled.

  MacDonald heard them and knew that there was meaning in them, that they were trying to communicate and that he could understand them and respond to them if he could only concentrate on what they were saying, but he couldn’t bring himself to make the effort.

  “Back behind everything, lurking like a silent shadow behind the closed door, is the question we can never answer except positively: Is there anybody there?”

  That was Bob Adams, eternally the devil’s advo
cate, looking querulously at the others around the conference table. His round face was sweating, although the mahogany-paneled room was cool.

  Saunders puffed hard on his pipe. “But that’s true of all science. The image of the scientist eliminating all negative possibilities is ridiculous. Can’t be done. So he goes ahead on faith and statistical probability.”

  MacDonald watched the smoke rise above Saunders’ head in clouds and wisps until it wavered in the draft from the air duct, thinned out, disappeared. He could not see it, but the odor reached his nostrils. It was an aromatic blend easily distinguishable from the flatter smell of the cigarettes being smoked by Adams and some of the others.

  Wasn’t this their task? MacDonald wondered. To detect the thin smoke of life that drifts through the universe, to separate one trace from another, molecule by molecule, and then force them to reverse their entropic paths into their ordered and meaningful original form.

  All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men…Life itself is impossible, he thought, but men exist by reversing entropy.

  Down the long table cluttered with overflowing ash trays and coffee cups and doodled scratch pads, Olsen said, “We always knew it would be a long search. Not years but centuries. The computers must have sufficient data, and that means bits of information approximating the number of molecules in the universe. Let’s not chicken out now.”

  “If seven maids with seven mops

  Swept it for half a year,

  Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,

  “That they could get it clear?”

  “…Ridiculous,” someone was saying, and then Adams broke in. “It’s easy for you to talk about centuries when you’ve been here only three years. Wait until you’ve been at it for ten years, like I have. Or Mac here who has been on the Project for twenty years and head of it for fifteen.”