Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

Introduction A HARMONY OF THOUGHTS Catherine Asaro

When I was a child, my parents gave me several framed prints of ballerinas by painter Edgar Degas. To this day, they remain in my old bedroom, on the wall above the ballet barre where I was supposed to practice but almost never did. Although I loved to dance, doing it alone in my room held little appeal when the alternative was to join my friends, the other dancers at the studios where I trained. Those Degas paintings, however, remain a part of the creative landscape in my mind, whether I am writing, dancing, composing music, or solving the partial differential equations of quantum scattering theory.

The conventional assumption in our culture is that artistic endeavors are distinct from analytic pursuits such as science and math. On one side lies the lush realm of emotion; on the other, we find the straight lines of logic. That separation is reflected in how we view works of speculative fiction. Although the division is most prominent in comparisons between fantasy and hard science fiction, it comes into play for all the speculative subgenres.

I protest this idea that emotion and logic are two mutually exclusive lands separated by a wall of our perceptions, that these realms must be disparate, one ruled by passion, the other by logic. In my experience, the analytic and artistic threads of human endeavor are so thoroughly entangled, it is impossible to separate them. In reading the stories on the ballot this year, I was struck by how well they illustrate that idea.

I wish I could have included every nominated story in this anthology. Unfortunately, that would have resulted in a book that cost more than would fit between two covers, while giving the contributors little more than the proverbial penny for their thoughts. However, the full ballot appears in this anthology, and I recommend all the stories.

David W. Goldman’s short story “The Axiom of Choice” is an ingenious play on a famous (some might say infamous) mathematical axiom. The axiom of choice seems simple at first glance. What it says is essentially this: given any collection of buckets, each holding at least one object, it is possible to choose exactly one object from each bucket. If every bucket contained a pair of shoes, for example, we could specify “the left shoe.” Then we’ve picked out one shoe from each bucket. Easy, right? But what if each bucket contains the same pair of identical socks? How do we specify one sock or the other when every choice is the same? The axiom of choice claims it is always possible to make that choice even if we don’t see how.

In his story, Goldman has the reader choose the plotline, making the story an interactive experience. As he weaves the tale of a guitarist who suffered a debilitating accident, the reader determines the plot. Or do we? The plot unfolds as a series of choices, forming an allegory for the axiom, which itself is a metaphor for the emotional journey taken by the musician.

Math and music are inextricably tangled together. The mathematics of music is one of the most beautiful areas of physics. Goldman’s story, with its structure of branches and numbered sections, is reminiscent of both a musical composition and a mathematical proof. So it seems only appropriate that he uses the axiom as the framing device.

In math, the axiom of choice is fundamental to the Banach-Tarski paradox, which says we can cut a solid ball into a finite number of pieces, even as few as five, and reassemble those pieces into two solid balls, each the same size and shape as the original; in fact, we could cut up a pea and reassemble it into a ball the size of our sun.[1] Say what? Such wild projects don’t work in real life because we would need to cut the balls into such convoluted pieces, they wouldn’t have a physically defined volume. They exist only in theory. And so Goldman plays with the choices made by his protagonist—or those that, in theory, he could have made. The musician’s choices, real or theoretical, become the space he curls into, seeking refuge between the notes he can no longer play. The story is an exquisite blending of mathematics and emotion, tangling the analytical with the human heart.

Origami is the art of paper folding, where the artist uses an intricate series of folds to transform a flat sheet of paper into a sculpture. Not only is it a visually exquisite art form, it has also defined an entire branch of mathematics and appears in questions on internationally renowned programs such as the American Regional Mathematics League.

In his story, “The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu explores the complex relationship between a young man of mixed heritage born in the United States and his mother, who was a mail-order bride from China, through the medium of her origami creations, which, in his childhood, she magically brought to life for him. The duality of origami—a pursuit that deeply embodies both artistic and analytic properties—becomes an inspired frame for Liu’s tale. The geometrical nature of origami is never described in the story, but for me as a reader, the complexity and multilayered tension felt by the son toward his mother is aptly symbolized by the tension that so many people perceive between art and the math therein, especially the three-dimensional complexity embodied by origami. That both of those aspects simultaneously exist in the same work despite their apparent contradictory nature offers an apt paradigm for love and its denial in this heartbreaking relationship between a son and his mother.

In her story, titled “Movement,” Nancy Fulda writes about an autistic prodigy who excels at ballet. Autism is a neural disorder that impacts how the brain interprets information, making it difficult for those affected to communicate with others. A small percentage of autistics are savants, particularly with music, memory, math, and, in this case, dance. Fulda uses the protagonist’s relationship with ballet to explore the ramifications behind a potential treatment for her autism.

As a former dancer in both ballet and jazz, I was struck by how well Fulda brought to life that sense of timelessness—meditation, even—that comes when you immerse yourself in the movement. It is a fitting device for the story, which centers on a narrator who experiences time differently than most people; it can take her hours, days, or even longer to answer a question. But that answer—when it finally comes—is a brilliantly choreographed piece of writing.

Plato’s words could apply equally well to the construction of a building, a bridge—or a science fiction novella. In “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Kij Johnson uses the creation of a bridge to construct the story of the man who raises that remarkable span. The bridge becomes a metaphor for his life and his world.

We often think of a bridge as an engineering feat, a triumph of physics and math, but the relationship of architects to their creations is much like that of artists to their art. As so aptly described by Plato, every piece of that bridge, whether the largest stone or the smallest cube, is necessary to its creation. It is fitting that Plato’s quote comes from his work Laws, in that laws—whether they are created by our judicial systems or are natural laws that we have discovered—are highly analytical yet achieve results that tangle intricately with the emotional well-being (or lack thereof) of those who live by them.

“The Man Who Bridged the Mist” reminds me of the lithograph “Hand with a Reflecting Sphere” by M. C. Escher. Just as Escher’s creation is an image of himself holding a sphere that reflects both his image and world, so the process of building a bridge across the mist reflects the architect in the story and his remarkable world. Escher evokes the scene in his lithograph with careful detail, using simple objects to tell us about himself; so the details of how the builder constructs his bridge tell us about his hopes, his history, and the people who impact his life.

Escher’s image achieves a dramatic effect with no explosion of color and action; it is done in gray and white and is all the more powerful for that choice. Johnson is similarly subtle with “The Man Who Bridged the Mist.” It is a story in colors of fog and stone. We learn of “fish” living within the mist, shadowy creatures considered small at six feet in length. The legendary “Big Ones” hidden in the depths are an ever-present threat. Johnson could have taken the easy path and thrown in an action-adventure scene, where such monsters explode from the gorge and go about canonical havoc-wreaking activities. She chooses a far more nuanced approach that, in the context of her story, is eminently more effective, providing a metaphor for the half-hidden events that shape and so subtly shatter the lives of the characters. She leaves the reader with a question: Are the submerged “Big Ones” hidden beneath our emotional landscape as great as we fear? It is a fascinating novella with new layers that emerge every time I reread the story.

In “The Ice Owl,” Carolyn Ives Gilman tells the story of Thorn, a bright and edgy young woman. She centers the story on the girl’s interactions with her tutor, an elderly collector who repatriates artwork stolen during a war that took place more than a hundred forty years prior. The loss and return of such works offers an effective allegory in the novella for the price exacted by wars on the people who survive them.

Throughout the novella, Gilman makes explicit connections between art and math or science and, in doing so, creates allegorical gems for the reader. A central aspect of the story derives from an ingenious blending of art and math used by certain artists. If they apply a certain algorithm to their media, each artist can create a work of art that looks dramatically different depending on how a person views the image. It is a clever play on holographic images in our real world that are visible only at certain angles, such as those that appear on many driver’s licenses. That artwork is a fitting theme for Thorn, who must learn to face the ways that “truth” can change depending on how she views her world. In another instance, Gilman uses the aromatic chemistry of benzene-based compounds to define a combination lock formed from the ornamentation on a box, itself a piece of art, which may or may not contain yet more secrets. The layering of puzzles on puzzles is an effective metaphor for the layered design of this inspired novella.

Gilman uses the word Holocide to describe a war that—like a holograph—encompassed every dimension of its world and was viewed from all sides by an interstellar civilization. Its similarity to the word Holocaust is telling. During World War II, the Nazis confiscated hundreds of thousands of artworks, and to this day the repatriation of those stolen pieces continues. In Gilman’s able hands, repatriation becomes a symbol of the impact war has on our humanity. The theme had a particular resonance for me in that I was writing this introduction when I read that Anton Dobrolski, the oldest known survivor of Auschwitz, had died at age 108. As the last survivors from the concentration camps of World War II pass away, their oral histories fade into a few sentences in history texts. If we forget, will that allow the atrocities to happen again? In Gilman’s novella, where relativistic spaceflight allows people to jump into the future every time they travel, the memories of the survivors stretch out for centuries and spread across the stars.

In “The Migratory Pattern of Dancers,” Katherine Sparrow writes about men who are genetically engineered with the DNA of birds, which have become extinct. Although the men remain essentially human, twice a year they are driven to travel the routes that birds once flew during their migrations. As part of their journey, the men make periodic stops to perform dances in places such as Yellowstone National Park, choreographing works that draw on the traits of those vanished birds—and that also make millions of dollars for the avaricious backers who sponsor their shows. The performances evoke the avian multitudes that once soared through our skies in the freedom of flight, yet that very evocation of freedom becomes a form of prison for the dancers.

Audiences come to the shows to be entertained, amused, and, yes, to see what fate might befall those dancers who dare to seek the closest that humans can come to unaided flight. As such, the story explores the ramifications of the human fascination with death as entertainment. Sparrow hints at an insidious end to humanity; will we become so inured to the loss of life through our entertainment that we participate in our own demise? Rather than a dramatic apocalypse, the story suggests that human extinction may come from within, prodded by the same instincts that led the characters in the story to reduce the once-great species of birds that flew our skies to an echo found only in human dances.

Jo Walton turns around the idea of combining science and the arts in her metafictional novel Among Others. Here the art is writing; the book is told through the narrator’s love of literature, in particular, science fiction. As such, the novel invokes many of our great speculative writers, specifically those from the science fiction canon of several decades ago. Literature plays a role in Walton’s novel similar to the role played by art, music, or dance for other works in this anthology. But the art that Walton uses to frame her story is our art, the literature of the fantastic, as illustrated, for example, by this anthology. The Nebula Aweards Showcase 2013 doesn’t dance, sing, paint, strum, or drum—but it becomes a recursive loop, one constructed out of its stories, which use other arts to frame the literary works so that the anthology becomes the art that frames itself.

Metafiction is a story that refers to literature and its conventions as part of the story. In other words, the tale is self-referential. The idea is that it exposes the illusions created by a work of fiction, blurring the line between the “real” world of the reader and the imagined world of the story. Walton employs this technique to good effect in her novel, using speculative fiction to frame a story of fantasy, even prodding the reader to ask if the magical aspects to the story are “real” within the context of the narrator’s tale or a fiction within a fiction masquerading as reality for the fictional characters.

In analogy with the self-referential loop that arises from the description of this anthology as an art that frames itself, it could be said that Walton’s book leaves out one important novel in the works she referenced—Among Others, by Jo Walton. What a satisfying creation of fractal metafiction that would be; the book refers to the book that refers to the book that refers to… well, you get the idea. It could be a recursive triumph worthy of Mandelbrot, the mathematician who created the gorgeous fractal known as the Mandelbrot set, which repeats itself the mesmerizing structure of its images at ever-finer and finer detail. For me, Among Others felt close to a literary version of the online video that shows the Mandelbrot fractal at greater and greater magnification, offering a musical glimpse into the ultimate representation of self-referential art.[2]

The Club Story has a long tradition in science fiction. Such a tale consists of two parts: a frame that describes a club or other place where the narrator is relating his story within a story, and the tale itself, which the narrator often claims involved him. In the words of John Clute, “A club story is a tale told by one person to others in a place where the story can be related safely, either a collection featuring one teller with many tales or several storytellers taking turns.” Clute, one of our two Solstice Award winners this year, offers here an essay on the Club Story adapted from his article in the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Not only does it form a compelling entry in the discussion of fiction as art form, but the essay itself is a form of art in its construction for an online audience, illustrating how the electronic age is changing the way we present literature. For the paper copy of this anthology, we can’t give the hyperlinks that allow readers to click on words and phrases from the essay to find connected entries in the encyclopedia, creating a hypertext document. However, you can enjoy the essay in its original electronic form in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction at www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/club_story.

In her all-too-short story “Ado,” Connie Willis uses the art of literature in a satire that, beneath its lighthearted comedy, gives a satisfying smack to censorship. The “world” she creates lies in the not-so-distant future where the constraints on what teachers may teach is stringently limited for fear of offending someone. Anyone. For all that it is amusing, the story also offers a sobering look at what could happen to our children and their futures if we allow censors to eviscerate the literature they read. In the world of “Ado,” I’ve already written too much—

Another theme that struck me about the stories on this year’s ballot is the diversity in the portrayal of both real cultures on Earth and those formed in the imaginations of the writers. At its best, speculative fiction can evoke astonishing universes. We paint prose pictures of other places, other worlds, other suns. Ironically, in earlier days of science fiction, the “alien” worlds depicted in many of our works were sometimes less alien than other cultures on our own planet. The current ballot illustrates the maturing of the genre. It is a cornucopia of world building, not only for imagined places, but also in exploring the people, ways of life, and ideas on our own planet that come from other cultures besides the West.

When I was a child, about age eight or nine, I remember being at my grandparents’ Spanish-style home in Escondido, California, not the endless metropolis that area has become now, but back in the days when it was a sleepy little town among the avocado farms. With nothing to do on a day baking beneath a relentless summer sun, I wandered down to the local library and sat in the air-conditioned reading room absorbed in a book about bees. I don’t remember the title or the author, but I will never forget how much I loved its tale of great bee adventure.

I remembered that book when I read E. Lily Yu’s story “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees.” Yu extrapolates the behavior of bees and wasps as known to modern science into a tale set in the village of Yiwei, which in Mandarin Chinese roughly translates as “to suppose.” It is an apt name for the opening locale of a story that concerns map-making wasps and their conflicts with bees both revolutionary and not. The societies of these remarkable insects are portrayed with depth and a gentle humor. Their cultures serve as a foil for the other culture in the story, that of the humans. The tale offers an unusual twist on science fiction stories of first contact and a salient commentary on human political systems of Earth.

Amal El-Mohtar’s poem “Peach-Creamed Honey” gives bees a very different look. They are among the many images she invokes with her sensual poem that won the 2011 Rhysling Award in the short form category. The sheer beauty of the writing is a pleasure to read, like a song. As I write this, it inspires my mind to compose melodies, edgily sweet, a haunting fusion of Western and Near Eastern music with a mesmerizing drumbeat, all conjured by these lines from the poem:

C. S. E. Cooney, the 2011 Rhysling Award winner in the long form category, also treats the reader to gratifyingly evocative language in “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her lyrical word pictures evoke a fantastic land in the deep sea. At turns graceful and irreverent, the poem is a sequel to the traditional Scandinavian ballad “Agnete and the Merman.” Cooney offers the ill-behaved merman a second chance for happiness, though at first he refuses to notice. The clever contrasts between the conventions of traditional folktales and the sensibility of a modern woman make for a delicious mix in this poem.

Brad R. Torgersen offers a science fiction take on the deep sea in his story “Ray of Light.” Although the world he evokes with such careful detail is here on Earth, it is as alien to most of us as another planet. “Ray of Light” centers on the confinement of Earth’s last humans in undersea settlements after the surface has become unlivable. Torgersen uses the milieu to frame a teenager’s alienation, not only her rebellion against her father, but also against her environment. The setting exerts a literary pressure on the characters analogous to the pressure of the deep sea that dominates their lives. It didn’t surprise me that the means by which the young people came together in secret to plan was through a music club. Although music played a relatively small part compared to the arts in other stories in this anthology, I found it a satisfying accent for the tale of a father’s struggles to accept his child’s transition into adulthood.

Ferrett Steinmetz sweeps us off to another sort of world in his novelette “Sauerkraut Station.” The story is set on a space habitat that offers medical aid and refits ships with supplies. Those supplies include their specialty, sauerkraut, which most of their visitors hold in far too low esteem, at least in the view of Lizzie, the narrator. The setting is brought alive by the author’s careful detail and serves as a foil for the political background of the universe Steinmetz builds. The tale is both stark and reaffirming, the story of a remarkable young woman.

When I first read “Sauerkraut Station,” I assumed it had appeared in Analog. It has that feel for me in part because of the well described life in a space station, including what happens if we lose amenities we take for granted, such as light and gravity. I was intrigued to learn that it came from the online zine GigaNotoSaurus. In fact, two works in this book first appeared in GigaNotoSaurus, the other being “The Migratory Patterns of Dancers.” They offer telling examples of the sea changes in publishing we’ve experienced over the last decade. In the past, when the outlets for short fiction were limited to hardcopy markets, the expense of producing and distributing such publications drastically constrained the number of markets, which meant many good stories went unpublished or appeared in hard-to-find places. Now, with the advent of so many online markets, more top-notch stories than ever are seeing print. This is the first I’ve seen of GigaNotoSaurus, but I will definitely be looking up more of their issues.

Geoff Ryman’s carefully rendered novelette “What We Found” takes place in Nigeria. On one level, it centers on the attempts of Terhemba, a Nigerian scientist, to reconcile his research with the ravages suffered by his family; the two converge when he discovers evidence that parents can pass the effects of traumas they have endured to their children. The narrator writes, “What we found is that 1966 can reach into your head and into your balls and stain your children red. You pass war on… . We live our grandfathers’ lives.” In telling Terhemba’s story, Ryman writes vividly of a Nigeria that is in turns severe and beautiful.

On another level, “What We Found” draws on a phenomenon observed by psychologists, in particular John Schooler, that their research showed a “decline effect,” where attempts to duplicate a well-documented result become less and less successful over time even if many scientists initially replicate the work. The decline may derive from psychological effects, that the experimenters expect the result and so are subconsciously predisposed toward work that verifies their expectation. The decline is then the reassertion of the scientific method over time. However, even that theory doesn’t seem to fully account for the effect. In “What We Found,” Ryman extrapolates the idea to a fascinatingly eerie extreme. What if all scientific results disappeared over time?

To motivate the idea, Ryman draws on quantum theory, specifically the result that the act of observing a system changes that system, collapsing it from a mixture of possible states to the one observed. As a physicist, I’ve calculated linear superpositions of quantum states to describe the behavior of atoms and molecules. Mathematically, it simply means that more than one state exists for the particles in a collection, and we don’t know which applies to a particular particle until we look at it. In popular culture, it has become famous as the “Schrödinger’s cat” paradox, which essentially says, “The cat in the box is neither dead nor alive, but is a mixture of those states—until we look.”

Ryman takes the idea a wonderfully fanciful step further. Suppose the act of observation changed everything scientists observed, including on a macroscopic level, so that the more they attempted to replicate previous results, the less they succeeded? All our scientific laws, including those we’ve known for centuries, even millennia, would eventually cease to be true. Ryman uses the idea to frame one man’s attempt to understand himself, his family, and his future.

The two novels excerpted in this anthology both have vivid resonances for me. As with many science fiction readers, I related to the protagonist in the book Among Others. Like her, I was an outcast during my elementary school years, and I too found a refuge in science fiction, practically inhaling every book I could lay hands on. But my world had another aspect: ballet. I began training as a small child and never stopped regardless of the obstacles, including a body shape better suited to jazz than classical dance. When I hit puberty, the unexpected happened. Those many years of dance classes after school and on weekends, those mornings I got up early and went running in the park to let my feet pound away my frustrations—they paid off in a manner I had no idea would happen. Until then, I had known only that when I danced, I could let free a part of myself that had no other outlet. I never realized all that training was also turning me from the proverbial ugly duckling into if not a swan, then at least a graceful duck.

By the time I hit middle school, I was deep within the cognitive dissonance of going from the least popular kid in school to being liked and accepted as a dancer, knowing all the time that inside, I was the same person my peers had bullied only two years before. To me, nothing had changed except my exterior. It was a sobering wake-up call to the effects of bias and stereotype. For many, twelve is the “golden age” of science fiction, that age when they find the genre and community that speaks to them. For me, twelve was the end of my (first) science fiction age. Struggling with the confusion of a puberty that hit me like an express train slamming into a brick wall, I could no longer ignore the sexism in the science fiction stories I had devoured for so many years, nor the fact that those stories were targeted at my male peers. The books were about their dreams, their confusion, and their adventures, and I didn’t fit in anywhere.

I went to John F. Kennedy High School in Richmond, California, which was known at that time for its innovative academic programs. In those days, the Richmond Voluntary Integration Plan was at its height, bringing in students from all over the region. As a result, I attended a school noted for its diversity, a student body that was about one-half African American and the rest a mix of other races, mostly Caucasian, also Asian and Hispanic. That had a marked effect on my new preferences in literature, though I didn’t realize it until years later. I read what my friends and classmates were reading, authors like Martin Luther King Jr. and discussions about the music of Miles Davis. At that point in my life, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, the story of a young black man dealing with the invisibility conferred by racism, spoke to me far more than H. G. Wells’s science fiction novella “The Invisible Man.”

Another work that stands out in my mind from that time is a book by John Howard Griffin, an American journalist who wrote about racial inequality. In 1959, Griffin darkened his light skin and traveled through the American Deep South as an African American. He took the title of his book about his experiences, Black Like Me, from the poem “Dream Variations” by Langston Hughes. The narrative of a white man experiencing the full force of racism against black Americans left an indelible impression on my young mind.

Echoes of Griffin’s book came to me when I read the excerpt printed here from Delia Sherman’s Norton Award–winning novel, The Freedom Maze. The three chapters concern a young woman sent from 1960s Louisiana back to 1860. The girl, a descendant of the plantation owners who built her ancestral home, is taken for a slave, the by-blow of a white man with a black woman. Not only must she confront the crushing racism of that time, which she comes to realize has survived in more subtle forms into her future world, but she must also live under its weight.

Sherman’s narrator offers a different viewpoint than is usually seen in works of social commentary; this is the story of a teenaged girl, traditionally one of the most misrepresented groups in literary canons. It is ironic that as a sign of our more enlightened times, we can now read stories where the main character undergoing such grueling experiences is a young woman. Is that progress? I would say yes, because it is a statement that the experiences of women are as valuable to our social conscience as those of men.

In graduate school, I began reading science fiction again to relax from the rigors of my doctoral program. This time around, my selections included many authors I hadn’t known before, among them Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Joan D. Vinge, and Anne McCaffrey. I also found new stories by the authors I had read as a child and discovered I could enjoy them again. I was left with the best of speculative fiction, a genre that dares to ask what could be different. Our literature has two faces: one that looks toward the beloved past I knew as a child, but also the face that looks forward, that asks challenging questions and pushes the envelope in almost any way we can imagine, whether it is scientific, fantastic, sociological, cultural, political, or artistic. Most of all, it became the genre of my intellect and of my heart.