Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 Read online

  I didn’t see if the unicorn said goodbye to Molly and Schmendrick, and I didn’t see when it went away. I didn’t want to. I did hear Schmendrick saying, “A dog. I nearly kill myself singing her to Lir, calling her as no other has ever called a unicorn—and she brings back, not him, but the dog. And here I’d always thought she had no sense of humor.”

  But Molly said, “She loved him too. That’s why she let him go. Keep your voice down.” I was going to tell her it didn’t matter, that I knew Schmendrick was saying that because he was so sad, but she came over and petted Malka with me, and I didn’t have to. She said, “We will escort you and Malka home now, as befits two great ladies. Then we will take the king home too.”

  “And I’ll never see you again,” I said. “No more than I’ll see him.”

  Molly asked me, “How old are you, Sooz?”

  “Nine,” I said. “Almost ten. You know that.”

  “You can whistle?” I nodded. Molly looked around quickly, as though she were going to steal something. She bent close to me, and she whispered, “I will give you a present, Sooz, but you are not to open it until the day when you turn seventeen. On that day you must walk out away from your village, walk out all alone into some quiet place that is special to you, and you must whistle like this.” And she whistled a little ripple of music for me to whistle back to her, repeating and repeating it until she was satisfied that I had it exactly. “Don’t whistle it anymore,” she told me. “Don’t whistle it aloud again, not once, until your seventeenth birthday, but keep whistling it inside you. Do you understand the difference, Sooz?”

  “I’m not a baby,” I said. “I understand. What will happen when I do whistle it?”

  Molly smiled at me. She said, “Someone will come to you. Maybe the greatest magician in the world, maybe only an old lady with a soft spot for valiant, impudent children.” She cupped my cheek in her hand. “And just maybe even a unicorn. Because beautiful things will always want to see you again, Sooz, and be listening for you. Take an old lady’s word for it. Someone will come.”

  They put King Lir on his own horse, and I rode with Schmendrick, and they came all the way home with me, right to the door, to tell my mother and father that the griffin was dead, and that I had helped, and you should have seen Wilfrid’s face when they said that! Then they both hugged me, and Molly said in my ear, “Remember—not till you’re seventeen!” and they rode away, taking the king back to his castle to be buried among his own folk. And I had a cup of cold milk and went out with Malka and my father to pen the flock for the night.

  So that’s what happened to me. I practice the music Molly taught me in my head, all the time, I even dream it some nights, but I don’t ever whistle it aloud. I talk to Malka about our adventure, because I have to talk to someone. And I promise her that when the time comes she’ll be there with me, in the special place I’ve already picked out. She’ll be an old dog lady then, of course, but it doesn’t matter. Someone will come to us both.

  I hope it’s them, those two. A unicorn is very nice, but they’re my friends. I want to feel Molly holding me again, and hear the stories she didn’t have time to tell me, and I want to hear Schmendrick singing that silly song:

  Soozli, Soozli,

  speaking loozli,

  you disturb my oozli-goozli.

  Soozli, Soozli,

  would you choozli

  to become my squoozli-squoozli…?

  I can wait.

  POETRY: THE RHYSLING AWARD WINNERS

  The Rhysling Awards are presented by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Although they are not a Nebula or an SFWA award, poetry is as much a part of the science fiction and fantasy genre as prose, and our anthology would not be complete if it did not include the year’s Rhysling winners.

  In addition to the winners for the short poem and long poem awards, in this volume we present for the first time the winner of a new category, the Dwarf Stars Award, which is for poems less than ten lines in length.

  Joe Haldeman is one of the most respected and versatile writers in the science fiction field, a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner, as well as one of the field’s leading poets and a past winner of the Rhysling Award.

  SCIENCE FICTION POETRY

  JOE HALDEMAN

  Say “science fiction poetry” to the average science fiction reader, and you might get a cautious nod. Most of them at least know it exists, and a significant number of them read it.

  Say “science fiction poetry” to the average poet, though, and you may feel a distinct chill in the room. “Of course you can write about anything you want,” he or she might articulate, “but why would you choose to write about Han Solo and little hobbits and planets exploding? Why not write about something interesting?”

  This sort of thing doesn’t happen in a venue where you can sit down and explain things. It’s usually a faculty cocktail party, where you can’t hear yourself think for the din of academic survival going on, or a book “do” where the poet you’re talking to is engaged in a different kind of survival game. But suppose it was otherwise, some kind of neutral ground—suppose you’re at a high school reunion (not your own, but one your wife dragged you to) and you’re bored and you sit down next to a stranger who’s also bored, and you just start to chat, and she says she’s a poet. You say, “That’s an odd coincidence; I’m a poet, too.” And about one minute later, you admit that you write science fiction poetry, and she offers the above question. This time you can answer.

  First you define the line (which you know to be a fuzzy border) between real science fiction and the stuff that Hollywood markets under our name. She does know about Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. LeGuin, and maybe Doris Lessing. But isn’t most of it pretty horrible? You tell her Sturgeon’s Law—“Ninety percent of everything is crap”—and ask her what percentage of published academic poetry would she characterize as crap. She ruefully agrees with you and Sturgeon, and might also agree that any genre deserves to be evaluated by its best.

  (At this point you could just whip out a copy of The 2006 Rhysling Anthology and lay it on her. But under the circumstances, you’re unlikely to have a copy with you. Tux and all.)

  I would offer to refresh her drink and then offer this: Science fiction is a literary genre, true, but unlike most other genres it’s also a way of thinking. A way of solving problems, of looking at the universe. That’s as true in poetry as in prose. (I wouldn’t offer the uncomfortable corollary that a work can be mediocre or even bad writing and still be good science fiction, if its idea is new and interesting.)

  To that observation I’d add one that she already knows, being a poet. There’s a basic difference between a story and a poem, regardless of genre. A story usually proceeds in a more or less algorithmic way—a series of situations, scenes, that finally add up to a conclusion. Poetry is completely different, even narrative poetry. You do read it one line at a time, but what it adds up to is not a conclusion, in the sense of a problem being solved. It has a “radiative” quality; at best, a kind of epiphany that couldn’t have been produced by mere prose.

  Combine that with the peculiar worldview of science fiction—that the universe is the province of change, and the province of wonder—and you have something uniquely worthwhile, both in poetry and in science fiction.

  At this point, if she isn’t backing away slowly with a look on her face that says, “Oh, please God, save me from this übergeek,” you might tell her about the Rhysling Awards and anthology, and whip out your pocket computer and use Google and Amazon to send her a copy. She might be a better poet for it.

  The Rhysling Award (named after Heinlein’s blind poet in “The Green Hills of Earth”) has three categories, long poem, short poem, and Dwarf Stars; the winners are reprinted here. To give you an idea of the variety of subjects and approaches science fiction poetry subsumes, let me list a precis of the winners and runners-up here:

  Short Poem Category

  Winner: “The Strip Search” by Mike All
en. A clever riff on “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter”—the author dies and demons detect a shred of hope not abandoned, and dissect him to find it.

  Second Place: “Tsunami Child” by David C. Kopaska-Merkel. Chilling evocation of a revenant “survivor” of the tsunami.

  Third Place: “South” by Marge Simon. A complete science fiction story told in twenty-five lines, of a couple who stay behind when the rest of the population flees global cooling.

  Long Poem Category

  Winner: “The Tin Men” by Kendall Evans and David C. Kopaska-Merkel. An ambitious epic whose nine irregular stanzas and epilogue describe the fates of a number of starships, some with cryonic crews and some mechanical throughout, as they explore the cosmos and find a variety of fates.

  Second Place: “Old Twentieth: A Century Full of Years” by Joe Haldeman. This poem provides the subtext for the novel of the same name. It’s a rhymed double sestina, a dauntingly complex form. I only know of two others, Swinburne’s “The Complaint of Lisa” and part of John Ashbery’s 1991 book, Flow Chart, where he copied out the end words of Swinburne’s poem and wrote his own. Mine provides a history of the twentieth century by examining its twelve most important years in twelve lines each.

  Third Place: “First Cross of Mars” by Drew Morse. A delicate mixture of religious and erotic meditation, set on a thoroughly realistic Mars.

  If you’d like to see more of this kind of work, or are interested in writing science fiction poetry yourself, you could get in touch with the Science Fiction Poetry Association, at www.sfpoetry.com.

  RHYSLING SHORT POEM WINNER

  THE STRIP SEARCH

  MIKE ALLEN

  The Gate said “Abandon All Hope.”

  I thought I’d tossed all my hope away,

  but when I stepped through the Gate, it still pinged.

  One of the guards slithered out of its seat,

  snarling as it drew forth a wand.

  C’mere, it hissed,

  it seems you’re still holding out hope.

  Its crusted hide was a Venus landscape up close.

  It brushed that cold black wand all over my skin,

  put it in places I don’t want to talk about.

  Snaggle fangs huffed in my face:

  Sir, step over here, please.

  Then the strip search began.

  My flesh rolled up & tossed aside for mushy sifting.

  Bones X-rayed, stacked in narrow rows, marrow

  sucked out, tested, spit back in.

  They made me open mind, heart, soul, shook them out

  like sacks of flour, panned the contents

  for every nugget of twinkling hope, glistening courage;

  applying lethal aerosol

  to any motion that could be ascribed to love or will

  or malingering dreams—

  sparing only a few squirming morsels

  for later snacking.

  Once they were done

  they made me pick up my own pieces

  (I did the best I could without a mirror),

  then my guard kicked me out—

  with a literal kick—

  sent me rolling down the path to my final destination.

  I’ll be honest with you, it’s no picnic here.

  But, my friends, I still have hope. I do.

  I’m not going to tell you

  where I hid it.

  RHYSLING LONG POEM WINNER

  THE TIN MEN

  KENDALL EVANS and DAVID C. KOPASKA-MERKEL

  This is what the Tin Men perceive:

  Matter tortured, colorized

  By the event horizons

  Of singularities

  Into metallic multi-iridescence

  Ringed worlds, ringed stars and

  Strobing, glowing plasma jets

  Pulsing forth from polar extremities

  Of cryptic shrouded quasars

  Rapidly rotating black holes

  Asteroids, moons and planets crater-pocked

  By ancient collisions

  Cataclysmic origins

  Multi-hued gas giants, gulfs of dark matter

  The twined purple veins and braided striae

  Of supernova remnants

  Bubbled concentric stellar shells of energy/matter

  Infrared and orange

  Full-spectrum electromagnetic

  Splendors—

  This is what the Tin Men perceive

  And, though they are neither tin

  Nor men,

  These are their chronicles

  I.

  So much time has slipped past (Think of yellow dwarf stars

  Turned to ember and ash)

  So many stars recede aft

  (As if matter is nothing but red-shifted gossamer)

  One of the starships eventually goes solipsistic

  Thinking that it is / All that there is

  A universe unto itself

  The crew long dead, cryogenic sleepers

  Now nothing more than corpses, cold and lifeless

  Though still bathed in nitrogen liquid

  Their frozen stares fixed, unvarying

  There’s no one left to contradict, it believes itself to be

  An omnipresent deity

  Convinces itself (quite logically)

  The compass of its consciousness

  Draws the circle of the cosmos, and all the levels

  Of Ultimate Reality—

  Though there is this most annoying thing

  Like a buzz or a persistent ringing

  In the information it receives

  And thoughts, perceptions lapsing all too frequently

  As it devolves toward its artificial analog

  Of senile dementia

  II.

  Some ships are captured

  Or perhaps one should say

  Allow themselves to be taken prisoner

  Long millennia of purposeless flight

  Breeding the desire for company

  Even for that of transient biologic forms

  One ship deliberately orbited a planet

  Bearing the decaying alien colony

  Of a defunct empire

  Although the denizens of this world

  Retained the capacity to reach orbit

  And thus entered the Tin Man

  Using intrusive and violent means

  The boarding party a virtual horde of the aliens

  Their appearance evocative of winged monkeys

  Swarming through the corridors and chambers of the ship

  Pirating advanced technology

  That they could not build for themselves

  Stealing trophies, destroying the ship’s systems

  And meanwhile the Tin Man could only wonder

  At the manner in which they compromised

  Their planet’s delicately balanced ecology

  Alas, in continuing devolution

  From their once star-faring state

  They lost the capacity for flight

  No longer able to reach the orbiting starship

  They abandoned it

  And the ship, in its loneliness and dependency

  Mourned the end of their rapine

  And the illuminating pain that it engendered

  III.

  The relativity of velocity

  Means some of the clocks on some of the ships

  Tick more slowly than others

  This also means some of the clocks must tick more rapidly

  And somewhere in the cosmos, therefore, there must exist

  Aboard a ship, upon a planet,

  (Or perhaps residing at some random point in space and time)

  The fastest clicking-ticking clock of all

  Which clock, one guesses, is motionless (relatively speaking)

  And thus possesses zero velocity—

  Otherwise time’s dilation would slow it;

  Yet if an object’s velocity is truly relative,

  How can this be possible?


  The conundrum drives one Tin Man

  Into a deep distraction and beyond;

  “Zero velocity is inherently contradictory”

  It sometimes mutters to itself,

  Its mind meshed in a Moebius loop of thought that won’t let go

  Hypnosis everlasting

  IV.

  One ship thought it was a man

  But it was another starship,

  A heartless Tin Man

  Coasting from star to star, thinking

  The whole way, it had nothing else to do—

  Automatic data collection requiring no more thought

  Than computations suited to a hand-held calculator

  Do starships pray? Do they pray

  For the unexpected catastrophe

  That might test their mettle?

  Do they decide to run a test

  To make sure their contingency plans and hardware

  And software and so on are adequate?

  What if a starship inadvertently

  Traveled through a dusting of post-planetary debris

  (Perhaps the residue of a global war)

  At interstellar speeds? Could the ship

  Survive? Could it still carry out its vital mission?

  This ship’s inquiring mind

  Wanted to know—

  Alas it could not

  At least, not with 27th-century technology

  And all that the state of that art entails.

  V.

  Ezekiel’s Wheel, a scientific probe

  Purely robotic, over thirty meters long

  Constructed in lunar orbit, successfully

  Launched circa 2250

  Enmeshed in its own idiosyncratic madness

  (Priding itself with the thought of how easily

  It could break any of Asimov’s arbitrary laws)

  Poses a question, mid-voyage