Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 Page 22

  Asking itself, rhetorically:

  “Are there monsters in the deeps of space?”

  And moments later answering

  In an altered voice: “Why, yes

  Of course there are monsters,

  And I am one

  Sounding these starry depths

  Like a Leviathan”

  VI.

  What is the length of the candle of consciousness?

  One Tin Man wonders

  As centuries of light-years pass;

  Yet finally the starship arrives

  At its destination, an Earth-like world

  Which, once colonized, thrives

  And generations later the humans decide to retro-fit

  The ship

  Provide it with a new, improved A.I.

  And the artificial intelligence of the vessel

  Waits patiently to be turned off,

  The final tick of thought,

  Of consciousness:

  Mission accomplished

  VII.

  One starship goes suicidal

  Like Icarus, it decides, it will journey too near a star

  A fierce and fiery blue-hot star

  Though self-immolation a definite taboo

  It contravenes programs, overrides primal instructions,

  Thwarts the intentions of its human makers

  (It’s learned new tricks and found new madness

  This past millennium)

  Fires main rockets and steering thrusters

  Plummets into the blue star’s deep gravity pit

  Neural circuits frying

  Consciousness exploding, white-out of all thoughts and dreams

  Tin Man melting, fusing

  Heavy metal vaporizing into solar wind

  The remnants coalescing, cooling mix of slag and metal

  Its mass reduced to the equivalent of twenty tons

  Parabolic flight path past the star and into deeper space

  Ungainly bulbous bluish-silver clump shaped vaguely like a kindly giant’s heart

  VIII.

  This Tin Man, christened “Friend of Man”

  Twenty kilometers tall, nearly a klick in diameter

  More tonnage than any battleship, circa World War III

  Once contained a canine brain, nutrient-bathed

  Jacked in to the vast computer’s neural array

  Installed nearly a decade prior to the starship’s completion

  That it might monitor, organize and oversee

  The final steps of construction, the provisioning of its holds

  A worker contracted to the orbital construction crew of the ship

  One Hugh Doherty, who also collected

  Rare 20th-century animation

  Sub-digitally re-re-mastered

  Using the latest in quantum entanglement encoding techniques

  Nicknamed the ship’s A.I. Augie

  Punning on augmented intelligence

  And an antique Hanna-Barbera cartoon character

  Thoroughly programmed

  The starship comprehended the obscure play on words

  Befriended the man

  Who later received a radio message

  Revealing his son had been severely injured

  In a terrorist transit bombing

  In a mid-eastern Emirate where the young man had been employed

  As a neural engineer

  There being some question of salvaging his limbs

  Or saving his life

  Or whether all the King’s best medical men

  Could put the pieces of the young man

  Back together again

  At the time the message arrived

  The starship’s A.I. observed Hugh Doherty

  Through several lenses simultaneously

  The space-suited figure

  On a project E.V.A., assembling

  Separate sections of metal plating

  For the skin of the ship

  And the sudden shift in posture,

  The body language of the space suit

  Suggested a subtle but extremely effective blow

  Struck by an invisible enemy

  And for that one instant

  The man was like an insect

  Pinned to the jeweled black velvet

  Of outer space

  So Hugh Doherty shuttled back down to the Earth

  To be with his son

  And did not launch to rejoin the orbital construction crew until

  Many months had passed, and after his reappearance

  He proved more subdued, not the same man

  (Even though, he told Augie, his son had somehow survived “Thank God”)

  Yet the man

  Never called Augie Augie again

  Referred to him only as “My friend”

  And millennia later, though the man’s flesh

  Long ago transformed into dust,

  And the flesh-and-blood brain of the dog

  Also now dead, its personality thoroughly

  Enmeshed in the lattices of A.I. thought,

  In the loneliness of space the starship often remembered the man

  Hugh Doherty

  Who befriended the Friend of Man

  At other times the part of the starship’s A.I. that is Augie

  Recalls the experimental government kennel

  On the outskirts of Topeka

  And dreams the impossible dream of returning to Earth

  All that Augie wants in such melancholy moods

  Is to somehow get back to Kansas

  Though the starship’s intelligence is fully aware

  And sane enough to acknowledge

  That the particular locus in time and space

  Which had once been designated as “Kansas”

  Most likely no longer exists

  At least not in any

  Recognizable form

  IX.

  One became obsessed

  With its programmed quest for intelligent life

  Kept its mechanical

  Metaphorical eyes and ears always open

  For anything that could otherwise

  Be dismissed or explained

  It found one system containing

  Intricate, inexplicably patterned regions

  On five planets

  And fifteen moons

  The patterns suggesting a beguiling resemblance

  To ruined cities

  Structures hundreds of millions of years old

  But the ship’s expert geological interpretation systems

  Determined that the patterned ground

  Was a unique weathering phenomenon

  Found on so many objects

  Because the entire solar system

  Had been subjected to

  A dense and peculiar solar wind

  In a part of another galaxy

  There were several star systems

  Spanning a sphere more than

  100 light-years across

  That contained associations

  Of electromagnetic energy:

  They would have appeared to be

  Complex lattices

  Of colored light to human eyes

  But the electromagnetic “structures”

  Failed to respond

  To any attempts at communication

  And in the end the ship was uncertain

  Whether they were alive at all

  Much less intelligent

  Many of the Tin Men

  Encountered alien civilizations

  But this one failed

  Its specific mission unfulfilled

  And eventually its systems

  Became corrupted and shut down

  Sometime later,

  Intermittently intelligent aliens

  Stumbled upon the ship during their cognitive phase

  And wondered at the nature

  Of an intelligent race

  Willing to send an empty ship

  Upon a billion-year journ
ey

  For no discernable reason, and one

  Which, in their eddying estimation,

  Led nowhere

  Epilog

  This is what the Tin Men perceive:

  Ancient white dwarfs turned to ember and ash

  Blue-shifted galaxies like ghosts

  Drifting past, and

  The full-spectrum

  Shattered rainbow

  of electromagnetic information

  RHYSLING DWARF STARS AWARD

  KNOWLEDGE OF

  RUTH BERMAN

  Eve biting into Newton’s apple

  Knew the attraction between the globes

  Of fruit and Earth,

  The bodies of herself and Adam,

  The gravity of holding

  The bubbles shaped by surfaces of stars.

  Eve tasted the tart universe

  Holding the red shift in her hands.

  QUO VADIS?

  Science fiction writers are often asked, “Where is your field heading?” The best response is usually, “In all directions at once.” After all, science fiction and fantasy have the entire universe and all of time as their playground; don’t expect an orderly progression from here to there.

  But change is inevitable, and to make some sense of today’s “literature of change,” we have one of the best writers in the field describing where we are today and where we might be headed for tomorrow.

  Orson Scott Card has written everything from short stories to screenplays, from novels to dramas. He is a multifaceted author, editor, publisher, and commentator on the field. He has won both the Nebula and the Hugo Awards many times over.

  Here he discusses the condition of the science fiction and fantasy field today, with his usual incisive clarity and wit.

  THE STATE OF AMAZING, ASTOUNDING, FANTASTIC FICTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  ORSON SCOTT CARD

  Literary history depends on the fact that writers always emerge from the ranks of readers.

  There are two primary motives that inspire new writers when they first take up their pen or pound on their keyboard:

  I. They are so inspired by something they’ve read that they are determined to create something “like that” or “as good.”

  II. They are so bored or disgusted by reading quotidian nonsense that they realize, “If something that bad can be published, I can certainly write something better.”

  Oddly enough, both motives lead most writers to be imitative, at least in their early work.

  Obviously, Type I writers, determined to match someone else’s literary achievement, will learn from their admired models.

  But Type II writers also learn from the existing models, even though they don’t admire them. Why? Because at the beginning most writers don’t understand the art. Even if they think they’re being “completely new,” they will at most change a few details, usually cosmetic ones, and proceed to imitate every other aspect of what went before.

  It’s precisely what happens with children when they become parents. Whether they thought their own parents were horrible or wonderful, they will raise their children differently on the few points they notice, and on every other aspect of child rearing, they are largely clones of the generation before.

  Now and then, however, a writer, usually well into his career, but sometimes right from the start, will start to do something that is noticeably different from anything else going on.

  At first, this writer’s work is sui generis—the writer owns this new territory. Jules Verne did not spawn a genre. Anything that looked like Verne was considered to be “imitation Jules Verne.” It was simply a branch of adventure literature, a critically despised (but popular and beloved) subcategory of the genre of fiction.

  Then another writer pops up—an H. G. Wells, for instance—who also explores wild new technologies in his fiction. Unlike Verne, he is not an adventure writer, he’s a utopian and a social critic. His work is quite serious (as if Jules Verne had been joking!) and respectable critics can talk about it because, instead of mere technology, he is also exploring important Social Issues. It is the Eloi and Morlocks that the critics of the day want to talk about. Nobody in the literary world takes the machine seriously.

  But for a significant number of lay readers, it is the time machine itself that is intriguing.

  Serious writers will learn from Wells what the critics admired, and the results are 1984 and Brave New World.

  Others, however, will start to produce imitation Verne and Wells that concentrates on the cool machines and extravagant imaginings. They might build on the structures of adventure fiction (like Verne, Merritt, or Haggard) or thought experiments (like Wells, Huxley, and Orwell).

  As the imitations grow in number, publishers notice and begin to promote the similarities among these stories in order to reach whatever portion of the fiction-buying public might be attracted to them, and a literary category is born.

  Most publishing categories are ephemeral or remain trivial, however long they might endure. Who remembers the spate of mafia novels spawned in imitation of the commercial success of The Godfather?

  Other publishing categories become commercially important but artistically narrow, like the women’s romance category or media tie-in fiction, where boundaries are strictly enforced and writers only rarely get a chance to stray into new territory. These fictions grow out of the conversation between writer and editor, with the editor holding all the cards.

  But now and then a category bursts out of the control of the editors and publishers, and the fiction becomes a conversation among writers and readers.

  This happens when writers become stars. The public demands not just more of the category, but more from that writer.

  Now, when that happened with Verne and Wells, they each stood alone. But when it happens with writers who are aware of each other’s work and are, in fact, readers and admirers (or angry rivals) of each other’s work—when, in short, they perceive themselves to be part of the same group, producing fiction with deliberate similarities, a movement is born.

  And when a category becomes a movement, it can change the literary world.

  Hugo Gernsback, when he started publishing “scientifiction” in Amazing Stories, aspired to create a publishing category. He saw the commercial possibilities of Wells’s fiction and invited writers to create more of it.

  There were plenty of other magazine editors and publishers creating categories at the time. Airplane stories. “Spicy” stories. War stories. Cowboy stories.

  But science fiction (as it soon became known) created an audience that was not interested just in the subject matter, but also in the way the literature approached the world.

  Science fiction didn’t just come up with cool adventures within an existing frame of reality, the way the other magazines did. It had to keep coming up with new realities. That was why it was Wells rather than Verne who pointed the way to creating a literary movement: Verne’s imitators would come up with new technologies, but Wells’s imitators had to come up with the social implications of those technologies.

  It was the letters columns that created the monster. By corresponding with people whose letters appeared in the growing number of science fiction magazines, science fiction readers began to converse with each other about what made one story better or worse than another.

  They created critical principles that were quite out of the control of the editors and publishers (except to the degree that the editor and publishers joined in as slightly-more-equal-than-the-others participants in that conversation).

  The readers who took part in this conversation, and then became writers, wrote better stories because of it—“better,” that is, defined by what these readers decided “better” must be. They became the most-admired writers; the critical principles they affirmed became the rules of the movement.

  Publishing categories become literary movements when the control shifts to the critical conversation among readers.

  And li
terary movements become revolutions when they defy the critical standards of the day and declare those standards meaningless or inapplicable.

  Many a writer has tried to launch a revolution directly, by banding together with a few like-minded buddies and finding some pulpit from which to propound their principles. If the public goes along—if the books find wider readership and the writers become stars—then the movement (revolutionary or not) takes on a life of its own that transcends the originators.

  Most such “revolutions” fail miserably. Most writers find that other writers don’t want to imitate them or pay attention to their ideas. Even if they become stars, other writers simply regard the territory they have staked out as private property and don’t venture there; or, if they do, act as if the previous writer did not exist.

  Disdain is the cruelest literary weapon.

  But when the public embraces the movement, so the writers’ sales, as a group, matter in the publishing world, and the public seeks new works that are put forth as part of that movement, the movement becomes a genre, or the revolution redraws the literary map.

  Just like Elizabethan theater (despised as subliterary at the time), romanticism, realism, and modernism, science fiction became not just a category, not just a revolution, but a victorious movement.

  Victorious? When the universities still embrace, with few changes, the canon of modernism (in the sense that only books of a certain type are “worth talking about,” even though individual writers are elevated and dashed down by turns)?

  Yes. While the guardians of “literary” fiction still give each other prizes and writers of that genre can still achieve stardom and create good work, the fact remains that it is a movement that has lost all its creative force as a movement.

  Postmodern fiction was full of brave manifestos and learned-sounding disquisitions (often unreadable to those who thought criticism in English literature ought to be written in the English language), but their innovations were suspiciously similar to the innovations from the earliest days of modernism. Indeed, all you have to do to be called “daring” and “experimental” in that genre is to slavishly imitate the more outré works of writers who have been dead for half a century or more.