Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (36 page)

As the decade opened, the New Wave movement in science fiction that began in the late 1960s reached its peak (and I was admittedly too young to grok it). New Wave works dominated the major SF awards ballots. Turning away from fast-paced tales set on imaginative worlds, a group of authors used highly experimental and artistic techniques—with nary a bug-eyed monster in sight—to gain literary respectability for our frowned-upon genre. Paramount among these architects of the New Wave were Samuel R. Delany, Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, Barry N. Malzberg, and Harlan Ellison.

Though some works were more accessible than others (you know which ones I’m talking about), alas, for some readers like myself who grew up with traditional SF—Andre Norton, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frank Herbert’s
Dune
—the New Wave achieved only incomprehensibility and a lot of head-scratching. But the critics liked those books, and they earned plenty of awards, so who am I to judge?

For those of us seeking vibrant and ambitious plots, exotic settings, and sense-of-wonder adventures, the 1970s saw truly great works of core science fiction, such as Larry Niven’s
Ringworld
, Arthur C. Clarke’s
Rendezvous with Rama
, Joe Haldeman’s
The Forever War
, Niven & Pournelle’s
The Mote in God’s Eye
and
Lucifer’s Hammer
, Frederik Pohl’s
Gateway
, and many others. Poul Anderson did some of his best work in the 1970s, as did Robert Silverberg.

In 1972, Frank Herbert’s
Dune Messiah
, the much-anticipated sequel to
Dune
, met with a mixed reaction because of its dramatic shift, turning hero Paul Atreides into a hated tyrant. Four years later, however, Herbert’s
Children of Dune
(1976) became the first novel unabashedly marketed as science fiction to appear on the
New York Times
bestseller list, with a first hardcover printing of 100,000 copies. Only Michael Crichton’s
The Andromeda Strain
(1972) had numbers that could match it, though Crichton’s novel was marketed strictly as a “thriller,” not SF.

Two years later, Anne McCaffrey’s novel
The White Dragon
(with its seminal Michael Whelan cover) also hit the
NYT
list. McCaffrey, who began her
Dragonriders of Pern
series in 1967 with the novellas
Weyr Search
and
Dragonrider
(winners of the Hugo and Nebula, respectively), published the novel
Dragonflight
in 1968, then
Dragonquest
in 1970. Her young-adult Harper Hall trilogy (
Dragonsong
,
Dragonsinger
,
Dragondrums
) was published from 1976 through 1979. McCaffrey’s imaginative and entertaining stories combined traditional dragon tropes with science fiction and captivated a wide audience. Her work both broadened and blurred the audience for science fiction and fantasy.

Stephen King appeared on the scene in 1974 with
Carrie
and produced some of his most influential work, developing a brand of fantasy/horror/sf that tapped into a significant mainstream readership. He followed his first novel with
Salem’s Lot
(1975),
The Stand
(1978), and
The Dead Zone
(1979), all landmark bestsellers. (Interestingly,
The Dead Zone
was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, but King withdrew it because he considered precognition to be science fiction, not fantasy.)

Roger Zelazny’s first
Amber
series spanned most of the decade, as did Katherine Kurtz’s popular
Deryni
series; these books paved the way for a much larger fantasy audience. 1977 in particular was a very good year for the genre: Terry Brooks’s
The Sword of Shannara
was the first fantasy novel ever to appear on the
New York Times
bestseller list. (
Shannara
was also the first novel published by Lester del Rey’s new eponymous book line.) Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever” debuted the same year with
Lord Foul’s Bane
, as did J. R. R. Tolkien’s posthumous
The Silmarillion
(which became a #1 bestseller with over a million copies sold in hardcover)—altogether launching a tremendous and unstoppable commercial fantasy boom.

Yes, the momentum was building.

Then a film was released that changed the perception of science fiction forever. As an unexpected follow-up to his Oscar-nominated nostalgia film
American Graffiti
(1973), George Lucas decided to do a big science fiction movie—and he wanted $11 million to do it right. Since it was common knowledge that science fiction films never made much money, and that the audience was small, the studios thought he was crazy to want such a large budget.

Lucas had already done a (rather dreary and slow) SF film in 1971,
THX-1138
, but now he was pitching something entirely different.
The Star Wars
. In order to get the movie made, he waived his up-front fee as a director (astonishing in light of the fact that
American Graffiti
had been nominated for an Academy Award) and in exchange Lucas negotiated to keep the merchandising rights for
Star Wars
, which the studio deemed to be without value anyway.

In its initial year alone,
Star Wars
took in over $270 million—the highest-grossing movie in history, up to that date. The same year, Steven Spielberg’s SF entry,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, earned well over $80 million—a one-two punch that permanently convinced the world that there was a large audience for science fiction.

That same year, 1977, saw the first launch of the space shuttle. Ambitious fan Bjo Trimble—who had led a major write-in campaign to keep
Star Trek
on the air for one more season in the late 1960s and to resurrect it as an animated series (1973-1974)—organized a crusade among powerful
Star Trek
fans to get NASA to christen the first experimental orbiter
Enterprise
. Science fiction showed its newfound muscle, and the campaign succeeded.

After a long hiatus, just a few days before we turned our calendars over to 1980,
Star Trek
came to the big screen with
Star Trek:The Motion Picture
. I remember walking down a snowy State Street in Madison, Wisconsin, where I attended university; I had skipped classes so I could see the very first showing of the new movie. The credits rolled, and the Klingons appeared—with ridges on their foreheads? What? Yes indeed, more big changes were ahead for science fiction.

Who would have thought at the beginning of the 1970s that our relatively obscure and insular genre would become a juggernaut of entertainment, both on-screen and off? The nerdy duckling had transformed into a shining swan that was no longer teased or ridiculed. Science fiction had stepped out into the broad, vibrant relevance of the mainstream.

A
lanna and I have been together most of our lives. She is the beautiful one, and I am the worker; at least, that’s how it looks to people who see us now. It is not how we began. I was a princess in a tower, and she was a drudge who worked for my father, tending all the machinery that kept me imprisoned and alive, and trained me in my terrible purpose.

All that changed when we found and ate the bondfruit.

We live more than half our lives beneath the surface now. Inside, we are all sorts of different people, and outside, we have tried on many different roles, but we also meld into one another as we share eyes and thoughts and conversation. Still, I am the one who doesn’t mind work and is driven mad by music, and she is the one who makes plans and minds details.

Alanna laughs and thinks,
Tell them your name,Ylva.You always forget the important things!

Very well. My name is Ylva Sif.

Gwelf Kinnowar, currently married to Alanna, is the fourth husband we have had between us, and when we first met him, we thought he was the best. He didn’t argue when Alanna told him that to marry her, he had to accept me into his household. He has plenty of money, and let us use it; and, though we live with him in various residences on planets where oppressive social conditions hold, he gives us freedom from the prevailing mores in the privacy of his house, so long as Alanna acts the perfect ornamental wife in public.

The first time Gwelf slept with another woman after the wedding, we lost faith in him. He didn’t betray us in any other way, though, so we stayed, even though in his travels he often slept with other women. The benefits of the marriage still outweigh the troubles, so we adjusted our hopes and attitudes and went on with our real job, which is rescuing people, as we ourselves have been rescued.

 

Alanna was in the balcony room looking out over Haladion, the planet where Gwelf ’s main residence was. Alanna and I loved the balcony room. The mansion was built into the side of a cliff, among a cluster of others, and below the cliff lay all the world: at the base, the market town Risen, and beyond it, farmlands, with the spaceport to the west, ringed by businesses that catered to offworld travelers. Near the spaceport was the technomall for people who liked to shop for factory-made things in person.

Out beyond the farmlands lay the forest, with the Fang Mountains rising in the distance.

Alanna dialed controls on the focusing window and peered down at the central market square, where the servants of cliffside mansions bought fresh produce from the farmers. “Ripe sakal,” she thought.

I was in the kitchen, a level below, checking our stores and making a list. I paused and styled sakal on my list. “Much?”

“Going fast,” she thought. “Oh! Perberries! Only three pints left! At the SunGlo booth.”

“On my way.” I shut the list, grabbed a carrybag, and headed for the door. In the purification room, I dipped into the amber scent bowl and dabbed it at my wrists. I pulled on an outer robe and hooked my veil across my lower face, then coded through the privacy portal and entered the communal elevator bank. My pod opened a moment later onto the public access foyer to the outdoors at the base of the cliff. Others came and went in various pods.

Outdoors, the heat and scents and sounds were intense. Meat cooking, bread baking, the faint taint of scoot fuel, though no mechanized transport was allowed in the city core except float carts to carry home one’s purchases. Voices called as people spoke to each other in person or at a distance.

I headed to the market. At the SunGlo booth, all the perberries the vendor had on display were gone, but she saw the sigil on my hood and smiled at me. As a farm worker, she wore no veil or head covering; she was outside the life lived in houses and only another farmer would look at her as a wife. So the people professed to believe, anyway. One heard stories.

“I knew you’d be by, Ser Sif,” the vendor, Vigil, said, and reached under the table for a whole flat of perberries.

“Thank you, Vigil.” I pressed my thumb to her pay pad without even discussing price. Sometimes it was worth paying extra.

“Oh, no! I wanted some of those,” said a low voice to my left. I turned to see a stranger, her hood unmarked by house. Her eyes were large, dark, liquid, under narrow black brows, and she wore a very plain outer robe, dusty light blue with one line of white at the hem. Her veil was opaque, giving no hint of who she was beneath. “Someone at the clay booth said you had them,” she said to Vigil, “and I so hoped.”

“Maybe we can arrange something.” I opened the compartment in the carrybag for fragile perishables and slid the flat in, activating the stasis field that would hold my berries safe.

Ask her who she works for,
Alanna thought-whispered; she was present behind my eyes, as I was behind hers.

“Whose house are you affiliated with?” I asked.

The stranger’s eyes looked frightened. “I can’t say,” she whispered.

“Come with me for coffee and I’ll sell you some of my berries. Thanks again, Vigil.”

“I have other shopping,” said the stranger as I tugged her toward Kalenki’s Tea House. They had rooms in the back where women could unveil.

“I’ll help you with it when we’ve finished our talk. I can see you’re a stranger here. I can show you all the best bargains.” I raised my voice. “Kalenki!”

“Ser Sif.” He smiled at me and twirled his waxed mustache. “The sandalwood room?”

“Please.”

He gestured us toward the back, and I led the stranger to my favorite room, its walls fretted with carved wood, its scent warm and spicy. It had a heavy curtain that almost muffled outside sound and kept those within private enough to speak in low voices without fear. I took the bug zapper from the pouch at my waist and scanned the room for hidden ears. None today.