Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (49 page)

Still, you can ignore all that and just sit back and enjoy the movie.

An air of enchantment.
Eve is taken aback.

 

WALLY

She drifts through the sea of knickknacks.
Becomes spooked by a SINGING BILLY BASS FISH.
Threatens to shoot it, but Wally calms her down.
He is compelled to show her everything.

Hands her an eggbeater . . .
. . . bubble wrap (so infectious to pop) . . .
. . . a lightbulb (lights when she holds it) . . .
. . . the Rubik’s Cube (she solves it immediately)
. . . his
Hello Dolly
tape.
Curious, she begins unspooling the tape.

 

WALLY

He grabs it back. Protective.
Inserts it carefully into the VCR. Please still work
The movie eventually appears on the TV.
Plays a clip of
POYSC.
Wally is relieved.

 

WALLY

Mimics the dancing for Eve.
Encourages her to try.
She clumsily hops up and down.
Makes dents in the floor. Rattles everything.
Wally politely stops her.

 

WALLY

Spins in a circle. Arms out.
Eve copies.
Spins faster, and faster . . .
Too fast.
Accidentally strikes Wally. He flies into the shelves.
Eve helps him up from the mess.
Wally’s LEFT BINOCULAR EYE falls off.
Dangles from two wires.
Eve GASPS with concern.
Wally placates her.

EXT. TRUCK—NIGHT

INT. TRUCK—SAME

INT. WALLY’S TRUCK—NEXT MORNING

EXT. ROOF OF WALLY’S TRUCK

EXT. WALLY’S WORK SITE—THAT MORNING

W
hat’s this? How do I come to be in this room full of luminaries? When mere moments ago I was in Canada, filming a film?

Aha, I have fooled you. My image is being beamed to you through a waveavatronic electron machine that causes you to see me although I am not here. That’s right: this is the future. This is one of the many future gadgets you will soon learn to enjoy. Future is my business, because I write fictionalized scientific, or as the kids call it nowadays, fi sci. And right now, I’m very honored to be, not physically but spectrally, among so many people that I admire, especially you, and you . . . and that hot chick over there—why are you even here? I would like to be with you physically, but I can’t, because I’m filming a movie that I feel certain will cause you to take this award back away from me.

But, if I could be there, I would probably say something exactly like what I am saying now. Which is simply that there is no bigger influence on my writing, really, than Ray Bradbury. He is the forefather of us in so many ways. Nobody made fi sci more human, more exciting, the horror, the engagement. It’s stayed with me my whole life, before Stephen King, before Frank Herbert, before so many people I admire, Bradbury was the first. This award is something that I will genuinely treasure when I actually get to be near it physically.

Thank you all. And now . . . I disappear.

H
arry Harrison—Grand Master, writer, critic, illustrator, friend. He has entertained us for over half a century. He’s been published in twenty-five languages. And he’s a creator of worlds and characters that will be long remembered.

In
Make Room! Make Room!
he made us consider the consequences of overpopulation and of our consumption of the world’s resources. The novel was the basis for the movie
Soylent Green
. I never thought the movie did justice to the book, but it was still good enough to win the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

Over the years, Harry has excited us with the hardest of hard science fiction—and spoofed the same genre with his
Bill, The Galactic Hero
series. He’s combined adventure with humor in the tales of Slippery Jim diGriz,
The Stainless Steel Rat
, the first of which he sold to John W. Campbell for
Astounding
in 1957, thereby initiating a long and productive relationship. It’s his longest-running and probably his most famous series, and he’s currently polishing the first draft of its latest installment, the novel
The Stainless Steel Rat Returns
, which we plan to publish at Tor next year. Among his many other memorable works are the disaster novel
Skyfall
, the Deathworld series with its endless and harrowing struggle for human survival, and the marvelous parallel worlds of the Eden series and
The Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!
Few have produced such quality at such range over such an extended period of time.

When I met my wife in Leningrad, back in the days of the old Soviet Union, he was one of the few American science fiction writers well known to her and her friends. Truly a man of the world, he had traveled in Russia and been published there when there was still an Iron Curtain. He’s been the honorary president of the Esperanto Association of Ireland. In our long friendship I’ve visited with him and with his lovely wife Joan in Mexico, in Ireland, in England, and at my own home on Long Island. They have also lived and worked in Italy, Denmark and, of course, in the United States. Wherever he’s lived, he’s always had stories to tell of his travels, his work, and the great people he’s worked with.

He started out in comics in the 1940s, working both as an illustrator and as a writer. In the 1950s and ’60s I loved his internationally syndicated
Flash Gordon
newspaper comic strips and those wonderful stories in
Astounding
. At the same time he did magazine illustrations and some covers. He edited magazines—the first issue of
Rocket Stories
, and for a short time
Amazing
and
Fantastic
. He edited books, including a number of distinguished anthologies alone and with Brian Aldiss. Along with Brian he raised the level of science fiction criticism. Most of all he wrote
wonderful stories.
To be proclaimed a Grand Master is a very special thing and I am delighted it has come to so special a man.