Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 (30 page)

9

We don’t know the details of what they did, Erwin Schrödinger and the woman he was with, during the winter of 1925/26. The important thing is that he came out from that snow-covered chalet with his wave equations. And we shouldn’t pry into what John and Amy did after they had dashed through the downpour and into her flat. John probably spent most of his waking hours on his equations, some of his time with Amy, and a couple of hours playing handball with his colleague Gino. As for Amy, most likely she waitressed at the Capri and spent her free time on a new mosaic. What’s important is that on Sunday, April 18, 2004, Amy stepped out of a hot shower, wrapped herself in a towel and—Hey!—there stood John in the open doorway, wisps of the steam cloud floating away to reveal a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses in the other. “I finished it!” he announced.

“Wonderful! Fantastic!” said Amy.

In the kitchen John set to work uncorking the bottle while Amy toweled her hair. Then they sat at the table and he poured a glass for her, a glass for himself. “Greek wine,” he told her, smiling. He was more unshaven than ever, his eyes puffy and red rimmed from lack of sleep, but he was happy. “Greeks have been producing wine for thousands of years,” he said, lifting his glass.

“Producing mathematicians and physicists, too,” Amy said, smiling a little, touching her glass to his. They drank.

They talked about this and that, trivial things like John’s having enough time now to get his car radio fixed. Actually, Amy wasn’t paying attention to the conversation because up to now she had been able to avoid thinking about where John might disappear to when he had finished his graduate studies. Now she was thinking about it. John asked her how her new mosaic was coming along. Amy said she’d show him later. He said it felt good to be through being a student and that it would feel even better to go to a real job someplace. Amy felt her heart contract at the thought of his leaving. She hesitated a long moment. “Now what do you do?” she asked him.

“I take a shower. Like you,” he said, standing up, laughing. “A long, hot shower.” He pulled off his T-shirt and padded barefoot down the hall toward the bathroom, tossing his shirt in the air, catching it, singing. By the time John returned to the kitchen Amy had pulled on her cutoffs and a frayed jersey that said
Xanadu
, and was refilling their glasses. John lifted his glass to hers, saying, “Tell me about Schrödinger’s woman and show me your new mosaic.”

“I’ll show you the mosaic,” Amy said, touching her glass to his.

“What about the anonymous woman and her daughter and so on?”

“I’m sorry I ever said anything,” Amy told him. She hurriedly drained her glass and nearly choked, then coughed. “Now you think I’m crazy or silly or just strange.” She coughed again, wiped her eyes and looked at John hopelessly.

“Tell me anyway,” he said. “Please.”

“I calculated that Erwin’s woman gave birth to a baby girl on September 9, 1926. I figure that about twenty-five years later this daughter gave birth to a daughter, too, probably in England. That would be Erwin’s granddaughter, like Olivia Newton-John is Max Born’s granddaughter, also born in England.”

“Olivia Newton-John, the singer? The singer in
Xanadu
? She’s Max Born’s granddaughter?”

“I thought everybody knew that.”

“Please go on,” said John.

“That woman, the granddaughter, probably gave birth about twenty-five years later to a daughter, probably here in the United States,” she said, fearing that every word would drive him away.

“In California?”

“In California, yes,” she said firmly. “Probably.”

“And you are?”

Amy laughed. “Amy Bellacqua, daughter of Vincent and Catherine Bellacqua, who is the daughter of Cosima Ferraro from Morano, Italy, and no relation to Erwin Schrödinger.”

“How would we know if we found Schrödinger’s great-granddaughter amid all these probabilities?”

“She’d be twenty-eight years old and have the Schrödinger equation tattooed on her butt,” she said briskly. “Now let me show you the mosaic.”

They went into the front room, the one John loved to linger in, the air full of green leaves and tendrils, the floor carpeted with trays of moss, uncurling ferns, pale celery-colored sprouts, the mosaic tables bearing potted plants, the pots themselves composed of shards from broken mosaics, the walls blazing with mosaic designs. “Here,” she said, handing him a tray-like tablet where a dark background had imbedded in it a formula in white stones, like chalk on a blackboard. It was one of Schrödinger’s wave equations. “I copied it from
Schrödinger: Life and Thought
. I chose one I liked the shape of. As a kid I used to look at the symbols in my dad’s math books. I loved the sigmas, the deltas, the stately integration signs,” she told him. John gazed at the equation, murmuring “Yes,” and “Yes,” and “Yes,” all the while frowning. “But this first big symbol,” he said at last. “The wave function.”

“The Greek letter psi,” said Amy. “What’s wrong with it?”

“You’ve made it look like—it looks like—”

“Like a pitchfork, or a trident like the old man of the sea carries. It’s psi, but I made the tale a bit longer. It’s more elegant,” she said.

“What are the chances that Schrödinger’s unknown great-granddaughter has it tattooed on her shoulder?” he asked.

10

The third part of John’s dissertation was published by the American Physical Society (2004,
Phys. Rev. Lett.
09, 18 65–88) and was cited with sufficient frequency to be included in an online list of most important papers. Amy’s mosaics were exhibited by the Stern-Whitehall gallery in San Francisco, a show that was favorably reviewed in
California Spectrum
. Fred Marsh, hitherto unnamed, who drove the red Alfa Romeo sports car and who was already rich at thirty-five (beachfront property), was introduced to Heidi Egret at a gallery reception in Berkeley and two weeks later they were living together at his place.

The tattoo on Heidi’s shoulder did—and still does—look like the Greek letter psi,
y
, the symbol for the wave function in Schrödinger’s equations. The tattoo also looks like a pitchfork and like Poseidon’s trident because, in fact, they all look alike. So much for the tattoo. As for Heidi’s great-grandmother and whether she was the woman who spent fifteen or twenty days with Schrödinger in that snow-covered chalet, that’s far less clear. It’s as if nature had rigged the game so that the more precisely we get to know one part, the tattoo, the less certain we will be about the other, the great-grandmother. Indeed, in 1927 Heisenberg published a paper (
Zeitschrift für Physik
43, 172–98) neatly defining this problem which has since become known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

We know all we need to know about the tattoo. “It means I’m a follower of Neptune, you know, the sea god,” Heidi explained. “I used to do a lot of surfing—Wadell Creek, Santa Cruz, places like that.”

They were sitting in a café in Berkeley—Heidi and Fred and John and Amy. It was a clear sunny day and the view over the bay was spectacular.

“Does your mother have a tattoo like that?” John asked her.

“I don’t remember any,” Heidi said. Her mother had died when Heidi was eight. Heidi’s father later remarried but was killed in a foggy car crash on California Route 101 when Heidi was fourteen. She was brought up by her stepmother, with whom she became quite close, but when Heidi was seventeen her stepmother married again and Heidi ran off to a life on the beach, surfing. That’s when she got the tattoo. “In Santa Clara,” she added.

“I learn something new about her every day,” Fred said, smiling. He was wearing a silk jersey and a large expensive wristwatch and had his arm on the back of her chair.

“So it’s just a tattoo of Neptune’s trident,” said Amy. “That’s all?”

“And a good luck charm,” Heidi told her. “It was engraved on a silver pendent that my grandmother gave me, my mother’s mother, but I lost it.”

“It won’t get lost now,” Fred said, patting her shoulder.

The grandmother had come from Ireland to spend a year with Heidi and her father right after Heidi’s mother died. “And before she went back she gave me the pendent, her mother’s, I think,” Heidi said. “She’s buried someplace in Ireland. I don’t know where.”

Amy Bellacqua and John Artopoulos married on September 18, 2004. Amy has been able to cut down on her waitressing and now works almost full time on her mosaics, and John works as a postdoc. The probabilities suggest they’re living somewhere near Fermi Lab, around Batavia, Illinois. Or maybe they’re living in Cambridge and he’s working with Arkani-Hamed at Harvard. But Amy and John are together, that’s certain.

 

I
n addition to giving Nebula Awards each year, SFWA also presents the Damon Knight Grand Master Award to a living author for a lifetime of achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy. In accordance with SFWA’s bylaws, the incumbent president nominates a candidate, normally after consulting with previous presidents and the board of directors. The nomination is then voted upon by the SFWA’s officers.

Previous Grand Masters are Robert A. Heinlein (1974), Jack Williamson (1975), Clifford D. Simak (1976), L. Sprague de Camp (1978), Fritz Leiber (1980), André Norton (1983), Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1985), Isaac Asimov (1986), Alfred Bester (1987), Ray Bradbury (1988), Lester del Rey (1990), Frederik Pohl (1992), Damon Knight (1994), A. E. van Vogt (1995), Jack Vance (1996), Poul Anderson (1997), Hal Clement (Harry Stubbs) (1998), Brian W. Aldiss (1999), Philip José Farmer (2000), Ursula K. LeGuin (2002), Robert Silverberg (2003), Anne McCaffrey (2004), and Harlan Ellison (2005).

The 2006 Grand Master went to James Gunn, who is not only one of the premier writers in the field but a pioneer in teaching science fiction at the university level and bringing the field to acceptance by the academic community.

John Kessel, himself one of the field’s best writers, gives well-deserved tribute to James Gunn.

 

I
n the history of science fiction, only one person has served as president of both SFWA, the international organization of professional science fiction and fantasy writers, and SFRA (Science Fiction Research Association), the organization of professional scholars and critics of science fiction. That person is James Gunn.

I first met James Gunn when I showed up in his office at the University of Kansas in August 1972, a newly minted graduate student fresh from an eleven-hundred-mile drive from upstate New York. On that first afternoon I foisted off on him my quite awful undergraduate honors thesis on Samuel Delany. He was gracious and patient. I was to come into his office a lot of times over the next nine years as I, at a glacial pace, pursued both a Ph.D. in English and a career as an SF writer. He was always gracious and patient.

I had driven that eleven hundred miles because of James Gunn. I wanted to write science fiction, and study literature. At that time, aside from Jack Williamson, he was just about the only working SF writer who also was a working teacher and scholar in a major university. He taught one of the few US university courses on the genre: his class Science Fiction and the Popular Media drew huge numbers of students, sometimes more than one hundred a semester. Much of the structure of the class shows up in Gunn’s Pilgrim Award–winning history of the field,
Alternate Worlds
. Eventually I became Gunn’s graduate assistant in that course.

It was only over the time I was at KU that I came to realize how his career represented, in some ways, the main thread of the development of science fiction. As a boy, he shook hands with H. G. Wells. In the late 1940s he sold fiction to John W. Campbell and throughout the 1950s he was a regular in Horace Gold’s
Galaxy
, becoming a mainstay of the movement toward “sociological science fiction.” He was one of the first people ever to study science fiction in the academy, writing a master’s thesis on SF, portions of which were published in
Dynamic Science Fiction
in 1953. His first novel was a collaboration with Jack Williamson that the
New York Times
said read “like a collaboration between Asimov and Heinlein.”

Over the last sixty years he has published over one hundred short stories and twenty-six books, among them
The Joy Makers
,
The Immortals
,
The Listeners
, and
Kampus
.
The Immortals
was adapted into a movie and served as the basis of a TV series. In his fiction Gunn brings a literary sensibility to traditional SF materials.
The Listeners
parallels a search for extraterrestrial intelligence with the difficulty of communication between human beings, realized movingly in the breaking relationship between a scientist in charge of a project listening for messages from space, and his wife, waiting at home for some contact with a husband who is so caught up in the pressures of his work, and his desire for contact with aliens who may or may not exist, that he is unable to touch her, or let her touch him.

In his career as historian, editor, and scholar, Jim Gunn has worked tirelessly for the acceptance of science fiction as a legitimate academic field of study. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he filmed interviews with and lectures by Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, John Brunner, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, Gordon Dickson, and Harry Harrison. In 1983 he received the Hugo Award for his nonfiction book
Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction
. In 1992 he received the Eaton Award for lifetime achievement as a science fiction scholar and critic. At Kansas in the 1970s he started and ran the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction. This grew into the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which annually administers and awards the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for short fiction and the John W. Campbell Award for best SF novel.

His five-volume anthology
The Road to Science Fiction
is the best historical anthology of SF ever put together. His instructional book
The Science of Science Fiction Writing
is the result of a career’s worth of experience in the classroom and in the practical world of publishing. It is a significant addition to the small shelf of works about SF writing from the inside, and Gunn’s knowledge and craftmanship shine in every page.

It is as a writing teacher and a mentor that Jim Gunn means the most to me. No one knows more about how science fiction is and has been done. Writers as notable as Pat Cadigan and Bradley Denton have been his students, and I count it as one of my great honors to have sat in his classrooms at the University of Kansas back in the 1970s. I don’t write a word today that is not influenced by his teaching.

While I worked for and with him he brought many writers to campus, giving me the opportunity to meet Ben and Barbara Bova, Gordon Dickson, Brian Aldiss, Samuel Delany, John Brunner, Fred Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon, and, more than once, Harlan Ellison. He directed my M.A. thesis, a collection of SF short stories. He served on the committee for my Ph.D. dissertation, another collection of SF stories.

Ours was not always an easy relationship. Jim pushed me to think more and emote less. He told me that stories are not written, they are rewritten. Coming out of the 1960s and the New Wave, I wanted to reduce the differences between SF and mainstream writing. Jim insisted that the differences were vital, that to give them up was to sell out SF’s birthright. Strangely, I was to hear the same arguments, almost word for word, from Bruce Sterling in 1985, and I have come to understand and appreciate them—though I’m afraid, Jim, we are never going to come to a meeting of the minds over the virtues of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations.”

His office door was always open. When I came by, I would often interrupt him writing on his red IBM Selectric typewriter. He would turn around and give me, patiently, whatever time I needed, then calmly go back to work. We would argue about the nature of plotting, about character identification, about the triumphant Campbellian vision of the future of the human race. Looking back on it, I cringe to think of how much trivia I brought to him, when he had so much work to do. I know today how hard it is to get writing done and be a full-time academic. He did it, seemingly effortlessly.

Through all this, he never blew his own horn. He became, and is still, my role model. I wanted his job, and in some ways, I got it. I only hope that I treat the students who come into my office at North Carolina State with the respect that he gave me, long before anyone could ever have known that I might earn it.

On a number of occasions he invited me into his home, on the west side of Lawrence, at that time very much the edge of town. Outside his back door was a prairie with horses wandering around it. Sometimes they would come to the wire fence and stick their heads over into his backyard.

I imagine those horses are long gone.

Lots of things are gone. Barry Malzberg once commented on a photo that appears on page 193 of Gunn’s
Alternate Worlds
, of a banquet table at the 1955 Worldcon in Cleveland. Seated at the table are Mildred Clingerman, Mark Clifton, Judith Merril, Frank Riley and family, and Jim Gunn, looking as young, dapper, and handsome as Kevin McCarthy from
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.

All gone now, but Jim. His has been a life devoted to science fiction. He may not tell you what it has meant to him, but I just needed to tell you what he has meant to me.

Congratulations, Jim, and thanks.