Nebula Awards Showcase 2013
Read Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 Online
Authors: Catherine Asaro
Published 2013 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
Nebula Awards Showcase 2013.
Copyright © 2013 by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA, Inc.). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover illustration © 2013 Julie Dillon
Cover design by Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger
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Nebula Awards showcase 2013 / edited by Catherine Asaro.
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To Eleanor Wood,
who has given so much to the field of speculative fiction.
“The Paper Menagerie,” copyright 2011 by Ken Liu, first published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, March/April 2011.
“The Ice Owl,” copyright 2011 by Carolyn Ives Gilman, first published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, November/December 2011.
“Ado,” copyright 1988 by Connie Willis, first published in
Asimov's Science Fiction
, January 1988.
“The Migratory Pattern of Dancers,” copyright 2011 by Katherine Sparrow, first published in
GigaNotoSaurus
, July 2011.
“Peach-Creamed Honey,” copyright 2010 by Amal El-Mohtar, first published in
The Honey Month
, Summer 2010. Used by permission of Papaveria Press.
“The Axiom of Choice,” copyright 2011 by David W. Goldman, first published in
The New Haven Review
, Winter 2011.
“Club Story,” copyright 1993â2012 by John Clute, first published in
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: Third Edition
(2011â), sf-encyclopedia.com.
“What We Found,” copyright 2011 by Geoff Ryman, first published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, September/October 2011.
Among Others
, copyright 2011 by Jo Walton. Used by permission of Tor Books and Constable & Robinson Ltd.
“Movement,” copyright 2011 by Nancy Fulda, first published in
Asimov's Science Fiction
, March 2011.
“Sauerkraut Station,” copyright 2011 by Ferrett Steinmetz, first published in
GigaNotoSaurus
, November 2011.
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” copyright 2011 by E. Lily Yu, first published in
Clarkesworld Magazine
, April 2011.
“Ray of Light,” copyright 2011 by Brad R. Torgersen, first published in
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
, December 2011.
The Freedom Maze
, copyright 2011 by Delia Sherman. Used by permission of Big Mouth House.
“The Sea King's Second Bride,” copyright 2011 by C. S. E. Cooney, first published in Goblin Fruit, Spring 2010.
“The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” copyright 2011 by Kij Johnson, first published in
Asimov's Science Fiction
, October/November 2011.
Introduction: A Harmony of Thoughts
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The Migratory Pattern of Dancers
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The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees
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The Sea King's Second Bride, poetry
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2012 Nebula Awards Winners, Nominees, and Honorees
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Drawing is not what you see, but what you must make others see.
âEdgar Degas,
The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas
,
edited by R.
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H. Ives Gammell
When I was a child, my parents gave me several framed prints of ballerinas by painter Edgar Degas. To this day, they remain in my old bedroom, on the wall above the ballet barre where I was supposed to practice but almost never did. Although I loved to dance, doing it alone in my room held little appeal when the alternative was to join my friends, the other dancers at the studios where I trained. Those Degas paintings, however, remain a part of the creative landscape in my mind, whether I am writing, dancing, composing music, or solving the partial differential equations of quantum scattering theory.
The conventional assumption in our culture is that artistic endeavors are distinct from analytic pursuits such as science and math. On one side lies the lush realm of emotion; on the other, we find the straight lines of logic. That separation is reflected in how we view works of speculative fiction. Although the division is most prominent in comparisons between fantasy and hard science fiction, it comes into play for all the speculative subgenres.
I protest this idea that emotion and logic are two mutually exclusive lands separated by a wall of our perceptions, that these realms must be disparate, one ruled by passion, the other by logic. In my experience, the analytic and artistic threads of human endeavor are so thoroughly entangled, it is impossible to separate them. In reading the stories on the ballot this year, I was struck by how well they illustrate that idea.
I wish I could have included every nominated story in this anthology. Unfortunately, that would have resulted in a book that cost more than would fit between two covers, while giving the contributors little more than the proverbial penny for their thoughts. However, the full ballot appears in this anthology, and I recommend all the stories.
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
âMaya Angelou,
Gather Together in My Name
David W. Goldman's short story “The Axiom of Choice” is an ingenious play on a famous (some might say infamous) mathematical axiom. The axiom of choice seems simple at first glance. What it says is essentially this: given any collection of buckets, each holding at least one object, it is possible to choose exactly one object from each bucket. If every bucket contained a pair of shoes, for example, we could specify “the left shoe.” Then we've picked out one shoe from each bucket. Easy, right? But what if each bucket contains the same pair of identical socks? How do we specify one sock or the other when every choice is the same? The axiom of choice claims it is always possible to make that choice even if we don't see how.
In his story, Goldman has the reader choose the plotline, making the story an interactive experience. As he weaves the tale of a guitarist who suffered a debilitating accident, the reader determines the plot. Or do we? The plot unfolds as a series of choices, forming an allegory for the axiom, which itself is a metaphor for the emotional journey taken by the musician.
Math and music are inextricably tangled together. The mathematics of music is one of the most beautiful areas of physics. Goldman's story, with its structure of branches and numbered sections, is reminiscent of both a musical composition and a mathematical proof. So it seems only appropriate that he uses the axiom as the framing device.
In math, the axiom of choice is fundamental to the Banach-Tarski paradox, which says we can cut a solid ball into a finite number of pieces, even as few as five, and reassemble those pieces into two solid balls, each the same size and shape as the original; in fact, we could cut up a pea and reassemble it into a ball the size of our sun.
1
Say what?
Such wild projects don't work in real life because we would need to cut the balls into such convoluted pieces, they wouldn't have a physically defined volume. They exist only in theory. And so Goldman plays with the choices made by his protagonistâor those that, in theory, he could have made. The musician's choices, real or theoretical, become the space he curls into, seeking refuge between the notes he can no longer play. The story is an exquisite blending of mathematics and emotion, tangling the analytical with the human heart.