"Nancy Kress - Nebula Awards Showcase 2003" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

Geoffrey A. Landis • Scott Edelman • Terry Bisson
Andy Duncan • Mindy L. Klasky • Ellen Datlow
Harry Turtledove • Michael Cassutt
THE QUANTUM ROSE
Catherine Asaro



PAST NEBULA AWARD WINNERS

INTRODUCTION: ENTERING THE FIELD



You always remember your first Nebula Awards banquet. Mine was Friday, May 3, 1985, at the
Warwick Hotel in New York City. Young and starry-eyed, I was thrilled to be introduced to Donald
Kingsbury and Harlan Ellison. At the banquet I sat next to A. J. Budrys and talked about advertising.
William Gibson won Best Novel forNeuromancer . I lost Best Novella to John Varley for “PRESS
ENTER.” He was gracious, I was gracious, and everyone went around saying, “It’s an honor just to be
nominated.”

The Nebula banquet held April 27, 2002, at the Westin Crown Center hotel in Kansas City both was
and was not different. I knew nearly everyone, and they all looked older. The awards format was by now
completely familiar (“. . . and the nominees are . . .”). As in 1985, some of the works I wanted to win did
so, some didn’t. And everyone still went around saying, “It’s an honor just to be nominated.”

Oddly enough for a genre supposedly looking toward the future, SF generates a lot of nostalgia. People
reminisce endlessly about the great editors, writers, and stories of yesteryear, with “yesteryear”
sometimes defined as half a decade ago. Comparisons are made, trends dissected, time lines created. In
one sense, all of speculative fiction is one huge time machine, in which past, present, and future are not
distinctly separate entities but rather coexisting ones, like rooms in the same house.

That seems especially true of this year’s Nebula ballot, in three ways. First, the nominees range from new
writers like Kelly Link and William Shunn, who have yet to publish their first novels, to veteran Jack
Williamson. At ninety-four, Jack is a time machine all by himself, able to entertainingly tell you about SF
in 1929 or in 1999.

Second, nearly all of the fiction nominated for the 2001 Nebula was not published in 2001. The reason is
the esoteric nominating rules. The effect is to create an impression of temporal fluidity, as if January 2000
sat side-by-side with December 2001, separated by no more than the second it takes to turn a single
page.

Third, the stories themselves bend time. Severna Park’s winner, “The Cure for Everything,” is rooted
firmly in present-day biotech explorations—with terrifying implications for the future. Lucius Shepard’s
“Radiant Green Star” and James Morrow’s “ Auspicious Eggs” take place in the future but comment
witheringly on messes we’ve made in the past. Andy Duncan’s “The Pottawatomie Giant” sets its events
in the past—two pasts, take your choice—in the hope of shaping a more benevolent present. Jim Kelly
cavalierly disregards any temporal barriers whatsoever as he careens around time in “Undone.” Connie
Willis’s novelPassages goes one step further, discarding time altogether in the world the brain creates for
itself during—and maybe after—that major event, death.