posted
This time with a trendy uncapitalized title and what's actually a kind of nice impressionistic cover. So, the 1993 Nebula awards.
Introduction, by Pamela Sargent: Sargent provides a nice list of not just Nebula winners, but the other nominees, which is something I liked, since if somewhere where to use these awards as a reading guide they might find themselves led astray reading only winners, awards being the contentious and political things that they are. I've read none of them, as it turns out, aside from the ones included in this book.
The Year in Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Symposium, by various: I enjoy these kinds of things, even if no one else does. This time a bunch of different people weigh in, including recent favorite of mine Michael Swanwick. (Go read Bones of the Earth if you trust me even just a little bit.)
Swanwick's little essay is about what he sees as a decline in hardcore speculation about the future (not, necessarily, hard SF, but I'm extrapolating a bit here) and a rise in experimentation, literary and otherwise. I don't know enough about the time to say, myself.
Maureen F. McHugh takes on sex and gender, and just sort of mentions a few works she liked that dealt with such issues. I've actually read one of these; "Forever, Said the Duck," by Jonathan Lethem. Kind of minor Lethem, in my opinion, about a virtual reality party put on by some vengeful hosts. Anyway, at the party the guests find themselves stuck in the bodies their hosts feel appropriate. And then your usual Big City Party Scene Decadence. Maybe I do not go to enough parties.
Rebecca Ore says that she doesn't really have anything to say, because she feels that writers are just writing what they've written before, this year, for good or for ill.
Robert J. Sawyer bemoans the then new trend of media tie-in novels. Well, not exactly new, but he feels things are about to shift massively in their favor, and of course he is right. Those Reeves-Stevenses used to write books that weren't about TV shows? Huh. (Timothy Zahn's first Star Wars books were just coming out/had come out at the time. And, oh my, the number of Star Wars novels I own is enough to drag any soul down to perdition.)
Paul Di Filippo talks about various real-world events that felt kind of science fictional, and looking back on the distant twentieth century we can only shake our heads at his naivete. (I mean, he is not naive. But, you know, things were just getting started.)
Norman Spinrad is concerned that everyone is publishing Mars novels all of a sudden while real chances of going to Mars in his lifetime are dropping rapidly.
Eleanor Arnason identifies "Four Trends in Recent SF." (It is nice when titles lend themselves to quoting like that.) And they are: Expansion of vision. More SF about more stuff. Expansion of media. A growth in small press SF publishers. Plus science fiction on TV and movies. Expansion of audience. Lots more people get SF or SFnal exposure through lots of nontraditional ways. Definition by exclusion. "Core" fans defining science fiction in such a way as to shut out new fans of those weird new subgenres and delivery methods mentioned earlier.
Gregory Benford talks about how hard SF is still going strong, damn it! He gets in a swipe at deconstructionists, too. He does praise Gibson's Virtual Light, though.
And now, some stories.
The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore, by Harlan Ellison. You know, I think I suffer from some sort of tone deafness when it comes to Ellison. I can tell that there's something neat and good going on, but it just doesn't seem to get all the way into my head. This is a story about a guy who wanders around time and space being anarchic and mercurial, and I am sure it is not autobiographical in the least. He saves some people, kills others, kicks a cat into a tree, and, well, it's in the title. I think "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" is the only Ellison story I've read that didn't give me this weird vibe. Maybe "A Boy and his Dog," too, and that one about the guy who meets himself and finds he's kind of hard to get along with.
Best Short Story: Graves, by Joe Haldeman. A Vietnam horror story, with most of the horror being handily provided by the war, with some help from a possibly undead monster. Lots of gruesome detail about grave duty in wartime. This would make a really neat movie, which kind of sounds like I am doing it an injustice, but I mean to say that there are some lingering images here well worth borrowing.
Best Novel: Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson, represented here by an excerpt titled "Festival Night." I am being inconistent with my quotation marks and italicizing, it seems. Anyway, I'm sure I've read at least one of these books long ago, but it didn't seem to make much of an impression on me. The whole colorful Mars trilogy is, I note, somewhat controversial among readers. Robinson himself enjoyed symbolic enemy status for the cyberpunks a decade earlier, among others, and this is nearly the sum of what I know about him. That aside, I'm intrigued enough by this excerpt to pick up the book and see what I make of it now.
Alfred, by Lisa Goldstein. A young girl meets an old man and struggles with being a happy 60s child with Holocaust-surviving parents, who are understandably more grim in their outlook. Nice, but slight. I won't spoil the fantasy element. It's a bit of wish fulfillment in the purest sense. For the girl, I mean. (And the author, according to her introduction.) This makes me wonder, has anyone read any books written by or about the post-war children of Holocaust survivors? Fiction or non.
In Memorium: Avram Davidson, Lester del Rey, Chad Oliver, by various, being three very brief essays by Lucius Shepard, Robert Silverberg, and Howard Waldrop, respectively. I mention this only for the sake of completeness, or in case someone else has something to say about any of these three men. (The dead ones, I mean.)
Best Novelette: George on My Mind, by Charles Sheffield. A functioning Analytical Engine of Babbage design, aliens, and how one might go about trying to prove any of this. Neat. Fun. Ends with a paean to the Superior Character of Science Fiction Authors, Fans, and Other Thinky Types, which is, let's say, not the best ending imaginable.
Rhysling Award Winners. Two poems, one by William J. Daciuk and one by Jane Yolen. Daciuk contributes "To Be From Earth," which is kind of preachy (it is spoken by a temporarily uplifted leopard), enough so that I can't really say I enjoyed it, but it has some nice parts. Yolen wrote "Will," about a dead father and his other life. I kind of get a Sylvia Plath/Daddy vibe from this, in the language, though not in the theme or the, uh, I don't know, plot, I guess. But, dead fathers and eating metaphors. I didn't think this one was all that special either, though it isn't bad.
Death on the Nile, by Connie Willis. Some tourists go either to Egypt or the Egyptian land of the dead. I liked this a lot, though I have little to say about it. Coincidentally I just read American Gods, which also features some Egyptian death-related activity, kind of.
Big Teeth and Small Magic: SF and Fantasy Films of 1993, by Kathi Maio. To sum up her feelings: Jurassic Park: huge and impressive and dumb. We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story: "rather vapid." Prehysteria: "only for very young, extremely forgiving viewers." Carnosaur: Smarter than Jurassic Park. I remember hearing about this at the time. Jurassic Park meets Aliens, they say. Not in the film-making sense; it features women giving birth to dinosaurs in a rather painful fashion. Ew. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm: Better than the live action movies. Meteor Man: She faults it for not being zippy enough. Honest. The Last Action Hero: "better than Jurassic Park." My best friend and his family swear this is one of the best films of the 90s, and I'm all, yeah, I get it, but self-awareness only works if you can back it up with something interesting. I don't know. She says it ultimately falls apart, but has some "dandy moments." Demolition Man: No good. Could the poor performance of The Last Action Hero and Demolition Man be the end of the big dumb muscle film she asks? HA HA HA HA HA say we from the future. (Note that she doesn't say it is, though, just wonders.) Like Water for Chocolate: "awkward and thoroughly depressing." She doesn't say it is bad, though. Orlando: "a rather cold, sterile cinematic exercise." Into the West: she likes it a lot. Hey, I saw a clip from this in my awkward and thoroughly depressing film studies class a year or two ago. The Secret Garden: good. Groundhog Day: great. 12:01: "a nice little film that deserved better." Apparently this was aired as a TV movie. Frankenstein: "often awkward and always turgid." The TNT TV movie. Wild Palms: bad. The Tommyknockers: bad. Daybreak: good. And for some reason we're in miniseries and HBO territory now. Rain Without Thunder: "most thought provoking...of the year." Fortress: Surprisingly OK! The exclamation mark is mine. I mean, Christopher Lambert? I have seen the sequel, though not by choice. Between Heaven and Earth: she gives a sort of shrug to this one. Addams Family Values: good. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: "about due to crawl back into their shells." Though I'm not entirely clear on whether she's talking about its quality or its poor box office performance, but I can hardly imagine anyone claiming this film got a rough break. Kevin Eastman takes pictures of his oft-naked wife and sleeps on piles of cash today anyway. Coneheads: bad. Robocop 3: bad, but better than... Super Mario Brothers Hocus Pocus: awful, and disrespectful to the victims of the real Salem Witch Trials, though that is kind of a distant thing to get worked up about. Warlock: The Armageddon: better, "utterly eerie" Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas: great. Matinee: she liked it a lot, though she qualifies that it isn't really a science fiction movie but a movie about people watching science fiction movies. I liked it when I saw it, and wished that there were still bomb shelters around to get stuck in with comely young women, though at probably 15 or 16 (it took me awhile to see it, I was not so cutting edge then) I would have surely hyperventilated and passed out, no bomb shelter required.
England Underway, by Terry Bisson. Technically Britain Underway, really. A quiet and timid man who is not willing to leave England (at least he does really live there, in Brighton) to see his neice finds he doesn't have to when the island sets sail for him. Fun and humorous and touching. "ENGLAND UNDERWAY AT 2.9 KNOTS; SCOTLAND, WALES COMING ALONG PEACEFULLY; CHARLES FIRM AT 'HELM' OF UNITED KINGDOM."
The Franchise, by John Kessel. A story about the World Series of 1959, which saw the titanic matchup between fresh-from-the-minors first baseman George Herbert Walker Bush and, on the plate, firey pitcher Fidel Castro, aka "The Franchise." So, alternate history, but neither man is so different that they can escape their own histories. I am, surprisingly, not much of a sports fan, and yet I've read and enjoyed my fair share of baseball fiction, which is what this essentially is. I do kind of like baseball.
Best Novella: The Night We Buried Road Dog, by Jack Cady. This is an odd story. It is car fiction as much as "The Franchise" is baseball fiction, and they both call up that sort of quasi-mythical American post-war era. There are ghosts in this story, maybe, and ghost cars for sure, and a man and his twin, though maybe they are one and the same, and all in all I liked it. It was kind of folksy, but not too much so.
In addition to the final Nebula ballot printed in the introduction, this year's edition includes the preliminary ballot in an appendix. And, well, I still haven't read most of them, though it includes Steel Beach, whose first line at least is familiar. "Vanilla Dunk," by Jonathan Lethem was up for consideration, by far one of the best SF stories to deal with sports I've ever read. You should read Lethem's story collection, The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye sometime. I've also read Bruce Sterling's "Deep Eddy."
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote: Best Novel: Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson, represented here by an excerpt titled "Festival Night." I am being inconistent with my quotation marks and italicizing, it seems. Anyway, I'm sure I've read at least one of these books long ago, but it didn't seem to make much of an impression on me. The whole colorful Mars trilogy is, I note, somewhat controversial among readers. Robinson himself enjoyed symbolic enemy status for the cyberpunks a decade earlier, among others, and this is nearly the sum of what I know about him. That aside, I'm intrigued enough by this excerpt to pick up the book and see what I make of it now
Yeah, the Mars trilogy can be somewhat variable. Overall I like them, but some of the science gets quite deep and occasionally the descriptions are a bit too long and involved. But the story is pretty compelling, especially in the first two books; I think the story flags a little in Blue Mars, especially towards the end. Good characterisation though.
Incidentally, how did Robinson gain 'symbolic enemy status for the cyberpunks'?
-------------------- "I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman, which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch when it suits me." --Jubal Harshaw
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
I've heard the other side of that argument too, that there are some science howlers in the books. Something to do with thermodynamics, but the people who notice this sort of thing are usually wild-haired crazy people.
As far as Robinson vs. the Cyberpunks goes, every movement needs an enemy, and it was useful to frame things, at the time, as Cyberpunks vs. Humanists, of whom Robinson was one. (I mean, as much as any writer is ever part of a category or "movement," which is to say not much, really.) Read all about it in aging copies of Cheap Truth.
Registered: Mar 1999
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