For Immediate Release
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The WinnersNovel: Seeker, by Jack McDevitt
(Ace, Nov05)
Novella: "Burn," by James Patrick Kelly (podcast version)
(Tachyon Publications, Dec05)
Novelette: "Two Hearts," by Peter S. Beagle
(F&SF, Oct/Nov05)
Short Story: "Echo," by Elizabeth Hand
(F&SF, Oct/Nov05)
Script: Howl's Moving Castle, by Hayao Miyazaki, Cindy Davis Hewitt, and Donald H. Hewitt
(Studio Ghibli and Walt Disney Pictures, U.S. Premier 10 Jun05. Based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones.)
Andre Norton Award: Magic or Madness, by Justine Larbalestier
(Penguin Razorbill, May05)
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The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner
(Bantam Spectra, Jul06)
Seeker, by Jack McDevitt
(Ace, Nov05)
The Girl in the Glass, by Jeffrey Ford
(Dark Alley, Aug05)
Farthing, by Jo Walton
(Tor, Aug06)
From the Files of the Time Rangers, by Richard Bowes
(Golden Gryphon Press, Sep05)
To Crush the Moon, by Wil McCarthy
(Bantam Spectra, May05)
"Burn," by James Patrick Kelly (podcast version)
(Tachyon Publications, Dec05)
"Sanctuary," by Michael A. Burstein
(Analog, Sep05)
"The Walls of the Universe," by Paul Melko
(Asimov's, Apr/May06)
"Inclination," by William Shunn
(Asimov's, Apr/May06)
"The Language of Moths," by Christopher Barzak
(Realms of Fantasy, Apr05)
"Walpurgis Afternoon," by Delia Sherman
(F&SF, Dec05)
"Journey into the Kingdom," by M. Rickert
(F&SF, May06)
"Two Hearts," by Peter S. Beagle
(F&SF, Oct/Nov05)
"Little Faces," by Vonda N. McIntyre
(SciFiction, 23 Feb05)
"Echo," by Elizabeth Hand
(F&SF, Oct/Nov05)
"Helen Remembers the Stork Club," by Esther M. Friesner
(F&SF, Nov05)
"The Woman in Schrodinger's Wave Equations," by Eugene Mirabelli
(F&SF, Aug05)
"Henry James, This One's For You," by Jack McDevitt
(Subterranean #2, Nov05)
"An End to All Things," by Karina Sumner-Smith
(Children of Magic, DAW Books, Jun06)
"Pip and the Fairies," by Theodora Goss
(Strange Horizons, 3Oct05)
Batman Begins, by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
(Warner Bros., released 17 Jun05)
Howl's Moving Castle, by Hayao Miyazaki, Cindy Davis Hewitt, and Donald H. Hewitt
(Studio Ghibli and Walt Disney Pictures, U.S. Premier 10 Jun05. Based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones.)
Unfinished Business, by Michael Taylor
(Battlestar Galactica, Dec06)
The Girl in the Fireplace
(Doctor Who, BBC/The Sci-Fi Channel, Oct06 (broadcast 10Oct06))
Magic or Madness, by Justine Larbalestier
(Penguin Razorbill, May05)
Devilish, by Maureen Johnson
(Razorbill, Penguin Young Readers Group, Sep06)
The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner
(Greenwillow Books, HarperCollins, 2006)
Midnighters #2: Touching Darkness, by Scott Westerfeld
(Eos, Mar05)
Peeps, by Scott Westerfeld
(Penguin Razorbill, Sep05)
Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer
(Harcourt, Oct06)
...is a novelist and short story writer. He grew up in rural Ohio, went to university in a decaying post-industrial city in Ohio, has lived in a Southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan. His short stories have appeared in a variety of venues, including Nerve, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Strange Horizons, Trampoline, Salon Fantastique, Coyote Road, Realms of Fantasy, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His first novel, One for Sorrow, will be published by Bantam Books in August of 2007. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches writing at Youngstown State University
.Traditional fantasy holds up the natural world as better than the modern, postindustrial one we find ourselves living in these days. However, in writing "The Language of Moths", it wasn't a goal of mine to look backward into an agrarian past viewed by some as golden and pure. Instead I wanted to write about how language is a subjective matter, how even when people share a language, communication is often not achieved, how even within the traditional unit of the nuclear family, with its narrowly defined borders of membership, difference and otherness exists and is often misunderstood.
It's possible to read the autistic girl, Dawn, in my story "The Language of Moths" as yet another magical fool in the history of fantasy archetypes. While writing it, she didn't feel magical at all; for me she only spoke a different language from ours. If anything feels magical to me in this story, it's the setting — more importantly, the relationship Dawn has with the setting — the place where she is able to understand the world around her for the first time in her life. Autistic authors who have found ways to bear witness to the conditions of their lives describe relationships with animals and nature that sound like utter fantasy but must be accepted as their reality. The autistic author Temple Grandin, for example, reported she could "see through a cow's eyes," which lead her to become an important designer of livestock restraint systems and slaughterhouses.
The language I used to write the story doesn't reflect the unhappy circumstances of the characters. I used a more fanciful, florid language to emphasize the hopeful aspects of a story about characters who are dealing with many unfortunate life circumstances. I felt that a light-handed language could be interesting in contrast to events that might normally be portrayed with a starker language. It's noted that, once the Carroll family returns home at the end of the story, Dawn, though able to make simple sentences depending on context and circumstances, is still not going to live a full life according to how we define that for "normal" people. There's an elasticity and semi-meaninglessness to the social language of humans that surrounds her that's never going to change for her. Dawn's brother, Eliot, has been placed in therapy, that last-straw institution where people go to speak and be heard when no one else seems capable of hearing and comprehending them. Though there's a promise that life will get better for Eliot in the future, he still has many years of unhappiness to endure before he finds what he needs. The father and mother continue on in their own lives, enjoying some success in their academic ventures. What they fail to do, though, is comprehend the lives of their children. All of this, for me, adds up to a downbeat vision of a life where we are most alone when surrounded by the people with whom we're supposed to have our first experiences of love and loyalty.
The language of the story, then, was part of my attempt to write a story that felt like a children's picture book with adult themes, though without any actual pictures. I think I managed that, but I think this may not be the story's most obvious effect. That's the sort of thing I like to do: create new reading effects without drawing direct attention to them. While I wrote, I imagined "The Language of Moths" as a small book, with accompanying illustrations, the sort that appear in books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A friction, a force that tugs and pulls at the same time, exists between scenes in which fireflies speak (the way animals and creatures do in fairy tales and fables) and scenes in which adolescent boys encounter a fraught, somewhat dangerous sexual experience in a summer cabin while parents huddle around a campfire outside, mere yards away, discussing their own problems (the way adolescents often encounter such things in coming of age stories). For me, finding a language to write a story that incorporates both kinds of story — fable and realism — was the goal.
It is, in fact, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that inspired me, in part, to write "The Language of Moths". It's why I named the family the Carrolls. It's why I chose to see through Dawn's eyes as well as Eliot's, trying to explore the story through her vision of life as well. I saw her as a young woman who has fallen down a rabbit hole; but instead of entering a land where logic and language are suddenly turned on their heads, disorienting her, she enters a world where things suddenly make sense.
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... has written five novels, the most recent of which are Minions of the Moon (1999) and From the Files of the Time Rangers (2005). His stories have appeared in F&SF, SciFiction and elsewhere. His most recent short fiction collection is Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies from PS Publications in England (2006). He has won the World Fantasy, Lambda, International Horror Guild and Million Writers Awards. Recent and upcoming appearances include F&SF, Subterranean Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, and the Salon Fantastique, Coyote Road, So Fey, and Datlow Del Rey anthologies. His toy photographs will appear in Farrago’s Wainscot.
1. One of the many great pleasures about my getting onto the final ballot with this novel is that this has happened to a small press book. The majors still dominate these ballots but I think it’s possible that the genre readership and the SFWA membership have begun taking a wider look at the field.
2. When I decided to call From the Files of the Time Rangers, a Mosaic Novel I had imagined other origins for the term. Recently Michael Swanwick informed me that the term Mosaic Novel was invented by George R. R. Martin for his Wild Cards books. I thank them both.
What I intended the term to convey was a novel made up of individual stories which had been designed to form a whole greater than the sum of the parts. The idea also appealed to me that it was a work created, as a visual mosaic is, out of bits of glass, of tiles, of colored stones. In part that’s how I saw the book: chunks of fantasy and pieces of science fiction, myth and politics, ancient gods and cable TV, embedded side by side.
When I discovered Speculative Fiction in the 1950’s, books like Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and Simak’s City were referred to within the trade as ‘fix-ups.’ But they were marketed as novels plain and simple. As a kid I had no knowledge of things like that but I was always especially fascinated by novels in which each chapter was a separate reality linked by an overall concept to those around it. Those books seemed to cover more territory, have more depth, than through-written novels of the same size. They could take a subject and present it at various times and from a variety of vantage points.
Over the years I found plenty of other examples of the form: Keith Roberts’ Pavane, Gene Wolfe’s Fifth Head of Cerberus, Thomas Disch’s 334. Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman series of graphic novels seems to me the ultimate speculative fictional mosaic.
In mainstream fiction, I caught sight of a mosaic in works like Babel’s Red Cavalry and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Perhaps if one thinks about it long enough and looks closely enough all fiction is a mosaic.
...short fiction has earned ten Hugo nominations and three Nebula nominations. In 1997, he won the John Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He lives with his wife, Nomi, in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is an elected Town Meeting Member and Trustee of the Public Library. For many years, he was a teacher. When not writing fiction, he edits science textbooks.
“Sanctuary” began with the flash of an image in my mind: an alien is desperately asking a human priest for sanctuary on a space station. At the time, I didn’t know why the alien needed sanctuary, or from whom. Nor did I know who the priest was, although I knew that he was going to find himself on the horns of a rather significant dilemma. But I knew that I wanted to find out who these people were and write their story.
The story went through three drafts. Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog, gave me extensive notes pointing out ways I could improve the story. Thanks to his input, I was able to paint a more comprehensive picture of the future world in which the story takes place, as well as better understand the society of the alien race I named the Stanquel. The story won the Analytical Laboratory Award for Best Novella of 2005, and I am delighted that it resonated with the readers of Analog.
Had I been able to do so, I would have made the priest a rabbi and used my extensive knowledge of my own religious tradition to cast the story. But sanctuary is a Catholic concept, so I had to go with a priest as the main character. Since I am not Catholic, I was concerned with getting the details of the religion right. For a while, I was approaching every Catholic science fiction reader I knew and asking them to check the story for accuracy. I named an archbishop in the story for one of those readers, Peter Grace. But even though Peter and a few other friends checked the story for me, I was still hoping for an expert on Catholicism who wouldn’t be put off by the premise.
Providence intervened. At Boskone 40 in February 2003, I met Brother Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit and astronomer who lives and works in Vatican City. Brother Guy is also a science fiction fan, and when I explained what I was trying to write, he offered to look over the story for me. He was amused to discover that I had gotten the details of the doxology from a website created by one of his old friends. With Brother Guy’s help, I managed to capture the flavor of the Catholic faith and put in the mouth of Father Lester Wickham the proper words he would use to describe his beliefs. I thanked Brother Guy by opening the story with a quote from his fascinating book Brother Astronomer.
I knew my research had paid off when devout Catholic readers thanked me for the story and expressed their astonishment at my understanding of their beliefs and traditions. Quite a few were disappointed at what finally happened to the alien Zwaren and wondered about the resolution. To them I say what I say to all readers, that you should always be careful not to mix up the beliefs of the characters with the beliefs of the writer.
...is the author of over 30 novels and 150 short stories, plus poetry and one (count it, 1) professionally produced play. Her latest books are the YA novels Tempting Fate (2006; Penguin/ Dutton) and Nobody’s Princess (2007; Random House), with Nobody’s Prize to follow in 2008. She has two grown children and lives in Connecticut with her husband and a brace of cats.
I seem to have gone on a Helen of Troy kick lately. “Helen Remembers the Stork Club” shares mythological elbowroom with Nobody’s Princess and Nobody’s Prize, my two YA novels about the lady in question back in the days when she was still Helen of Sparta. And those books sprang from a short story I did for the Random House YA anthology, Young Warriors.
Why the fascination with Helen? Buy my Muse a drink and ask her. I’ve always been one to want to know the backstory on certain characters, and when there’s no satisfactory backstory out there, I make one up. It amuses me and keeps me off the streets and out of the pool halls. Maybe I felt sorry for Helen, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Can we talk about pressure? Maybe I forgot all about the fact that she’s only a mythological figure and so doesn’t need to have a Before, just a Now. Maybe I wanted to give her more of a story than being just another pretty face. Yes, just another pretty face that caused a ten-year war, destroyed a major city, and when it was all over, got her husband to take her back by dropping her robe off her shoulders in the great-grandmomma of all Spartan Queens Gone Wild videos, but still—!
I wrote “Helen Remembers the Stork Club” because I’d noticed an unpleasant but there-it-is-nonetheless phenomenon of our times, the almost magical power of women d’une certain age, as they say, to become suddenly unseen. Youth and visibility seem to go hand-in-hand, especially in cities known for a high concentration of the young and the beautiful. Bad enough for any woman to experience, but what about one whose whole identity was her beauty? Worse still for someone who has outlived all those who might yet remember her the way she was when it seemed like her youth and beauty were going to be as immortal as she.
Alas, this isn’t a phenomenon limited to fading belles. Even if we’ve never made Flavor-of-the-Month status with our looks, our professional triumphs, our athletic glories, or our financial successes, almost every human being comes to yearn for the lost time when the world was kinder to us and someone, somewhere, made us feel that we counted, that we’d achieved something memorable with our lives. But if your one claim to fame has been beauty and beauty alone. . .
Thousands of years after Helen’s era, female beauty is still rewarded with fame, fortune, and often, a flirtation with immortality. How much press coverage and air time was given to the funeral of any female scientist, head of state, or less-than- lovely entertainer compared to, oh, I don’t know… Anna Nicole Smith’s? Marilyn Monroe’s suspicious death is still the stuff of legend, while Dorothy Kilgallen’s is trivia. It might not be Politically Correct to refer to the Miss America competition as a Beauty pageant, but I don’t see anyone rushing to re-name it a Talent-and-Intelligence pageant, either.
“Helen Remembers the Stork Club” isn’t about how mightily youth and beauty can affect the way we treat others, or even about the equally unfair She’s-gorgeous-so-she-has-to-be-stupid flipside. The world is what it is. We may miss what it once was, but that won’t bring back our personal Good Old days. Helen’s story is about recognizing that the world is what it is, yet finding the strength to refuse to let it tell us who and what we must be. It’s about cherishing the sweetness of our memories without drowning ourselves in them. It’s not always easy, but Helen of Troy was Helen of Sparta first, and where’s the true Spartan who ever ran from a good fight?
Photo by Kendrick Goss |
... was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She is completing a Ph.D. in English literature at Boston University, where she teaches classes on fantasy and the gothic. Most recently, she edited Interfictions, an anthology of “interstitial” short stories, with Delia Sherman, which was published in 2007 by Small Beer Press. Her first short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, was published in 2006 by Prime Books. Her short stories and poems have been published in magazines and anthologies such as Alchemy, Realms of Fantasy, Polyphony, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Flytrap, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and have been reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens. Her short story “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” was nominated for a World Fantasy Award.
When my daughter was born, her real name, Ophelia, seemed too formal, too imposing, for such a small person, so we called her Pip. At one point, I started wondering what it would be like to write a story about her. And then, I started wondering what she would think of that story when she grew up! That’s how “Pip and the Fairies” first came into being. Someone once asked me how I classify my writing, and I told him that I write fantasy. But I believe that fantasy is a particularly broad term: not a category of writing so much as a tendency, a pull that writers feel. We feel pulled to represent the world we see (the pull of realism), and pulled to create what we have never seen (the pull of fantasy). We all, as writers, find ourselves somewhere between, pulled in both directions, both realists and fantasists, although to different degrees. Perhaps the degree to which we are pulled in one direction, the degree to which we exhibit a particular tendency, is temperamental. Or perhaps it is cultural. I have always believed that my own tendency to write fantasy, a pull I have felt since childhood, has to do in part with being Hungarian, born in a country that is, to me, both absolutely real and a fairy tale. Or perhaps it is a result of our experiences. Perhaps, because I traveled extensively when I was a child, I have been drawn to fantasy, which is a literature of dislocation, a literature in which you find yourself somewhere different, somewhere you have never been. A literature in which, like Pip, you have to imagine yourself home.
... is the author of nine novels, including the forthcoming psychological thriller Generation Loss and a just-published fantasy, Illyria, as well as three collections of short fiction, the most recent of which is Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories. She grew up in Yonkers and Pound Ridge, NY, before moving to Washington DC in 1975 to study playwriting at Catholic University. Having spent most of her time knocking around the nascent punk scenes in DC and NYC, she flunked out after three years, got a job at the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum, and in 1985 finally received a BA in cultural anthropology. In 1988 she moved to the coast of Maine with novelist Richard Grant, the father of her two teenage children. In 1990 she bought a 300-square-foot, lakefront cottage with no indoor plumbing or running water (it now has both), where her family lived until 1999. She and Richard split after eight years but remain close, and live just a few miles apart.
Her fiction has received the Nebula Award, two World Fantasy Awards, The James Tiptree Jr. Award, The Mythopoeic Society Award, and two International Horror Guild Awards, and in 2001 she was awarded a fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission/NEA. She is a longtime contributor to the Washington Post Book World, the Village Voice, and DownEast Magazine, among numerous others, and writes a regular column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She lives in Maine with her children and her partner, UK critic John Clute, in an 1850s house two miles from Tooley Cottage, where she still writes every day. She is currently working on a novel about Arthur Rimbaud, titled Wonderwall.
“Echo” grew from my long epistolary friendship with journalist David Streitfeld. We’ve only met a handful of times since 1988, but have corresponded regularly since then, and obsessively (on my part) since adopting email in the mid-90s. My novels Mortal Love and Generation Loss are dedicated to David, along with the four stories that comprise “The Lost Domain” sequence, published separately but collected in toto in Saffron and Brimstone. The phrase “The lost domain” comes from Alain-Fournier’s 1913 novel The Wanderer (Le Grand Meaulnes), a favorite of John Fowles, whose work inspired much of my written conversation with David over the years. The nature of inspiration and desire, the relationship of the muse to an artist — these were the things we talked about (still talk about) endlessly. Most of the work I’ve done in the new millennium has been informed by these discussions, and “The Lost Domain” was a protracted effort on my part to shape these ideas into fiction.
“Echo” was the first of this sequence.
In September 2002, David went on assignment to Baghdad to write about what was then euphemistically termed “the rebuilding effort.” We were out of touch during his stint there, though, unlike other journalists and far too many solders, he returned safely home to write about the experience. “Echo” grew out of the dread I felt during that time, along with the surreal sense of horror and isolation that continues to shade our post- 9/11 world.
The reason I’m not at the Nebula Awards banquet is that my muse is getting married that day, and he and his fiancée, Phuong, asked me to help celebrate their wedding. So I am now an officially ordained minister, of perhaps the only church in America that draws on the work of Gene Wolfe and John Crowley. This makes me happier than almost anything I can think of: to come full circle on this long friendship with my muse and his soon-to-be wife. As a writer, I can’t imagine a happier ending.
Photo by Beth Gwinn |
... has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows. With John Kessel he is co-editor of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The New Cyberpunk Anthology. His fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. He has won the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award twice: in 1996, for his novelette “Think Like A Dinosaur” and in 2000, for his novelette, “Ten to the Sixteenth to One.” He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He has two podcasts: Free Reads, a Creative Commons podcast on his website , and James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible, a pay podcast which features him reading fifty-two of his own stories.
Jacob Weisman of Tachyon Publications cajoled me into signing a contract for a 30,000 word novella by telling me I could write pretty much whatever I wanted. If it hadn’t been for him, I probably would’ve spent the end of 2004 and early 2005 on short fiction, as had been my habit for almost a decade. I signed on thinking how pleasant it would be to have a new book that wasn’t a short story collection. However, I wasn’t at all sure that I could sustain a narrative over 30,000 words, after way too many years away from the long form. At the time I told myself that if worse came to worse, I could churn out 22-25,000 words and hand in a manuscript with a large font and wide margins. And so, by giving myself permission to fail, I was able to begin.
Years ago I had made a note about the curious incident of the forest fire that Henry David Thoreau started. After accidentally setting the Walden woods ablaze — some estimates hold that more than three hundred acres were consumed — our First Naturalist repaired to the top of Fair Haven Hill to admire his own private conflagration. I thought folks ought to know about this. You see, as a student I was force fed Walden and much of it disagreed with me. I will admit that never has the Luddite point of view been advanced quite so eloquently. And while I agree that simplicity can be a virtue and that cultivation of one’s inner resources is necessary for the good life, it seems clear to me that the habit of thought which Thoreau urges on us is antithetical to the enterprise of science fiction. Thoreau had little use for the technology of his own time, dismissing both the telegraph and the railroad. I can imagine his horror at the spread of our own asphalt and information superhighways. Hey, I’m all for spirituality, but not if it means I can’t check my email.
I know more about the Thousand Worlds than I have told in Burn. I was surprised that once I got into the book, I had no trouble reaching 25,000 words, then 30,000, then 35,000. As my deadline loomed, I had to make some strategic decisions about the shape of the book. I decided leave out stuff, in order to keep a tight focus on my main character and his problems, some of which open out into the larger concerns of his world and the galactic culture, but some of which are as personal as who will pick the apples or play the outfield. I think this reflects the kind of life that I’m living. I’m concerned about global warming and the pointless war in Iraq, but the dishes still have to go into the dishwasher and the grass is growing. Maybe it’s time to strap on the headphones and load Walden into my mp3 player. I can listen to Thoreau lecture me about men leading lives of quite desperation while I mow the lawn.
I’d like to say a special thank you to the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop, who read Burn on short notice and whose criticisms were invaluable. Thanks also to you, the members of SFWA, for all your support over the years.
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...author, performer and radio personality, hosts and writes the national public radio series PRI’s Sound & Spirit with Ellen Kushner, which Bill Moyers called “the best program on public radio, bar none.” Her first novel, Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners, has been called the progenitor of the “Mannerpunk” school of fantasy. Her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer, shared the 1991 World Fantasy Award with James Morrow, and won the Mythopoeic Award. The Fall of the Kings, written with Delia Sherman (2002), takes place 60 years after the events of Swordspoint; The Privilege of the Sword (2006) is set about 15 years after them.
Kushner is also active as a lecturer and stage performer, writing her own material including the stage and radio special Esther: the Feast of Masks (2004 Gracie Allen Award), and The Golden Dreydl: a Klezmer “Nutcracker” for Chanukah (with Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, on Rykodisc CD), which will be published as a “chapter book” by Charlesbridge in 2007. She has taught writing at Clarion, Odyssey, and the American Book Center in Amsterdam. She and Delia Sherman are the anchor team for the 2007 Clarion workshop in San Diego. Kushner is an active member of the Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts and a founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation.
Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman were legally married in Massachusetts in 2004, but they moved to New York City in 2006, where they are now living in sin. They had no cats then, they have no cats now, and they never will have any cats.
I didn’t know what the hell to call this novel. Its longtime working title was First Disguise, which was out of the question if only because it is almost impossible to say aloud, which is hard on the sales reps. But I like finding catchy phrases in my novels and turning them into titles. It’s a fine old tradition. That one comes from a line early in the book where the teenage narrator envisions her future: “First disguise; then revelation!” She turns out to be entirely wrong, and so was I. The book is about transformation.
But then, I’m not really a theorist. When scholars ask me intelligent questions about the thematic underpinnings of my work, I usually look them in the eye and say, “That’s your job. I just write ’em.” I remember I was thinking at that time that the book would have sort of a Shakespearean undertone, with people putting on guises — of costume or manner — that simultaneously hide who they think they are and reveal their true natures despite themselves. I love that, and I think it’s true: when we put on a costume is often when we tell the world the most about the way we see ourselves. I think it’s one reason we choose to write fantasy: in the fanciful disguise of Other Lands and Mythic Beings, we can sneak up on and reveal the deepest truths of our world underneath the mask.
But in this novel, the guises and disguises are imposed on the characters by necessity or the will of others, or even by the dictates of society. Society in my novels is pretty much always a major player. In this case, I needed to set up a society in which a nicely-brought-up, conventional upper-class girl expects to find security through marriage and dependence on her male relatives. I wanted to explore what it would take to turn her into a confident, independent-minded person — resisting it all the way, but getting there in the end.
Halfway through the book I got that awful feeling you get when you realize it was all a huge mistake. What was I thinking?! We live in a post-feminist age when girls know perfectly well that they can have careers and wear pants and fight their own battles! What kind of useless retro crap was I working so hard on here to create — the Great American Fantasy Novel of 1815?
It was too late to turn back. So I went on. I was enjoying this book, at least. That counted for something. And I’ve found that, as usual, my own strengths and purpose were disguised in a welter of plot and structure and character. They are slowly being revealed to me by readers, one by one, who explain to me how and why what I wrote matters to them today — and by you, my very dear and respected colleagues, who in nominating the book for the Nebula have given me an honor I treasure very deeply.
So in the end, I chose the title The Privilege of the Sword — from a 17th century political ballad about violence vs. intellect: “Lay by your pleading/ Law lies a’bleeding/ Burn all your studies now and throw away your reading….”
I call it TPOTS (pronounced “teapots”) for short.
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...is a former contributing editor for Wired magazine and the science columnist for the SciFi channel, where his “Lab Notes” column has been running since 1999. With eleven books, 30 short stories, and hundreds of science fact articles in his bibliography, he has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, AnLab, Colorado Book, Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick awards, and contributed to projects that won a Webbie, a Game Developers’ Choice Award, and a General Excellence National Magazine Award. Previously an engineer for Lockheed Martin Space Launch Systems, and later a project manager for Omnitech Robotics, and then a fulltime writer for four years, McCarthy is currently the president of The Programmable Matter Corporation in Lakewood, CO.
To Crush the Moon is a book about immortal (well, immorbid) people in a mortal society. Banishing death in no way removes the forces that cause civilizations to rise and fall, so in some sense living forever guarantees that you’ll outlive the culture that created you. How people handle that will have, for better or worse, a tremendous effect on the civilizations that follow. What if the Romans (some of them, anyway) were still with us? What happens when a wealthy, ambitious society, capable of reshaping planets (or moons, anyway) begins to realize its days are numbered? I set out to write a book about silly gonzo science, but the body count got a little out of control, and when I started to ask myself the hard questions — what would really happen next? What’s it really like to live for thousands of years? — the book overflowed its covers. Now, four volumes later, I’ve finally reached the ending, and while I can’t claim to be impartial about my own work, I’ll say that To Crush the Moon turned out exactly like I always hoped it would.
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...is a former English teacher, naval officer, Philadelphia taxi driver, customs officer, and motivational trainer.
His first novel, The Hercules Text, was published in the celebrated Ace Specials series, and won the Philip K. Dick Special Award. In 1991, he won the first $10,000 UPC International Prize for his novella “Ships in the Night.” The Engines of God was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and his novella “Time Travelers Never Die” was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula. Omega received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel, 2003.
McDevitt lives with his wife Maureen in Georgia, where he plays chess, reads mysteries, and eats lunch regularly with his cronies.
At Deepsouthcon 2000, McDevitt was presented with the Phoenix Award for his body of work.
Nineteen forty-seven was a big year for the paranormal. Haunted lighthouses were showing up along the east coast, and the first flying saucers were reported in the Seattle area. At school I encountered the lost colony at Roanoke. Fate Magazine was on the way. And Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer began publishing Richard Shaver's accounts (apparently actually written by Palmer) of Lemuria.
I was in grade school, just starting to read science fiction. None of the kids in my Philadelphia neighborhood bought into the lighthouses, but most of us took to hoping for a UFO landing on the vacant patch of ground at the north end of South Myrtlewood Street. While we waited, I discovered Amazing, and got entranced by the idea of Lemuria.
I already knew about Atlantis, of course. And I'd encountered Mu somewhere along the line. Lost continents, islands that sank beneath the ocean, advanced civilizations predating the Egyptians, these were hot stuff for a sixth grader.
The Lemurian tales had two problems. They were almost unreadable; and Amazing seemed to be saying they were true. I might almost have gone for it had Shaver not claimed that he literally remembered the place. Some sort of reincarnation thing. That was too much even for a twelve-year-old.
But it got me interested in lost continents. Atlantis, I duscovered, was reported (or invented) by Plato. Nobody else in ancient times ever mentioned it. Plato describes wars between the Europeans and the kings of Atlantis in "Timaeus" and "Critias." Unfortunately the only exotic aspect of the lost kingdom was that it had gotten lost. I'd be the last person to criticize Plato, but if he was going to invent a civilization and then sink it, he might have done a better job with the details.
Alex Benedict lives in the thirteenth millennium, and makes a living in the antiquities business. They've had FTL travel for thousands of years. It seemed reasonable to me that, in all that time, someone would have gone out and gotten lost. Gone so far, as one of them said when they were leaving Earth, that even God wouldn't be able to find them.
Anyhow, thanks to Richard Shaver, Plato, and whoever came up with Mu.
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...writes science fiction. She lives in Seattle where she neglects her garden (“I did it that way on purpose,” she says) and creates the occasional bead creature (anemones, nudibranchs, jellyfish, and featherless anacondas), some of which are explained at Science News. She is experimenting with making her work (including “Little Faces” and “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand”) available online.
Interstellar distances are vast and intractable. How can a spacefarer manage interaction and communication, if she lives alone, light-years, even parsecs, from others of her kind, and if the instinct of her ship is to explore ever farther? How does she live, work, reproduce? What are her society’s mores... and what happens when someone violates those mores?
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...lives in Ohio with his beautiful wife and four fairly wonderful children. Paul’s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Spider Magazine, Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction (twice), and other magazines and anthologies. Singularity’s Ring, his first novel, is forthcoming from Tor in 2008 and a Science Fiction collection, Ten Sigmas and Other Unlikelihoods, is forthcoming from Fairwood Press in October 2007. His second novel will include his nominated story and will be entitled The Walls of the Universe.
Paul workshopped with fellow nominee Bill Shunn at the Blue Heaven workshop on Kellys Island in Lake Erie. He attended Viable Paradise on Martha’s Vineyard, where fellow nominee James Patrick Kelly imparted apparently effective wisdom. This year’s Nebulas is the first time he’s been on an island with fellow nominee Michael Burstein.
“The Walls of the Universe” was once a novel, then it was a novella, and now it will be a novel again. I’ve enjoyed writing it, all three times. The first time I wrote it, as a novel, I took it to Blue Heaven, a writers workshop held annually on Kellys Island. I learned everything that was wrong with it. I fixed that and it became the novella, which I am happy that Sheila Williams took for Asimov’s. Now it is a novel again (or will be soon), sold as a follow-up to my first novel. A parallel worlds story with a serial existence. I’ve always been infatuated with parallel worlds, especially exploitable and hidden parallel worlds. It probably goes back to Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series, a set of books I adored as a teen reader. I’ve written other stories of exploitable parallel earths: “Ten Sigmas” and “The Teosinte War.” It’s my most common writing meme, apparently.
It’s a tremendous honor for this story to be nominated for the Nebula. I wasn’t expecting it, nor the nomination that I’ve just found out about for the Hugo. I’d like to thank everyone who nominated and voted for the story. I’d also like to thank Sheila Williams at Asimov’s for picking it. The crew at Blue Heaven is of course partially responsible, with their sharp eyes and red pencils. Thank you all for your help and for this honor.
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...short story collection, Map of Dreams, was published by Golden Gryphon Press in 2006.
1. Father Beast Ghost
White hair like snow. Hawk nose. Large gray eyes, half-drooped lids. How to describe your lips? In all these photographs, smiling. How you loved a party! Here, you tip your new Christmas hat. Here, you pose at the door, one hand behind your head, one on your hip. In the distance Marie Callas raises her throated song at full volume. You sleep on the couch. We tiptoe around you. When we kiss you good night, five daughters in flannel robes and natty hair, chastely placed lips on your forehead, you say, “You are stinky children.”
What is a kiss? Wrapped in lizard skin with slicky lips this beast drips wetly through the house. The children run when he arrives and their mother kisses him. She kisses him as they, in flannel gowns and bare feet, hair all a tangle of bubble gum and wind, watch from the door. She kisses him. The stench fills the room and they cover their noses, giggling, run and hide under the dining room chairs when this beast slithers by on three clawed toes. He lies on the couch and closes his eyes. Where is their father at times like this? Marie Callas raises her voice and the house rises with it, to a sickening high precipice. The children dare not look out the window. All those black trees reaching skeletal branches against sugar panes. All that brown grass waiting for snow. All that beauty waits while the monster sleeps in their house. They kiss him demurely on his forehead. “You smell,” he growls. They retreat on cold little feet with dirty toenails, their waxy ears and un-brushed breath, gone. He dares not. He dares not follow them, or look out the window at the ice of stars and wonder of moon. He dares not sing, but only listens to the song.
Ghost, you sneaky slant what have you done with him? Memory falls back. Deflates. It is a real tragedy, this loss of mind. But the ghost arrives to replace forgiveness. Song rises behind you but the house settles after all these years at that odd height. It lands gently like a thing with wings. The dust puffs out and glows in the winter sun like a cinnamon snow. From all this distance I can feel the beast and all that he ever was, turn in his sleep and dream this dream. What is more beautiful? Memory? Or forgetting?
It has been a warm December. The windows are bright with sun. The trees wait for that first snowflake. White ice will crack your lungs. Your face will fissure at each pore. Your nose hairs will freeze. You will leave footprints in the snow. They will melt. You will die. You will be remembered and then you will be forgotten, ghost. This is what it means to be alive.
2. She Burns Memories
She burns memories wherever they arrive at the kitchen table or the bus stop and strangers say, “That woman is always on fire,” but it isn’t her really, only what surrounds her, like a halo this saint or is it martyr cold ice melts in the heat of her small fires only to form a flowered web across her eyes, her lips, the keeper of secrets, and her fingers are frost bitten and sore anger writhes bitter fires and smoke seeps from her before God she bows secrets and the stained light bleeds across her mouth.
She feeds them cake and tea with sugar and listens to their selfish whines of loneliness, ingratitude this generation that thinks they deserve something, this generation that only throws the broken things away and what’s broken are the memories she burns for the children sent out to play in the wild yard while the clouds ate birds and the statue of the virgin Mary stayed frozen in her reverie of snakes and snails and dog turds and the yard of littered tricycle wheels spinning leaves and she burns like ice at life’s terrible savagery, she trembles at the fly that crawls on her face as if she is already a cadaver and her children never notice after all these years they are grown to say, “She’s so angry all of a sudden, it must be her age” and she carries the truth she’s learned, heavy as angel’s wings, the things unsaid, unknown and forgotten still occurred.
3. A Photograph Is Worth a Thousand Forgotten Moments
We stand there in black and white space forever grinning our various shapes and lengths of hair and coats handed down and mended and knee socks and stockings bunched around skinny ankles and knees and even the sun is gray. We stand there in reverie before everything happens, before he forgets and she forgets and we forget, before all that forgetting and after the begetting of seven children somewhere in there, is the time when stuff happened. The suicide note written on a lampshade, unnoticed in the bright cast of day, illuminated in the night, and ignored. Who has time for such theatrics? Seven children! Count them with socks! The drugs he gave us, slipped into juice or milk cartons at the park, a memory forgotten until he laughed about it. He laughed, remembering. Remembering and forgetting, it isn’t a secret. We all know this. Stuff happened.
4. This part is about me
At night she buries things. A knife. A rope. A key to the mailbox. Bodies. In the morning she rises. Fresh as a daisy! Only the dirt on her soles betrays her. Her husband says, Where do you go? At night? And she says, I sleep. I only sleep.
She waits until he leaves before she brings the strangers into the house. Winged creatures seem to be a favorite. A lot of damaged women. The men don’t have faces. They move through the rooms with heads that look like giant thumbprints. She walks amongst them, weaving her dirty footprints with their invisible ones. She plucks wings and they let her. She holds the children close and weeps. She eats the butterflies and plays with the bears. At five O’clock she tells them they have to leave, wait in the shadows by the side of the house. Later, she buries them alive. She invites them back of course, even the thumbprint-face men, who nod their doughy heads at her. Each night she buries them. Each morning they rise. It is an agreement they’ve come to.
This is the story of my life.
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...was born in Tokyo, Japan, and brought up in New York City. She spent much of her early life at one end of a classroom or another, at Brown University where she earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies in 1981 and at Boston University and Northeastern, where she taught Freshman Composition and Fantasy as Literature. Her first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror (Ace, 1989), was an Ace Fantasy Special. In 1990, she was nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer. Her second novel, The Porcelain Dove (Dutton, 1993; Plume, 1994), won the Mythopoeic Award. She made her debut in the world of children’s literature with short stories in The Green Man and Faery Reel (edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow) and Firebirds (Viking, 2003). Her first novel for children is Changeling (Viking, 2006).
Delia has been a judge for the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel, served on the Motherboard of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and is a founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation.
As an editor of books and anthologies, Delia’s continuing quest is to get more of the kind of fantasy she likes out to readers. She has been a contributing editor for Tor Books and has co-edited, with Ellen Kushner and Don Keller, the fantasy anthology The Horns of Elfland (Roc) as well as the Bordertown punk-elf anthology The Essential Bordertown with Terri Windling. With Theodora Goss, she edited Interficitons: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing (Small Beer Press, 2007). She teaches SF and Fantasy writing whenever she can at Odyssey, Clarion, and workshops at regional and national science fiction conventions.
It all started with a party in Provincetown.
Summer evening on the beach, my neighbor’s Turquoise Terror punch, lots of colorful characters in gender-inappropriate clothing. I was eavesdropping. Tallullah jokes. Relationship dish. And then: “My pearls?” I heard someone say. ”Why, thank you, darling. But you know, they’re only stimulated.”
Then I had a dream about a house appearing in an empty lot. A big house, with more rooms than it could possibly hold and a talking newel post.
More than enough material for a story.
So I made up some characters and pushed them around a bit, and eventually I ended up with a really cool party scene, a confused and angry narrator, and a plot that went nowhere I wanted to follow. So I put the story into a drawer and let it compost.
Over the next twenty years, a lot of things changed. I moved out of the suburbs and into a fulfilling relationship. Massachusetts passed a law legalizing same-sex marriage. I finally got enough distance to separate out the cool idea from the actual story I wanted to tell. That happens with stories sometimes. You try to make them about one thing, and then you discover that they’re about something else entirely, something, perhaps, you’re not really willing to write about yet. Twenty years after I began “Walpurgis Afternoon,” I was ready, willing, and able. So I took it out of the drawer and finished it.
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...was born in Los Angeles and grew up near Salt Lake City. A computer science graduate of the University of Utah, his employers have ranged from WordPerfect to the Children’s Television Workshop. He first arrived in New York City twelve years ago, and did not leave again. He lives in Queens with his wife Laura Chavoen and their soft-coated wheaten terrier, Ella.
Bill attended Clarion in 1985, and since 1993 his short fiction has appeared in Salon, Storyteller, Asimov’s, F&SF, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, and various anthologies. He was previously nominated for the Nebula Award in 2002, and “Inclination” is also a current Hugo nominee. A chapbook of his stories, An Alternate History of the 21st Century, is due this summer from Spilt Milk Press, and he is at work on a science fiction novel, Inclination. In his podcast he has just finished serializing his memoir The Accidental Terrorist, the tale of his rather shady past as a Mormon missionary in Canada.
“Inclination” is the third published story set in my Netherview Station universe. Since the previous Netherheim story, “Dance of the Yellow-Breasted Luddites,” was also a Nebula nominee, I should clearly be writing more of them! “Inclination,” at least in part, is about the questions we never ask because no one has taught us enough to know to ask. It owes a lot to all the John Varley I read when I was young and impressionable — almost as much as it does to all the Joseph Smith I read when I was young and impressionable. It also owes plenty to the industrial-arts textbooks my dad left lying around the house.
“Inclination” is now available as a podcast.
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...is a Toronto-based author published in a number of anthologies, including Children of Magic and Mythspring, and magazines such as Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Fantasy. In addition to spending her days pretending to be an IT consultant, Karina is also co-owner of a small jewelry design company. She is currently battling a novel.
I’ve often heard tell of the writer’s learning curve, the slow increase in skill and confidence that will raise a new author towards a professional level. Yet no one thought to warn me that experiencing this so-called “curve” feels very much like riding a rollercoaster…and having forgotten to pull down the safety bar.
Even a simple task, like writing a story to meet an editor’s request and deadline, can be joyful and terrifying in equal parts. When asked to submit a story to the anthology Children of Magic, the thrill of the invite was tempered by uneasiness from the tight deadline. The writing, too, came with emotional peaks and valleys, as writing so often does — not to mention the wild dips and loops that came from the realization that my beautiful story had somehow become utter nonsense, the characters flat, the plot unusable. In the shadow of the deadline, I started a new tale. Long evenings and short lunch breaks and in the cramped corners of meeting handouts I wrote, and panicked, and wrote.
At the end of the sweat-soaked, chaotic ride, I had a story — “An End To All Things” — another sale for my slim bibliography, and a feeling much like that voiced by children at theme parks worldwide: “That was fun! Can we do it again?”
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...is the author of The King’s Peace, The King’s Name, The Prize In the Game and the World Fantasy Award winning Tooth and Claw. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002. She comes from Wales, but lives in Montreal where the food and books are better.
Farthing is an alternate-history mystery. I had the idea for the world when I was rereading Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar. The book was published in 1952, and set in England. There’s a lot of backstory about things that happened ten years before, in England and France. As I was reading, I suddenly asked myself when it was set. It couldn’t quite be set in the 1930s, because technology had moved on, but it couldn’t possibly be set in a 1950 where ten years before France would have been Occupied France and Britain involved in fighting the Nazis. My SF-reading brain came to the conclusion that clearly this was a world where there was no WWII, or where it ended early, and read the rest of the book with the firm belief that this cosy mystery was happening in a world where Hitler controlled everything up to the Channel, and England went smugly on. This immediately connected up with the Auden poem “Lullaby” which was written in 1933 and which has always seemed to me to be about turning away from the political to the personal with the awareness that the political will catch up with you in the end.
It took two more things to come together for me to write Farthing. The first was getting the first person voice of the protagonist, Lucy, very clearly in my head, rattling on unstoppably. She was an irresistible character, on the one hand undeniably silly, on the other, much wiser than everyone around her. Her voice went with the world. I had no idea where the plot was going when I started writing, but I had a very strong idea of who Lucy was, and who the people around her were. The second voice, the detective Carmichael, came to me just as strongly when I started to write his chapters. The alternation of these two very different points-of-view drove the story.
The last thing it took was the experience of being in Montreal while Britain and the US invaded Iraq on the thinnest of pretexts, with the Prime Minister lying to Parliament about the necessity.
I was brought up by my grandparents, and for them the defining event of their lives was World War II. I grew up with the narrative of that war. I never thought I would live to see the day when I’d seriously be comparing the actions of my country and my government — who I’d even voted for — with those of Hitler in 1939. If I’d been in Britain at the time of the Iraq invasion, no doubt I’d have protested, as so many people did, ultimately futilely. But I was in Montreal, and Canada had the good sense not to step into that particular meat-grinder. My husband’s Irish, and Ireland wasn’t waging a war of aggression either. I think the sense of isolation and fury that engendered is the other ingredient that went into Farthing.
In an online discussion once, someone said that politics don’t belong in fiction, no more than salt belongs in ice-cream. Someone else replied that there are ice-cream makers where you put the salt in the outside and the cream and fruit in the inside, and it is the salt that makes the sweet things cold enough to turn into ice-cream. I hope that’s what happened with Farthing. I didn’t set out to write an allegory, or to suggest anything about the world outside the story. I wrote the story of the characters, I wouldn’t cheat on that. But I doubt I’d have written the novel at all without that last ingredient, and certainly not the way I did; without stopping, in seventeen days.
I think SF has always been a genre of political exploration of all kinds. I grew up reading Heinlein and Delany and Le Guin and Mack Reynolds and Pournelle and, and, and… The sheer diversity of political opinions within the genre taught me a lot. The thing that I learned most from reading SF, lots and lots of SF, the wisdom I brought back with me from the aliens was that the world we have here isn’t the only possible world, that the way we do things isn’t the only possible way to do things, that there are always other angles of looking at everything. And they’re interesting angles. I didn’t learn that from any one piece of SF, but from the great clashing quilt of thought experiments and literalisations of metaphor and “what if” that makes up SF.
Farthing is my little square of that great quilt. I’m very honoured that the Nebula nominators liked it sufficiently to notice it on the shortlist.
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Founded in 1965 by the late Damon Knight, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America brings together the most successful and daring writers of speculative fiction throughout the world.
Since its inception, SFWA® has grown in numbers and influence until it is now widely recognized as one of the most effective non-profit writers' organizations in existence, boasting a membership of approximately 1,500 science fiction and fantasy writers as well as artists, editors and allied professionals. Each year the organization presents the prestigious Nebula Awards® for the year's best literary and dramatic works of speculative fiction.
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