hese are the important days for the planet—and for SF, the best medium we have yet devised to utter the stories that best illuminate the days we face—and so it is good to see a book whose niches are as informed by talk as this one. The great bulk of Nebula Awards Showcase 2002 is,
of course, like its predecessors in this ongoing anthology series, occupied by the Nebula Award-winning stories from the year covered (in this case, 1999), but, like previous editors, Kim Stanley Robinson has had some free space to play with. The two stories he has selected from the Nebula short-list, by Eleanor Arnason and Gardner Dozois, are as good as the actual winners, but it is the non-fiction—Robinson's neat and sober introduction; a series of short commentaries "On Science Fiction and the World," written a year or so later than the fiction was; and some other matter—that points the anthology toward the world.
Or, more accurately perhaps, illuminates the points the fiction had already made, back then in the last moments of the last century.
But I need to intervene in my own person for a moment. What I need to say relates to the rather grandiose name given this column when it started in 1997. A long while earlier, I had used the term in a piece arguing that the SF world was so small, and its personnel so tightly interwoven, that the only way for a reviewer to do his job, which was to tell his form of truth about stories which purported to tell significant truths about the world, was to consciously attempt to ignore his own personal connections within the genre, to consciously try to be honest, even though it might be about friends; even though it might be hurtful.
The downsides of this are obvious; an upside might be the believability of praise, even when it's about intimates. In the case of the 18 named contributors to Nebula Awards Showcase 2002, I have myself met or know pretty well 15; two I have never met, and now—it is now April 2002—I will never meet the great Damon Knight, teacher of us all, who has just died young at 80; and one is me. Given such richness, the only useful response must surely be honesty. It is, I suppose, good luck right now that the upside applies to Robinson's anthology: because I think it is a genuinely pretty good book. But excessive candour cannot cover every base, and I won't refer to my own short non-fiction piece—one of the nine comments on "Science Fiction and the World"—in this review. That would be a candour too far.
Beneath the controversies, truth remains
There has been a good deal of controversy over the Nebula Awards, much of it focused on an inward-looking tendency on the part of SFWA members to short list only stories by fellow SFWA members, and upon the talmudic obscurities of the eligibility rules, which can only help writers so very desirous of an award that they master them. My own take on this appeared at great length in the New York Review of Science Fiction #131 (July 1999), where I commented on stories first published in 1996, and I won't apply any similar analysis to the current anthology, which in any case reflects a much higher standard of SFWA choice than many previous years' anthologies were permitted to showcase. And Robinson's introduction does not attempt to pitch the indefensible; he is interested in other things.
In that introduction, he speaks first of the changes that have rewritten the world, and SF, since the SFWA was founded in 1965; of how all these transformations "on all fronts combined to turn our entire social reality into one giant science fiction novel, which we are all writing together in the great collaboration called history." Which is as neat a formulation of our condition today as I have yet seen. The world (as at least one of the non-fiction commentaries also concludes) is what we write. Which means that the stories we write—like the stories here published—are not only personal responses to input, not only assays at satisfying the itch of afflatus, not only ways of paying for "healthcare"; for the stories we write help make the world we respond to.
Which is not to say that SF stories are literally true.
Which is why it is of particular interest, Robinson continues, to think about the large amount of current SF about downloading minds (i.e., human essences) into computers. Downloading is, he suggests, a deep SF metaphor—"like time travel or faster-than-light travel" in the 20th century—whose function is to make manifest and storable a human dream or nightmare or anticipation, and to do so with a fine disregard for the fact that that metaphor, when unpacked into the world of real science, describes a nonsense. Downloading, Robinson says, is "an idea that ignores or misunderstands the complexity of the brain, the nature of computers, and the utter absence of any conceivable method to transfer the one into the other."
But so what?
Downloading stories are about living in a world which feels, to mature Westerners, increasingly paradoxical. We conduct our lives through tools which allow us to write on screens our jobs, our friendships, our meaning structures; we spend much of our lives in cars, or SUVs, which increasingly resemble dioramas pasted to the inside of our heads. But at the same time, we are possessed by solitude, powerlessness: as though the diorama was controlled—"channeled and choreographed"—by programs we could not ultimately affect. Downloading stories tell us this may be
the case, and by doing so, by making our lives conceivable, they make them true.
Exploring yesterday is exploring tomorrow
The stories themselves should be well known by now. An excerpt from Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio takes 45 pages, which are vivid enough, but a cookie cutter's snippet from a finely structured big book. Linda Nagata's "Goddesses" may be the most traditional: a near-future world full of problems which are perfectly solvable, given a caring World Bank; given benevolent international corporations which rewrite the Third World in order to make things better for women oppressed by traditional fundamentalists; given eager bacteria discovered at just the right time in order to devour pollution without side effects; and no enemies. Hungry? "Mondo-wheat" feeds all. Poor? Get a charity corporate scholarship and do very well at a really great university. Within the procrustean bed of all these easy fixes, however, a slow but humanly involving double story meshes into the mind, and may be what we remember.
Of sharper interest is Walter Jon Williams' downloading tale, "Daddy's World" (from Not of Woman Born, edited by Constance Ash), which places the mind of a dead child in a virtual-reality world run by an increasingly obsolete computer and manipulated by his control-freak father (it is mentioned somewhere that to create a VR world is by definition to be a control freak: I myself work on a screen run by Windows XP, hey). Eventually, the child, after years of immurement, gains death. The father immediately loads another copy of his son into his world. Terry Bisson's "Macs" (F&SF) is an exemplary fable: The mind of a murderer is downloaded into a number of clone bodies, each of which is passed over for execution to the families of his victims. The narrative—couched as a series of interview fragments—is exquisitely crafted, and bites savagely.
Eleanor Arnason's "Stellar Harvest" (Asimov's) is an escape, an exhilarated planetary romance, though it bites, too: Its protagonist, a scout for a production company specializing in action series, undergoes various adventures on a planet of humanoids where uncastrated males are few and feared. But her adventures, which are vivid, are in fact framed by her job as scout: The whole story, like a download, is a quote of a planetary romance. In the end, most of the cast go off to become stars.
Gardner Dozois' "A Night of Ghosts and Shadows" (Asimov's) begins as a fully bodied fiction; turns into an intriguing essay arguing that—after AIs revolt in the 21st century, and various forms of mutation and download push the envelope of the sentient world way beyond normal human compass—the best course for unmodified Meat Humans is to hitchhike to the stars on the backs of our betters, and to survive in the niches, exogamously. It turns back into a moving story about a last Meat holdout, who has an epiphany about the thingness of things, and (it seems) lifts his thumb.
The "Science Fiction and the World" comments, and various interpolations by Robinson, surround these gifts. They make a whole bigger than the parts. Reading all of Nebula Awards Showcase 2002 is a way of reading a bunch of good stories. It is also a very good way to explore the writing of tomorrow.
