Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

Polly suppressed a smile. Sir Godfrey thanked the two ladies solemnly, his voice quiet and refined again. Watching him putting on his coat and picking up his umbrella, it was hard to believe he’d just given that mesmerizing performance.

Lila and Viv folded their blankets and gathered up their magazines, Mr. Dorming picked up his thermos, Mrs. Brightford picked up Trot, and they all converged on the door. The rector pulled the bolt back and opened it, and as he did, Polly caught an echo of the tense, frightened look they’d had before Sir Godfrey intervened, this time for what they might find when they went through that door and up those steps: their houses gone, London in ruins. Or German tanks driving down Lampden Road.

The rector stepped back from the opened door to let them through, but no one moved, not even Nelson, who’d been cooped up since before midnight.

‘“Hie you, make haste!”‘ Sir Godfrey’s clarion voice rang out, “‘See this dispatch’d with all the haste thou canst,”‘ and Nelson shot through the door.

Everyone laughed.

“Nelson, come back!” Mr. Simms shouted and ran after him. He called down from the top of the steps, “No damage I can see,” and the rest of them trooped up the steps and looked around at the street, peaceful in the dim, gray predawn light. The buildings were all intact, though there was a smoky pall in the air, and a sharp smell of cordite and burning wood.

“Lambeth got it last night,” Mr. Dorming said, pointing at plumes of black smoke off to the southeast.

“And Piccadilly Circus, looks like,” Mr. Simms said, coming back with Nelson and pointing at what was actually Oxford Street and the smoke from John Lewis. Mr. Dorming was wrong, too. Shoreditch and Whitechapel had taken the brunt of the first round of raids, not Lambeth, but from the look of the smoke, nowhere in the East End was safe.

“I don’t understand,” Lila said, looking around at the tranquil scene. “It sounded like it was bang on top of us.”

“What will it sound like if it is on top of us, I wonder?” Viv asked.

“I’ve heard one hears a very loud, very high-pitched scream,” Mr. Simms began, but Mr. Dorming was shaking his head.

“You won’t hear it,” he said, “You’ll never know what hit you,” and stomped away.

“Cheerful,” Viv said, looking after him.

Lila was still looking toward the smoke of Oxford Street. “I suppose the Underground won’t be running,” she said glumly, “and it’ll take us ages to get to work.”

“And when we get there,” Viv said, “the windows will have been blown out again. We’ll have to spend all day sweeping up.”

‘“What’s this, varlets?”‘ Sir Godfrey roared. “‘Do I hear talk of terror and defeat? Stiffen the sinews! Summon up the blood!”‘

Lila and Viv giggled.

Sir Godfrey drew his umbrella like a sword. “‘Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more!”‘ he shouted, raising it high, “We fight for England!”‘

“Oh, I do love Richard the Third!” Miss Laburnum said.

Sir Godfrey gripped the umbrella handle violently, and for a moment Polly thought he was going to run Miss Laburnum through, but instead he hooked it over his arm. ‘“And if we no more meet till we meet in heaven,”‘ he said, “‘then joyfully, my noble lords and my kind kinsmen, warriors all, adieu!”‘ and strode off, umbrella in hand, as if going into battle.

Which he is, Polly thought, watching him. Which they all are.

“How marvellous!” Miss Laburnum said. “Do you think if we asked him, he’d do another play tomorrow? The Tempest, perhaps, or Henry the Fifth?’

Connie Willis has won seven Nebulas, more than any other writer, and was the first author to win the Nebula in all four categories.

Here’s the winner of this year’s Dwarf Star Award, “Bumbershoot” by Howard Hendrix.

Night, a gun-blue umbrella tricked with distant suns and planets, is not to be opened indoors—more bad luck, or worse.

Hold it to the mind’s sky. Finger the trigger in its handle.

A meteor bullets the firmament. The universe falls shut with a whoosh.

Shake the drops of the stars from the loose skin of the darkness.

Think of nothing for which to wish. Step into a different house.

Howard V. Hendrix is the author of six novels, three short story collections, and a whole bunch of poems that he really should put forward as a collection one of these days. He teaches English literature and creative writing at the college level. He has recently served as guest editor for a Midsummer Night’s Dream- themed issue of the Pedestal Magazine, and is lead editor on Visions of Mars: Essays on the Fiction and Science of the Red Planet.

I recently realized, with something like horror, that I’m fast closing in on my twenty-fifth year as a published writer. If you asked me where the time went, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Perhaps the same place as my hair or a body type that was once upon a time described as emaciated and is now closer to spherical.

“Arvies” is my sixth Nebula nomination, one that as always leaves me scratching my head over the mysterious forces that usher one story into being while another—that might be just as promising—remains imprisoned in the brain vault and in no particular hurry to be released. Its genesis was the standard SF trick of turning the real-world status quo upside down and seeing what happens. In this case it was the premise that life legally begins at birth; I wondered what would happen if life legally ended there.

I am proud that the tale has been interpreted, by various partisans on opposite sides of the abortion debate, as being both for and against. . . while being criticized by others for refusing to take a stand. I’m firmly prochoice myself, but the story itself is none of the above; it’s just a thought experiment about an alien way to live and a demonstration of the truism that even in societies that offer their most privileged citizens unlimited opportunities for happiness, there’s always somebody, somewhere, who gets royally screwed.

This is the story of a mother, and a daughter, and the right to life, and the dignity of all living things, and of some souls granted great destinies at the moment of their conception, and of others damned to remain society’s useful idiots.

Expect cute plush animals and amniotic fluid and a more or less happy ending for everybody, though the definition of happiness may depend on the truncated emotional capacity of those unable to feel anything else. Some of the characters are rich and famous, others are underage, and one is legally dead, though you may like her the most of all.

We first encounter Molly June on her fifteenth deathday, when the monitors in charge of deciding such things declare her safe for passengers. Congratulating her on completing the only important stage of her development, they truck her in a padded skimmer to the arvie showroom where she is claimed, right away, by one of the Living.

The fast sale surprises nobody, not the servos that trained her into her current state of health and attractiveness, not the AI routines managing the showroom, and least of all Molly June, who has spent her infancy and early childhood having the ability to feel surprise, or anything beyond a vague contentment, scrubbed from her emotional palate. Crying, she’d learned while still capable of such things, brought punishment, while unconditional acceptance of anything the engineers saw fit to provide brought light and flower scent and warmth. By this point in her existence she’ll greet anything short of an exploding bomb with no reaction deeper than vague concern. Her sale is a minor development by comparison: a happy development, reinforcing her feelings of dull satisfaction. Don’t feel sorry for her. Her entire life, or more accurately death, is happy ending. All she has to do is spend the rest of it carrying a passenger.