Nebula Awards Showcase 2019 Read online

  Nebula Awards® Showcase 2019

  Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  www.ParvusPress.com

  Parvus Press, LLC

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  Yardley, PA 19067-8224

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  Nebula Awards® Showcase 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

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  Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everybody, the Nebulas Tonight!

  ISBN 13 978-1-7338119-7-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-7338119-6-5

  Cover Illustration © Tiffany Dae

  Cover design by R J Theodore

  Designed and typeset by Catspaw DTP Services

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  The 2018 Nebula Award® Finalists

  Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™

  Rebecca Roanhorse>

  A Series of Steaks

  Vina Jie-Min Prasad

  Weaponized Math

  Jonathan P. Brazee

  Utopia, Lol?

  Jamie Wahls

  Fandom for Robots

  Vina Jie-Min Prasad

  All Systems Red

  Martha Wells

  Wind Will Rove

  Sarah Pinsker

  Dirty Old Town

  Richard Bowes

  The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard)

  Matthew Kressel

  Carnival Nine

  Caroline M. Yoachim

  Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time

  K.M. Szpara

  Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand

  Fran Wilde

  A Human Stain

  Kelly Robson

  Biographies

  About the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)

  About the Nebula Awards

  A Word from Parvus Press

  Introduction

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  When I began selling short stories in 2006 the speculative fiction landscape was radically different. For one, I had to purchase international reply coupons to send along with my manuscripts. I’d dread each and every time the acronym IRC appeared in the submissions guidelines. Not every postal outlet carried these coupons. Often, you’d have an irritated postal worker rummaging through a drawer and muttering to themselves until, at the bottom, they found the precious slip of paper. Nowadays, most budding writers don’t know what an IRC is.

  There was something else that was different back in 2006: I was alone.

  When I first harnessed the courage to start sending my stories out in 2006, it truly was a frightening prospect. I had never seen a Latina writer in any of the fantasy and science fiction magazines I read, nor at the bookstore. Yes, I knew that Latin American magic realist writers existed, but they sat on the literary shelf. The science fiction and fantasy section was virtually devoid of people like me.

  There were the odd names which popped up here and there. Ernest Hogan had published High Aztech in the 1990s, but he was the only Latino writer under a science fiction or fantasy imprint I could name. And that had happened more than a decade before and he seemed to have gone out of print. Was there anyone in print, in bookstores?

  I found a handful of black speculative writers: Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany and Nalo Hopkinson. Hopkinson was Canadian and I had immigrated to Canada, so the discovery of this author was exciting. But that seemed to be the end of the list of writers of color I could reliably find at my local store.

  I had few role models to emulate, no person to ask for advice, no one to talk to at all. I did not know if I was even allowed to write. Fantasy was still the world of Medieval castles and science fiction futures did not include any Mexicans. There was no point in even considering horror, either. It was quite depressing.

  In a tiny magazine by the name of Deep Magic, I bumped into Aliette de Bodard. She was the first writer who I thought was a little bit like me: a woman of color who was about my age, who was also starting her writing career. She lived in France, to boot, which meant she was an international writer.

  For a long time I looked for de Bodard’s name in publications, as a sort of guiding light.

  If she exists, I might exist, I told myself.

  In 2007, Nnedi Okorafor was about to publish her second novel, The Shadow Speaker, when she discovered that the cover of the book would feature a white woman instead of the black protagonist of the story. Okorafor had written the novel because she wanted to “see Africa in the future.” She fought back against this imposition and the cover was changed. She didn’t tell the story of the whitewashed cover until 2017, but I saw the cover long before knowing this tale, ten years before, and thought that it was visually striking. It was another beacon.

  In 2009, Lavie Tidhar edited The Apex Book of World SF, which reprinted stories by writers from around the world. I don’t think anything like that had been attempted before. There was a story by de Bodard and a bunch of writers I had never heard about. Today, this anthology series has five volumes.

  New magazines began popping up and they were mostly online. The move to electronic submissions, which occurred in parallel with the creation of more and more online magazines, had a profound effect on the science fiction and fantasy short story landscape. For one, it allowed international submissions with ease and therefore increased the presence of writers of color.

  Around this time there also began to be an interest and an appeal for diversity in fiction. I still didn’t know very many fellow writers of color, but Twitter was now a thing and I joined this social network. Online, at a distance, I became more aware of others like me. I even interacted with some of them through Twitter. I began to look for their names on shelfs, in tables of contents, as beacons, just like de Bodard had been a beacon.

  There, right there, was proof I wasn’t alone.

  In 2010, Justine Larbalestier’s YA novel Liar was published. It originally was supposed to have a white woman on the cover, despite the fact that the heroine is black. Echoing Okorafor’s struggle, Larbalestier managed to have the cover modified. In ensuing online talks about this, someone mentioned that Octavia Butler’s covers had also been whitewashed back in the 70s.

  It seemed that publishing worked like a wheel and people of color were trampled under it. Why, they were not even allowed on the cover. If Butler had been whitewashed—Butler, who was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Fellowship—what chance did people like me have?

  I wondered if publishing would ever welcome people of color, if I’d ever have a book published, if I’d ever meet another Latina writer at a science fiction and fantasy convention.

  Then, something happened. Because that same year Nora K. Jemisin published The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

  I began hearing all kinds of buzz about Jemisin, who had already netted attention with her short fiction. The next year, Jemisin was nominated for
so many awards I can’t even list them all. The Nebula, the Hugo, the World Fantasy. She won a Locus for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and would go on to win multiple awards, including the 2018 Nebula for The Stone Sky. She was also the first writer to win three Hugos in a row for her Broken Earth trilogy.

  The publishing world is different from when I started writing. Jemisin’s success will surely serve as a beacon to a new generation. But she is not alone. In 2018, Fonda Lee was nominated for both the Nebula adult and young adult novel categories. Cindy Pon also netted a nomination in the Nebula YA category. Vina Jie-Min Prasad (who appears in this volume with the story “Fandom for Robots” and the novelette “A Series of Steaks”), Caroline M. Yoachim ( “Carnival Nine”) and Rebecca Roanhorse (winner of both a Hugo and Nebula for “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™,” which opens this showcase) and JY Yang (shortlisted for her novella The Black Tides of Heaven) are only but a few of the writers of color that are popping up in the arena of speculative fiction. Beyond the 2018 Nebula finalists, there’s also Yoon Ha Lee, Cixin Liu, Victor LaValle, Kai Ashante Wilson, Alyssa Wong, and many others.

  Comparing the 2006 Nebula finalists and the list of finalists in 2018, it’s also evident there’s many more women, including relative newcomers such as Kelly Robson, winner of the Nebula for Best Novelette (“A Human Stain,” which closes this volume), and established authors such as Martha Wells, of the Murderbot series (another double winner, her novella All Systems Red was awarded a Nebula and a Hugo and is the longest work in this showcase).

  There’s young queer writers, like K.M. Szpara (“Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time”) and more established authors, such as Lambda-winner Richard Bowes (“Dirty Old Town”). And because life is intersectional, like kids say these days, some of these identities overlap like Venn diagrams even if I’m lumping them in a pile right now.

  There are twin questions that people ask me sometimes. One, does it matter who writes a story? And two, have things changed in your field, is it better now?

  The answer is, yes, it matters. It used to be that I had only a couple of writers I identified with to look at and follow, and now a constellation of writers seems to be revealing itself. It doesn’t mean that all the other stars in the sky cease to exist, only that you can see more shapes in the night sky. I’m sure others are having this same experience.

  Question number two: has it changed? Is it better now? As you can obviously see, it has changed for the better. Thirteen years ago I wouldn’t have thought I’d be writing this introduction, nor that you would be reading some of the stories contained here.

  However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t more changes that must take place. I recall, still, not so long ago, editors telling me I should modify the names of my characters to be less Mexican or that my characters were not relatable because they were Latin American.

  The 2017 #BlackSpecFic Report showed that 4.3% of the stories published by speculative fiction publications were written by Black authors. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s statistics on the number of children’s books by and about people of color show that even though 40% of people in the US are people of color, Black, Latino and Native authors wrote less than 6% of the new children’s books published in 2016. In the field of romance, the 2017 Ripped Bodice’s Diversity Report indicates that 6.2% of all romance books were published by authors of color. The Ripped Bodice is a bookstore and it’s also worth noting that 60% of The Ripped Bodice’s 2017 bestsellers were written by authors of color.

  So, yes, the publishing landscape is changing, but it is easy to overestimate our successes.

  It is easy to declare that diversity is a done deal, or even worse, that diversity is a trend, a fad, which has run its course. It is easy to churn lists that purport to contain the 10 Best Science Fiction Novels of all time and find out that the only woman who made the list was Mary Shelley. Or to find threads with people saying that women can’t write Lovecraftian fiction because women are able to give birth and therefore cannot understand cosmic horror (I am not making this comment up).

  It’s also easy for me to get hate mail for publishing an all-women anthology, including a comment which I screencapped and kept on my desktop for a long time which said that I, and all the women I had published, should be led to the gas chambers, complete with a picture of Hitler.

  So, yes, all of this is easy.

  What is hard is to build a better, more inclusive publishing community. It’s hard to read widely, to read beyond the things that you are used to, to organize events which feature a broad variety of guests, to write lists which go beyond the usual suspects. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. Librarians can make displays that highlight the diversity and variety of genre books available, people in charge of concoms can research new and different speakers, writers can go beyond the customary with their list of Best Science Fiction Novels so that they don’t end up only with Mary Shelley as the lone woman in the field.

  We call speculative fiction the literature of the imagination, so why not imagine a future in which a young writer can find plenty of authors to emulate? A future in which that author is not silent and scared and feeling like she has no stories to tell, as I was 13 years ago when I began my writing journey.

  If you are reading this volume, perhaps it will give you hope for the future of our field. All these tales—whether they be short stories, novelettes or novellas—show you a beautiful and dazzling sky. We live in an ever-expanding universe. This can also be true of speculative fiction.

  Tlazohcamati. Gracias. Thanks. Merci.

  —Silvia Moreno-Garcia, November 2018

  The 2018 Nebula Award Finalists

  Best Novel

  Winner: The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

  Amberlough, Lara Elena Donnelly (Tor)

  The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Theodora Goss (Saga)

  Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory (Knopf; riverrun)

  Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty (Orbit US)

  Jade City, Fonda Lee (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

  Autonomous, Annalee Newitz (Tor; Orbit UK 2018)

  Best Novella

  Winner: All Systems Red, Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

  River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing)

  Passing Strange, Ellen Klages (Tor.com Publishing)

  And Then There Were (N-One), Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny 3–4/17)

  Barry’s Deal, Lawrence M. Schoen (NobleFusion Press)

  The Black Tides of Heaven, JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing)

  Best Novelette

  Winner: A Human Stain, Kelly Robson (Tor.com 1/4/17)

  Dirty Old Town, Richard Bowes (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 5–6/17)

  Weaponized Math, Jonathan P. Brazee (The Expanding Universe, Vol. 3)

  Wind Will Rove, Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s 9–10/17)

  A Series of Steaks, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Clarkesworld 1/17)

  Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time, K.M. Szpara (Uncanny 5–6/17)

  Best Short Story

  Winner: “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™”, Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex 8/17)

  “Fandom for Robots”, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Uncanny 9–10/17)

  “Utopia, LOL?”, Jamie Wahls (Strange Horizons 6/5/17)

  “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand”, Fran Wilde (Uncanny 9–10/17)

  “The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard)”, Matthew Kressel (Tor.com 3/15/17)

  “Carnival Nine”, Caroline M. Yoachim (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 5/11/17)

  The Ray Bradbury Award for

  Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

  Winner: Get Out (Written by Jordan Peele)

  The Good Place: “Michael’s Gambit” (Written by Michael Schur)

&nb
sp; Logan (screenplay by Scott Frank, James Mangold, and Michael Green)

  The Shape of Water (Screenplay by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor)

  Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Written by Rian Johnson)

  Wonder Woman (Screenplay by Allan Heinberg)

  The Andre Norton Award for Outstanding

  Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy Book

  Winner: The Art of Starving, Sam J. Miller (HarperTeen)

  Exo, Fonda Lee (Scholastic Press)

  Weave a Circle Round, Kari Maaren (Tor)

  Want, Cindy Pon (Simon Pulse)

  Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™

  Rebecca Roanhorse

  In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.

  —Sherman Alexie, How to Write the Great American Indian Novel

  You maintain a menu of a half dozen Experiences on your digital blackboard, but Vision Quest is the one the Tourists choose the most. That certainly makes your workday easy. All a Vision Quest requires is a dash of mystical shaman, a spirit animal (wolf usually, but birds of prey are on the upswing this year), and the approximation of a peyote experience. Tourists always come out of the Experience feeling spiritually transformed. (You’ve never actually tried peyote, but you did smoke your share of weed during that one year at Arizona State, and who’s going to call you on the difference?) It’s all 101 stuff, really, these Quests. But no other Indian working at Sedona Sweats can do it better. Your sales numbers are tops.

  Your wife Theresa doesn’t approve of the gig. Oh, she likes you working, especially after that dismal stretch of unemployment the year before last when she almost left you, but she thinks the job itself is demeaning.