Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (41 page)

That’s why I’m here now, getting the new will finalized, setting up the trusts and all of that, before anybody can say I’m too far gone. Been talking to the family too, letting everybody know what to expect. The good news is, nobody objects to the trust for you. You’re not just my lawyer, you’re an old friend.

The trouble is, nobody in my family has ever been cremated. We’ve got that family plot in Oakdale cemetery, right across the street from here. Look, you can see it from your office window. My mother put a lot of store on all of us being buried close together. Some of the family just think cremation is silly, but for others it’s like sacrilege. I might as well ask for voodoo rites at my funeral.

That’s where you come in. You’ve got to make it very clear to all my loving relatives that unless my corpse is cremated, nobody gets anything. The trusts are dissolved, the legacies annulled, and everything goes to AIDS research. Well, hell, there isn’t any vampire research. That includes the trust for you. Essentially, you don’t get paid if I don’t get burned. You know that carrot and stick approach? That’s the carrot.

It’s not selfishness. I’ll be dead, whatever happens. I’m not trying to save myself from turning into a monster. Well, maybe some of that. It’s not a sweet picture, my dead body creeping around in the dark like an animated vacuum cleaner, looking for veins to suck. But mostly it’s the one favor I can do for the world, and this world needs all the favors it can get.

I hope it hasn’t been a mistake, talking to you like this. If I tried it with any of my family, they’d be sure I’d gone over the edge. But I feel a little better now. I’ve done what I can; from here on it’s in your hands. So don’t take this personally, old friend, just hear it as a statement of fact: if you let them bury me uncremated, you’ll be sorry. That’s the stick.

T
he science fiction field seemed to have no boundaries in the 1990s. Six-figure advances no longer made headlines; seven-figure advances were not unheard of; there were even some eight-figure advances, this in a field where more than half the acknowledged classics had been written for two cents a word or less.

There was a time when science fiction movies were solely for the true believers. They were made up of guys in robot suits, scientists’ beautiful daughters who couldn’t get work in “A” movies, and painfully clumsy and obvious special effects. No more. By the end of the decade, more than a dozen of the top twenty all-time box office grossers were science fiction or related films, and mighty few A-list directors and stars didn’t take a shot at one (or more).

There was a time—a lot of people don’t remember it, and the younger ones usually don’t believe it—when
Star Trek
was a dismal flop, when it hung out near the bottom of the Nielsen ratings for the entire three years of its existence before the network, which had given in to Bjo Trimble’s Save Trek campaign once, elected not to do so again. Move the calendar ahead, and counting animation there were over one hundred science fiction shows on television in the 1990s.

Things looked pretty rosy. The Old Wave/New Wave wars were over, the general public was discovering that we weren’t all just writing that crazy Buck Rogers stuff, there were viable publishers everywhere you looked, and there was a constant influx of new, talented writers.

If you looked closely enough, there were some problems too. At the three-quarter mark of the century, there were something like seventeen New York houses with science fiction lines. We published more books in 1999 than 1975, far more . . . but there were only eight houses with science fiction lines (and in another decade there would be only six—that’s not a lot of editorial taste to spread around). The anthology market was incredibly healthy at the beginning of the decade, less so at the end. The magazines had been selling very well in 1990; by 1999 each had lost more than half its circulation, and a new title,
Science Fiction Age
, which was actually the bestselling of them all a year or two into its existence, was gone by the end of the decade.

There were a number of truly fine novels in the 1990s, but I don’t believe any had the immediate classic status of predecessors such as
The Forever War
,
Dune
,
The Left Hand of Darkness
,
Neuromancer
, or
Ender’s Game
. Still, there were some wonderful and popular novels, among them Lois McMaster Bujold’s
Barrayar
and
The Vor Game
, Connie Willis’s
Doomsday Book
, Nancy Kress’s
Beggars in Spain
(an expansion of a now-classic novella), and the truly unique and important trilogy of
Red Mars
,
Green Mars
, and
Blue Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson, each of which won a Hugo or a Nebula.

Speaking of awards, the decade was dominated by Connie Willis, who won seven Nebulas and Hugos, and by 1999 was the all-time leader in both categories. Others to win three or more Hugos and Nebulas combined during the decade include Lois McMaster Bujold (4), Kim Stanley Robinson (3), Nancy Kress (3), Joe Haldeman (5), and your humble undersigned (4). Major work was also done by Robert J. Sawyer, Michael Swanwick, Greg Bear, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, James Morrow, Allen Steele, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harry Turtledove, Maureen McHugh, William Gibson, Neal Stephen-son, and many others.

Among the editors, Gardner Dozois won nine of the ten Hugos given during the decade (there is no Nebula for editing), and Kristine Kathryn Rusch won the other. Among artists (where there is also no Nebula), Bob Eggleton walked away with five Hugos, while Michael Whelan and Don Maitz won two apiece, and Jim Burns picked up the remaining one.

We also had our share of very talented newcomers break into science fiction during the 1990s, including Kage Baker, Ted Chiang, Tobias S. Buckell, Michael Burstein, Nalo Hopkinson, Cory Doctorow, Kay Kenyon, Susan R. Matthews, Laura Resnick, Ellen Klages, Mary Doria Russell, Nicholas A. Di-Chario, Michelle Sagara West, Julie Czerneda, and many more.

We also lost our share of writers: gone were Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Lester del Rey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, James White, Walter M. Miller Jr., Avram Davidson, John Brunner (who became the first writer or fan to die at a Worldcon), Bob Shaw, Judith Merril, Jo Clayton, Frank Belknap Long, Ed Emshwiller, Jack Finney, and more.

A number of our authors appeared regularly on the various bestseller lists: Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, Terry Good-kind, Stephen Donaldson, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Sir Terry Pratchett, Kevin J. Anderson (alone and in collaboration with Brian Herbert), Timothy Zahn, David Weber, and more. Dean Koontz, who used to write halves of Ace Doubles for $1,500 a shot, joined Stephen King as the two writers of the fantastic who belong to that tiny community of authors whose manuscripts command eight-figure advances.

It was no longer difficult to get funding, or stars, or star directors, for science fiction movies. CGI has made it possible to put anything you can imagine on the screen, which we all thought would be a boon to the cinema . . . but I have come to the conclusion that it may be the very worst thing to happen to science fiction movies, because they can now throw so many mind-blowing images at you that more and more often the images are taking the place of plot and characterization.

This is not to say the audiences weren’t pleased, and weren’t willing to shell out multiples of $100 million at the box office. 1990’s
Jurassic Park
took in a billion dollars by the time the DVDs were through selling. (It also asked you to believe that a hungry T. rex cannot spot you from six inches away if you don’t move.) The sequel,
The Lost World
, another megahit, suggests that a tyrannosaur can catch an elevated train, but cannot catch a bunch of panicky tourists fleeing on foot in a straight line.
Armageddon
, which became Disney’s top live-action grosser until Johnny Depp visited the Caribbean, asked you to believe that some not-very-bright wildcatters could become astronauts easier than highly-trained physically-fit astronauts could be taught to find and extract oil.
Starship Troopers
poured money into the production, but would have been better titled “Ken and Barbie Go to War.” The long-awaited fourth
Star Wars
movie (or first, if you’re into fictional chronology) was in profit before a single foot of film was shot, which was all for the best.
Terminator 2
and
The Matrix
had their moments, and the latter sported a stunning cyberpunk look, but I think at decade’s end the two most artistically successful science fiction films were two of the least demanding and ambitious (which may well explain why):
Men in Black
and
Galaxy Quest,
a pair of delightful comedies.

(I have been discussing theatrical releases here. Actually, the best fantastic film of the decade was
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit
, scripted by Ray Bradbury from his own story. It had charm, grace, poignancy, and beauty in abundance—so of course it was released directly to video.)

I gave up on television in the early 1980s, and have not watched a single network series since then, so I asked a number of fans from my Listserv to suggest the best of the 1990s television shows, and it is their consensus that the following were the best of the lot:
Babylon 5
,
The X-Files
,
Highlander
,
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
,
Star Trek: Voyager
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
,
Lois and Clark
,
Sliders
,
Xena
,
Third Rock from the Sun
, and
Stargate SG1
.

As the decade drew to a close, no one was quite sure what was coming next. But with the advantage of hindsight, it’s not too difficult to see that there were two major innovations between the end of the New Wave as a movement, and the beginning of the new millennium: William Gibson became the creator and the finest exemplar of cyberpunk; and Anne Rice decided that vampires, which had hitherto been unclean dead things that sucked away your lifeblood, were sexy.

The critics loved cyberpunk and snickered at vampire romances. Which is one more reason why we don’t pay much attention to the critics. I doubt that there are three cyberpunk novels a year these days; I also doubt that there are fewer than ten vampire romances a week, and a lot of them live on the bestseller list. It’s a billion-dollar industry, and more and more science fiction publishers are starting to yield to the pressure.

I don’t think anybody in the 1990s saw it coming. So much for science fiction’s vaunted talent for prognostication.