Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (48 page)

Clearly I needed something bigger. Much bigger. But I didn’t know any bigger sigils—well, I knew some bigger sigils in principle, but not in action. What would Nini Mo do? She’d dazzle them with a Scintilla Sigil, or confuse them with an Ambiguity Sigil, or turn them into goats with a Transubstantiation Sigil. But while I knew
of
these sigils, I did not know their Gramatica.

The outlaw was advancing down the aisle. My mind had gone blank with terror—surely not a problem Nini Mo ever faced—and a funny taste was growing in the back of my throat, a rotten meaty taste. I swallowed hard, but that just made me gag, and when I opened my mouth to spit, a low ominous noise came out instead, a noise that vibrated my teeth and made the hair on the back of my neck tingle. A pale sickly glow began to seep through the car, the kind of light that makes the living look dead and the dead look decomposed. With detached horror, I realized that the glow was coming from me. I stood up and stepped out into the aisle, coldfire writhing like galvanic green ribbons from my outstretched fingertips. The outlaw dropped his gun and screeched.

“Flora—what are you doing?” Udo asked from somewhere behind me, his voice breaking.

The Word exploded from my mouth, its glittering coldfire letters whirling in a haze of furious fuliginous blackness, its edges as sharp and black as a Birdie obsidian sacrificial knife. The Word flung down the aisle, making
whomp-whomp
noises, and caught the outlaw square in the kisser. He screamed, a horrible sound that plunged into my brain like an ice pick in the ear. For a moment his head was separated from his body by a thick line of blackness, and then his head flew upward, buoyant on a spray of blood. He was still screaming, or maybe that was air howling as it escaped from his neck. Whatever the noise, it was horrific.

A sharp poke pushed me out of my daze. Udo was shoving me toward the emergency door. I crawled over to the door and rolled out, catching myself just before I hit the pavement, where the Zu-Zu waited. Udo prodded at Jack, who staggered out after me. We broke into a tearing run, eager to leave the howling shrieks and screams and the pallid glow of the horsecar as far behind as possible. No one followed.

Somehow, somewhere, we stopped running. Or rather, Udo and the Zu-Zu stopped, and then I couldn’t run anymore and had to stop, too. In fact, not just stop, but sit down, not just sit down, but collapse, which I did. The curb was dirty and wet, but I didn’t care. I had to get new stays; I was squeezed so tightly into the old ones that my lungs were sucking against each other, and all the blood was bouncing around inside my skull, so that I felt as though I was going to upchuck.

Udo leaned over, folding his arms around his stomach, gasping. “What . . . hell . . . Flora . . . hell? Your hair . . . on fire . . .” His braids flopped over his bright red face.

“An Ominous Apparition, followed by an Active Protective Sigil,” the Zu-Zu said. She was barely winded, but her hair, I noticed happily, had become even more disarranged. “Where did you learn all that, Flora?”

“I didn’t,” I gurgled. “I dunno—”

“Whatever. I want a coffee,” the Zu-Zu said. “Let’s go to el Mono Real, Udo, and you can get me a coffee.”

I straightened up and tried to look refreshed and relaxed, as though I invoked Ominous Apparitions, flung forth Active Protective Sigils, and ran pell-mell from killers all the time, no big. What I really wanted to do was expel the contents of my tum and then collapse on the ground in a little pile of goo. “What about Springheel Jack?”

The outlaw had kept pace with our flight and had stopped with our stop; he didn’t look winded at all, or concerned, or worried. Just blank and drooly.

“Oh, he can have coffee, too, if he wants,” the Zu-Zu answered. “Come on, Udo. We’re only a block from el Mono Real. I’m perishing.”

“Ayah, so,” Udo agreed, as though he was actually going to go with the Zu-Zu for coffee, thus leaving me to wait and see if the outlaws caught up with us.

“Hey! What about Jack’s gang?” I demanded.

“Are you kidding, Flora? I think at this point they probably know better than to mess with us,” Udo said. “Come on, let’s get coffee.”

“And what are you going to do about Jack?”

The Zu-Zu was already drifting down the street, a blot of imperious spookiness who didn’t seem to care if we followed her or not. Udo glanced at her and then back at me, and took two steps in her direction. “Turn him in tomorrow, Flora. Come on.”

“I have to get home, Udo. I’ve got a curfew, remember, and so do you.”

“Don’t be a stick—”

The Zu-Zu had stopped and turned. “Udo!”

“Come on, Flora,” Udo said, half-pleadingly.

“I have to go home, Udo. You can go get coffee, if you want—with your pallid girl and your zombie pard. But I have to go home.”

Udo stood up straight and said loftily, “Then go. No one is stopping you.”

And with that, Udo trotted after the Zu-Zu, Springheel Jack close on his heels, leaving me standing alone in the middle of the empty street.

S
ince mass entertainment began, in the theaters of ancient Greece, or perhaps just as likely around a Neanderthal’s campfire, stories often came with a maxim, a warning, or a moral intended for the public welfare that the storyteller wanted to get across to his listeners. “The gods would be angry if we are disobedient to their will.” “Obey the king, the senate, your master, your father.” “Do not waste the bounty of the earth.” “Have compassion for the weak and the poor.” “Do not fear the stranger, for he may have gifts to give you.” An effective and compelling script, well acted, and set perhaps just a little outside their own sphere of existence, would amuse the members of the audience and give them something to think about later. Sneak an idea into their subconscious, and you can change the world for the better. Some playwrights were more subtle in their approach than others, but their intention was the same: to change the world’s mind for the better by presenting a new idea in a way that was palatable to the audience.

For over a hundred years, science fiction films have provided an excellent medium for the promotion of new or important ideas. Tolerance, new technology, ecology, warnings against nuclear war, pollution, communism or the dehumanization of mankind have all been tucked into—or plastered across—feature films.

The trend began early in cinema. George Melies’s ground-breaking film
From the Earth to the Moon
(1902) was not even plausibly scientific, but it introduced a visual representation of rockets and space travel. Audiences could now aspire to land on the moon. The idea was planted; though it took nearly seventy years to come to fruition, it excited the imagination of audiences throughout that time.

Much more a warning than an idea to which to aspire was Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent blockbuster,
Metropolis
. The epic black-and-white film was based partly upon a novel by the director’s wife, Thea von Harbou, as well as other science fiction novels and stories of the day and Lang’s observation of society in post-war Europe. Future society became divided between the haves and the far larger population of have-nots to the point where there is little to no contact between them. The latter live only to supply the wants and whims of the former. Their misery goes unobserved by the privileged class until the son of the dictator falls under the influence of Maria, a mysterious and eloquent woman, sees the broken half of society for himself and vows to put an end to slavery and poverty.

A similar warning that mankind could become dehumanized by dividing itself into the social elite and the working drones came in the George Pal version of
The Time Machine
, based on the novel by H.G. Wells. Those remaining dregs who had a purpose, however base, would retain intelligence, while those who existed only to enjoy life would lose their potential. As the Morlocks had become cannibals who preyed upon the ethereal Eloi, Wells’s story was an extreme example of the divergence of the two halves of humanity’s potential. Filmmakers have rarely claimed to be social architects, but a visual representation of horror is a powerful inducement to an audience to retain all of its faculties.

The original film of
The Thing
(1951), directed by Howard Hawks (listed as producer, but reportedly also its director), was based upon
Who Goes There?
by John W. Campbell. Its subtext reflects the public fears of the time about atomic weapons and invasion by dangerous enemies that can masquerade as friends. The substitution of creatures for human beings was a frequent theme, including such movies as
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956, remade in 1978). At the time, paranoia over communism and other movements to destroy society was widespread.
Invasion
made the hidden monster real instead of philosophical—you could not tell by looking who was the enemy who would destroy you until it was too late.

Fear of nuclear weapons was a pervasive theme, usually characterized as causing the uprising of ordinary creatures mutated into giants by radiation, such as
Them
, about giant ants, and
The Beginning of the End
, featuring enormous grasshoppers wreaking havoc upon Chicago. The most popular in this vein has to be the Japanese cult film,
Gojira
, or as it was renamed in the United States,
Godzilla
. The original film saw the giant lizard awakened as a result of atomic explosions. Along the way, Godzilla became beloved, even a hero, when fear of bombs gave way to fear of environmental pollution, and he defeated the eponymous enemy in
Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster
. (The closing song, translated from the Japanese, begins, “Savior! Savior!”) A more heavy-handed production was
The War of the Worlds
(1953), an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel. Its special effects evoked the horror of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the silhouettes made of soot that were all that was left of victims of the invaders.

Directed by Robert Wise,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951) offered the opposite thesis, in which humankind itself was the enemy of nature, by introducing an intelligent alien who brings a warning that Earth must be destroyed if it did not embrace peace. The way in which the characters treated the messenger, Klaatu, suggested that humankind wasn’t ready for interstellar peace, but perhaps one day it could be.

Science fiction had its first A-list picture in 1957 with
Forbidden Planet
, starring Walter Pigeon and Leslie Nielsen. The plot was based upon William Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
in a futuristic setting. Like
The Tempest
, it showed humanity’s greed and folly, but held out hope it could become wise in time.

Disney joined the SF legions with a big-budget picture,
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
, Jules Verne’s story of a disaffected sea captain whose unique submarine, the
Nautilus
, predated modern nuclear submarines. Sick of humankind, Captain Nemo had turned his back upon the land in favor of the ocean. Beings who dwelled in its depths took only what they needed from nature.

One of the most haunting films with a theme of preservation of the environment was
Silent Running
(1972), a Douglas Trumbull picture that starred Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell. The ship carrying the last of Earth’s precious forests is ordered destroyed by the powers that be. Lowell cannot in conscience carry out the order, and goes on the run. His only helpers on board are three small worker robots—drones—who were the precursors to
Star Wars
’s R2D2: Huey, Dewey and Louie. The story is a tragedy because the freighters are ordered to jettison their irreplaceable cargo in the interests of immediate profit. Lowell sacrifices himself rather than allow the last of Earth’s forests to die.

This year’s winner of the Nebula for best script,
WALL-E
, offers the gentle story of a lonely robot who finds romance among the trash left behind after humanity departed for the stars. The stark landscape of rotting discards and rusted machinery throws into sharp relief the single living plant that WALL-E discovers. There could be no more poignant reminder that our ecology is fragile, but Pixar did not shove it down the audience’s collective throat—instead, we are drawn to care more about the feelings of a mechanical trash collector, cheer on the heroics of a complaisant human starship captain who learns to fight bureaucracy and his own indolence, and rejoice in not one, but two love stories. We can’t help but notice the desolation of Earth, and should go away resolving to live greener lives.