Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 Read Free

which have become extinct. Although the men remain essentially human, twice a year they are driven to travel the routes that birds once flew during their migrations. As part of their journey, the men make periodic stops to perform dances in places such as Yellowstone National Park, choreographing works that draw on the traits of those vanished birds—and that also make millions of dollars for the avaricious backers who sponsor their shows. The performances evoke the avian multitudes that once soared through our skies in the freedom of flight, yet that very evocation of freedom becomes a form of prison for the dancers.
    Audiences come to the shows to be entertained, amused, and, yes, to see what fate might befall those dancers who dare to seek the closest that humans can come to unaided flight. As such, the story explores the ramifications of the human fascination with death as entertainment. Sparrow hints at an insidious end to humanity; will we become so inured to the loss of life through our entertainment that we participate in our own demise? Rather than a dramatic apocalypse, the story suggests that human extinction may come from within, prodded by the same instincts that led the characters in the story to reduce the once-great species of birds that flew our skies to an echo found only in human dances.
    Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.
    â€”Thomas Huxley, Science and Culture: And Other Essays , volume 3
    Jo Walton turns around the idea of combining science and the arts in her metafictional novel Among Others . Here the art is writing; the book is told through the narrator’s love of literature, in particular, science fiction. As such, the novel invokes many of our great speculative writers, specifically those from the science fiction canon of several decades ago. Literature plays a role in Walton’s novel similar to the role played by art, music, or dance for other works in this anthology. But the art that Walton uses to frame her story is our art, the literature of the fantastic, as illustrated, for example, by this anthology. The Nebula Aweards Showcase 2013 doesn’t dance, sing, paint, strum, or drum—but it becomes a recursive loop, one constructed out of its stories, which use other arts to frame the literary works so that the anthology becomes the art that frames itself.
    Metafiction is a story that refers to literature and its conventions as part of the story. In other words, the tale is self-referential. The idea is that it exposes the illusions created by a work of fiction, blurring the line between the “real” world of the reader and the imagined world of the story. Walton employs this technique to good effect in her novel, using speculative fiction to frame a story of fantasy, even prodding the reader to ask if the magical aspects to the story are “real” within the context of the narrator’s tale or a fiction within a fiction masquerading as reality for the fictional characters.
    In analogy with the self-referential loop that arises from the description of this anthology as an art that frames itself, it could be said that Walton’s book leaves out one important novel in the works she referenced— Among Others , by Jo Walton. What a satisfying creation of fractal metafiction that would be; the book refers to the book that refers to the book that refers to . . . well, you get the idea. It could be a recursive triumph worthy of Mandelbrot, the mathematician who created the gorgeous fractal known as the Mandelbrot set, which repeats itself the mesmerizing structure of its images at ever-finer and finer detail. For me, Among Others felt close to a literary version of the online video that shows the Mandelbrot fractal at greater and greater magnification, offering a musical glimpse into the ultimate representation of self-referential art. 2
    But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),