Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 Read Free Page A

and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze   .   .   .
    â€”Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
    The Club Story has a long tradition in science fiction. Such a tale consists of two parts: a frame that describes a club or other place where the narrator is relating his story within a story, and the tale itself, which the narrator often claims involved him. In the words of John Clute, “A club story is a tale told by one person to others in a place where the story can be related safely, either a collection featuring one teller with many tales or several storytellers taking turns.” Clute, one of our two Solstice Award winners this year, offers here an essay on the Club Story adapted from his article in the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . Not only does it form a compelling entry in the discussion of fiction as art form, but the essay itself is a form of art in its construction for an online audience, illustrating how the electronic age is changing the way we present literature. For the paper copy of this anthology, we can’t give the hyperlinks that allow readers to click on words and phrases from the essay to find connected entries in the encyclopedia, creating a hypertext document. However, you can enjoy the essay in its original electronic form in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction at www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/club_story .
    I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog; therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking: in the meantime let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.
    â€”Don John, in William Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing
    Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.
    â€”George Bernard Shaw, “Literary Censorship in England,” Current Opinion
    In her all-too-short story “Ado,” Connie Willis uses the art of literature in a satire that, beneath its lighthearted comedy, gives a satisfying smack to censorship. The “world” she creates lies in the not-so-distant future where the constraints on what teachers may teach is stringently limited for fear of offending someone. Anyone. For all that it is amusing, the story also offers a sobering look at what could happen to our children and their futures if we allow censors to eviscerate the literature they read. In the world of “Ado,” I’ve already written too much—
    Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot. Others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
    â€”widely attributed to Pablo Picasso
    Another theme that struck me about the stories on this year’s ballot is the diversity in the portrayal of both real cultures on Earth and those formed in the imaginations of the writers. At its best, speculative fiction can evoke astonishing universes. We paint prose pictures of other places, other worlds, other suns. Ironically, in earlier days of science fiction, the “alien” worlds depicted in many of our works were sometimes less alien than other cultures on our own planet. The current ballot illustrates the maturing of the genre. It is a cornucopia of world building, not only for imagined places, but also in exploring the people, ways of life, and ideas on our own planet that come from other cultures besides the West.
    Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.
    â€”Carl Sagan, Cosmos
    When I was a child, about age eight or nine, I remember being at my grandparents' Spanish-style home in Escondido, California, not the endless metropolis that area has become now, but back in the days when it was a sleepy little town among the avocado farms. With nothing to do on a day baking beneath a relentless summer sun, I wandered down to the local library and