Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 Read Free Page B

sat in the air-conditioned reading room absorbed in a book about bees. I don’t remember the title or the author, but I will never forget how much I loved its tale of great bee adventure.
    I remembered that book when I read E. Lily Yu’s story “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees.” Yu extrapolates the behavior of bees and wasps as known to modern science into a tale set in the village of Yiwei, which in Mandarin Chinese roughly translates as “to suppose.” It is an apt name for the opening locale of a story that concerns map-making wasps and their conflicts with bees both revolutionary and not. The societies of these remarkable insects are portrayed with depth and a gentle humor. Their cultures serve as a foil for the other culture in the story, that of the humans. The tale offers an unusual twist on science fiction stories of first contact and a salient commentary on human political systems of Earth.
    Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
    â€”Simonides of Ceos, in “On the Glory of the Athenians,”
by Plutarch, in The Moralia , Book 4
    Amal El-Mohtar’s poem “Peach-Creamed Honey” gives bees a very different look. They are among the many images she invokes with her sensual poem that won the 2011 Rhysling Award in the short form category. The sheer beauty of the writing is a pleasure to read, like a song. As I write this, it inspires my mind to compose melodies, edgily sweet, a haunting fusion of Western and Near Eastern music with a mesmerizing drumbeat, all conjured by these lines from the poem:
    â€œAnd I know she’ll let me tell her how the peaches lost their way
    how they fell out of a wagon on a sweaty summer’s day,
    how the buzz got all around that there was sugar to be had,
    and the bees came singing, and the bees came glad.”
    C. S. E. Cooney, the 2011 Rhysling Award winner in the long form category, also treats the reader to gratifyingly evocative language in “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her lyrical word pictures evoke a fantastic land in the deep sea. At turns graceful and irreverent, the poem is a sequel to the traditional Scandinavian ballad “Agnete and the Merman.” Cooney offers the ill-behaved merman a second chance for happiness, though at first he refuses to notice. The clever contrasts between the conventions of traditional folktales and the sensibility of a modern woman make for a delicious mix in this poem.
    Pouring forth its seas everywhere, then, the ocean envelops the earth and fills its deeper chasms.
    â€”Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
    Brad R. Torgersen offers a science fiction take on the deep sea in his story “Ray of Light.” Although the world he evokes with such careful detail is here on Earth, it is as alien to most of us as another planet. “Ray of Light” centers on the confinement of Earth’s last humans in undersea settlements after the surface has become unlivable. Torgersen uses the milieu to frame a teenager’s alienation, not only her rebellion against her father, but also against her environment. The setting exerts a literary pressure on the characters analogous to the pressure of the deep sea that dominates their lives. It didn’t surprise me that the means by which the young people came together in secret to plan was through a music club. Although music played a relatively small part compared to the arts in other stories in this anthology, I found it a satisfying accent for the tale of a father’s struggles to accept his child’s transition into adulthood.
    Sauerkraut is tolerant, for it seems to be a well of contradictions. Not that it would preach a gastronomic neutrality that would endure all heresies. It rejects dogmatism and approves of individual tastes.
    â€”Julien Freund, director of the Institute of Sociology in Strasbourg,
Les Saisons d’Alsace
    Ferrett Steinmetz sweeps us