Nebula Awards Showcase 2015, Page 2

  The Andre Norton Award is not a Nebula Award, but it follows Nebula nomination, voting, and award rules and guidelines. It was founded in 2005 to honor popular science fiction and fantasy author Andre Norton.

  2013 NEBULA AWARDS FINAL BALLOT

  NOVEL

  Winner: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

  Nominees:

  We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Marian Wood)

  The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (William Morrow; Headline)

  Fire with Fire by Charles E. Gannon (Baen)

  Hild by Nicola Griffith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

  The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata (Mythic Island)

  A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar (Small Beer)

  The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (Harper)

  NOVELLA

  Winner: “The Weight of the Sunrise” by Vylar Kaftan (Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2013)

  Nominees:

  “Wakulla Springs” by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages (Tor.com, October 2, 2013)

  “Annabel Lee” by Nancy Kress (New Under the Sun, Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick)

  “Burning Girls” by Veronica Schanoes (Tor.com, June 19, 2013)

  “Trial of the Century” by Lawrence M. Schoen (lawrencemschoen.com, August 2013; World Jumping, Hadley Rille Books)

  Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean)

  NOVELETTE

  Winner: “The Waiting Stars” by Aliette de Bodard (The Other Half of the Sky, Candlemark & Gleam)

  Nominees:

  “Paranormal Romance” by Christopher Barzak (Lightspeed, June 2013)

  “They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass” by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2013)

  “Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters” by Henry Lien (Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2013)

  “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” by Ken Liu (Lightspeed, August 2013)

  “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” by Sarah Pinsker (Strange Horizons, July 1, 2013, and July 8, 2013)

  SHORT STORY

  Winner: “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky (Apex Magazine, March 2013)

  Nominees:

  “The Sounds of Old Earth” by Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed, January 2013)

  “Selkie Stories Are for Losers” by Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons, January 7, 2013)

  “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” by Kenneth Schneyer (Clockwork Phoenix 4, Mythic Delirium Books)

  “Alive, Alive Oh” by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley (Lightspeed, June 2013)

  RAY BRADBURY AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING DRAMIC PRESENTATION

  Winner: Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón (director); Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón (writers) (Warner Bros.)

  Nominees:

  Doctor Who: “The Day of the Doctor,” Nick Hurran (director); Steven Moffat (writer) (BBC Wales)

  Europa Report, Sebastián Cordero (director); Philip Gelatt (writer) (Start Motion Pictures)

  Her, Spike Jonze (director); Spike Jonze (writer) (Warner Bros.)

  The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Francis Lawrence (director); Simon Beaufoy and Michael deBruyn (writers) (Lionsgate)

  Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro (director); Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro (writers) (Warner Bros.)

  ANDRE NORTON AWARD FOR YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

  Winner: Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson (Grand Central)

  Nominees:

  The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black (Little, Brown; Indigo)

  When We Wake by Karen Healey (Allen & Unwin; Little, Brown)

  The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)

  Hero by Alethea Kontis (Harcourt)

  September Girls by Bennett Madison (Harper Teen)

  A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty (Levine)

  NEBULA AWARD WINNER

  BEST SHORT STORY

  “IF YOU WERE A DINOSAUR, MY LOVE”

  RACHEL SWIRSKY

  Rachel Swirsky has previously won a 2010 Nebula Award and has also been nominated for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” was published in Apex Magazine.

  If you were a dinosaur, my love, then you would be a T-Rex. You’d be a small one, only five foot ten inches, the same height as human-you. You’d be fragile-boned and you’d walk with as delicate and polite a gait as you could manage on massive talons. Your eyes would gaze gently from beneath your bony brow ridge.

  If you were a T-Rex, then I would become a zookeeper so that I could spend all my time with you. I’d bring you raw chickens and live goats. I’d watch the gore shining on your teeth. I’d make my bed on the floor of your cage, in the moist dirt, cushioned by leaves. When you couldn’t sleep, I’d sing you lullabies.

  If I sang you lullabies, I’d soon notice how quickly you picked up music. You’d harmonize with me, your rough, vibrating voice a strange counterpoint to mine. When you thought I was asleep, you’d cry unrequited love songs into the night.

  If you sang unrequited love songs, I’d take you on tour. We’d go to Broadway. You’d stand onstage, talons digging into the floorboards. Audiences would weep at the melancholy beauty of your singing.

  If audiences wept at the melancholy beauty of your singing, they’d rally to fund new research into reviving extinct species. Money would flood into scientific institutions. Biologists would reverse engineer chickens until they could discover how to give them jaws with teeth. Paleontologists would mine ancient fossils for traces of collagen. Geneticists would figure out how to build a dinosaur from nothing by discovering exactly what DNA sequences code everything about a creature, from the size of its pupils to what enables a brain to contemplate a sunset. They’d work until they’d built you a mate.

  If they built you a mate, I’d stand as the best woman at your wedding. I’d watch awkwardly in green chiffon that made me look sallow as I listened to your vows. I’d be jealous, of course, and also sad, because I want to marry you. Still, I’d know that it was for the best that you marry another creature like yourself, one that shares your body and bone and genetic template. I’d stare at the two of you standing together by the altar and I’d love you even more than I do now. My soul would feel light because I’d know that you and I had made something new in the world and at the same time revived something very old. I would be borrowed, too, because I’d be borrowing your happiness. All I’d need would be something blue.

  If all I needed was something blue, I’d run across the church, heels clicking on the marble, until I reached a vase by the front pew. I’d pull out a hydrangea the shade of the sky and press it against my heart and my heart would beat like a flower. I’d bloom. My happiness would become petals. Green chiffon would turn into leaves. My legs would be pale stems, my hair delicate pistils. From my throat, bees would drink exotic nectars. I would astonish everyone assembled, the biologists and the paleontologists and the geneticists, the reporters and the rubberneckers and the music aficionados, all those people who—deceived by the helix-and-fossil trappings of cloned dinosaurs—believed that they lived in a science fictional world when really they lived in a world of magic where anything was possible.

  If we lived in a world of magic where anything was possible, then you would be a dinosaur, my love. You’d be a creature of courage and strength but also gentleness. Your claws and fangs would intimidate your foes effortlessly. Whereas you—fragile, lovely, human you—must rely on wits and charm.

  A T-Rex, even a small one, would never have to stand against five blustering men soaked in gin and malice. A T-Rex would bare its fangs and they would cower. They’d hide beneath the tables instead of knocking them over. They’d grasp each other for comfort instead of seizing the pool cues with which they beat you, calling you a fag, a towel-head, a shemale, a sissy, a spic, every epithet they could think of, regardless of whether it had
anything to do with you or not, shouting and shouting as you slid to the floor in the slick of your own blood.

  If you were a dinosaur, my love, I’d teach you the scents of those men. I’d lead you to them quietly, oh so quietly. Still, they would see you. They’d run. Your nostrils would flare as you inhaled the night and then, with the suddenness of a predator, you’d strike. I’d watch as you decanted their lives—the flood of red; the spill of glistening, coiled things—and I’d laugh, laugh, laugh.

  If I laughed, laughed, laughed, I’d eventually feel guilty. I’d promise never to do something like that again. I’d avert my eyes from the newspapers when they showed photographs of the men’s tearful widows and fatherless children, just as they must avert their eyes from the newspapers that show my face. How reporters adore my face, the face of the paleontologist’s fiancée with her half-planned wedding, bouquets of hydrangeas already ordered, green chiffon bridesmaid dresses already picked out. The paleontologist’s fiancée who waits by the bedside of a man who will probably never wake.

  If you were a dinosaur, my love, then nothing could break you, and if nothing could break you, then nothing could break me. I would bloom into the most beautiful flower. I would stretch joyfully toward the sun. I’d trust in your teeth and talons to keep you/me/us safe now and forever from the scratch of chalk on pool cues, and the scuff of the nurses’ shoes in the hospital corridor, and the stuttering of my broken heart.

  NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE

  BEST SHORT STORY

  “THE SOUNDS OF OLD EARTH”

  MATTHEW KRESSEL

  This is Matthew Kressel’s first nomination for a Nebula Award. “The Sounds of Old Earth” was first published in Lightspeed.

  Earth has grown quiet since everyone’s shipped off to the new one. I walk New Paltz’s empty streets with an ox-mask tight about my face. An acidic rain mists my body, and a thick fog obscures the vac-sealed storefronts. Last week they hauled the Pyramids of Giza to New Earth. The week before, Stonehenge. The week before that, Versailles and a good chunk of the Great Wall. But the minor landmarks are too expensive to move, the NEU says, and so New Paltz’s Huguenot Street, seven centuries old, will remain here, to be sliced to pieces in a few months when the planetary lasers begin to cut the Earth apart.

  I pump nano into my bloodstream to alleviate my creeping osteoarthritis and nod to a few fellow holdouts. We take our strolls through these dusty streets at ten every morning, our little act of rebellion against the mandatory evacuation orders. I wave hello to Marta, ninety-six, in her stylishly pink ox-mask. I shake hands with Dr. Wu, who performed the op to insert my cranial when I was a boy. I smile at Cordelia, one hundred and thirty three, as she trots by on her quad servo-legs. All of us have lived in New Paltz our entire lives and all of us plan to die here.

  Someone laughs behind me, a sound I haven’t heard in a long time. A group of teenage boys and girls ride ancient turbocycles over the cracked pavement toward me. They skid to a halt and their eager, flushed faces take me in. None wear ox-masks, which is against the law. I like them already.

  “Hey shinhun!” a boy says. “Do you know where the frogs are?”

  Before I can answer, an attractive girl with a techplant on her cheek blows a dreadlock of green hair from her eyes and says, “We heard some wankuzidi has an old house where he keeps a gose-load of frogs.” A boy pops a wheelie and another takes a hit of braino from an orange inhaler. A third puffs a cigalectric and exhales fluorescent smoke.

  “Behind my house I have a pond with a few frogs still alive,” I say.

  “Xin!” she exclaims. “How ’bout you ride with us? I’m Lin.”

  These kids are as high as orbitals, but it’s not as if I have much left to lose. “Abner,” I say.

  And just like that I’m hanging on to her waist as we speed toward my house over broken roads no ground vehicle has used in decades. The wind in my face feels exhilarating.

  “We’re from Albany,” Lin says, “We tried taking the old Interstate down, but after Juan got tossed when he hit a cheeda crack, we decided to go local. Took us yungyeh!”

  The stascreen around my property makes my fifty acres of forest flicker like water in sunlight. It’s a matter of pride that I keep it functioning at high efficiency; after all, I designed the damn technology. When we pass through the screen’s charged threshold, I take off my ox-mask, and breathe deep. The kids smile when they smell the fertile earth, the decaying leaves.

  “It don’t smell like this in Albany,” Lin says.

  We park the cycles on the overgrown grass and I lead them into the woods behind my house. The kids stare up at the huge maples and birches and fall quiet.

  “The frogs croak loudest at sunset and before it rains,” I say. “That’s when the males are trying to attract a mate.” The kids giggle as they leap over branches. “If you really want to hear them, you should stay until it gets dark.”

  “You got anything to eat?” a boy says. “We haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

  I search inside the house and return with some readimades, pretty much all you can buy on Earth these days, while the kids shudder and wobble as they inhale braino. The green-haired Lin wanders off to vomit in the trees.

  “Is she going to be all right?” I ask a boy.

  “Oh, Lin always pukes after her first hit. Want some?” He offers a red inhaler, but I decline.

  We sit beside the pond, all of us squeezed on a log. Lin sits next to me, and I pop up the straw of the readimade for her. “You okay?” I say.

  “Yeah, I always get all shunbeen when I deepen.”

  “It’s probably none of my business,” I say. “But shouldn’t you kids be in school or something?”

  “School closed four months ago,” she says. “Not enough teachers.”

  “So what do you do all day?”

  She wipes saliva from her cheek and shrugs. “I don’t know. This.”

  Another boy goes off to puke in the woods.

  “What about you?” she says. “You live here all by yourself?”

  I nod.

  “And what do you do all day? Hang out with the frogs?”

  “Most of my time I just try to keep the stascreen working.”

  “That your job or something?”

  “Used to be. I was a stascreen engineer for fifty-one years. I designed the nanofilters that keep ecosystems like this free of envirotoxins. But the NRDC laid me off four years back.”

  “Why? This place is xin!”

  I smile wanly. “Because toxfiltering’s a dead business now. People are only interested in making new life, not preserving the old.”

  She seems to take me in for the first time. “And how old is this place, Abner? These trees look cheeda ancient.”

  “I know that when my ancestor built this house four hundred years ago, the frog pond was already here.”

  She sighs. “Fucking NEU making you leave this place?”

  “They’re making everyone leave.”

  She throws a rock into the pond, and a dozen frogs squeak away in fright.

  “Please,” I say, gently touching her arm. “You’ll scare them off.”

  “How long?” she says, giving me a tender look, and I’m not sure if she means the frogs or my eviction.

  “Soon.”

  The kids grow hungry again. I had been saving some hard-to-find vegisteaks for my grandkids, but they haven’t visited in ages. As I grill them on the deck the smoke rises through the trees, and the dipping sun sends girders of light through the branches.

  The kids inhale more braino, howl with laughter, and Lin pukes again. And when they tire, I glimpse something desperate in their bloodshot eyes, something I’ve seen in the expressions of Cordelia and Dr. Wu and Marta and the other holdouts. Regret doesn’t spare you just because you’re young.

  “You cycled all the way from Albany for this?” I ask Lin.

  “Nothing but dust and skyscrapers there,” she says. “No real trees. We heard this was xin. Do you have
kids, Abner?”

  The question catches me off-guard. “Yeah, a son and daughter. And two grandkids. You sort of remind me of my granddaughter, Rachael.”

  She pauses to consider this. “They come here lots?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Why not? I’d be here every day.”

  “They’ve moved.” I point to the sky.

  She frowns, and her body sags like an old tree. “We’re moving too.”

  “New Earth?”

  She harrumphs. “Nah, that’s only for rich kids. We’re going to Wal-Mart Toyota.”

  “Haven’t heard of it.”

  “You wouldn’t. It’s like cheeda ancient, one of the first orbitals. But you gotta go where they send you, or else, you know?”

  “I know,” I say, staring at the upside-down trees reflected in the water.

  Night creeps over the forest and the frogs begin their mating calls in earnest. The croaking rises to a din, and the kids pause and listen. The glorious stars emerge, and I’m not sure if it’s my imagination, but the frogs seem to plead to them, over and over again, “Save us, save us, save us!”

  We listen for a while, until the frogs tire. “It’s late,” I say. “It’s a long way back to Albany. Why don’t you kids stay? There are plenty of beds.”

  So we head inside. I set them up with fresh linen I haven’t used in years, and during the night I hear fucking and shuffling and laughing as I pour myself tumbler after tumbler of rye whiskey until I pass out. Late in the night, I hear someone whimpering outside my door, and I rise groggily from bed. Lin sits in the hallway, her eyes as red as cinders as she looks up at me.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, wiping away tears. “I didn’t know that was your bedroom.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” she says as she climbs to her feet.

  “You okay?”

  “I was just thinking. You don’t know us, Abner, but you welcomed us into your home.”