Nebula Awards Blog

Fantastic Voyages

2009-07-01T00:16:01-06:00

Humans are born with wanderlust; the lure of the long migration out of Africa is in our blood. And I suspect that as soon as boats were invented, our ancestors discovered the thrill of the sea voyage into the unknown. I think of this when I walk my dogs along the bluff in Long Beach and see two great ocean liners, one the Queen Mary that will never go to sea again, and the other a ship of the Carnival Cruise Line that journeys up and down the coasts of Southern California and Mexico with its load of holiday-makers and sightseers. When we are prevented from voyaging in person, by finances or health or circumstance, we have always turned to the next best thing, the tales of other explorers’ adventures. One of the first of these ancient, popular accounts of exploration by sea voyage still moves us today with its images of strangeness and danger: Homer’s Odyssey.

The Venetians made their reputation as formidable explorers of the watery world early on; they were joined by the Norse, the Portugese, the Spanish, and later the English. And we cannot forget the voyages undertaken on faith across an uncharted expanse of Pacific Ocean by the peoples of Micronesia. Nor should we overlook the voyages of trade and exploration of the Chinese fleets during the Ming Empire. An interesting facet of these Chinese voyages is the thousands of non-sailors who were aboard the junks for other purposes than manning the boats or fighting battles once they landed. These people included diplomats and concubines, farmers and animal caretakers (for any colonies that might be settled along the way), mapmakers and scribes, translators, Buddhist priests, and those rich enough to buy the experience of discovery. This wasn’t only an Oriental custom; Francis Drake’s Golden Hind sailed around the globe in the sixteenth century with a number of English nobles and their pages along for the excitement – and possible treasure – and incidentally contributing much-needed funds to the operation. Like the Chinese a century before, Drake provided musicians as well as navigators, and a parson to minister to these sea-faring souls, the tourists, we’d probably call them today.

And here perhaps we have the beginning of that modern trend: the ocean cruise. Whether it’s a brief weekend trip to Mazatlan, or a cruise through Alaska’s Inner Passage or the Caribbean, or the New York to Southampton run on one of the Queen Mary’s younger siblings, or something much longer, today’s passengers – like those on the Chinese junks and Drake’s galleon – expect food, entertainment, enlightenment, medical care, even spiritual counseling. We seem to take our culture with us when we go to sea for all but the briefest voyage. Our behavior on board can change too. Without the pressures and constraints of daily life, cruise ship passengers often exhibit characteristics that may have been suppressed before they took to the wide open spaces of the sea. Excessive eating and drinking are the norm, entertainment, games and other recreations are all part of the journey. Shipboard romances, even illicit ones, are not uncommon. And we know that people unanchored from their home reality often behave in a foreign port in ways they would never dream of at home.

Our planet has been rather thoroughly explored and charted by now, and there are only so many destinations on this planet we can choose , so we’re ready for the next phase, cruising among the stars. We’ve already witnessed the first wave of rich tourists paying large sums of money for the experience of shuttling up to the space station. We’re not quite ready for the next step, the luxury starliners touring space with thousands of ordinary folk aboard. But we have the next best thing, the science fiction tale of what it might be like.

Early examples of the “Tourists in Space” theme that has developed include a number of Jules Verne’s works (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (which might as well be a voyage into outer space), From the Earth to the Moon), and A.E. Van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle. A little later, we find Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero in this category too. One such science fictional voyage (Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001) even has the subtitle “A Space Odyssey.”

From these rousing adventures, it’s a small step to the television series, Star Trek. Large-canvas stories about space and the future – sometimes rather dismissively called “space opera” – fall into two major categories, tales about voyages of discovery, and tales about empire. Star Trek is one of the former, and Star Wars the latter. The Enterprise becomes a world unto itself on its long voyages; romances are not uncommon (although if they involve Captain Kirk, they are destined to end unhappily), and later iterations of the series even have elaborate entertainment features such as the holo-deck on board for the crew to while away the long time between ports-of-call.

To my mind, though, one of the most thought-provoking and imaginative of these future tourists-in-space accounts is Norman Spinrad’s 1983 novel, The Void Captain’s Tale. No priest or parson on the ships of Spinrad’s fictional line, but cruise directors and the entertainment they provide make for a vivid sub-plot. Unshackled from what Spinrad terms the ‘quotidian world,’ the passengers engage in bizarre behaviors and sexual rituals. In fact, the novel describes in some detail the culture of customs and recreation that develops on ships of the Second Starfaring Age. Spinrad continues this exploration through Child of Fortune, published two years later.

Are there any sociological lessons we can draw from these fantastic voyages? Science Fiction has long explored the idea of the generation ships that will be needed for truly long voyages in space , absent the discovery of FTL drives. What Spinrad gives us to think about is the notion that we won’t be just exporting human culture as we know it (or as our descendants will) when we voyage out into deep space. We will be landing on those far away planets with something unexpected and unknown, for our culture will change with and be changed by the trip itself. We may program the computers with our science and our arts, and stock the DNA so we can replicate the flora and fauna of Old Earth that we want to take with us, but no matter how hard we try we won’t be able to control the culture our voyagers land with. ‘New Earth’ won’t be much like ‘Old Earth.’ Customs we can probably not even dream about may have evolved. Certainly new fashions, new cuisine, new laws.

And will the long conversations with the stars on those odysseys bring about new takes on religion and philosophy, requiring new priests, parsons and prophets? I don’t see why not.

The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds. To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.

World SF

2009-06-02T10:52:00-06:00

World SF is one of those quaint and little-used expressions in modern science fiction. It refers to the publication of SF in non-English languages and SF published outside of the English-language country markets (US/Canada, UK/Australia/NZ/South Africa). For a time, a group calling itself World SF would meet once a year in a various countries, comprising both English and non-English writers, but seemed to have left us little beyond enthusiasm.

The publication of non-English writers remains rare in the English world. There is a handful of anthologies, and occasionally a story appears in one of the magazines. Is there reason to suppose any of this has changed?

There is. Most likely, it was the Internet that acted as a catalyst. Perhaps the prevalent studies of English-as-a-foreign-language throughout the world was another. But what is happening, in small doses yet more and more, is two-fold: that writers for whom English is a second (or even third) language are beginning to utilise it for fiction in order to reach a wider (potentially global) audience; and second, that more translators (amateur and professional) are available for translation into English from a wide variety of languages.

Perhaps the best-known of the second category of writers is the Serbian writer Zoran Živković, many of whose books have been translated into English by Alice Copple-Tošić. Živković’s work won the (American) World Fantasy Award and been published in book form in both the US and UK.

Of the second category, Thai writer (and composer) S.P. Somtow (pen name of Somtow Sucharitkul), is another WFA winner and a winner of science fiction’s John W. Campbell Award (an ironic win, perhaps, considering Campbell’s well-known disposition to believe in the supremacy of Europeans). Writing in English, Somtow now resides in Bangkok, where he is artistic director of the Bangkok Opera House, and remains one of the most well-known of the global SF writers.

Do these two writers symbolise a change? Or are they outliers on a graph, the exception to the rule?

Once, perhaps. But not now. In compiling The Apex Book of World SF, my new anthology of science fiction, fantasy and horror from around the world, I was surprised to discover just how many writers from outside the “Anglo-Saxon world” (as the French call it) are now being published professionally in American and British anthologies and magazines. Dutch writer Jetse de Vries became one of the editors of Interzone, the prestigious British SF magazine, published short stories in English in half-a-dozen places, and currently edits a major SF anthology for British publishers Solaris. Aliette de Bodard – who lives in Paris, speaks French, yet writes in English – had quickly made a name for herself with short fiction and is currently nominated for a – you guessed it – John W. Campbell Award.

From India, Anil Menon and Vandana Singh have been regularly publishing short stories while Ashok Banker’s epic fantasy series based on the Ramayana has been selling all over the world. Israeli writers, for the first time, made their appearance in the long-running Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine (Eyal Teler, Vered Tochterman), and Israeli writer Nir Yaniv became the first Israeli ever to appear in the legendary Weird Tales – recently. The Philippines have become a hotbed of original science fiction and criticism, with Charles Tan becoming a vocal and lucid commentator on the field (not to mention editing the recent Philippines Fiction Sampler and the Nebula Awards Blog), Dean Francis Alfar making an appearance in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, wife Nikki Alfar, and new writer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, both in Fantasy Magazine – the list goes on. Recent English book deals include those of Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski, new Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi and French writer Pierre Pevel. Call it a renaissance.

In the short fiction field, two publications, in particular, have proven important recently in terms of World SF. Clarkesworld and Fantasy are two online publications that have – perhaps surprisingly – featured a higher number of international writers, including the above-mentioned de Vries and de Bodard, Ukranian writer Sergey Gerasimov and others. Print magazine Interzone has always published such stories occasionally and recent Mundane SF issue featured three. And the re-launched Weird Tales set aside one issue for International SF.

So it suddenly seems as if World SF is becoming a little more than an excuse for Western writers to get drunk in different countries on a yearly excursion. And it might be because, for the first time, international writers are doing it for themselves. The Internet has acted as a levelling ground. English has become a de facto global language (to the natural dismay of the French). A new wave? A global movement? Not as such. Though it would be tempting to give it a name and a label, what we see is merely indicative of the changes in the larger world, and in the smaller world of SF by reflection.

And that change, I think, is a very good thing.

Lavie Tidhar is the author of linked-story collection HebrewPunk (2007), novellas An Occupation of Angels (2005), and forthcoming Cloud Permutations (2009) and Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God (2010) and, with Nir Yaniv, short novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009). He also edited anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults (2008) and the forthcoming The Apex Book of World SF (2009). He’s lived on three continents and one island-nation, and currently lives in South East Asia.

Old Man River

2009-05-11T22:41:01-06:00

The Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Rivers that form the western and eastern boundaries of Long Beach have been tamed. Concrete-channeled, laden with trash from careless upstream cities after a rainstorm, they empty into the Pacific like sad puppies let out to relieve themselves, a far cry from the wild beauty of their bigger brethren around the world. Gazing at these subdued California waterways, I find it depressing to remember rivers once played important roles in human history, not the least being as the first interstate highways. The river of my youth, the Thames, provided a highway for English kings and queens traveling between the royal residences at Hampton Court, Westminster and Greenwich.

Beyond their practical aspects, rivers in human imagination have always been powerful symbols. Our blood stream is a river in itself, so it’s no wonder the river’s passage from spring in the mountains to final emptying into the ocean came to be a metaphor for life from birth to death. Rivers appear in the myths and legends of almost every tribe on the planet, the Tigris and the Euphrates that bounded Eden, the Tiber, the Nile,the Danube, the Amazon, the sacred Ganges. Not surprisingly, we find writers as diverse as Thoreau, T.S. Eliot and Mark Twain using rivers as metaphors in their work. And a brief glance at a catalog of science fiction titles seems to indicate an equal fascination in our genre: HATRACK RIVER (Orson Scott Card), GRERAT SKY RIVER (Gregory Benford), “Child of the River” (Paul MacAuley), “The River Styx Runs Upstream” (Dan Simmons), and – of course – Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series.

Considered as metaphor, the source of the river symbolizes birth, and the mouth symbolizes our re-absorption back into the All, the direction of the flow being the natural path of life. So what are we to make of stories about going upriver, against the flow? It might be logical to expect them to carry themes of a return to childhood innocence , but instead they seem to reflect the opposite, the warning Thomas Wolfe gave us: “You can’t go home again.” Return to the womb is neither possible nor to be aspired to, upriver journeys tell us, especially when we realize nations follow the same path from a state of primitive existence to a later, more socialized one that human life follows. “Upriver” comes to symbolize devolution not evolution.

Joseph Conrad’s 19th century novel, HEART OF DARKNESS, where a journey up the Congo from the teeming civilization of the African coast to an earlier, troubling state of humanity in the jungle, reveals the breakdown of Kurtz’s psyche as its result. “Going native” here means much more than wearing Earth-friendly cotton and necklaces of seed pods, or avoiding fast food and pesticides. This novel has become the inspiration for others that have attempted to explore the same theme, the darkness that lies at the heart of “civilized” man. All our pious sophistication and our civilized manners and customs, such novels tell us, are only a thin skin over a raging horror of original, out-of-control appetites and evil intent. Conrad’s narrator, Marlowe, sees little innocence in the well-spring of our dark hearts.

Francis Ford Coppola’s movie version, APOCALYPSE NOW, remains true to this motif; Captain Willard travels deep into the jungle to encounter his own “Kurtz,” a once-admirable man who has “gone native” in all the worst senses of the phrase. The theme of losing the tenuous hold civilization has on humans, and becoming more influenced by amoral (to say the least) circumstances the further upriver one travels, is explored in another movie: THE MOSQUITO COAST, based on Paul Theroux’s novel of the same name. Allie Fox is a genius, a likable man when we first meet him, who conceives the plan to travel upriver deep into the jungle to build an ice house to supply the natives. But “upriver” seduces decent, capable men; they go from being helpers to exploiters, and eventually they go mad. APOCALYPSE NOW adds the somber message that such men must be killed for the common good. All our best stories tend toward myth, and these three versions of the going upriver theme warn us that we have no business feeling superior to those we perceive as less far along on the path than we are. Doing so, we court disaster.

Robert Silverberg’s 1970 novel, DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH, with its references to Conrad’s novel (including the name Kurtz in case we miss the similarities) explores much the same mythic territory. In a story which evokes humanity’s often disastrous colonial past, going upriver on an alien planet doesn’t result in greater innocence or humanity of spirit for the protagonist. Rather, the opposite is true. The main character, Gunderson, violates the belief and customs of the planet’s inhabitants for his own gain because he finds them of lesser value, and in doing so risks his own spiritual integrity. Science fiction is a kind of contemporary mythology, and myths are always didactic, so we shouldn’t be surprised to find lessons along with story in its pages. Silverberg’s novel offers a new perspective on the “going upriver” theme, warning us not to export our questionable values around the galaxy.

I remember in graduate school studying the difference in the European myth of the forest and the American myth of the frontier, and how these referenced the historic situation of the cultures the writers were embedded in. But the journey upriver transcends everybody’s history and expands into our future, a Jungian theme that speaks not of our past but of our soul. As we stand on the brink of the Age of Space, we might do well to study the lessons of these river journey stories.

Blogging from the Nebs

2009-04-26T03:00:00-06:00

This is just a preliminary blog from the UCLA campus. There was a very elegant pre-dinner cocktal party on a balcony overlooking LA. Now we’re starting on the banquet, salad and the main course has been brought out. Many of sf’s brightest stars are here, Nebula nominees Joihn Kessel, Mike Allen, Greg Benford, and too many more to mention by name. Also, Janis Ian,, the Toastrmistress, Jane Espenson who will be accepting the Bradbury Award for Joss Whedon, and lots of others. But I’d better get started eating my sea bass befored the waiter takes it away.

Okay, It’ s 9:30. We’ve finished the desert was a delicious cake within walls of white chocolate. Christine Valada is introducing Janis Ian. We’re on our way. Janis has brought her guitar and is singing a song with sf lyrics to the tune of “At Seventeen.”

Winners - Andre Norton Award - Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) - Ysabeau S. Wilce (Harcourt, Sep08)

Solstice Awards - Kate Wilhelm, A.J. Budrys, and Martin H. Greenberg
SFWA Service Award - Victoria Strauss
Jane Espenson is accepting the Brasdbury for Joss Whedon, and Joss is appearing via some strange technical sci-fi video.
Grand Master Harry Harrison
Author Emerita - M. J. Engh
Script - WALL-E
Short Story - “Trophy Wives” - Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Fellowship Fantastic, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, DAW Books, Jan08)
Novella - “The Spacetime Pool” - Catherine Asaro (Analog, Mar08)
Novellette - “Pride and Prometheus” - John Kessel (F&SF, Jan08)
Special thanks - Christine Valada
Novel - Powers - Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt, Sep07

That’s it. Janis is thanking us and the lights are coming up. The winners are gathering for photographs.

Thanks for joining me for this experimental blogging. The sea bass was delicious.

-Michael

Authors talk about their Nebula nominated fiction

2009-04-24T00:08:00-06:00

This is one of a series of essays written by the authors of Nebula nominated works and published in the SFWA Bulletin. To view the other essays and biographical notes in pdf format, please click here.

Note: “Baby Doll” appeared in the SFWA European Hall of Fame, and is a Nebula nominee for Best Short Story.

About “Baby Doll” by Johanna Sinisalo

“Baby Doll” is a story about vanishing childhood. But it is
also about vanishing parenthood.

In Finland today an increasing number of families are
run by the children. The kids decide the menus for family
meals, and they also select their own toys, games, tv
shows, and clothes. The parents do not even try to be
authorities; they simply want to keep the family “happy” by
avoiding all conflicts, and so they yield to the most
extravagant demands.

The kids, very aware of their power, use it to gain
access to the titillating world of fake adulthood. Because
the media idols and models themselves keep getting younger
and younger, the borders between the worlds of children and
adults are disappearing. Children are exploited and
marketed to other children, who are exploited in turn,
while the parents pay the bills.

In Finland, it is perfectly natural to see other
family members naked. In sauna baths, complete strangers
sit in the nude, making small talk. Children under the age
of eight or so play naked on the beaches. Because of this
generations-old tradition of not over-sexualizing the
environment, I find it much, much more disturbing to
require a two-year-old girl to wear a top in public.

Johanna Sinisalo Biographical Note

Johanna Sinisalo lives in Tampere, Finland. She has
received the national Atorox Award for the best domestic
sf/f story seven times. She has also written numerous
reviews, articles, comic books, and screenplays, and edited
two anthologies, including The Dedalus Book of Finnish
Fantasy.

Sinisalo’s debut novel, Not Before Sundown a.k.a.
Troll: a Love Story, got the most prestigious literary
award in Finland, the Finlandia Prize, and tied for the
James Tiptree, Jr. Award. She has published three other novels and a story
collection, and is currently working on an sf comedy film
script, Iron Sky.

Catch the Nebula Awards on Twitter

2009-04-23T23:42:00-06:00

Mike Allen (@mythicdelirium) and Mary Robinette Kowal (via @sfwa) will be Twittering at the Nebula Awards (if all goes well) this weekend. Be sure to check out their Twitter updates and this site for the latest news on the Nebula Awards.

A Basic Introduction to Chinese Mythology and Folklore

2009-04-20T11:45:00-06:00

This article is intended as a basic introduction to some of the most important concepts of Chinese mythology and folklore. By “Chinese”, I mean Ancient China, for my area of expertise stops after the uprising of 1911, which overthrew the long-standing Empire.

But, even with this limitation, “Ancient China” covers vast areas of both time and space: the last significant unification of the Chinese Empire took place in 214 BC; and China itself is vast enough to be a continent: even the reduced territory it occupied during most of its history covers more than half the surface of Europe. This vast country was far from uniform in its beliefs, and to cover it in detail would require one if not several bookshelves. I will focus here on the dominant, Han culture which flourished near the capital and not on that of the several minorities which peopled Ancient China.

The three sections of this article correspond to the three belief systems that cohabited in Ancient China: Confucianism, Daoism (Taoism), and Buddhism. To a certain extent, this is an artificial distinction, since many elements of the folklore pertain to several traditions at once. Nevertheless, I have chosen to retain that distinction for ease of reading.

Confucianism

Confucianism is often referred to as the state religion, a term that is misleading; for although Confucian practises and ideology formed the basis of the Chinese state, Confucius himself had little to say on spirits and the non-material world: one of his most famous sayings was “Respect the spirits, but stay away from them”. It’s typical of the Chinese psyche that the existence of spirits is acknowledged and documented, sometimes in great detail, but that political and economical matters are considered to be purely the province of men: calling on the spirits in those domains was an indication of failure.

Nevertheless, in spite of this Confucian lay ideal, a number of traditions can be traced back to Confucianism: on its insistence on an ordered universe, where everyone knew their place and their role, and on its conception of the state as the extension of family--the Emperor’s relation to a subject being much like the absolute authority a father had over a son. Also, Confucianism had, to some degree, to yield to the expectations of ordinary citizens--who needed some supernatural recourse against famine, floods and other disasters.

The main tradition that is tightly linked with Confucianism is ancestor worship. Age was a defining factor of superiority in Ancient China: the young were meant to respect and obey the old, particularly their direct ascendants. When those ascendants died, they became shen, benevolent spirits watching over the family’s fortune, to whom regular offerings of incense, food and paper money were made by the household. The focus of this worship were the ancestor tablets bearing the posthumous name of the deceased. Those kept in a special shrine: form of this ranged from a corner of a room to several lavish, dedicated buildings, either within the house or in the countryside, at the family’s traditional seat.

Other spirits, though, were not so benevolent. Gui were the yin counterpart of shen, responsible for many afflictions ranging from accidents to illnesses or crop failures. Many gui were dead who had not been properly honoured, though some might also be forces of nature.

The Chinese believed that spirits travelled in a straight line, so the entrance of most houses didn’t consist only of a gate opening on the outside, but also of a screen, a wall laid across the gate as a protection from the depredations of gui. Additional wards, which are seen in Chinese temple to this day, are guardian spirits, painted on either side of the door: those two life-sized pictures represent two generals of the Tang dynasty, who volunteered to protect the Emperor from a vengeful ghost.

The other thing Confucianism contributed to Chinese mythology was a detailed and complex hierarchy of spirit officials, from the humble earth god who watched over a village, to the city gods--all the way up to Heaven and its Courts, in a mirror of the Imperial power structures. Those spirits were part of official worship: the temple of the city god, in particular, received the petition of governing civil servants in case of natural disasters. City gods had not been born gods, but were mortals who had distinguished themselves by their upright conduct, and had thus been found fit to mediate between the people and Heaven.

Daoism

In many ways, Daoism is the polar opposite of Confucianism. Confucianism exalts the ideal of service to the nation, secure in one’s knowledge of one’s own place; Daoism advocates severing the ties of kinship and society, and meditating in the wilderness. Confucianism was highly ritualised and organised; Daoism made of the unknowable its supreme concept. Confucianism promoted hard labour and dedication; Daoism advocated “wuwei”, “[action] without action”, which involved knowing when not to act rather than acting.

The founder of Daoism was the legendary Lao Zi, who is said to have dictated his book, the Dao De Jing, before riding a water buffalo into the unsettled land west of China. His disciples, such as Zhuangzi, started a tradition of philosophy that soon had a profound impact on Chinese thought. In parallel, religions sects based on the Dao developed, the most famous being “The Tradition of the Mighty Commonwealth of the Orthodox Oneness”, popularly known as “The Five Pecks of Rice” after the offering that every faithful had to make upon joining the sect. Daoists established their own mythology and rituals, far apart from the elaborate pomp of officialdom.

One key element of Daoism was the search for immortality: Immortals were men who had transcended their mortal condition, being not only immune to death but also the possessors of fabulous powers which allowed them to transport themselves instantly from one place to another, or to vanquish demons (one major function of Daoist priests is to perform exorcisms). To become immortal was very much a matter of discipline: though the quest often involved the brewing of an elixir, the main point was refining one’s own body through a strict regimen of fasting and meditating, until the Dao, the supreme Way, had finally been attained.

Daoism filled in the top of the Heavenly hierarchy: the Jade Emperor, the ruler of Heaven, is worshipped as the supreme deity by some sects; and his wife (sometimes mother) Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, is the foremost immortal on Mount Kunlun: she dispenses prosperity, longevity and immortal bliss. It’s in her gardens that grow the legendary peaches of immortality, which ripen once every three thousand years.

Daoist immortals sit side by side with the often staid Confucian deities--whose sole distinction tends to be moral superiority. On the contrary, the Eight Immortals (Ba Xian, a twelfth-century addition to the pantheon) are often rowdy and colourful, engaging in drinking bouts and flashy swordfights. They range from the crabby old Iron-Crutch Li, who hides his soul in a gourd, to their leader Lu Dongbing, a known womaniser who should not be summoned to solve romantic problems; from the ambiguously-gendered Lan Caihe, to the eccentric Zhang Guo, who brews liquors and wine as a hobby. In many ways, the Eight Immortals are very much human, if larger than life--which contributes to explain their continued popularity.

Buddhism

Unlike the previous two, Buddhism isn’t a native religion, having been brought over from India by missionaries in the 1st century AD. It was gradually assimilated into Chinese society as its fundamental texts were translated from Sanskrit. Buddhism holds that men are bound by the weight of their actions, carrying over the karma of their past lives into their next reincarnations. Until they can free themselves from desire, they are bound to suffer. One who is genuinely free from desire can follow in the Buddha’s footsteps, and attain nirvana, a state of utter freedom from the cycles of rebirth.

In China, there are two main intermediate states between the mortal man and nirvana: lohans (translation of the Sanskrit arhat) are enlightened men, whereas pusas (more commonly known as bodhisattvas) are people who would be capable of attaining nirvana, but defer their enlightenment to help their fellow men ascend. The most popular pusa is undoubtedly Guanyin, “She Who Listens to the Sounds [of the World]”, the personification of compassion and kindness: Guanyin relieves suffering, and has the power to grant children to barren women.

Another popular (albeit a great deal less conventional) Buddhist figure is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, a mischievous and intractable character who attains his status of “Buddha of Victory Through Strife” by helping the monk Xuanzang retrieve Buddhist sutras from India in Journey to the West.

Like Confucianism and Daoism, Buddhism has its own demons, lower beings into which evil men can reincarnate to expiate their past wrongs.

All three religions combined to some extent to form Diyu, the Chinese Hell, but Buddhism contributed the bulk of it, since Hell is a place where punishments are visited on the sinners before they are allowed rebirth. The hierarchy of Hell looks much like that of a Chinese tribunal, presided by Yanluo, who judges the dead on their arrival; punishments for specific sins are dealt in a variable number of courts (three to four in some traditions, eighteen in others). The last court hosts the Wheel of Rebirth, where Old Lady Meng awaits, making the soul drink a potion of oblivion before sending it out into the world.

Bibliography

Sources of Chinese Tradition, William Theodore de Bary, Irene Bloom, Columbia University Press, 2000

Chinese Creeds and Customs, V.R. Burkhardt, Book World Co., 1958

A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols, Wolfram Eberhard, Routledge, 1986

Imperial China, the Historical Background to the Modern Age, Michael Loewe, Praeger, 1965

China’s Cultural Heritage, the Qing Dynasty, 1644-1912 (Second Edition), Richard J. Smith, Westview Press, 1994

Monkey: Journey to the West, Arthur Waley, Penguin, 2005

ALIETTE DE BODARD’s short fiction credits include Aztec mysteries ("Obsidian Shards”, published in Writers of the Future XXIII) and other stories inspired by Mesoamerican culture. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy, Interzone and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. She is a Campbell Award Nominee for 2009.

Visit her website or her blog for more information.

Listen to all Seven Nebula Nominee at Starship Sofa

2009-04-02T15:34:00-06:00

Want to read all the Nebula Nominees, but don’t have the time? Starship Sofa is podcasting all seven short story nominees today.

From the website:

StarShipSofa has, in one day, done what no other SF podcast has done before. In another unprecedented move, StarShipSofa has put out all seven Nebula Short Story 2008 nominees, all available as free audio podcasts for your listening pleasure.

Tony, who helms the podcast, says, “The Nebula’s are a very special event in the SF world and I wanted the StarShipSofa to mark this occasion by doing something unique for this year’s awards.

“I wanted to put out all the stories nominated in one day so people can, straight away, have them downloaded back to back… sitting on their iPod and, for the next few hours, submerge themselves in SF stories of the very best calibre. All for free.

“Things are changing rapidly in this medium and this is one example of StarShipSofa pushing the boundaries of normal podcasting in both terms of quality and accessibility.

“It’s what the StarShipSofa was built for.”

Kij Johnson -26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss
Ruth Nestvold - Mars: A Traveler’s Guide
Mike Allen -The Button Bin
Jeffery Ford - The Dreaming Wind
Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Trophy Wives
James Patrick Kelly - Don’t Stop
Gwyneth Jones -Tomb Wife

Clowns, Dead Dogs and the Universe

2009-03-30T21:23:00-06:00

If we’d been alive in Syria, sometime in the 6th century, we might have witnessed a peculiar sight. A man dressed in rags, who has recently been living in the desert, is dragging the body of a dead dog through the streets and into the church! What’s going on? That was just the beginning of the strange and unsettling tricks that Abba Simeon used to lure people to God. Saint Simeon, as he later became, is the first recorded Holy Fool of the western world, and – not surprisingly – the patron of clowns to this day. There was a purpose to Simeon’s mad behavior; such foolish-seeming antics drew people’s attention, defused their scepticism and allowed the gospel message to permeate their hearts and minds.

Simeon is the first of what became a long line of Holy Fools in history and literature, characters so simple and silly that we perceive an innocence about them, perhaps even the aura of holiness. (The root form of the adjective “silly” is the Old English “saelig,” soulful, or blessed. By Shakespeare’s time the word’s meaning had slipped to “weak” or “simple.” ) The true role of the Holy Fool, or the Sacred Clowns of Hopi tradition, is to get past our defenses through laughter, allowing us to perceive the world around us and our place in it in a different way, at the very least to break our deadly cynicism that prevents us from seeing what’s staring us in the face. Throughout the ancient European world, the clown in attendance at the royal court was often the only one allowed to criticize their majesties and get away with it, such criticism, of course, to be veiled in foolish-seeming speech and antics. In due time we have Gimpel the Fool, Mullah Nasruddin, Don Quixote and Parsifal, and later: Marshall Dillon’s deputy, Festus Haggen, and Forrest Gump.

We shouldn’t be surprised to find that some science fiction authors have found the Fool to be a useful addition to the stock of characters on the frontiers of space. (The most obvious stock character is the Naive Observer, the person along on the adventure who is mostly clueless, thus allowing the rest of the characters to explain things to him. This nicely avoids the problem of characters having to say to each other, “As you know, Fred ...” in order to get vital information to the reader.) But sometimes, the plot provides the central characters, the starship captains and the chief scientists, with a problem that evades their ability to figure out. Perhaps they’re trying too hard, or maybe they’re not good at thinking outside the box. The author could just step in, of course, and hand the protagonist a clue: “Look, men! I just found the Rosetta Stone that explains everything!” But where’s the fun in that? Besides, it’s not believable and denies the reader the pleasure of figuring things out along with the characters. Here’s where the Holy Fool is useful.

This character is more than just the Outsider figure Heinlein utilized to advantage, for the Outsider lacks influence not smarts. Allowed to tinker with the problem, the Outsider comes up with a solution that leaves others wondering why they didn’t think of that. And the Fool isn’t the same as the dummy who messes things up and complicates the plot, sometimes for malevolent reasons – thus becoming the antagonist. The significant thing about the Holy Fool is his or her purity of motive and innocence of action; the Fool stands outside of conventional thinking and has no hidden personal agenda. He or she asks questions the others consider beside the point, off-topic, valueless, easily dismissed as not fitting what we might call “received wisdom” or at times: science. The Fool’s behavior, dragging that dead dog across the planet, alternately puzzles and irritates the rest of the characters, often unsettling them when they’re trying hardest to figure things out. And that’s the whole point. Whether the Fool is a holy idiot or crazy as a fox like Simeon or the Hopi Clowns, his or her job is to break through the stereotypical thinking the others are indulging in.

Or that the reader is caught up in. For sometimes the main characters of the story just won’t get it, but the reader is left wondering if the Fool wasn’t right after all. Another, more cynical way of saying this is to suggest that the author is having her cake and eating it too, scrupulously following scientific reason on the one hand, and cracking open the story for doubt, cynicism, mysticism and all manner of strangeness to creep in on the other. One of the most memorable Holy Fools in SF is Brother Francis Gerard in Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz . The category has to include Davy in Edgar Pangborn’s novel of the same name, and to a certain extent, Valentine Michael Smith from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

Often the writer doesn’t know beforehand that’s what the Fool is going to do – often doesn’t even know ahead of time the character is a fool. Characters have a way of birthing themselves in a writer’s head and running away with the best planned plots. Sorel Varney was only meant to be a retarded “handyjack,” along on the mission to take care of chores while the others explored the planet, when I started to write “Stranger Than Imagination Can,”. By the end of the story I was convinced that as a result of his innocence and his immature magical thinking he instinctively understood more about the aliens who once inhabited the planet than any of the smarter characters. Naturally, he couldn’t explain any of it, but I hope the reader will think about the possibilities he’s raised.

As J.B.S.Haldane famously said, “The universe is queerer than we can imagine.” I suspect that the more we learn about the universe and our place in it, the more we’ll realize there are any number of things we can’t understand. Maybe it takes a Holy Fool to make sure we remember that.

Author photos at the Nebula weekend

2009-03-29T08:53:00-06:00

As part of the new website, SFWA will offer a “Featured Author” slot
on the front page. To be included in this, authors must be Active or
Associate SFWA members with a professional headshot.

To keep with the tone of the website, photos must be ones that would
be suitable to appear on a novel. If you already have a suitable
photo, please email a jpg and a 25 word bio to
featuredauthor@sfwa.org.

Photos must be 150dpi, minimum. It will be cropped to 180 px wide by200 px tall.

Since not all members have access to professional photographers, SFWA
has arranged for a photographer to be onsite at the Nebula weekend. If
you would like to sign up for a slot with the photographer, please
email featuredauthor@sfwa.org. These slots are extremely limited so
please don’t delay.