The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

fossil-fuels-are-killing-our-planet thing. He’s been riding his bike and working in longhand by the light of an oil lamp for years. And even though the war on the environment’s going really well these days, with Joe on our side, it makes me think the planet might just survive after all.

NUMBER 3: Joe’s teaching. Being a Grand Master isn’t just about writing. It’s about giving back, and over the years Joe has given back an enormous amount. He’s shared his thoughts and his craft with hundreds of students, among them Eileen Gunn, Leslie What, Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Frost, Cynthia Felice, and James Patrick Kelly. He’s taught at Clarion and Clarion West, and for the last twenty-seven years has taught creative writing at MIT.

His students love him. James Patrick Kelly remembers him as one of the best instructors he ever had, not only for his insights on writing, but for his practical advice and attitude toward the enterprise of writing, from contracts to conventions.

NUMBER 4: Joe’s consummate professionalism. Joe’s books are meticulously thought out, crafted, and researched. Sheila Williams tells the story of having to call Joe and a new writer on the same day to ask for revisions to their stories in Asimov’s. The new writer had made a glaring historical mistake about the moon landing.

Joe had possibly made a minor mistake on the technology in his story.

Joe said he’d check on it and call her back. The new writer ranted, raved, refused to change the error because it was too much work, and besides, nobody remembered the moon landing anyway, and then hung up on her. Joe called back a few hours later to say, “I’m sorry it took so long. I couldn’t find it in MIT’s library, so I had to ride my bike into Boston to the library there.”

Which, as Sheila says, is why he’s Joe Haldeman and why the new writer never sold another story to Asimov’s.

NUMBER 5: The Forever War. (You were wondering when I’d get to that, weren’t you?)

One of the hardest things for a writer is to write a great book early on in your career, let alone a classic. Most writers never recover from it. They either crack up under the pressure and go off to live in the woods, like J.D. Salinger. Or spend the rest of their life living off their fame, like Orson Welles. Or get enormously swelled heads and turn into complete jerks, like… oh, thousands I could name.

Joe didn’t do any of those things. He kept on writing, experimenting with new styles and new subject matter, and producing a lifetime’s worth of wonderful books.

But it doesn’t change the fact that The Forever War is a classic, a thought- provoking work that uses science fiction to explore the harsh realities of war and the dehumanization and alienation it produces in those who fight it. It’s also a harsh indictment of those who run the war and horrifyingly prophetic in its depiction of the directions warfare will take.

It may originally have been about Vietnam, but with its underequipped soldiers and cynical, corporatized military, it’s also clearly about Iraq and Blackwater. And wars we haven’t even declared yet.

Which is why it began being on Top Ten Science Fiction Novels lists from the moment it was written and is still there. It’s the real deal. And all by itself it would qualify Joe to be a Grand Master.

NUMBER 6: Finally, Joe, deserves this Grand Master Award for the person he is, and also the person he was. This was a kid who wanted to be an astronaut, who rode his bike to the public library, who saved up his paper-route money to buy a telescope, who studied astronomy and chemistry on his own, and read the encyclopedia for fun.

Kip Russell in the flesh — a true Heinlein hero.

All that’s lacking is the slide rule.

Joe, I have something I want to give you. No, not the Grand Master Nebula. Not yet. This is a present from me.

It’s not a K and E log log decitrig 4081-5 like Kip had in Have Space Suit — Will Travel, but it’s the next best thing. It’s a Pickett N600-ES, the same model of slide rule — excuse me, slipstick — that the NASA astronauts took to the Moon.

As a kid, you were a teenaged Heinlein hero. And now you’re that Heinlein hero all grown up. And my hero. Our hero. And a Nebula Grand Master of Science Fiction.

Congratulations!

—Connie Willis

A !TANGLED WEB Joe Haldeman

FROM THE AUTHOR: I chose this story because I think it’s funny, and there isn’t enough humor in SF anthologies.

You don’t always know where a story comes from, but in this case I can pinpoint it exactly — August 26, 1981. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had invited a bunch of science fiction writers to come witness the Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn.

It was immensely exciting, but there were long periods when nothing was happening. Jerry Pournelle had a cooler full of iced beer in the back of his Jeep, and I was happy to join him for one in the California sun.

We got to talking about the movie Star Wars, and I expressed admiration for the tavern scene, all those weird aliens drinking impossible stuff, munching on raw meat, and so forth. Jerry said hell, that’s nothing new. Every science fiction writer has done the aliens-in-a-bar scene a dozen times.

As a matter of fact, I hadn’t. So I went home and did it.

YOUR SPACEPORT BARS fall into two distinct groups: the ones for the baggage and the ones for the crew. I was baggage, this trip, but didn’t feel like paying the prices that people who space for fun can afford. The Facility Directory listed under “Food and Drink” four establishments: the Hartford Club (inevitably), the Silver Slipper Lounge, Antoine’s, and Slim Joan’s Bar & Grill.

I went to a currency exchange booth first, assuming that Slim Joan was no better at arithmetic than most bartenders, and cashed in a hundredth share of Hartford stock. Then I took the drop lift down to the bottom level. That the bar’s door was right at the drop-lift exit would be a dead giveaway even if its name had been the Bell, Book, and Candle. Baggage don’t generally like to fall ten stories, no matter how slowly.

It smelled right, stir-fry and stale beer, and the low lighting suggested economy rather than atmosphere. Slim Joan turned out to be about a hundred thousand grams of transvestite. Well, I hadn’t come for the scenery.

The clientele seemed evenly mixed between humans and others, most of the aliens being !tang, since this was Morocho III. I’ve got nothing against the company of aliens, but if I was going to spend all next week wrapping my jaws around !tanglish, I preferred to mix my drinking with some human tongue.

“Speak English?” I asked Slim Joan.

“Some,” he/she/it growled. “You would drink something?” I’d never heard a Russian-Brooklyn accent before. I ordered a double saki, cold, in Russian, and took it to an empty booth.

One of the advantages of being a Hartford interpreter is that you can order a drink in a hundred different languages and dialects. Saves money; they figure if you can speak the lingo you can count your change.

I was freelancing this trip, though, working for a real-estate cartel that wanted to screw the !tang out of a few thousand square kilometers of useless seashore property. It wouldn’t stay useless, of course.

Morocho III is a real garden of a planet, but most people never see it. The tachyon nexus is down by Morocho I, which we in the trade refer to as “Armpit,” and not many people take the local hop out to III (Armpit’s the stopover on the Earth-Sammler run). Starlodge, Limited was hoping to change that situation.

I couldn’t help eavesdropping on the !tangs behind me. (I’m not a snoop; it’s a side effect of the hypnotic-